Vacation Property Owners: We want to hear from you! If you own a vacation rental property in Dunsmuir, please take a moment to tell us a bit about yourselves, what you love about Dunsmuir, why you choose to rent to vacationers and why you think it’s important to maintain this property right.
The Dunsmuir Vacation Rental Issue…
- A bit of common sense in the matter
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December 11, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Erich Veyhl
We own property in downeast Maine that we used to make available to vacationers but stopped over three years ago because of new state requrements for registration and “hotel lodging taxes”. It takes a lot of work to maintain one’s own home for vacationers and screen them as responsible tenants. The income only helped with costs, and it simply wasn’t worth the extra taxes and the belligerent abuse from intrusive bureaucrats egged on by envious and hostile neighbors seeking to control other people. Once the bureaucracy and taxes are established it only gets worse, so keep them out of your area.
Even worse, the state is furious because we kept our website up stating why we stopped offering vacation rentals (See http://MooseCove.com). A neighborhood political activist who wants higher taxes and controls set them off and they have been harassing us with impositions of tens of thousands of dollars in bogus taxes and penalties and threats to seize our property. The Maine tax bureaucracy has assumed the power to impose anything it wants to under non-objective law giving them the discretion to impose “estimated” taxes, demanding that the victim “prove” a negative to its satisfaction, which is impossible. They even sent us a letter last New Year’s Eve (illegally) announcing that we had no right to appeal. It is costing us thousands of dollars to try to fight this abuse in court. It is unbelievable that this bullying is allowed to go on in this country, but it is happening routinely in “progressive” Maine. We are only one of the cases described at http://MaineTaxAbuse.org. If you are a tourist or a potential property owner, stay out of Maine, and make sure this isn’t allowed to happen in your state.