Blacksburg Stuck with the Check

As a semester comes to a close at Virginia Tech, students call home to their parents begging for more money as their meal card runs near empty.

As the seasons go by, residents in Blacksburg complain to council members and local government for cleaner and safer streets.

As a result, the Blacksburg Town Council unanimously passed an ordinance that will increase the meals tax to 6 percent beginning July 1 when the new budget goes into effect. It is estimated that the increase will generate nearly $500,000 annually for the town.

So after years of debate between the university and the town, Blacksburg is stuck with the check.

“The town would have liked to work it out with Virginia Tech to implement a meals tax or pay a fee to level the playing field,” Town Manager Marc Verniel said. “Especially since Tech is beginning to capture more off campus [customers] now.”

After local businesses in Blacksburg thwarted the same meals tax proposal in 2005, the town increasingly engaged in talks with Tech to implement a meals tax for its on-campus dining facilities as a gesture of fair business and to generate extra revenue for the town.

Since the dining facilities are on the Tech campus, which is an agency of the state, they are not obligated—and do not—collect the local meals tax.

Sherwood Wilson, Tech’s Vice President for Administrative Services, said that while the town and the university have a great relationship, there would be no compelling reason legally or ethically for Tech to implement a meals tax.

“We would be setting a huge precedent if we suddenly implemented a meals tax,” Wilson said. “The argument is that because Virginia Tech is in the town, all meals should include a tax. That’s an extreme argument and we need to be careful that we don’t open any doors that ultimately hurt the students most.”

Less than 15 miles away in Radford, the city does have an arrangement with the campus dining contractor to collect the meals tax. Tech junior Jenna Coker said a meals tax at Tech would not be something she would want to see.

“College costs get more expensive every year so it’s great to see that Tech is making an effort to keep the meal costs fairly low for students,” Coker said.

Kevin Long, the restaurant manager at The Cellar on North Main Street said he can see both sides to the issue and that having Tech around is like a double edged sword.

“Without Tech, we wouldn’t have the larger population but they do have an unfair business advantage, that’s obvious,” Long said. “But Tech is unrelated to the town and you just learn to live with these things.”

According to a 2007 report from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, the meals tax increase to 6 percent will tie Blacksburg with four other towns, including Christiansburg, as having the third highest meals tax in the commonwealth.

With a total of 104 towns in Virginia, only Orange and Farmville will have higher meals taxes at 8 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively.

According to a March article in The Roanoke Times, Blacksburg’s 57-officer force has not seen added patrol officers in 14 years. The additional revenue will pay four new police officers, an additional emergency service dispatcher for 911 calls and create a new cleaning crew that will work in the downtown commercial district.