Our Comments to Council on MAT

The Town’s Municipal Accommodation Tax (MAT) presents a wonderful opportunity to both support our tourism sector, which is of course one of our primary economic drivers, and also help to address impacts from high levels of tourism on our residents and community.

This leads to what the BMRA sees as the most logical and appropriate approach to allocating MAT revenues - projected to be $3-4 million annually. 

Half to Tourism…

Fifty percent goes to the Tourism Industry Marketing Association, to be spent to support our community destination strategy, and encourage overnight stays and more shoulder season visits. That investment would grow targeted additional visits for the Blue Mountain Resort, Blue Mountain Village operators, and other service entities across the entire Town. Ensuring tourism businesses thrive benefits all parties, including residents.

and half to the Town.

The allocation of the other half of MAT revenues, considered to be the “Town’s portion”, must be directed based on input from community stakeholder groups, as part of a yet to be established Destination Advisory Committee.

There seem some obvious opportunities to invest funding to support community residents while also benefiting the tourist sector. This would largely entail infrastructure spending on road capacity and safety, parking, water system capacity, and health services. The challenge in maintaining our critical infrastructure was evidenced by Council’s decision to allocate 2026 budget funding to our Asset Management Reserves. High levels of tourist activity obviously contribute to infrastructure depreciation.

Helping address our housing challenge

The other community and industry “win-win” investment area would be workforce housing. Our Town has a severe shortage of rental housing that service workers can access. This presents significant staffing challenges for local businesses and makes it more difficult for younger Town residents to continue to live and work here. Allocating MAT funding to support affordable workforce housing should be a priority.

Our Ask to Council

The  BMRA requests that Council ensures community perspectives and priorities are clearly and formally incorporated into MAT allocation decisions, which will be critical to

building public support for the program.

Any Questions?