A funny thing happened when the Warren County Treasurer’s Office began sending out letters in recent months to hotel and motel owners and others in the county who rent out rooms about a new audit policy.

Tax payments rose, sharply.

Coupled with what most are seeing as a big summer tourism-wise in the Lake George region, the enforcement effort has helped occupancy tax receipts surge 24.2 percent for 2018 as of Aug. 17.

That amounts to a $351,000 increase on receipts of $1,448,951 million.

That figure doesn’t include the bulk of July for most of the businesses, Treasurer Mike Swan said, so much the impact of what appears to have been a busy summer is still left to be felt, he explained.

The county’s occupancy tax revenue comes from a 4 percent tax on room nights imposed on those who rent hotel, motel and bed-and-breakfast rooms. The money is used to fund the county’s Tourism Department and for other promotion.

Warren County Tourism Coordinator Joanne Conley said hotel room sale reports showed a 6 percent increase in Warren County through July, and she said the state Department of Environmental Conservation indicated campground bookings were up 5 percent into the early summer as well.

Lake George also got some good tourism media attention this year, with Lake George Steamboat Co. featured in a state “I Love New York” commercial, and Time magazine and TripAdvisor both giving the region positive writeups.

“I do think it’s a combination of enforcement by Mike Swan’s office, but the weather has definitely been in our favor and we got some good media attention,” she said.

July’s unusually warm and dry weather was among the best for tourism in years. While August has been wetter, “it hasn’t been a washout,” and visitors continued to come to the region for the second part of the summer, Conley said.

Gina Mintzer, the executive director of the Lake George Chamber of Commerce, said it was unclear how much of the increase stemmed from the opening of the new Holiday Inn Express and a full year of the Courtyard Marriott in Lake George. She said a snowy winter also helped the year get off to a better start.

She said events have been well attended, citing the Churney Gurney mountain bike race in Queensbury that drew more than 300 riders earlier this month, many of them from outside the state.

“We’ve had some really strong things going on,” she said.

The enforcement effort targeting bed tax scofflaws is just beginning.

The Treasurer’s Office has gotten the go-ahead to hire an additional staff member to perform audits of businesses that collect occupancy tax, to make sure they are forwarding what they should to the county. That hiring came after a state audit called for more enforcement of occupancy tax collection.