It was as audacious a plan as any that Flagler County Tourism Director Amy Lukasik presented to the Tourist Development Council this morning: take out $10.3 million out of two tourism funds’ reserves, reducing those reserves to $1.2 million, and appropriate the money for construction of the ambitious Flagler County Visitor and Eco Discovery Center on State Road 100, near the metallurgic foot bridge.
The council went for it, voting 7-2 to recommend moving forward with Lukasik’s plan. The center would double up as the administrative home of the county’s tourism department, currently renting space at the county airport.
The vote is only a recommendation. It must be ratified by the County Commission. Based on today’s vote, there may be some opposition there: the two dissenting votes were from two of the three elected officials on the tourism board. Five other voting members are from the private sector. It’s a quirk of state law, which defines TDC membership. Flagler’s TDC includes a restaurant owner, resort, hotel or tourist attraction managers and a travel agent whose job primarily is to maximize bottom lines, not look after public treasuries. Their businesses would each have a lot to gain from the Discovery Center.
TDC Chair Andy Dance, who also chairs the County Commission, and Flagler Beach City Commission member Eric Cooley, voted against. Their primary job as elected officials is to be stewards of the public treasury.
“It’s very aggressive,” Cooley said of Lukasik’s proposal. “My comments have nothing to do with the concept of an Eco Discovery Center. I think that’s great. I’m worried that this might be overly aggressive, wiping out almost all reserves.” Cooley said the county is in the midst of looking for new revenue for beach renourishment funding, with a portion of that money possibly coming from tourism tax money. “I worry this might be happening before that decision and might be out of order. That discussion on where tourism lies with the beach should probably happen first, so everyone has a clear idea of where the responsibility lies.”
Fellow-TDC member jumped in to defend the Lukasik approach, saying that Cooley was talking about a different fund. They were not grasping what he was saying, however: the county is considering changing the proportion of money that goes to each of the tourism bureau’s fund, which would impact all those funds. But today’s discussion was short on perspective and quick on trigger-pulling: it was clear that several members of the council had come prepared to vote for the proposal as quickly as possible, as when Pam Walker, one of the members, ended discussion by calling for a vote.
The third elected official on the panel, Palm Coast City Council member Nick Klufas, voted for the Lukasik plan. However, his city two years ago benefited from a huge TDC grant, it was in line again for another grant of the same size today (as was Flagler Beach). He couldn’t very well snub the members of the panel who’d supported the city and might support it again. (They did not: Flagler Beach got the grant nod.) And Klufas is running for a County Commission seat in a tight race: he cannot afford alienating private-sector supporters.
But the Eco Tourism Center is not a fly-by-night project without strong and long-standing support. The TDC approved building an Eco Discovery Center as part of its long-term goals in late 2019. The council subsequently pledged $1.6 million out of tourism tax reserves to pay a share of the construction cost. That $1.6 million is part of the $10.3 million Lukasik discussed today.
The Flagler County Commission approved inclusion of the Discovery Center in its wish list for legislative appropriations when it sought to take advantage of its own Paul Renner as House Speaker and the seniority and accrued power of Sen. Travis Hutson, the two Flagler County representatives. It worked: the Eco Discovery Center initially was slated for a $10 million appropriation. That got pared down to $5 million during the conferencing between Senate and House budgets. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed the $5 million.
It was a big setback. Lukasik was undeterred. She is pursuing a $3 million grant from the National Scenic Byways Program to perhaps lower the amount of money needed from the TDC. But nothing guarantees the grant, and anyway it wouldn’t be enough to pay for what, at today’s prices, Lukasik estimates, perhaps optimistically, would be a roughly $10 million project. (The county just awarded a $14 million contract to a builder for a 23,000 square foot library. An enticing video rendering of the Discovery Center projects a more architecturally challenging and luxurious facility amid larger grounds.)
Plus, Lukasik argued, the health and wealth of the reserves should be looked at as proof of the tourism division’s good planning–not as a stick with which to beat back a project: “Typically, we wouldn’t have this bunch of money in reserves,” Lukasik told the council, hearing Cooley’s opposition. “”We know we’ve been kind of saving for this project. Never once have we had to go into the reserves, knock on wood, even through the pandemic. What we’re able to do thankfully, and because our office is able to be nimble, just like when there’s storms or the pandemic, we’re able to quickly adjust our budget right then and there where there’s things that we’re not committed to, that we’re able to pause and put on hold. And keep in mind too: Even though construction will still be happening, we’re still collecting. So by the time the project’s done, we’re probably looking at three years, we’re still collecting each of those three years. So the $400,000 will continue to increase just like it had in the past few years.”
Flagler County’s tourism bureau is a division of county government. It is funded entirely through the 5 percent sales surtax on hotels, motels and other forms of short-term lodging, including vacation rentals like Airbnb. (No property tax or general fund revenue is involved.) The surtax is paid overwhelmingly by visitors. Last year it generated $4.6 million, a 3.5 percent increase over 2022. This year it’s projected to generate $4.4 million.
By state law, tourism revenue is split into three pots, or funds: every year, 60 percent ($2.64 million) goes to promoting the county through marketing and advertising, special grants to local, regional or national organizations whose local events attract tourists, and to pay for the tourism bureau’s staff and overhead; 20 percent ($880,000) goes to capital projects that attract visitors, such as the pier or Palm Coast’s Southern Recreation Center; and 20 percent goes to beach protection.
The operating and promotions pot has accumulated a $5.4 million reserve over the years. The capital projects fund has accumulated $6.14 million in reserves, including $1.6 million already pledged to the Eco Tourism Center. The beach fund has accumulated a $2 million reserve, but the County Commission has already pledged that money in next year’s beach management budget.
The County Commission is discussing the possibility of raising the proportion of money that would go to beach protection. It did so in 2017, temporarily. If it does so again, the proportions that go to marketing or capital projects, or both, would have to be lowered. Lukasik is not keen on the idea, and today proposed a joint meeting between the TDC and the County Commission so she can present her facts.
Dance, the chair of the TDC and the County Commission, was as leery as Cooley to go with the Lukasik plan on the Discovery Center–not out of opposition to the center, but for the same reasons Cooley discussed. Dance proposed merely moving the discussion to the end of the meeting, after a discussion item that was to take up beach management. He got no support.
“I personally don’t think we’re looking at it out of turn,” Felicia Cook, a TDC member and the park director at Marineland Dolphin Adventure, said, perhaps unsurprisingly: In the video rendering of the future visitor center, the main lobby is more handsome than Marineland’s own and is lavished with the Marineland Dolphin Adventure brand, which rises like a monolith from the center toward hanging dolphins and turtles. It is surprising that the county has not asked the private companies that will benefit most from the center to pitch in, if only to defray the costs of permanent, free advertising on public property.
“It was a decision we made,” Cook continued without a word about the center’s benefit to her business. “We don’t stick to it, if we don’t earmark this money, then exactly what’s going to happen is somebody else is going to come in and take it.”
Cook did not say who the mysterious “somebody” could be, or how, after so many years, no one had come in and taken the money, which cannot be “taken” by anyone without approval from the TDC and the County Commission. “For me I just think it’s time.”
Walker, of Walker Adventures, called for a vote, and Cook made the motion to recommend approval of Lukasik’s plan. Stephen Baker of the Hammock Beach Resort, Lisa Robinson of Hampton Inn and Suites, Daniel Mundrean of the Hilton garden Inn, John Lulgjuraj of Oceanside Beach Bar & Grill, along with Klufas, voted in the majority.
County Commissioner Dave Sullivan, a former chair of the TDC, was in the audience. The panel had approved the Eco Discovery Center on his watch in 2019. He was pleased with the vote, which he said he will support when it reaches the County Commission. “It’s not like normal reserves where we’re supposed to have two-twelfths of the budget in the reserves, that’s not the way it works on the tourist development side,” Sullivan said. “I think it’s OK because there’s new money coming in all the time. So I don’t have any problem with it.”
