When will we ever learn?
If you were one of the few hardy souls who made it to the "special" (i.e. untelevised) city commission meeting on Tuesday September 5th, then you saw city officials experience a minor panic attack. It involved news that a cruise line whose ships had unloaded at the Navy's outer mole would from now on be using the Hilton's Pier B instead. The news of the move— and its accompanying loss of over $487,000 in annual revenue to the city— caused several of the commissioners to visibly blanch.
That's because funds they were counting on had suddenly evaporated, meaning that either items will have to stripped from the already emaciated city budget, or the city will have to raise ad valorum taxes. Or, most likely, both.
The city manager assured the distraught commissioners that he was working to find a replacement for the missing cruise ship and the lost revenue. But neither he nor the commissioners recognized the much bigger problem that this crisis pointed out: our crippling dependence on unreliable sources of funding like cruise ship revenues.
Despite the clear lessons of Key West's history regarding the perils of having all of our economic eggs in one basket— wrecking, sponging, cigar making, the Navy— our city officials insist on repeating the mistakes of the past. Rather than attempting to diversify our economic base—by, say, wooing some up-and-coming computer software company to move here—city officials weakly insist that our town is good for only one thing. As a result, we have made ourselves dependent on perhaps the most fickle industry there is.
If you were here in the 1970s and early 1980s when the price of crude oil skyrocketed, then you remember how bad things got. Because three-quarters of our visitors arrive here by car, the resulting gasoline shortages kept tourists away in droves. Even is they could get enough fuel on the mainland to make it down here, there was no guarantee they could find enough here to get back. The resulting fall-off in tourism had a catastrophic effect on our community as businesses failed, jobs disappeared and mortgages couldn't be paid.
During the first "fuel shortage" in the early 1970s I was working for Marion Glass and Shirley Willer at the Rock Shop in the Harbor House on Front Street. All of us from the five shops in the buildings would meet in the central patio and worry together about how bad business was, keeping an eye out just in case a customer did come into the building.
The streets were nearly empty and we had days with $12 in total sales. It would have been worse if local people hadn't done all they could to support each others businesses. Anyone who lived here through those two relatively short times of declining numbers of tourists realizes how critical it is to work more aggressively to diversify our economy.
Today's rising fuel costs raise the chilling specter of a return to those dismal days. If fuel prices continue to rise, the travel market could experience another crash. And this time, our community would be hit even harder because our economy is even more heavily dependent on mass tourism now than it was in the bad old days.
Shortsighted thinking will continue to subject us to the usual boom and bust cycles until our leaders recognize the wisdom in having a more diverse economy. The sudden loss of cruise ship revenues sent the city a clear wake-up call. But the city commission decided to hit the snooze button.