God love 'em, every tourist that comes to Tampa Bay leaves a little bit of the best of them behind. In taxes. Tourism taxes paid on hotel visits, to be exact.
What happens to those public dollars in Pinellas County — more than $27 million a year — is open to full scrutiny. You can get the e-mails, expense checks and other info just by asking or filing a public records request.
The story is different in Tampa, where the visitors bureau that administers more than $9 million annually is not a public agency. Its budget is filed each year with Hillsborough County government, but its inner workings and details of exactly how it spends those dollars are not subject to public records laws.
I raise this distinction because of the crimes that went on in West Palm Beach last year and the media stink over public records currently playing out in Orlando with similar private convention and visitors agencies.
The Palm Beach visitors bureau lost $1.5 million when its controller embezzled money for three years. One account in the Orlando Sentinel said, "During the investigation into what went wrong in Palm Beach, auditors also turned up lavish expense reports that showed the bureau spent money on everything from New York strip and rib eyes to bottles of Absolut vodka and Crown Royal whiskey."
Yummy.
In Orlando, the visitors bureau (fueled by its $50 million in tourist taxes generated from all those worldwide travelers coming to Disney, Universal, Sea World, et al.) is trying hard not to explain exactly how it spent $109,000 on "local entertainment" or reveal the salaries of top executives. It went so far as to send memos to important politicos such as Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty asking him to clam up about it as well.
The columnist who has been raising some Sunshine Law hell in Orlando is Scott Maxwell. He had this gem in an April 12 piece about how the manager of the Peabody Hotel had also requested Omerta from the local public officials: The GM wrote, "My personal feeling is that we should move on from this Sentinel CVB feeding frenzy and provide them with only the minimum information that is legally permissible. We have far more important issues to address than worrying about what the Sentinel and Scott Maxwell are saying about us."
Maxwell's torch has been passed in our area to Mike Deeson, a reporter for Tampa Bay's 10. On April 10, Deeson aired a story after having his public records requests to the Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau rejected on the grounds that the agency isn't public, despite the fact that 80 percent of its $9.4 million budget comes from public dollars. Deeson reported that the bureau's top executive, Paul Catoe, makes more than Tampa's mayor or Florida's governor, but that few other details about agency expenditures are available.
I asked Catoe about it. He said his agency is accountable mainly to the Hillsborough County Commission and its Tourist Development Council, which allocates the tourist dollars to it, approves its budget and conducts audits. He defended his agency's private status because of its work trying to lure conventions to Tampa. To give competitors the inside dope on Tampa's various convention bids would put it at a disadvantage, he said.
But still, wouldn't it make sense — given the millions and millions of public dollars involved and the fact that convention bids could be kept temporarily shielded just like corporate relocation bids are — to move all these agencies into the public column?
Farrell on the radio: Former Democratic candidate Scott Farrell has a new moonlighting gig, trying to return progressive talk to Tampa Bay's airwaves. He premiers The Scott Farrell Show on AM 1040 Newstalk on May 13. The show will include news talk, politics, books and some media chat, he said. "Obviously with tongue planted firmly in cheek and with a progressive bent," Farrell added.
Farrell, a journalism graduate from the University of Florida, said he's excited to put his collegiate training to use. The topics may get serious, but he promised, "We want to have some fun."
For a daily dose of political pearls, visit PoHo's blog, thepoliticalwhore.com.
This article appears in May 2-8, 2007.