Princess and the Pea Bed and Breakfast owner Wally Martin was celebrating Monday night when he learned the two per cent municipal hotel tax will cease to exist, effective July 2011.

Martin has been a vocal opponent of the local hotel tax since its inception in 2006. The extra two per cent tax he had to charge guests flows to the province, which then gives it back to the municipalities to use for marketing their towns.

In Langley, an average of $340,000 in local hotel tax revenue has been going directly into Tourism Langley, which has a $700,000 budget in 2009. Tourism Langley was created in 2007, after the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce turned its tourism operations over to the new organization.

On Monday night, Tourism Langley executive director Deborah Kulchiski was in front of council providing clarification on the fee-for-service rules for the two per cent hotel tax.

She said the organization is looking at other ways to get revenue, perhaps through booking commissions, should the province choose to no longer fund tourism offices. An additional $20,000 per year received from provincial visitor fees may also be cut, she said.

“We know the municipalities won’t be picking up the slack,” she said.

Gary MacKinnon said the Township’s economic advisory committee recommends the Township keep paying its $51,000 (the City contributes $15,000) and write a letter to the province asking it to keep the hotel tax or pay the same funds back to Tourism Langley.

“The EAC believes this is a cost effective use of funds,” said MacKinnon.

“What do they do for me? I don’t need Tourism Langley to market for me, I want to do that myself,” said Martin.

“Organizations such as Tourism BC, and locally Tourism Langley, probably had some relevance in the 1960s and 1970s, but in today’s world of internet marketing, they have no relevance.”

The province’s will stop charging the local tax, because the HST will replace that tax structure.

Originally, the hotel tax was going to end at the same time the HST was to come into effect, in July 2010, but an extension was asked for.

Martin likes the HST because it brings down taxes by one point for his guests.

In the meantime, the province is looking at giving a portion of the HST back to municipalities for tourism or funding it some other way, said Township Councillor Jordan Bateman, a past Tourism Langley board member.

“I suspect the province will find a way to calculate the funding to continue. The province recognizes the importance of tourism.”

Langley Tourism’s info centre is moving into the bottom floor of the Langley Events Centre in December. It will have offices and a boardroom upstairs at a cost of $80,000 per year.

However, a $200,000 grant that was given to Tourism Langley for \upgrades to the LEC, to bring it up to provincial info centre standards.

Tourism Langley’s budget for 2009 was $703,000. Much of that was provincial and municipal grants and hotel tax revenue.

“They run a lean office with only three staff and we get a visitors guide, they run the Circle Farm Tour, are very active on Twitter, their website is being looked at by Tourism Vancouver as a shining example. Marketing makes up more than $500,000 of their budget. It’s good fees for service,” Bateman said. Kulchiski said visitors to the centre increased nine per cent from 2008 to 2009 and Fort Camping said they saw 40 per cent more visitors this year, as did the Fort Langley Historic Site which saw record numbers this year.

But Kulchiski didn’t have actual tourism numbers for all of Langley.

“They are measurable,” said Kulchiski after Councillor Kim Richter sad those kind of numbers should be tracked year to year.

, to see how many and who is visiting Langley.

“Surrey pays $450,000 for a visitors’ centre and nothing more.”