Tom Stieghorst
Tourism businesses and those that rely on them escaped another session of the Florida legislature with the state's tourism promotion arm, Visit Florida, intact.
House speaker Jose Oliva had included no money for Visit Florida in his preliminary budget but acceded to the $50 million proposed by the Senate and Gov. Ron DeSantis, saying the marketing by Visit Florida, at least within the legislature, was great.
While coronavirus played some role in convincing legislators of the need for tourism promotion, the win also resulted in no small measure from having the right person at the right time in the CEO job at Visit Florida.
Dana Young, who was approved in early 2019 to be the CEO, had herself been a legislator, both in the state House of Representatives and later in the Florida Senate. If anyone knew how to engage the levers of legislative persuasion in Visit Florida's defense, it was Young.
"We knew her as a fierce fighter," said Virginia Haley, the Visit Florida chairwoman and president of Visit Sarasota County. "We have fabulous marketing folks on our staff. What we need in the leadership is someone who was going to mind everything that goes on in Tallahassee."
Haley, who credits DeSantis for nominating Young, said walking the Capitol with Young is an exercise in frustration. "You can't walk for five minutes without her being stopped by someone to talk," Haley said.
By orchestrating the lobbying effort to preserve Visit Florida, Young earned every penny of her $165,000 salary. But threats to Florida's tourism promotion are still lurking.
A bill in the Florida legislature introduced by Hialeah Rep. Bryan Avila would have drastically widened the use of bed tax dollars to allow them to fund public parks and trails and a panoply of water quality improvement projects.
Allowable water projects would include everything from flood mitigation and seagrass or seaweed removal to algae control measures and septic to sewer conversion projects.
An amendment that would have added Avila's House Bill 7097 to tax legislation in the Senate was tabled in the last week of the session.
Already, local jurisdictions can direct bed tax dollars to sports stadiums, public arts programs, television and film production, beach restoration and other items that subtract from dollars available for tourism advertising and marketing.
In early March, the Brevard County Commission voted 4 to 1 to divert incremental growth in the bed tax to road and bridge repairs and environmental projects. Any new revenues in the Melbourne-area jurisdiction above the $16.6 million budgeted for the current fiscal year could go to such projects, including restoring the Indian River Lagoon.
Already, less than half of the collected bed tax in Brevard goes to advertising, with the balance going to beach improvement, capital facilities, cultural events, tourism information centers, the Brevard Zoo and the Space Coast Stadium baseball spring training facility.
Similar proposals surface periodically in other Florida counties, Haley noted. "I think you're seeing that more and more," she said.