Zakopane. Tourist tax. An appeal to Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the Sejm

The possibility of charging a local fee is specified in the Environmental Protection Act and the Regulation of the Council of Ministers of December 18, 2007 on the conditions that a given locality should meet.

Under current regulations, a local tax may be charged to visitors only in tourist placeswhere the air is not polluted and meets appropriate standards. However, such standards are set as an average for the entire region, including even several counties, which significantly lowers Zakopane's statistics. The problem also applies to other resorts in Poland.

In Zakopane the local tax is: PLN 2 per person per nightis collected from people staying in Zakopane for more than one day for tourist, recreation or training purposes by hoteliers or accommodation providers and transferred to the City Hall. The city budget receives approximately PLN 4.5 million annually from local fees. In the previous term, among others: buses were purchased from these funds.

As explained by Tymoteusz Mróz, a councilor from Zakopane and head of the city's tourism and promotion committee, the councilors' initiative is the result of a court case between Zakopane and representatives of one of the pro-ecological foundations and a tourist who formally complained about Zakopane's charging of a local fee due to the poor air condition. . The case is currently being heard in court for the second time.

– In the case of Zakopane, the zone covers several dozen towns from several districts and in this case air standards have already been exceeded. Then charging a local fee is not legal. We are fighting to change this law and have appealed to the Council of Ministers and the Chancellery of the Sejm to ensure that air quality is taken into account only in specific towns that collect such a fee, explained Mróz.

He added that 10 years ago, Zakopane had worse results in terms of air quality, because in winter there were days when the standards were exceeded. Over the following years, investments were made in the development of the geothermal heating network, and many residents took advantage of the program of replacing heating boilers with ecological ones. This means that Zakopane currently has very good air quality.

In 2018, the Provincial Administrative Court in Kraków ruled that Zakopane was unjustifiably charging a local fee due to air pollution. The court then illegally obliged Zakopane to refund the local fee to the complainant, who visited the city near Giewont in 2015. Zakopane filed a cassation appeal against this judgment to the Supreme Administrative Court, because the complainant referred to an outdated resolution from 2008.

In December 2023, the Zakopane City Council adopted a new resolution on the local fee, but the College of the Regional Chamber of Audit in Krakow found it invalid. Therefore, the resolution on this matter from 2015 applies to the resolution of the case by the Supreme Administrative Court.

Court cases regarding the collection of a local fee have also been brought against other tourist destinations in the south. Unfavorable judgments were passed against Wisła and Szczyrk.