Key West business owners plead with legislators: ‘Respect our vote’ to limit cruise traffic

Nineteen business owners and Key West residents took time off Wednesday to travel to Tallahassee before dawn so they could plead with a Senate committee to reject a bill designed to cancel out their vote to limit cruise-ship traffic in the city.

“I’m here to ask for opportunity, self determination and for respect for our community’s ballot box,” said Billy Litmer, owner of Honest Eco Charters. He said he refunded $2,000 for canceled charters and skipped a city board meeting in which he was seeking permission to purchase a neighboring business “because today’s losses will pale in comparison to the economic damage we will suffer if we wrecked the reef with these giant ships.”

Despite their appeals, the Senate Rules Committee voted 12-5 to approve SB 426 which would preempt three new ordinances adopted by more than 60% of voters in Key West in November. The measures ban cruise ships with more than 1,300 passengers from docking at the city port and limit the total number of cruise visitors who can disembark each day to 1,500. A similar bill, HB

267, is barreling through the House.

Unable to defeat the bill in committee at the Capitol, the Key West organizers then assembled at the Governor’s Mansion, where they hoped to send a message to urge the governor to threaten a veto if the bills should pass.

“We want to find balance, and we want to protect the beautiful things in Florida that make us a great state. We know you care about that and invite you down,’’ said Will Benson, an awardwinning fishing guide.

He invited DeSantis, who has not commented on the bill, to come fishing with them so they could show him the migration of the “silver kings,” the tarpon that come every spring to Key West. “We’re looking for your leadership on this.”

The business owners explained how the goal of the initiative was to protect the coral reef and its ecosystem but to the GOP-controlled Senate Rules Committee, they focused on the economics.

Before this year, they said, they had a love-hate relationship with the cruise ship industry. In a normal year, 900,000 people disembarked from cruise ships as three cruise ships a day sent 9,000 to 12,000 people onto the narrow streets and sidewalks of Key West for a five-hour visit.

“If you can imagine the chaos and the mayhem that occurs during those times,’’ said Teri Johnston, Key West’s mayor. “It’s not a quality experience for our visitors. It’s not a quality experience for our residents.”

But since the last shipped sailed out of their port in March 2020, the touristdependent economy has retooled its marketing plans and even without the cruise traffic has rebounded. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s no-sail order for cruise ships served as a forced experiment of what could happen if an extreme version of the citizen’s initiative were to take effect. And the unintended consequences surprised everyone.

The community was “very, very scared” when COVID-19 forced the cancellation of cruises to their tiny island, Johnston said, but the pandemic led business owners to rewrite their business model and Key West businesses are now “a having a record year.”

“They’re actually serving less customers who are actually buying more in an enjoyable environment,’’ she said.

“At the end of the year 2020, we were at 97% of our sales tax revenue against the year 2019, which was a record year for the city of Key West,’’ Johnston said. Businesses operating from the city’s working waterfront are “at 98% and above and some are 124% of their last year’s sales.”

The business owners told the committee they organized the voter referenda not to eliminate cruise traffic but to protect the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend.

“‘I’m here to beg you to listen to the fishermen who’ve been raising the alarm for decades about the negative impacts large cruise ships have on our water quality and on their health,’’ said Arlo Haskell, who was born and raised in the Keys and was one of the organizers of the referenda effort.

“We want cruise ships to come to Key West. We support the governor’s call to lift the no-sail order. All we’re saying is send us your smaller ships because mega cruise ships are destroying the beauty of the Florida Keys and threatening the future of our tourist-based economy.”