CENTRAL FLORIDA Maladecki, president of the Central Florida Hotel & Lodging Association. Dyer quickly signed on. Orlando, as a player and the primary coordinator of the region’s interests, wants the investments to be in Orlando. With the growing tax, with the deletion of the planned-for soccer stadium debt, and with the anticipated revenues, all of this — more than $100 million — could be added to the Big Three venues’ package. And the tourism development tax revenue still could pay off all the bonds by 2024. The opportunities to take more steps toward giving Orlando a full set of world-class amenities were too good to pass up. World-class amenities help make a world-class city. A world-class city is one more draw for a world-class tourism market. Let’s get it done, Dyer argued. Put on the gas. Jacobs pumped the brakes. The plan had no details, she charged. It needed, she argued, careful analysis — by her staff, and by Orange County Comptroller Martha Haynie’s, not others. Today’s rosy growth projections may be just another unexpected economic downturn away from being disastrously wrong. The risks of committing so much money could even endanger the top buckets, the convention center and Visit Orlando, she cautioned. Rosen, who owns seven hotels in the convention center area, expressed outrage at the April plan. None of the things on the list are technically tourism investments. For better or worse, tourism is Orange County’s economic engine, employing tens of thousands of people just in the hotels. The hotel tax should first and foremost be used to assure their economic security, he argued, not diverted to downtown Orlando. The International Drive Resort Area Chamber of Commerce, often a Rosen compatriot, and for many huge hotels in the I-Drive area a rival organization to the Central Florida Hotel & Lodging Association, stuck to its preference that future investment focus on the top bucket, the Orange County Convention Center, and plans to expand it again. And for a long time there has been another current of thought in Orange County, raised this year by at least a couple of candidates for the Orange County Board of Commissioners, that the tourism tax could be used for even greater needs. Tourists bring traffic. They put burdens on all civic services including law enforcement. Why not petition to do what is done in some other places nationally, and peel off a few of those tourist tax dollars to help support 84 | INFLUENCE SUMMER/FALL 2016 those other services? “To me, it’s like everybody against Orange County,” Foglesong said. The stakes are high, as far as the region’s tourism industry is concerned. Orlando sits well. But the competition is fierce. There’s head-to-head competition with Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in the next tier — San Francisco, New Orleans, San Antonio, Seattle, Atlanta, and a hundred other American cities. But that’s only the American side. “We’re a global destination. We’re really competing with other countries,” said Visit Orlando President George Aguel. And Orlando knows too well what happens when an economic downturn — or even a hiccup — hits. That lesson came not in the Great Recession of 2008, but in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, when the global tourism market nosedived. That, as much as anything, led to an unheralded part of the 2006 tourism development tax deal that also built the Big Three Venues: half of the new, sixth cent was dedicated to Visit Orlando. So as the Great Recession hit, Orlando’s tourism fell again. But perhaps not as much as might have happened, Aguel argued, because that extra tax revenue kept the marketing program robust. Orlando took advantage of competing cities’ declines. “Looking back now, we say, ‘Thank goodness,’” Aguel said. And looking forward? Looking forward, the tourism industry wants to keep that money flowing. “ Those are taxes. Those are collected from our visitors who come here. ... I think legislatively there are limitations on what we can do with the money. But they still are public funds. Who do they belong to? They belong to the public.” —TERESA JACOBS, ORLANDO MAYOR But whose money is it anyway? “It’s Orange County’s tax,” Foglesong said. “There is a difference of opinion on this one,” Jacobs conceded. “A lot of the tourism industry, and certain people in particular that I won’t mention by name (Rosen undoubtedly in her mind chief among them) definitely see it as theirs. “Those are taxes. Those are collected from our visitors who come here. Those are public funds,” Jacobs contended. “And I think legislatively there are limitations on what we can do with the money. But they still are public funds. Who do they belong to? They belong to the public. But who controls them is the Board of County Commissioners. And I think over the years Orange County has been pretty good stewards. We’re conservative and I think that’s been beneficial. And I understand why the tourism feels a sense of ownership, because they were also supportive of creating it with an expected purpose.” “I understand that. I understand. I just don’t technically think it’s their dollars that are collected from the visitors that come here,” she concluded. Legally, she’s right, which is why all the other players have targeted Jacobs. If she, or some future Orange County mayor says no, and the commissioners don’t override, or if she says yes, and the commissioners agree, there’s really not much anyone else can do about it. And that brings Orange County and Orlando to this year’s current fight. An effort pushed by Rosen, the I-Drive chamber, (and initially also Maladecki and other tourism leaders) would have Orange County lock in a process that would make it very difficult and very deliberative for anyone to make any changes in how the tourist tax money is spent. The initial proposal was to lock such a plan into the Orange County Charter, via a county-wide vote in November. That would have set the process in stone, Rosen told Jacobs in June, so that “you guys can’t be destructive … you guys can’t mess it up.” It wasn’t necessarily personal, de la Portilla argued. With term limits, neither Jacobs nor any of today’s commissioners will be in their current posts when 2024 rolls around. What happens this year is their policy. What happens eight years from now will be someone else’s. But in a bitter tug-of-war at the Orange County Charter Review Commission, Jacobs ultimately defeated Rosen and the charter amendment idea was killed. The alternative, which Jacobs wanted all along and Rosen and the I-Drive chamber now back, is to set the process in county ordinance. So Jacobs set out to develop that new law. In the meantime, Jacobs told Maladecki, Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, Dyer and others backing the April spending plan, everything else will have to wait until that ordinance is developed through a long, careful process of public hearings. Maybe November it’ll be ready. Maybe December. Maybe after that it’ll be time to debate actual changes in how the money is spent. Let the next rounds of battles begin.
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