Although the faltering economy has driven down Florida's tourist industry, in a special report by the Florida Taxwatch Center for Tourism, even a pessimistic forecast has over 89 million tourists stampeding through Central Florida by 2009. These guests provide such huge tax benefits when they buy airline tickets and hotel rooms that Florida can get by without a state income tax. But only a minuscule amount of the tax dollars are spent on Central Florida counties.
Orange County, where many of the theme parks are located, is known as a sponsor county – the tax benefits are applied throughout the state. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Florida gets 10 percent of all sales taxes it collects from Orange County. When the state divides its hundreds of millions in profits each year, Orange and its cities often receive less than 5 percent to the total take.
Of the 5 percent, these tourist tax dollars are spent primarily on new airport runways, roads, and ramps leading into and out of the theme parks, and construction on new hotels and convention centers and sports arenas. Worse, the Legislature routinely forces the cost of sales and gas taxes up, which the residents pay for along with the tourists. Residents also pay for the extra police protection and city clean-up crews for gala puke fests such as Spring Break and Bike Week in Daytona Beach.
In a city where the median age is 35.9 prime child-rearing years, some of those tourist tax dollars should be earmarked for education. According to the Florida DOE, more than 25 percent of third-graders failed the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test last year. Academically, Florida ranks in the bottom quarter on the nation and only 68% of high school students graduate.
Some of those tax dollars should be earmarked for public transportation since traffic in Orlando is basically a blocked asphalt artery. Yet local government shot down the idea of a bullet train between Orlando and Miami. Next they’re about to aim at the proposal hitching up Orlando and Tampa. There are Lynx buses in Orlando with mysterious stops that are relayed to commuters through a reliable system of telepathy and trial and error- and there are always taxis so economical and convenient in a sprawling metropolis with three area codes and a spastic traffic system.
Orlando's past claims to fame - picking oranges, the space program and designing nuclear warheads - pretty much went bust thanks to citrus canker, the Challenger, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is time to develop industry that does more than pay minimum wage for working at a swank attraction. It is time for Florida to grow up, before it grows out of an outdated economic subsidy, namely the tourism industry.
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