Travel experts said a tax increase could have a chilling effect, particularly as gas and food prices rise.
"If the cost of everything keeps going up, people aren't going to be able to travel," said Mary Jo McCulloch, president of the Maryland Hotel and Lodging Association. "This plain just isn't the time."
This kind of attempt to put the burden on nonresidents, as Leopold attempted last year with a failed rental car tax proposal, has had mixed results elsewhere.
Prince George's County passed a similar increase in 1989, when lawmakers doubled the bed tax from 5 percent to 10 percent to fund the salaries of 100 additional police officers. The increase led to a sharp decline in revenues, said J. Matthew Neitzey, executive director of the Prince George's County, Maryland Conference and Visitors Bureau Inc., and was repealed gradually during the next six years.
The combined 16 percent tax rate in Anne Arundel would be sixth-highest in the country, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. The rate of 17.25 percent in Chattanooga, Tenn., is first, followed by Houston and Cincinnati, each at 17 percent.
In Maryland, the new National Harbor complex on the Prince George's waterfront is hitting visitors with a 10 percent bed tax. Baltimore County visitors pay 8 percent and Baltimore City's tax is 7.5 percent.
The last jurisdiction in Maryland to increase the hotel tax was Worcester County, home to Ocean City and ranked fourth among counties for generating tourism dollars, according to the Maryland tourism bureau. Worcester County raised the hotel tax from 4 percent to 4.5 percent on Jan. 1, after two years of deliberations. The new revenue will go into marketing the destination, said Donna Abbot, public relations director for Ocean City.
The Anne Arundel visitors bureau would only get a $100,000 bump from the tax increase, and tourism advocates, who showed up in force at a public budget hearing Wednesday night, say they were given less than a week to react to the change.
Alan R. Friedman, Leopold's director of government relations, said the doomsday scenarios are unrealistic, adding that Anne Arundel's unique qualities, both as a center for the defense industry and as a historic destination, will keep people coming back.
"If you do business with the National Security Agency, you can't have your conference and you can't bring your people to Charlotte," he said. "We have a 300-year-old state capital with the oldest statehouse in continuous legislative use. That doesn't exist anywhere else."
