Follow the Money: The Destination Kent Committee raised nearly half a million dollars in their attempt to get voters to support the Hotel Tax Ballot Initiative

GRIID has been tracking the hotel tax ballot issue since it was approved by the Kent County Commissioners just a few months ago. I posted a recent article looking at the kinds of mailers they have sent out and which members of the local power structure are involved in the project.

Campaign Finance data was just made public yesterday and here is what I found out about the amount raised by the Destination Kent Committee, the entity that has been coordinating the hotel tax ballot initiative.

According to the Kent County Clerk’s office, there were two campaign finance documents filed. The first document was the standard campaign finance record for the Destination Kent Committee, and the second document was a late contribution report. 

There were not a large number of contributors, since those involved were almost exclusively people and organizations with deep pockets. Here is the list of campaign contributors from the largest to the smallest amounts:

• Grand Action 2.0 – $300,000.00
• GR Area Chamber Ballot Committee – $50,000.00
• Acrisure LLC – $25,000.00
• Amway Corporation – $25,000.00
• Amway Grand Plaza – $25,000.00
• Corewell Health – $10,000.00
• Pioneer Incorporated $5,500.00
• Progressive AE – $5,000.00
• Michael Jandernoa Trust – $5,000.00
• Chris VanBergen (Rockford Construction) – $5,000.00
• Gordon Food Service – $5,000.00
• Tower Pinkster – $2,500.00
• Todd Custer (CEO of Custer) – $2,000.00
• Benjamin Wickstrom (President of Erhardt Construction) – $1,500.00
• Sable Developing Inc. – $1,000.00
• David Leonard (Corewell) – $500.00
• Rosalynn Bliss – $250.00
• Michael Sytsma – $100.00
• William Brennan – $100.00

Total raised – $468,450.00

You can see that the largest contributor was Grand Action 2.0, which is behind the Amphitheater and Soccer Stadium projects, but is made up of members of the Grand Rapids Power Structure.

The Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce is second on the list, which is no surprise, since they are primarily interested in expanding the wealth of certain businesses in this city and several of their staff members have been the sources for news stories on the hotel tax ballot initiative.

Acrisure LCC makes sense, since they bought the naming rights to the Amphitheater. Amway, both the Corporation and the Hotel, will benefit from bringing more tourists to GR. 

Then there are the developers and construction companies involved – Rockford Construction, Erhardt Construction, Pioneer Construction, Tower Pinkster, Progressive AE. In addition, there are major employers, Corewell Health, Custer and Gordon Foods. All of these entities stand to get contracts for the upcoming development projects or potentially additional projects that will be created from the current ones that will be funded by the hotel tax increase.

As I have been saying all along, if these few entities can generate nearly a half a million dollars in just a few months to convince voters to support an increase in the hotel tax, why don’t they just pay for these projects themselves. Collectively these business and families are worth more than $10 Billion. However, getting the public to pay a large percentage of these projects is exactly how these people and these companies became millionaires and billionaires in the first place. Vote NO on the Hotel Tax on August 6th!