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Tourism in the Keys is
out of control
Tourism has gone too far
in the Keys.
When you awake to the
sound of sirens, burglar alarms and drunks coming back to the hotel at 4
a.m., you know it's gone too far. You can physically hear that it's gone
too far.
Tourism's gone too far
when you smell the supply trucks rolling into town instead of the
morning coffee and the first of 80 airplane flights per day fly low
overhead, making so much noise you can't talk on the phone. Tourism's
gone too far when tourist operators are sitting on commissions granting
business variances against the zoning codes that residents originally
designed to control commercial blight.
Tourism's gone too far
when tourism [officials] say "This is the way Old Town is going to be,
and if you don't like it, you can move out. We've got more money than
you do and that makes us in charge."
Things are back under
control when residents respond, "That is not the way it's going to be.
If you don't like it, you can go back where you came from."
Tourism's gone too far on
a small island when hotels and guest houses add 5,000 new toilets to the
sewer system and the lines get overloaded and discharge into the sea and
start killing the reef and people can't swim at the beaches because
fecal bacteria is already swimming there. When the people, who didn't
ask for mass tourism, indebt themselves to finance a $50 million sewer
bond issue with principle and interest to save the surrounding ocean
from tourism, tourism has imposed too much strain on the people and has
gone too far.
Tourism and public
relations promotion have gone too far when house prices triple in five
years. Tourism has gone too far when, cancer-like, a neighborhood guest
house gradually buys the houses all around and becomes a 30-room hotel
and nobody lives there anymore.
Tourism in the Florida
Keys has been developed and overdeveloped. It is well past the time for
responsible residents to fix the Tourist Development Council. It must
spend less money on advertisements and more on local infrastructure. The
TDC appears incapable of restraining itself and is leaving us with no
choice but to repeal the tax altogether, as thoughtfully provided for in
its enabling legislation. Tourism must pay for its own toilets.
Allen Meece,
Key West |
