Too much money, too many secrets
Maxwell: Visit Orlando furloughed staff, yet won’t divulge spending.
Back in April, when Visit Orlando was furloughing 40% of its staff, the taxpayer-funded agency refused to provide details about what financial sacrifices executives might be making — including CEO George Aguel, whose compensation package has topped $650,000.
Secrets about public money were bad enough. But now the Sentinel has learned Visit Orlando also handed out $278,000 worth of “incentive compensation” and still won’t release details.
Not only that, Mayor Jerry Demings and county commissioners actually rolled back some of the few transparency and accountability measures Visit Orlando used to abide by.
The agency can now disclose fewer top salaries — with a year or more delay.
Commissioners also repealed a prohibition on first-class travel. (This for an agency whose former CEO was once caught buying a $9,271 business-class ticket to Dubai … while resort magnate Harris Rosen flew coach in the back of the same plane.)
The county also rolled back restrictions on severance benefits. (Flashback to another past scandal when yet another former Visit Orlando CEO walked away with an $826,000 retirement package after the agency threw him a $103,000 going-away party.)
All of this at a taxpayer-funded “nonprofit,” mind you.
And most of it kept secret from taxpayers until this newspaper revealed it.
Imagine if you read about some despotic foreign country preventing its own citizens from seeing how tax dollars were spent. You’d scoff. Yet it happens in your own backyard… with the blessing of local leaders.
County commissioners granted Visit Orlando laxer requirements during a contract renewal last year, much of it at county staff ’s recommendation, even as the county was agreeing to give the private agency a higher percentage of the county’s hotel-tax haul each year.
Here’s the bottom line: When public money is involved, the public deserves to see how every penny is spent.
If all the salary, incentive and travel spending is justified, Visit Orlando shouldn’t be scared to let people see it.
Visit Orlando says the incentive
pay was based on job performance last year and claims the public doesn’t really need to know how the money was spent because the bonuses were paid with private contributions.
Let’s stop right here. Because that explanation is a steaming pile of bunk.
According to 2018 tax documents, Visit Orlando’s budget was funded by
$60.8 million in government money and only $3.3 million in “membership dues.”
First of all, that is wildly disproportionate. When this agency was created, it was billed as a publicprivate partnership. Well, a 20-to-1 ratio is only a pretty cruddy partnership.
If tourism businesses truly believe Visit Orlando provides a spectacular bang for the buck, the industries that benefit should pony up more of their own bucks.
County officials shouldn’t send another tax dollar to this agency until the private sector contributes at least 50% of the cash to this partnership.
Second, you don’t get to claim every suspicious expenditure comes from the tiny share of private contributions — especially when you refuse to open up your books and prove it.
Heck, this agency has had so many financial controversies, I’m not even sure it’s mathematically possible for private dollars to have covered them all.
There was the time the agency struck a namingrights deal for a weather camera for FOX35 — whose general manager just happened to be a member of Visit Orlando’s board. (Ask yourself why we need to tell people who live in Orlando to “Visit Orlando.”)
There was the time Visit Orlando refused to say how much money it spent— likely millions — in a marketing deal with the U.S. Tennis Association.
The time the agency was discovered spending more than $750,000 to attend a single travel-industry trade show in New Orleans.
The $9,271 plane ticket. The $103,000 party. The $826,000 retirement package. Aguel’s $650,000 compensation package.
Most of these stories were exposed by the Sentinel working inside sources and combing through scraps of public information provided in county records and federal tax documents.
Imagine what we’d find if we could see how all your money was spent.
Now, Mayor Demings didn’t create this system. I’ve been writing about Visit Orlando’s nasty secret-keeping habit for 13 years while most county leaders just did what tourism bosses ordered — handed over hotel taxes and let the agency spend much of it in secret.
Enough.
Visit Orlando should have to account for every public penny the moment it spends it. The only exceptions should be the plentiful exemptions that exist in Florida’s public records laws allowing temporary delays for trade secrets, legal negotiations and similar competitive reasons.
If total transparency works for Visit Florida — after former House
Speaker Richard Corocoran forced it — it can also work for Visit Orlando. If only local officials would demand it.
Demings needs to be that leader. Mr. Mayor, don’t let hoteliers write the transparency guidelines. Demand the total transparency you know taxpayers deserve. That’s not radical. It’s responsible.
Visit Orlando leaders disagree. In fact, while defending the agency’s secrecy, the agency’s board chairman told Sentinel reporter Jason Garcia to “refocus your energy and efforts into a more positive story to get our region’s local economy and tourism industry back on its feet.”
Listen: The job of journalists isn’t to write fluff pieces about any industry. It’s to tell the truth and watch out for the public’s resources. And if you don’t want taxpayers asking you to justify how you spend their money, then spend only your own darn dollars to market your industry.
That’s probably what you should be doing in the first place. It’s what virtually every other industry already does.