Nevada lawmakers seek tax on 2022 reservation donations
Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2021 4:30 pm
Burning Man has a fearsome legal department for which we are thankful.
Add if you can legally move your business or residence to Pershing County, like Winnemucca, and vote, that is a way to express your democratic rights at the county-level.
https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/bur ... 189867001/
Nevada lawmakers look to tax Burning Man's 'reservation' charges
Jenny Kane
Reno Gazette Journal
May 24, 2021
In a proposed amendment to the Live Entertainment Tax, legislators are looking at taxing fees or charges paid to reserve tickets or admission to future events.
Sen. Dina Neal (D-North Las Vegas) proposed an amendment to Senate Bill 367 after Burning Man recently charged their patrons to reserve future tickets. The Senate Committee on Revenue and Economic Development discussed the amendment during a hearing Thursday.
The Burning Man Project earlier this year opened up 1,000 reservations — at a cost of $2,500 each — that would guarantee the ability to buy tickets to two successive events in the future. Burning Man 2022 is expected to be the next in-person event.
Marnee Benson, Burning Man's associate director of government affairs, said the organization "strenuously opposed" the amendment. She added that Burning Man's use of reservations was a one-time strategy unique to the circumstances of the pandemic.
While Benson argued that it was unfair to tax funds that did not guarantee a patron's attendance, Neal noted that the reservations guaranteed those patrons the opportunity to attend and that was their choice to pay the nonrefundable fee.
The Live Entertainment Tax is a 9 percent tax applied to ticket sales of a variety of live events. The tax came into law in 2004 as a way for the state to gain revenue particularly from Las Vegas’s robust live entertainment industry.
Certain school, sporting, racing and nonprofit events are exempt from the tax. Neal also proposed that sporting events —— such as Raiders and Golden Knights games — lose their exemption, but that failed to make it through. The amendment as currently written would also exempt events that are strictly government fundraisers.
Nonprofit events that draw fewer than 7,500 people also are exempt. Lawmakers were considering lowering the threshold to 5,000, but walked back that change.
Burning Man became subject to the tax after revisions in 2015. The San Francisco-based nonprofit publicly disputed the tax on its ticket sales saying that it did not provide live entertainment.
"From our perspective, this is the latest attempt by an outside entity to unfairly tap the resources of Burning Man and its participants,” the organization previously stated. “Some seem to view Burning Man as the ‘golden goose’ they can turn to when they want money for other projects.”
Burning Man Project did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Organizers of the 80,000-person annual celebration in the Black Rock Desert told the Reno Gazette Journal in 2016 that they pay about $2.8 million each year to the state for the Live Entertainment Tax.
In the last fiscal year before the pandemic, the tax brought in more than $131 million in revenue to the state, the Nevada Independent reported. During the pandemic, that same revenue was down to $6.2 million in fiscal year 2021, a 93 percent drop, based on state reports.
If the organization caps the $2,500 reservations at 1,000, that would bring in an additional $225,000 to the state.
Add if you can legally move your business or residence to Pershing County, like Winnemucca, and vote, that is a way to express your democratic rights at the county-level.
https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/bur ... 189867001/
Nevada lawmakers look to tax Burning Man's 'reservation' charges
Jenny Kane
Reno Gazette Journal
May 24, 2021
In a proposed amendment to the Live Entertainment Tax, legislators are looking at taxing fees or charges paid to reserve tickets or admission to future events.
Sen. Dina Neal (D-North Las Vegas) proposed an amendment to Senate Bill 367 after Burning Man recently charged their patrons to reserve future tickets. The Senate Committee on Revenue and Economic Development discussed the amendment during a hearing Thursday.
The Burning Man Project earlier this year opened up 1,000 reservations — at a cost of $2,500 each — that would guarantee the ability to buy tickets to two successive events in the future. Burning Man 2022 is expected to be the next in-person event.
Marnee Benson, Burning Man's associate director of government affairs, said the organization "strenuously opposed" the amendment. She added that Burning Man's use of reservations was a one-time strategy unique to the circumstances of the pandemic.
While Benson argued that it was unfair to tax funds that did not guarantee a patron's attendance, Neal noted that the reservations guaranteed those patrons the opportunity to attend and that was their choice to pay the nonrefundable fee.
The Live Entertainment Tax is a 9 percent tax applied to ticket sales of a variety of live events. The tax came into law in 2004 as a way for the state to gain revenue particularly from Las Vegas’s robust live entertainment industry.
Certain school, sporting, racing and nonprofit events are exempt from the tax. Neal also proposed that sporting events —— such as Raiders and Golden Knights games — lose their exemption, but that failed to make it through. The amendment as currently written would also exempt events that are strictly government fundraisers.
Nonprofit events that draw fewer than 7,500 people also are exempt. Lawmakers were considering lowering the threshold to 5,000, but walked back that change.
Burning Man became subject to the tax after revisions in 2015. The San Francisco-based nonprofit publicly disputed the tax on its ticket sales saying that it did not provide live entertainment.
"From our perspective, this is the latest attempt by an outside entity to unfairly tap the resources of Burning Man and its participants,” the organization previously stated. “Some seem to view Burning Man as the ‘golden goose’ they can turn to when they want money for other projects.”
Burning Man Project did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Organizers of the 80,000-person annual celebration in the Black Rock Desert told the Reno Gazette Journal in 2016 that they pay about $2.8 million each year to the state for the Live Entertainment Tax.
In the last fiscal year before the pandemic, the tax brought in more than $131 million in revenue to the state, the Nevada Independent reported. During the pandemic, that same revenue was down to $6.2 million in fiscal year 2021, a 93 percent drop, based on state reports.
If the organization caps the $2,500 reservations at 1,000, that would bring in an additional $225,000 to the state.
