Uprising brewing on hotel-tax group?
Task force suggests overdue changes to build up infrastructure
It’s been interesting to watch members of Orange County’s new task force on hotel taxes.
You can sense something may be afoot. Something unprecedented. Something that could provide a long-needed jolt to this tourist town’s status quo.
Members, appointed by Mayor Jerry Demings and county commissioners, have been asked to make recommendations about how the county should spend billions of dollars in hotel taxes in coming years.
These volunteer members know this low-wage community has desperate needs — including better roads, a functional transit system, clean water and affordable housing. Yet they’ve been asked to pour billions into sporting venues, museums, even another expansion of the county’s already massive convention center.
It just doesn’t seem to make sense to some of them. Nor should it. Instead of addressing serious needs, they’re being asked to consider luxuries.
It’s like knowing your body needs proteins and vitamins to live — and being handed a menu full of 20 different desserts.
Well, thankfully, a number of members aren’t buying it. They’re pushing back. And there may be a way for them to succeed.
Last week, after the Orange County Regional History Center requested tens of millions of dollars for a potential expansion, task force member Eric Gray felt compelled to speak up.
Gray, the director of the Christian Service Center in downtown Orlando, said he was a big fan of the history center. Heck, he used to work there. But he said he had trouble thinking about dumping billions of dollars into sports stadiums and museums when this community is struggling so mightily on so many basic fronts.
And he said it makes sense for tourists, who often strain our local infrastructure, to help pay for that. “They flush toilets, take showers, use emergency rooms, use our roads and buses,” Gray said. “Sometimes they even commit crimes,” he continued, arguing that local leaders have “both moral and economic reasons” to consider using hotel taxes to pay for those costs.
That may sound like heresy to the hotel execs who have long pulled the strings in this town. But it’s common sense to most central Floridians — and to residents in other tourist towns.
In Las Vegas, for instance, city leaders decided long ago that it was lunacy to continue spending every hotel tax dollar on convention center expansions and glitzy marketing campaigns when the citizens who lived year-round in Vegas were dealing with clogged roads, overcrowded schools and a generally sub-par quality of life. Today, Vegas spends hotel taxes on everything from rail and roads to park land and schools.
And you don’t have to leave Florida to find other examples. Counties right here in Florida, from the Panhandle to the keys, have also pushed to change state law to allow them to spend hotel taxes on things like roads, environmental projects and public safety.
That is what people here want. While the issue hasn’t been polled in a while, every survey I’ve ever seen shows local residents believe hotel taxes should be used on services this community truly needs.
A Sentinel poll conducted in 2001 found more than 70% of residents wanted to amend state laws to allow hotel taxes to be spent on local needs. A survey conducted by former Mayor Glenda Hood put the number at 86%. Even the town’s business elite wanted to change, as evidenced by an 80% vote at a chamber of commerce hobnob.
I think task force members today know this. Member Stephen Facella, who owns a pizza restaurant, asked what kind of sense it makes to market this region to tourists but not spend money on the roads and transit they need to use once they get here. “So we can get them to Orange County but not to the actual events?” he asked.
Jane Healy, the co-chair of the task force and a former managing editor of the Orlando Sentinel, seemed receptive to Gray’s suggestion that members discuss expanding the allowable uses, saying: “I know there’s a lot of interest here in that.” Amen.
But here’s the catch: If members believe the county should seek legislation changing the way hotel taxes can be spent, they should make any spending recommendations contingent upon the county first trying to change those laws next session.
So sure, go ahead and vet all the requests from the baseball dreamers and convention planners. But recommend no major spending takes place until after the next legislative session is over — when we know what all our options are and whether we can order some entrees instead of just desserts.
Some tourism forces seem to be hoping that this group of well-meaning volunteers will do their dirty work — that task force members will just give up pushing for needed spending and agree to the status quo. That way they can say: See? We told you everyone wants to expand the convention center and Camping World Stadium once again. Even the local charitable leaders and small-business owners agree.
I don’t sense this group will be pushed around that easily. And good for them.
Some are also wisely suggesting the county look for creative ways to spend money on local needs under the existing statutes. That’s a good idea as well.
Even if we directed just a third of the annual hotel-tax revenues to local needs, that would be more than $100 million annually — enough to transform this region’s bus system, make SunRail more user friendly or massively expand workforce housing.
We’d still have more than $200 million a year for convention centers, marketing budgets and sports stadiums — more than this town’s tourism bosses ever imagined when this tax was first created. Isn’t that enough? It seems a growing number of people think so.