For years, Orange County has had the lowest median wages of any major metro in America.
We’re talking dead last — 50th out of 50, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Lower even than smaller cities with lower costs of living, like Birmingham, Alabama and Louisville, Kentucky.
This is what happens when you build an economy around ride attendants and hotel housekeepers. You get a workforce full of people who struggle to make ends meet — as the Sentinel detailed a few years ago in its “Laborland” series.
Well, this week, Orange County leaders voted to double down on all that — to forever be Laborland.
Mayor Jerry Demings and most of his peers on the mostly Democratic county commission voted to spend another half-billion dollars on a convention center that is already 7 million square feet, is rarely fully occupied and usually runs a deficit. All to please the hotel lobby, even as this community has other, pressing needs.
While other communities are courting high-wage jobs that pay $40 and $50 an hour, allowing workers to buy a house, pay for college and save for retirement, Orange County continues to spend billions on $13- and $15-an hour jobs that leave workers struggling.
And county leaders did all this without asking any independent, skeptical experts to vet their spending — probably because they knew what the experts would say. The world, after all, is moving away from in-person meetings. And we already know that building a big convention center doesn’t magically make a community wealthy since we’re at the bottom of the wage heap.
The bottom line: If you can’t make money running a 7-million-square-foot building, space isn’t the problem.
There was talk that maybe this community would do things differently. The mayor even created a task force to allegedly consider a fresh perspective. But that task force was largely a farce. Don’t take it from me. Take it from some of the task force members themselves.
“It was political theater and I was merely a character in the mayor’s and … hospitality industry’s show,” said member Stephen Facella, a small business owner in west Orange County. “I find it funny the poor are so vilified by receiving public funds to live, and yet our government is about to spend $500 million to give corporate welfare to the already rich.”
Facella is right that these subsidies are corporate welfare. Hotel taxes are used primarily in one way in Central Florida — to boost revenues for the hospitality industry, mainly through constant expansions of the convention center and subsidies for tourism marketing at Visit Orlando.
“Florida is the only state that fully restricts the use of hotel taxes to the promotion and development of an industry as opposed to also addressing the impacts of the industry,” said Eric Gray, another task force member.
In other places, like Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Phoenix, leaders use hotel taxes to pay for everything from transit and housing to roads and parks to help ease the tax burden for local residents. Here, local leaders ask citizens to raise their own taxes.
Other task force members, many aligned with this community’s long-time power structure, were pleased with their group’s results. But none can convincingly argue that the result, recommending yet another expansion of the convention center, wasn’t the baked-in outcome.
Only two county commissioners — Nicole Wilson and Emily Bonilla — voted against the plan to dump more money into the convention center.
The rest — Demings, Maribel Gomez Cordero, Christine Moore, Michael Scott and Mayra Uribe — voted for the status quo. And they did so without vetting their numbers.
Orange commissioners approve nearly $800 million in tourist-tax funding
“Clearly, a $500 million investment in anything requires an independent economic analysis of the highest order,” said Gray, the director of the nonprofit Christian Service Center. “If you’re not pushing for one, it is simply because you don’t want to see the results.”
The board also voted to make smaller investments in non-tourism endeavors, including $10 million a year for a UCF project and bumping up the spending for arts and cultural groups to $15 million a year. But with $330 million a year in hotel taxes, those are just crumbs.
The vast majority of the money, including tens of millions expected to go to Visit Orlando again, will be spent ensuring Central Florida remains a bottom-of-the barrel economy.
Just look at the numbers.
Sure, some jobs related to conventions and hospitality pay decent wages. Event and meeting planners, for instance, can make $50,000 or $60,000 a year. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have about 1,300 event-planning jobs — compared to 22,770 ride and attraction attendants.
The latter number represents a population larger than the city of Maitland that can’t afford to live in Maitland because their median wage is $13.79 an hour. (Meaning half make less than that.)
And that’s just the tip of the low-wage iceberg.
We also have tens of thousands of jobs in food prep ($13.93 an hour), housekeeping ($13.89) and hotel desk clerks ($14.68). None of those professions pay enough to make ends meet — even if you double them for a two-income home.
That’s why other communities focus on growing professions like software developers ($51.46 an hour) and medical and health service managers ($48.76). Because the people who fill those jobs can afford to provide for themselves.
Here, however, leaders seem complacent to remain a community with one of the worst affordable-housing crises in America — to remain forever Laborland.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
Orlando: 50th out of 50 in wages with costs-of-living on the rise | Commentary
