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Scott Wants $100 Million To Promote Florida For 100 Million Visitors
January 13, 2014
Gov. Rick Scott will seek $100 million to help bring 100 million visitors a year to the Sunshine State.
Scott announced Friday that he intends to ask the Legislature for the record amount of funding for Visit Florida, the state’s tourism-promotion arm, in the 2014 budget.
Legislative budget leaders are taking a cautious approach to the proposal.
The proposal is a jump of $25 million from what Scott sought last year and more than $35 million above what the Legislature eventually gave the agency for the current 2013-14 budget year.
The boost in funding would allow Visit Florida to expand its seasonal, city-specific targeted advertising to a year-round national campaign and would allow it to further target areas such as the United Kingdom and Brazil that already send large numbers of tourists to Florida.
During a morning appearance on an Orlando television station, Scott said marketing is “how we grow our economy.”
“All we have to do now is basically call up north and ask what the temperature is,” Scott said. “Other times, the more you put yourself in front of people, talk about our beaches, our weather, our attractions, our parks … so we just market ourselves more. We can get a lot more tourists in our state.”
And, of course, Scott said that with more tourists would come the creation of more jobs.
The funding request will be included in his annual budget request, which will be sent to the Legislature before the 2014 session starts in March.
Scott’s office released a series of supportive quotes from lawmakers, including Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, and Rep. Ed Hooper, R-Clearwater, who will help oversee the economic-development budget process in their respective chambers. However, that doesn’t mean the funding request will have an easy journey through the Legislature.
Sen. Joe Negron, a Stuart Republican who heads the powerful Appropriations Committee, called the proposal “bold” and said the Senate will give it great consideration. But he added that lawmakers will have to determine if the recent funding increases to Visit Florida are why the state has seen tourism numbers increase.
“While tourism has increased, is this a correlation or causation?” Negron said. “That’s something we’ll have to analyze as part of the committee process.”
Rep. Seth McKeel, a Lakeland Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said in a release that the proposal will be “thoughtfully considered.”
“Tourism is certainly an important industry in our state,” McKeel said. “However, each year during the legislative budget process we must look at all of the state’s priorities and determine how to best allocate our available funds statewide.”
The Legislature approved $63.5 million for Visit Florida during the 2013 session, a $9.5 million increase from the prior year.
Meanwhile, the state is expected to be close to 94 million visitors for 2013, which would easily break the 2012 record of 91.4 million visitors.
Through the first three-quarters of 2013, the state had attracted an estimated 72.5 million tourists.
With the $100 million proposal, Visit Florida President and CEO Will Seccombe said the governor is further challenging Visit Florida and the tourism industry to reach 100 million visitors.
“We’re on pace for a third consecutive record year of tourism,” Seccombe said. “If you’re on that kind of a pace, there are two things you can do: You can sit back and enjoy the ride or you can double down and redouble your efforts to build on that momentum. There is no question that is what the governor has done.”
The state has already started to market itself as a year-round destination rather than just a warm-weather winter playground. Also, while focusing on attracting more people from traditional locales — New York, Boston, Atlanta and Chicago — ads have increased in markets west of the Mississippi and overseas.
The additional money would expand on both domestic and international advertising and include efforts to encourage passenger air carriers to increase international flights to the Sunshine State, Seccombe said.
Of Florida’s 2012 visitors, 13.8 million were international travelers.
The state money is in addition to $110.9 million in private contributions to Visit Florida.
by Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida
Comments
11 Responses to “Scott Wants $100 Million To Promote Florida For 100 Million Visitors”
Here is a thought! We want to save money here in Florida STOP adding crap on to the Welcome To Florida signs. (Ex…. La Florida or Open For Business). What a waste of mone! Just think those stupid saying were put on every Welcome sign in Florida. What does that crap even mean? Waste, WAste, WASte,WASTe and more WASTE!
People you can quit wishing and hoping for heavy manufacturing and production jobs, those sunny days we enjoyed as kids as our parents were able to provide for us well, owing to their excellent wages. Those jobs are now giving families in other parts of this world their sunny day. The gap between the haves and have nots is rapidly widening, so which ever side of the bank your standing on, wave goodbye to the folks on the other side as the gap is growing and here to stay.
I would suggest studying and striving for an advanced degree with a practical application that has demand. Drone maintenance is a vocation that is hot.
All this talk of tourist and marijuana makes my mind think of the prohibition era of alcohol back in the 20th century, the underground clubs were refered to as speakeasies. I guess that in the future when people refer to our second era of prohibition on pot, they will speak of our underground clubs as toke-easies.
Toke easy or the law will hear you cough.
More than likely he want to invest that money in order to get political donations.
Btw, there are 310,000,000 million people in the US. So Scott is expecting close to 1/3 of Americans to come visit Florida?
This is like throwing money into the wind to see where it will land.
Nobody wants children to get high if they did they would just go to there local drug dealer and buy pot. No people want it for medicine to stop the seizure big huge diffrence. Since people do not believe in this maybe just think what would you do to save yourself from brain damage that can’t be changed. People who have never had this great pleasure of being scared that there child might not wake up. Will not understand but I can tell you it’s not much different from caring for someone who has had a stroke and will soon if not later start to have seizures and well I think most know the rest.
100,000,000. tourist.
You could probably turn good coin just recycling the waste they would generate.
Why argue over the marijuana…, and just take the touristas on down the trail.
Leagalize oh that’s real smart. Gee Whats next pcp, meth, crack Hey we can make $100,000,000 then. Leagalizing any drug is wrong and a risk for more crime. It’s called à gateway drug!!!!! I agree Scott has to go. He has cut pensions, have not produce jobs he promised. He’s a crook!!!! Why not take that 100 million and put it back into jobs, florida sells its self!!!!
Scott has got to go. He does not support medical marajuana for children I understand it is a little hard to understand but so is watching children in the USA suffer when another option is here. Please no words can describe the horror these people go through so much brain damage is done why not help these children. Does this governor understand the side effects prescription meds do to these children. Nothing child friendly here in florida.
CW .. this is exactly what is needed, good solid corporations that have a market for people who can begin work and plan to retire from the same organization. We have too many temporary jobs and low wage jobs.
There is a lot of talent in our area for highly skilled jobs.
Rick Scott, where are the 700,000 jobs you promised?
Seriously?
What a “conservative”. What a fine upstanding man (invoked 5th Amendment 75 times during his company’s Medicare Fraud case). What a humanitarian. His response when told small children suffering debilitating seizures could be helped or cured by a non-intoxicating variety of medicinal marijuana?
“When asked about allowing parents of children who have seizures to have access to a special strain of medical marijuana, Gov. Rick Scott shut the door.
‘I oppose illegal drug abuse,’ he told the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday.’I've watched what it does to families. I think the attorney general has done the right thing with the advice she gave the Supreme Court. Have a great day!’
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/01/09/3861541...
Give Skeletor his walking papers in November.
Legalize Marijuana if you want tourism, it costs nothing to do it and Colorado made 5 million dollars in 5 days
Florida needs to create some REAL jobs and quit relying on tourism so much. Most tourism related jobs are minimum wage service jobs.