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San Miguel lodging distributions show volatility as state adjustments continue
Summary
County finance staff reported that 2024 lodging-tax distributions remain subject to state adjustments, complicating short-term trend analysis; bookings for summer and fall months show modest increases but uncertainty remains.
Ramona Rummel, a staff member on the panel, told the San Miguel Valley Lodging Tax Panel on June 12 that the panel's annual report through fourth quarter 2024 has been submitted and that first-quarter 2025 distributions are still being processed.
Rummel said the panel's office is "processing first quarter 2025, and that'll be out by July 1," and that additional information from the state is pending to complete the first-quarter adjustment. She added that adjustments for the fourth quarter (adjustment 1 and adjustment 2) will be processed that week and sent to marketing companies.
The panel heard that year-to-date figures vary by school district: Rummel said the R-1 district looks down while the R-2 district looks up, but cautioned that "I don't think that that's directly correlated to the activity. I think that's just, financial tracking the way that we're getting the monies and the adjustments from the state." She noted that adjustments sometimes post retroactively and that some corrections previously applied to 2024 had been recorded back into 2023.
Panel members discussed the difficulty of using the monthly state receipts to infer when lodging occurred. Rummel said, "Because what I don't get is the dates of, when the activity occurred. I just get when the monies are remitted to the state for the lodging. So I don't know when the lodging took place. I only see when the monies were collected."
Panel members also discussed contemporaneous booking reports presented elsewhere. John Donovan, a panel member, summarized booking figures he heard reported by a town staffer: July was tracking up 2% to 4%, August up about 9%, September up 6% and October up 15%, with the caveat that data for months further out are less reliable. Donovan and others emphasized that booking projections can change and that state-collected tax receipts often lag activity and are subsequently adjusted.
Rummel recommended waiting a few weeks to reconcile first-quarter variances and the pending deposit to the treasurer before finalizing projections: she said the state's reporting was current through first quarter 2025 but that some line items "look really off compared to 2024," and she wanted to double-check those figures before wider distribution.
Panel discussion touched briefly on local lodging capacity: members noted Norwood has very limited short-term rooms and that Telluride and Mountain Village inventory affects regional trends. Rummel and members stressed that the figures presented are a backward-looking accounting of remittances and that ongoing adjustments by vendors and the state can change the numbers months after the lodging activity.
The panel did not take formal action on policy changes during this segment; members asked Rummel to continue reconciling state adjustments and to circulate the first-quarter report when finalized.
