State Tourism

The Assembly and Senate Budget Conference Committee voted recently to eliminate all public funding for the California Office of Tourism program. Understanding that the Legislature faces the unenviable necessity of making severe cuts in order to resolve the largest deficit in state history, the travel industry urges reinstatement of the tourism appropriation as an essential means to help solve the state’s economic and fiscal dilemma, not contribute to it.

California enjoys a position of precarious leadership in the tourism field by virtue of nature, geography and private investment. But we are by no means immune to competition for visitor spending, which supports one in every seven jobs in the state, $2 billion in state and local tax receipts and the largest industrial spending base of any mature industry.

Why should we spend tax dollars to promote tourism? For the very same reasons we spend tax dollars to support and protect our agricultural, natural and industrial resources--jobs (700,000), tax relief ($2 billion) and huge export spending in the form of 20 billion new dollars into our economy every year.

We are fortunate to have one of the larger tourism economies in the world. As a result, we are also among the most vulnerable to aggressive and well-funded competition, of which there is no short supply including other states, destinations and countries. To assume that tourism can survive, maintaining high-employment and revenue levels, without state involvement is an invitation to economic suicide. If just 1% of our tourism base is lost, half a billion dollars in spending across the state will go elsewhere, $20 million in tax revenues will be lost and 7,000 jobs will disappear! The risks compound rapidly.

The visitor industry has never asked the state to shoulder the tourism promotional burden alone. We have enjoyed a very productive partnership with state government, wherein the private sector has always provided the larger proportion of promotional total funding.

This partnership can work even more effectively in the future with reinstatement of the $8.4-million appropriation for the California Office of Tourism and adoption of SB 1184 to provide an independent tourism agency accountable to the Administration, Legislature and industry.

J. PHILLIP KEENE III

President, California Tourism Corp.