Dtw - Airport Parking Tax (update) Sb 353

Current situation

• The current tax rate is 27%, one of the highest tax rates in the state
• It includes all parking in and around Detroit Metro Airport (within 5 miles)
• SB 353 would reduce the tax rate –the final rate is still being negotiated in the Senate Finance Committee in Lansing

 

CALL TO ACTION

 

Contact Your State Senator

• Ask them to support SB 353
• Urge them to repeal or reduce of the Detroit Metro Airport Tax Rate
• This was first passed as a bailout for Wayne County in the 80′s but this temporary tax just never went away.  It’s time for it to go!
• Enough is enough. Twenty-five years have passed and now is the time to repeal or at least reduce the airport parking tax.
• Temporary taxes should be temporary, and shouldn’t live on just because politicians get addicted to the money

 

Background

• Twenty-five years ago, in 1987, a special tax was created in Wayne County, a 30% tax on parking at and around Detroit Metro Airport that raised about $8 million annually.  It was designed as a bailout for an earlier Wayne County fiscal crisis. It was supposed to go away in 2010 when the bailout debt was paid off, but in typical style, the debt is gone but the tax remains.
• Currently the tax brings in around $21.5 million annually, and has raised over $340 million in the last 25 years. Some goes to the State Aeronautics Fund. Some goes to the City of Romulus. Most goes to Wayne County, not to solve a fiscal crisis, or to support airport operations, but to fund indigent health care.
• There’s no tax like this at any other airport in Michigan. And there’s no good reason the business and vacation travelers who park their cars at Metro Airport should pay a special tax to fund Medicaid.  Medicaid is for the entire state, not just a handful of travelers.
• There’s a good reason to stop this diversion of funds dead in its tracks: it most likely violates federal law and common sense. Two different federal laws say you can’t tax airport travelers and divert the funds away from air travel.
• It’s the diversion of money off the Airport to the County that prompted the legislature to make the Airport a body independent of Wayne County 10 years ago. That legislation was supposed to separate the Airport financially from the County, now it’s time to finish what was started over a decade ago.