Manatee County has paid a heavy price for more tourism. Our quality of life is suffering | Letter to the editor
In a Dec. 23, 2019, article in the Bradenton Herald, Elliott Falcione, the executive director of the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau issued a New Year’s challenge to members of our community to look into our mirrors to see if we see a person as wonderful and as humble as he is. Ironically, many residents in this community frequently wonder how some members of the tourism and development industries and some of their cronies in government face themselves in a mirror at all.
The director boasts that under his direction “tourism development … enhances the quality of life for our residents.” Painfully obvious to residents are the many negative effects an over-dependence on tourism and development have had on our community. The strains on our fragile ecology, on our infrastructure; our tax and insurance burdens; our loss of full-time residents (especially on Anna Maria Island); the loss of historic “Old Florida” (not the BACVB’s Golden Goose anymore?) Our quality of life is being destroyed, not enhanced, a parasitic casualty of tourism and development.
Recently, the Manatee County Tourist Development Council, in their apparent, uncontested trust in this director, committed an abuse of the public trust and public funds by blindly and blithely handing over $200,000 to him for a “global event” for which he provided no details. This action seems symptomatic of the stranglehold tourism has over, not just this community but this state.
Are tourism and development essential to the financial health of this state? Absolutely! But have they reached a point where, to feed themselves, they lay waste to anything in their path? Though the director, “truthful” to himself, wants to put non-specified, “self centered (sic), arrogant people in a (sic) awkward position,” he proudly admits his commitment to the mission of those exploiting Florida.
Nancy Rae Deal
Holmes Beach
This story was originally published January 2, 2020 at 6:00 AM.