Visit Florida's $76 Million Budget Gets Legislative Approval After 4-Month Battle
Skift Take
At long last, Florida's tourism industry knows its fate. While Visit Florida will have enough funding to keep the lights on in the coming year, it faces a litany of new procedures and restrictions that will likely send reverberations to other state capitals across the U.S.
Visit Florida will survive another year to market the state's destinations, from the Florida panhandle to Key West, after one of the most high-profile destination marketing funding battles in recent memory came to close on Friday.
The Florida Legislature approved on Friday afternoon a $76 million budget for Visit Florida's for fiscal 2018 after a three-day special session in the Florida House and Senate.
That funding level is the same as fiscal 2017, although the governor had initially proposed a $100 million budget.
The special session followed a four-month long battle — which at one point involved a proposal to fund Florida's statewide tourism board at $25 million -- that had the most visited U.S. state's tourism industry on edge.
Some state politicians said funding cuts would have put thousands of state jobs at risk and, if funding cuts had been approved, would have taken Florida from having the second-highest tourism budget in the U.S. to the seventh highest.
The debate grew out of Miami rapper Pitbull's controversial $1 million contract with Visit Florida last year, and criticism that the organization operated with a lack of transparency.
Some of those transparency concerns have been addressed. For example, any contract worth $750,000 or more is subject to review by the Florida
