Editorial: Tourist-tax spending shouldn’t focus on convention center

If we’re reading the latest last-minute communique on tourist bed-tax spending from Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings correctly, a lot of people have wasted a lot of time.

After dozens of hours of meetings, painstakingly prepared presentations, thousands of words written in debate and hundreds of hours of testimony, Demings is right back to square one: His latest plan, dropped on his fellow commissioners Thursday night in preparation for a special meeting Tuesday, says he wants to dump close to $600 million into expanding the already-massive Orange County Convention Center. He’d still support improvements at Camping World Stadium and the Amway Center — though he now suggests that the city of Orlando take on the burden of financing any debt associated with the latter. He’d allocate relatively small pots of money for lesser projects. Anything else can wait.

Tourism development tax allocation must value people over profits | Commentary

Demings’ opposition to using funding in ways that acknowledge tourism’s impact on this community remains stone-cold. This significantly undercuts the county’s chances of making a successful pitch to state lawmakers to give counties more flexibility in the use of tourist development taxes. And while he may defend the county’s record on supporting some of the alternative priorities proposed for Orange County’s Tourism Development Tax, aka the TDT, the reality is too grim to ignore.

Commentary: Invest in Orange County’s tourism-driven economy to maintain our mainstay

The county has a study confirming that affordable housing is in a state of crisis. And Demings himself pleaded the sorry state of Orange County’s roads and public-transit system last year. Both of these needs spring from — and exacerbate — the county’s long history of reliance on industries that habitually offer low salaries, unpredictable hours and precarious survivability for the vast majority of its workers.

In the long run, neglecting these priorities will degrade Orange County’s economy in a way that shiny new ballrooms and concourses can never repair. Commissioners have to push back against Demings’ efforts to dominate this conversation — and they have to do it fast, preferably at Tuesday’s special meeting called to finalize bed-tax spending for the coming year.

It’s big enough

Over the course of this debate, Demings’ panel on TDT spending and potential alternative uses heard from plenty of hospitality-industry workers who pleaded as if their jobs would vanish tomorrow if the convention center weren’t expanded.

We feel their pain. But they’re worried about the wrong thing. The Orange County Convention Center is big enough, and much of its 7 million square feet sits echoingly empty for most of the year.

That’s not surprising, because it’s a lot of space — the second-largest convention center in the nation. There’s a 2,643-seat theater, three full-service restaurants and eight food courts, more than 2 million square feet of exhibit space, 97 truck bays, two ballrooms and 74 meeting rooms.

County figures say it hosts about 230 events per year, but most take up only a small fraction of the available space. Adding to it provides no guarantee that giant convention events will return. Many industry experts predict that in a post-COVID world, the need for big convention spaces will sharply dwindle.

None of this has stopped the county’s hospitality magnates from pleading for more space. They continually invoke the threat that Las Vegas will soon expand its own mammoth facilities, which would push Orange County’s comparative size to — gasp — third.

Nobody who’s evaluating facilities for future events will care. Orlando, Las Vegas and Chicago — currently, and probably eternally, the biggest convention space in the nation — are three very different destinations. Event planners will choose the city that is the best match for their own needs, and Orlando holds a few cards that other destinations can’t match — including multiple Disney theme parks and resorts (the largest single-site tourist attraction in the world) plus Universal parks, SeaWorld and more. When Las Vegas and Chicago can boast something similarly family-friendly, then local officials should worry.

Undercutting alternatives

The other factor often mentioned in the artificial push to tie up funding in the convention center is the potential that Orange County’s annual bed-tax revenues and massive surplus — each of which is projected to be about $300 million — could attract sticky-fingered lawmakers who want to re-allocate that money to other parts of the state or just siphon it into the shadowy caverns of the state budget.

Orlando is amazing. TDT funding can only make it better | Commentary

The reality is that if lawmakers want to come for that money, they will. Why hand them such an easy justification? Orange County has so much money, it wants to spend $600 million on a convention center that’s already too dang big. The Senate-floor speeches practically write themselves.

The county’s best defense against a cash grab is its desperate need for flexibility. Orange County leaders should be working with other regions of the state to demand legislation that would support that flexibility, along with authorization to consider a separate tourist-impact tax that could flow to affordable housing as well.

An easy way to pay for affordable housing | Commentary

There’s still time, but it’s running out. As soon as commissioners commit to Demings’ plan, they will put the county on a path that leaves it vulnerable to raids from the Legislature and seriously constrained in their ability to argue for alternatives. We urge other members of the commission to listen to the voices clamoring for change, and make the right call.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Contact us at insight@orlandosentinel.com.