Don’t expand the convention center
Orange County has other, pressing needs
Orange County has many pressing needs. Our bus system is one of the most underfunded in America. Affordable housing is at crisis levels. There aren’t enough cops on the streets. Some roads are still a congested mess. We need more sidewalks, permitting staff, parks — the list goes on.
Yet every few years, when residents are fretting over the problems associated with rapid growth and low wages, Orange County leaders decide to once again expand the convention center.
Keep in mind: This center is already one of the largest complexes on planet Earth. It’s 7 million square feet, having been expanded four times already — and yet still loses money most years. (The county has to offer incentives to get groups to stage in-person meetings in our increasingly Zoom-oriented world.)
Yet with billions of dollars in hotel taxes expected to pile up in the coming years, some hoteliers want to expand the center again.
Fortunately, Mayor Jerry Demings has decided to take a step back. Instead of just blindly plowing more money into another expansion and a bigger advertising budget for Visit Orlando, Demings wants to look at what this community actually needs. What a refreshing and overdue idea.
To show he’s serious, Demings appointed two well-known executives — Florida Blue market president Tony Jenkins and former Orlando Sentinel managing editor Jane Healy — to lead a task force that will study the best uses of the 6% hotel tax that generates more than $330 million a year.
Both Jenkins and Healy are smart, independent thinkers. I’m sure both have their faults as well. (One of Healy’s most obvious is that she hired me 25 years ago.)
But since I’ve studied hotel tax spending here for more than two decades, I thought I’d offer these two respected veterans some unsolicited advice.
Study what other tourist towns have done. Orlando tourism execs love to talk about Las Vegas as competition. But they conveniently ignore that Vegas has used hotel taxes to help local residents for years — on schools, roads, parks and more. Leaders there realized long ago that tourism puts a strain on any community. Other cities have done the same.
Study what other Florida cities have done.
In Brevard County, they’ve pushed to use hotel taxes on transportation and environmental needs. In the Keys they passed a different kind of hotel tax to help pay for affordable housing. In the Panhandle, tourist taxes pay for lifeguards. Sometimes leaders in these places had to push legislators to change state law. Other times they just asked their attorneys to read the statutes for themselves instead of relying on hoteliers’ interpretation. Don’t get caught up in what entrenched tourism interests say you can’t do. Look at what you want to do — and what others have already done.
Be skeptical. I rarely recommend anyone re-read my old columns. (Some people can’t stomach them the first time around.) But if you read just one, read this one from June of 2020: “Malarkey flows as Orange County tries to justify another $700 million for convention center.” It’s a primer on the kind of horse hockey that will be flung your way. Like when the county’s convention center chief claimed the pandemic and modern technology had “not diminished” the appetite for face-to-face meetings. Or when a staffer tried to calculate the center’s “return on investment” — but excluded the billions of dollars in ongoing debt payments in his calculations.
It was like trying to calculate the cost of owning a home without including the mortgage payments.
Use your head. You’ll be told that investing in tourism lifts everyone’s financial boats. You know that’s not true. Yes, there are plenty of high-paying jobs in the tourism and convention industry. But for every event planner, this town has 10 hotel housekeepers. This community has pumped
billions of tax dollars into growing a tourism economy and yet Orlando consistently ranks last in median wages among major metros. We’re talking 50th out of 50.
Think outside the box. You’ll hear tourism lobbyists say they need to promote their attractions and resorts. OK. But ask them why taxpayers should foot those bills. Most industries pay for their own darn advertising. That’s how free
markets supposedly work.
Seek fresh perspectives, part 2.
This one’s so important, I wanted to plug it twice. Eric Gray, the head of the Christian Service Center, once said that if he could do only one thing to improve this community for the working-class, it would be to make the bus system run properly. Listen to people like Gray, who have spent their lives on the front lines of this community’s affordability crisis. Commissioner Maribel Gomez Cordero was savvy enough to appoint Gray as her representative to this task force. Other members should listen to what he has to say.
I’m grateful Mayor Demings has asked fresh eyes to look at this old issue.
Way back in 2001, when I was still a beat reporter for the Sentinel, I wrote an article with this headline: “Poll: Spend tourist tax on roads, school. Residents said they would like to change state law so the money goes beyond the biggest industry.”
That was more than two decades ago. Yet local leaders consistently ignored the will of the people to let tourism bosses call the shots.
As a result, Orange County’s convention center is now bigger than the centers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia and Miami … combined.
And there are people who want to expand it again — even as we have traffic problems, a housing crisis and the mayor talking about raising taxes on locals to pay for solutions.
Fresh perspectives are desperately needed. In fact, they’re long overdue.