Questioning Ohio Tourism funding

Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

The typical state funded ecnomic development folks are out decrying yet another budget cut, this time state tourism:

If the proposed Ohio budget for 2010 and 2011 passes as written, the state’s Tour- ism Division budget in the coming year will shrink more than 90 percent, to $400,000, down from $7.2 million in the current year.

There is no money at all budgeted for 2011. That would make Ohio the only state in the nation that does not fund travel and tourism promotion.

“It’s almost laughable,” said Paul Astleford, chief executive of Experience Columbus, the city’s convention and visitors bureau. “For all practical purposes, it would mean the demise of the department.

“This would be creating job loss and taking money directly out of state coffers.”

The state’s tourism industry generated $39 billion in visitor spending in 2008 and sustained nearly 452,000 “full-time equivalent” jobs paying a total of $10.5 billion, the Ohio Department of Development’s Tourism Division said this week. Those jobs are at hotels, restaurants and a wide variety of attractions.

As I have noted before, this is the argument of every program that ever appears before the finance committee: we bring in more money than we spend!

Now I haven’t studied the effect of state tourism promotion on economic development, job creation, and tax recpiepts but it doesn’t take a PhD in this field to smell something funny.  This for example:

Michigan’s approach to its tourism budget is part of Gov. Jennifer Granholm‘s stimulus package for the state. Its tourism budget has grown from less than $6 million in 2005 to the current year’s $30 million.

Ohio’s budget, meanwhile, has fluctuated in a narrower range. Between 2000 and 2007, it ranged from $4.5 million to $6.2 million per year. It was increased by Strickland and has topped $7 million for the past two years.

What is wrong with this picture? Oh, yeah.  It’s that Michigan is one of the few states in the country worse off than Ohio! Does anyone have any indication that this massive spending effort – that stimulus word again – has helped Michigan? If this kind of spending is guareented to bring in money why have economic conditions in these two state suffered as spending has gone up?  This is just more of the same government creates jobs mentallity that has failed so spectacularly.

I am not saying that the state should have no role in tourism promotion.  I think having useful information available online and at state parks, etc. is necessary.  But the role needs to be limited.  There is no need to take tax payer dollars to create a bureaucracy whose job is to promote the state to the tune of millions of dollars.  If this kind of spending returns such clear benifts then businesses and trade associations should be confident it is money well spent. And in a time of severe budget cuts that level of spending is preposterous.

We have to get away from a structure where individuals and communities send money up the government food chain and with the promise of future reward (with no accountability and no standards) only to find out they are being asked for more the next budget crunch.  The farther away the money gets the less likely it is to be spent wisely and effectively; and it is disconnected from the profit motive.  If the Ohio Tourism spends its money poorly nothing happens.  If a marketing director fails to create sales they lose their job at some point.

I am just not buying this spend money to save money argument any more.