Dear Airbnb,
I'm happy to hear that you paid your taxes this year. I did too! Isn't it awesome? However, I've crunched some numbers and I have some bad news for you. Out of your $12 mil of hotel tax, only 1.4% percent goes to the SF Public Libraries. So that's $168,000. Divided by the 868 library staff, we have $193 per person. Assuming each employee works 5 days per week minus holidays, this is $0.78 per employee per day. Since that's significantly under San Francisco minimum wage ($12.25/hr), I doubt that your hotel tax can keep the libraries open more than a minute or two later.
However, had you donated that $8 million you spent fighting Proposition F directly to the public libraries you love so much, that could have made a bigger difference. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20!
Like I said before, When a multinational corporation spends $8M to defeat a ballot measure in a single city, it's a foregone conclusion that you should vote for it. There is literally no chance that doing what they want is in your best interest, unless you are on their board.
And let's not forget that the $12M to which they are referring is an assessment for several years worth of taxes that they skipped paying in the first place, and includes fines. "Officials had estimated that Airbnb owed the city as much as $25 million."
So they dodged half their tax bill and are now being gloating pricks about having finally paid half of what they owed. Well played, AirBnB. Well played.
