Mayors, tourism officials seek help
By Larry Copeland
USA Today
ATLANTA — Mayors and tourism officials, shaken by the loss of more than 500,000 travel and tourism jobs since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, are meeting here to seek federal help.
It's not just New York and other big cities like Honolulu that haven't bounced back. The drop in international tourism has cost U.S. cities more than $12.5 billion, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Tourism-related jobs in Nashville, for example, have dropped 14 percent since the attacks to 26,215, the conference says. In Tucson, tourism jobs have dropped 19 percent to 11,732. Chicago lost 36,000 such jobs, Los Angeles 33,600 and Atlanta 28,600.
Hawai'i has lost thousands of jobs as well; its hotel industry alone estimates a loss of about 2,000 jobs.
Alarmed by these numbers and seeing no immediate relief, the chair of the travel and tourism task force of the U.S. Conference of Mayors has called together a summit to highlight the importance of tourism to the nation's economic health.
The task force has said it will announce a 10-point plan that urges the Bush administration to establish a presidential advisory council on travel and tourism. They also will ask Congress to create a pilot program to provide money to some cities and states to market themselves as international destinations.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors represents 1,139 cities with populations of 30,000 or more.
While Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris is not attending the gathering, groups such as the International Association of Convention & Visitor Bureaus and the Travel Business Roundtable, a tourism lobbying group, are.
The mayors will ask Congress to increase the money that a matching-grant program that helps cities promote themselves abroad receives. The program now receives $2 million annually. In addition, the mayors want Congress to enact the American Travel Promotion Act, which would provide $100 million in matching grants to cities and states.
"It's people's jobs," said Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, who is chair of the Conference of Mayors' Travel and Tourism Task Force. "If (hotel) occupancy is low, they don't have jobs for people. For cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Honolulu, San Francisco and New Orleans, the economic impact is tremendous."
Franklin says sales tax revenue in Atlanta is down 8 percent since the terrorist attacks. "Airport travel is down. The hotel-motel tax is down. We pay our police officers, firefighters and parks workers with this money," Franklin says.
In 2000, travel and tourism was a $263 billion industry supporting 3.7 million jobs in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, according to the non-partisan Conference of Mayors,
"I want to lobby for the federal government to get involved in tourism like they do in Australia and other places around the world," Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera Oberndorf says. Virginia Beach drew 3.5 million visitors last year, Oberndorf says.
Tourism officials say the United States has slipped to third as an international tourist destination, behind France and Spain. Before the terrorist attacks, it trailed only France.
"What's unfortunate is that there is no public-private partnership in place to promote ellipsis the United States," says Jonathan Tisch, chairman of the Travel Business Roundtable and chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels. He says other developed nations make "a strategic federal investment" to promote themselves as international destinations.
"We would like to see an understanding of what our industry means to the U.S.," Tisch says.
