Maxwell: Here we go again. Orange County looks to ensure hotel taxes can't pay for local needs.

On his way out the door, Mayor Jerry Demings wants Orange County to consider committing itself to spending hundreds of millions of hotel tax dollars that will come in long after he leaves office.

If history is any indication, that means the county will once again spend boatloads on buildings like the county's already gargantuan convention center, which is rarely fully used and usually runs a deficit.

Meanwhile, local leaders will continue to claim they don't have enough money for things like buses and roads.

Demings says he doesn't have any specific project in mind and that he simply wants to ask a group of community-minded people to serve on a task force before he leaves office later this year. He’d rather they consider ways to spend the billions of dollars before Tallahassee lawmakers get any wise ideas about trying to steal it.

"We have substantial money that's just sitting there," he said. "That's not good for Orange County residents. That makes us very vulnerable that the state could come in and redirect that money."

But tying up the money now means there would be far less down the road for things this community truly needs.

And if this new task force is anything like the first one, the people appointed will be told they aren't allowed to think about those needs. Or the big picture. Or for themselves.

They'll be told they can't think about the region's transportation and transit shortcomings. Or the strains that tourists put on law enforcement.

They'll be told not to look at other places in Florida - like Key West and Monroe County - that decided long ago to start using hotel taxes on affordable housing.

Or at other major tourism towns in America - like Las Vegas - that, decades ago, began spending hotel taxes on parks, roads and schools.

Instead, they'll be told: That's not how we do things in Orange County.

Here, the tourism lobby calls the shots.

Members of the mayor's first hotel-tax task force actually staged a bit of a revolt in 2023. They said they didn't care if current state law says Orange County must spend hotel taxes primarily on things that promote more tourism, like advertising, convention centers and sports and entertainment venues. They knew other tourism towns had successfully changed the law.

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So the task force broke out of their prescribed mold and instructed the county to "strongly push the legislature to change the Tourist Impact Tax" to allow the county to spend the money on this region’s affordable housing crisis.

That did not happen. At least not in any high-profile way.

Demings said he worked behind the scenes without help from other county commissioners, but was unsuccessful.

Yet that same year, Monroe County leaders boldly and publicly pushed for change - and succeeded. They persuaded lawmakers to amend state law to allow them to spend even more hotel-tax money on affordable housing, primarily for low-wage tourism workers who can't otherwise afford to live in the keys.

The Keys Weekly said county leaders netted the win in 2024 by putting in "months of work on the proposed bill." And the next year, they reaped the rewards, as WPLG reported last summer: "Florida Keys officials turn tourist bucks into affordable housing for industry workers."

See how that works? Local leaders made a serious push and got the job done.

Demings is right when he says GOP legislators, who are part of the controlling party in Tallahassee and are largely beholden to the tourism lobby (as are many Democrats), have been an obstacle to change locally. But every change in state law has been led by a united, high-profile push from local leaders. Something we've never seen here.

In Las Vegas, leaders didn't work “behind the scenes.” They mounted a high-profile campaign to pressure tourism interests there into agreeing to spend hotel taxes on Sin City's mess of a school system. They called the campaign "Kids vs. Casinos." And by the time they were done, chagrined casino bosses were standing beside them, saying: Why yes, we'd be glad to share our hotel taxes with the community.

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You tell me if you've ever seen anything like that in this town. If you've ever seen the mayors stand up alongside the head of the chamber of commerce and say: "It's about damn time we start using this money to help this community." I sure haven't.

To his credit, the relatively new CEO of Rosen Resorts announced late last year that he would support a plan to levy additional hotel taxes to pay for transit or transportation. But his lone voice in the tourism community wasn't enough.

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Defenders of the status quo love to get bogged down in the complexities of the law - about how there's a difference between tourist development taxes and tourism impact taxes and how there are different rules for different counties. It's all just blabbity blah and complicated by design.

The laws that control how these tax dollars are used were written by politicians and can be changed just as easily. It’s just a matter of will.

I did find some encouraging things about Demings' latest incarnation of the hotel tax force.

Demings has tapped two thoughtful leaders to head it: former county Mayor Linda Chapin and nonprofit executive Eddy Moratin. I respect both. Still, you could put Gandhi and Mother Teresa on this committee. If you tell them they're not allowed to use this money to actually solve society's problems, there's not much they could do. You’d just be using their names to try to lend credence to an already-baked plan.

I’m glad Demings told the task force to consult an independent economic analyst, selected by Comptroller Phil Diamond, to vet the often-bloated claims of return on investment for these big-spending projects. That is sorely needed.

If members truly consider ROI, they'll look at how much money Orange County's convention center loses - and at the handful of major centers that actually post operating profits. One is in Chicago, where the public authority owns the hotels near the center, so that taxpayers get back some of the money they invest. In Central Florida, the definition of "return on investment" has long been that taxpayers invest and hoteliers reap the returns.

Maybe all my skepticism about this latest effort is unwarranted. Maybe this task force will truly be free to consider what this community needs vs. what more the tourism industry wants. I would love to be wrong.

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This story was originally published June 23, 2026 at 2:39 PM.