Move the focus from the convention center onto helping service workers
The time has come to find out whether the pandemic has taught elected officials anything about the need to reorder priorities, to finally start helping the low-wage workers who make this economy tick.
Orange County commissioners on Tuesday are scheduled to talk about spending some $700 million in tourist tax money to expand the county’s already expansive, expensive and underused convention center.
What they say about it will say a lot about whether this region’s leaders are finally going to start making service workers a higher priority, or whether they’ll continue to do the tourism industry’s bidding, which is to largely hoard the tax for its own gain.
The tax has long been used to enrich business, creating an ever larger labor force that often enough doesn’t make enough money to keep roofs over their heads, gas in their tanks, food on the table and kids in day-care.
The convention center expansion is a perfect example. It’s already a mind-boggling 7 million square feet, the equivalent area of 120 football fields. It has more than 2 million square feet of exhibit space alone, second in the nation only to Chicago’s McCormick Place.
Tourism businesses want to expand because more conventions and meetings might fill more hotel rooms and send more people to attractions and bars and restaurants. They’ll tout the new jobs without mentioning most are the low-wage types that make Central Florida the worst region in the nation for wages year after year.
We say the expansion “might” drum up more business because the convention industry is still dead in the water, and no one knows for sure what its future will look like.
Conventions are the Centers for Disease Control’s definition of the highestrisk gatherings for transmitting coronavirus: “Large in-person gatherings where it is difficult for individuals to remain spaced at least 6 feet apart and attendees travel from outside the local area.”
That’s what a convention is, folks, and that’s why they were one of the very first activities to get shut down in March.
Even if life returns to something closer to normal, companies across the country are reassessing how to conduct business. Businesses are starting to realize they can save money and maintain productivity by having people work from home. Won’t they also cast a critical eye on the high cost and potential health risk of putting employees on jets and sending them to live conventions?
We don’t know the answer, but neither does the Orange County Commission, even as it plows full speed ahead with plans to commit hundreds of millions more in tax dollars to an industry that might undergo fundamental and lasting change.
That’s one good reason to put the brakes on this expansion. Here’s another: Tourist tax collections — the money generated from tourists paying a 6% tax when they rent a hotel room — are the in tank. The tax generated less than $800,000 in April, down 97% from the $25.7 million take in April 2019.
Theme parks are reopening and hotels, too, but coronavirus cases are spiking again and no one is certain where this is all going. It seems financially irresponsible to take on $700 million in new debt when the tax that pays the debt may not recover for years.
But neither of those problems is the most compelling reason to halt the expansion.
Look around. The people who already work in the tourism industry have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s economic fallout. The May unemployment figures for Florida had Osceola and Orange counties with the highest and second-highest rates (31% and 23%, respectively). And if you don’t make enough money to pay the rent, you don’t make enough money to sock some away to get through hard times like these.
Unemployment was supposed to help but Florida’s contempt for the out-of-work resulted in a miserly weekly payment that hundreds of thousands of workers couldn’t even collect because the state’s payment distribution incompetence.
No, it’s way past time for Orange and other counties to reset their priorities. The pandemic has clearly shown us how vulnerable service workers are.
Instead of spending money to create a passel of new service-class jobs that don’t pay living wages, elected officials need to start taking care of the people who already have those jobs.
Instead of spending money on a bigger convention center so a small group of people and companies can get even richer, the county should start spending it to beef up the inadequate bus system that many of those people rely on to get to work. The county could do that now but has chosen to interpret state law otherwise.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings understands the need for better transportation and planned to ask taxpayers this fall to approve a 1-cent sales tax to pay for it. But that’s off the table now because the economy is a wreck.
So start beating on doors in Tallahassee and demand that legislators change the law so tourist tax money can be spent on buses and public safety and schools and parks.
The economy has been rigged long enough against the service workers who keep this economy functioning. We’ll soon learn whether the Orange County Commission is prepared to do something about it.