Florida’s Tourist Development Tax – the so-called “bed tax” collected from visitors who stay at hotels – will continue to provide Indian River County with almost $5 million to promote tourism and shore up its beaches for at least another year.

A controversial plan to eliminate Florida’s 62 Tourist Development Councils and use tourist tax dollars to reduce property taxes failed to make it into the $117 billion state budget bill signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“When this whole thing started two months ago, it was frustrating to think that someone would even pose this idea,” said Ben Earman, vice president of tourism for Indian River County.

Indian River County is projected to collect about $4.92 million in Tourist Development Taxes when the fiscal year ends Sept. 30. About 40 percent of that money, or $1.96 million, will fund tourism development. About 55 percent, or $2.7 million, will help pay for beach renourishment projects, while the remainder pays for the county lease on the Jackie Robinson Training Complex.

Returning tourist tax dollars to residents as credits on property taxes would have averaged only about $66 per homeowner, according to Earman.

Tourism in 2023 created approximately $712.8 million in economic impact for Indian River County, Earman said. Tourism spending increased by 8.7 percent the following year and is expected to increase even more in the upcoming year with the voter-approved increase in the tourist tax from 4 cents per dollar to five cents per dollar.

“As a fourth-generation Indian River County resident, I get it when some people complain about the traffic or parking,” Earman said, “but ... I try to impress upon our residents that, if we didn’t have our tourist visitors, most of the restaurants and other amenities that we all love probably would not survive.”

“In our case, we would not have come out ahead because the larger portion of our tourist taxes is spent on beach renourishment and we would then have to spend other money on that,” said County Commissioner Laura Moss, whose district includes central and south beach.

One proposal did survive and made it into the final budget bill – new verbiage allows counties to spend some of their tourist taxes to employ, train and equip lifeguards. Moss likes this idea.

The City of Vero Beach has been asking the county to take over lifeguard operations at the city’s three beaches and this new verbiage might help open the doors to finally get that done, Moss said.

In another plus for tourism development, the Legislature allocated $80 million to VisitFlorida, which provides marketing assistance to small, minority and rural municipalities, including $1.2 million funneled to Indian River County for tourism promotion.