Daniel Samess, the CEO of the Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about scholarships.
The Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce is very involved with creating opportunities, not only for businesses, but also for students to pursue secondary education.
Samess said, “This community is amazing. If you really want to see what’s one of the many things that’s so great about our Marathon community, and honestly, up and down the Keys, the scores of local nonprofits, charitable organizations, estates, things like that, that provide scholarships to our Middle Key students amazes me every year. I think it’s, over $300,000 every year. The Marathon Chamber is definitely a big part of that. My board of directors takes a lot of pride in awarding annual scholarships to Marathon High School seniors. A cool wrinkle we’ve added, this is year two, is we’re specifically also offering scholarships to students pursuing a trade or vocational based school because the Board of Directors really sees the importance of that path for some students that might not want to pursue the traditional educational secondary path of a university or college, and they want to learn a trade. They want to be a carpenter. They want to work towards being an electrician, a technician of some type, a welder. All things that we know we need here locally and are great opportunities for young adults. So we provide that, and then the traditional ones, and we are also wrapped up our continuing education grants, and those are for actual Chamber members that want to continue to pursue educational endeavors, training classes, seminars for owners or their staff to help them improve their knowledge skills and abilities. We literally met last night, took a good couple hours and happy to say we’ll be awarding 10 $1,000 scholarships to Marathon High School seniors, pursuing both vocational and traditional paths, as well as $5,000 in continuing education grants to marathon Chamber members. So, good stuff.”
The state Senate is looking at two bills which could disband all Tourist Development Councils in the state of Florida.
Samess said, “There’s a lot to say on it. It’s extremely disheartening, dangerous, ill conceived, and just frustrating to see a bill like this come forth, and even if we want to talk politics for Republican House to come up with this thinking that this is going to somehow, economically, have a better return on investment versus what the TDT tax currently provides is just, it’s literally ludicrous. I could lay all the numbers out. It makes no sense, mathematically, fiscally, it’s just such an ill conceived bill. It’s baffling to see any politician far left, far right, middle come up with this because it just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t help. The idea is to bring down property taxes. That’s their big push. The TDT tax would stay in place if passed as currently written, it would stay in place. Visitors would still pay it. Locals don’t pay a penny of that. Typically, 99% of time it’s paid for by visitors. If this bill passes that money, then instead of going to your traditional paths where it’s gone, for the TDC to market our destination to the world, to bring people back, which means they spend money in town, not only paying the tax, but also going out to eat, fishing, charter, shopping, going to our local attractions, all the good things that that visitors spend, which is also sales tax revenue, which is the main reason Florida enjoys not having a state income tax. So I’ve been telling legislators the long term play unfortunate consequence, unintended, I would hope, is that it’s going to potentially force the state, years down the road as bed tax dollars eventually dry up because when you don’t market a product, a destination, people go elsewhere, despite what some of my even friends here will say, oh, it’s the Keys everybody knows about us. It doesn’t mean they’re going to come if you stop the messaging. I always use the analogy there’s a reason Coke and Pepsi, the two biggest behemoths in that industry, continue to spend hundreds of millions on advertising every year to push their products. The same reason why GM and Ford and all the big car manufacturers every other ad is a car ad. If everyone knows the big car companies, why do they need to advertise? Every, every other ad, too, is a cruise ad, or is, go to California, go to New York, Texas, other areas, and good for them, as they should be. It’s very disheartening while they’re attacking TDT is I get it, I guess it’s low hanging fruit as far as money to go after.”
Another issue with the bill is it doesn’t even specify that only homesteaded properties would receive a property tax break.
Samess said, “It goes to everyone. Tell me how many properties in the whole state of Florida, because it’s a statewide initiative, not just the Keys, are non homesteaded, meaning it’s a second, third, fourth property. Why should they receive a tax break versus the homesteaded one? So it doesn’t even relegate it only to homesteaded property owners, which is what I think they would want to try to help. It’s just a bad bill. Part of our mission at the Chamber is to advocate, and that does mean at times, on the state and even federal level, in this case, the state level, we’ve been working closely with our state Rep Jim Mooney, who has voted no on those House bills so far. We’ve been in close contact with our state Senator, Ana Maria, who is doing great right now. Fortunately, the Senate so far is the arm of reason in the state of Florida Legislature. The House has just, sadly, it’s passed on the House floor. So what the hope now is that the Senate won’t even take this up, because even the initial bill for this was still bad, and then newer versions got worse and worse, how it would basically dismantle all the TDCs. By the way, there’s a case study out there in 1993 which is going back a little bit, the state of Colorado did the same thing. In their infinite wisdom, they killed their entire tourism arm and all the local arms, like the TDCs, and it took them 15 to 20 years to rebound, because you don’t just prop back up your TDCs and taxes and say, okay, flip the switch. It doesn’t work like that. They assumed everyone knows about the Rocky Mountains, the national parks, the skiing, Aspen, Vail. They don’t come if you don’t market to them. As much as a lot of locals don’t love traffic. I get it, and I know vacation rentals here are an issue for sure, if you want to see half of your friends lose their jobs, people have to sell their homes, it’s going to be bad. I don’t want that.”
Michael Stapleford of KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM pointed out, “I harken back to the 80s when Key West declared bankruptcy and unemployment was rampant because tourism was not yet developed like it is today, but there’s so many numbers running out there. The one I heard recently is, if this were to go forward based on the premise that it will reduce property taxes maybe by $200 a year, whereas every dollar of marketing that is spent to promote the Florida Keys translates to about $3.27 in additional revenue, and 11,500 jobs would be lost county wide, fairly immediately. $35 million was given last year to affordable housing initiatives that will be used over time, every event in the Keys that we enjoy, even as locals, is underwritten by the TDC, the list goes on and on and on. I am befuddled as to why any legislator would find this to be a wise move.”
Could the governor veto it?
Samess said, “He’s playing it close to the vest. His big goal, if you recall, a month or two ago, was trying to, I think it was a bit of a talking piece, but he wants to get property taxes down, almost actually, he has made comments to get it to zero. It’s a lofty goal, kind of a pie in the sky deal. Do I love the idea? Of course, who wouldn’t love to not pay property taxes? But how does that fund local municipalities, county governments, and the services they provide? I don’t know what he would do to that effect, if he would, in fact, veto it. So it’s an interesting game, and the cost benefit analysis isn’t there for me, the savings is not worth the benefit of tourism and TDC dollars locally, they maintain and re-nourish our beaches. They pay for coral restoration for those that love the environment and want to keep trying to protect it. Who’s going to pick that tab up? I’ll tell you, it will be local cities and the county government, which then means they have to increase their budget, basically negating the savings they’re going to get from the TDT taxes moving to save on property, and here in the Keys again, there’s more homes here owned that are non homesteaded versus homesteaded. So it’s going to benefit more people that don’t even live here full time and rent their homes out. You think they’re going to pass that savings on to their renters? No, they’re not, because millage rates will probably still end up going up slightly because local government has to then foot other expenses. The math, doesn’t math. It makes no sense. It’s really sad. It’s weird. I don’t know if it’s more of just a negotiating game and legislature funded Visit Florida to a record of 80 million without any argument. So how do you jive funding the state tourism arm for 80 million, but now you want to kill the local TDCs, which do all the heavy lifting. Visit Florida is great. They kind of provide a lot of support, and they promote the state of Florida, but they’re not going to promote the Keys aggressively, because they’re a state tourism bureau, basically and 80 million, honestly, is a drop in the bucket. Our TDC’s budget is about 60+ million, almost as much as Visit Florida. And again, it’s all paid for by visitors. So I don’t know why we’re thinking this is going to do all these things. We won’t need to build more housing if the TDC goes under, because tons of people will lose their jobs and their livelihoods and will just leave.”
Stapleford insisted, “We’re not trying to be alarmists here. I think this is a very accurate depiction of what it could look like if this would happen.”
Samess said, “It really is a no-brainer. Maybe for some retired folks who need not tourism or could care about it, I tell them, you still like to go out to eat and enjoy your local watering holes and restaurants. The people that serve you are locals who depend on visitors year round to fund their businesses and the restaurants and bars they work in. Locals can’t sustain that. We learned that during COVID when we were briefly shut down. There are not enough of us to sustain 50+ percent of our businesses.”
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