Officials from Oak Grove and Lyon County came Thursday afternoon to the Cadiz/Trigg County Tourist Commission to tout the benefits of a restaurant tax.

Traci Cunningham, executive director of the Oak Grove Tourism board, and fellow Oak Grove Tourism member Charles Sanders, were up first to talk about all that the 3-percent restaurant tax has done for their community.

Cunningham said that between their restaurant tax and their 4-percent hotel tax – referred to as transient room tax in Trigg County – their tourism board has roughly $800,000 in revenue to work with.

“When I was doing the campaigning for [Oak Grove] City Council, the same question kept coming up when I was out talking to people: What does Oak Grove have,” said Oak Grove City Councilperson Janet Edwards. “Now, because of the tourism commission, we can say … that Oak Grove has a Halloween Hullabaloo that has almost 9,000 people from Hopkinsville and Clarksville and even from Cadiz.”

With that revenue, they’ve built a walking trail, which was completed in 2002, and there are 15 monuments along that trail now, said Cunningham. She also talked about their convention center, the Viceroy Performing Arts Center, which they helped pay for with an extra 1 percent on their hotel tax in 2007.

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