GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The Clay County Tourism Development Council could soon be using funds to pay for infrastructure, building maintenance and sewage work if Florida House of Representatives legislation gets passed.

The committee got some good news at their March 11 meeting. Bed tax collections are up more than 16% for January, month over month and new sports events are coming to the county.

But there was one issue Tourism Director Kimberly Morgan said wasn’t good.

“There is one other [piece of legislation] I really want you all to pay attention to because it affects this board directly,” Morgan said. “It’s the taxation legislation. The House has really requested that they expand permissible uses of the [Tourism Development Tax] to include road construction, water and sewer infrastructure, and parks and recreation.”

Those costs are paid for by other departments in the county government and they tend to take up a large amount of funds, especially in the case of road construction and water and sewer infrastructure. If the legislation passes, some of the county’s tourism department’s funds would likely be open to use for those kinds of things.

TDC member Pat Sickles said she thought the legislation only applied to TDT amounts more than $16 million, which means it wouldn’t apply to Clay County. Morgan said whether or not the funds come out of Clay County’s TDT, the county would feel the effects of funding coming out of other larger county’s tourism departments.

“If our neighbors to the north and east who have those budgets [more than $16 million] are impacted, that directly impacts us whether we like it or not,” Morgan said. “We reap the benefits from their marketing dollars.

“When that starts to happen, and their marketing dollars are threatened to go toward infrastructure, then the pipeline to refuel the engine of economic development goes away.”

TDC chair and county commissioner Mike Cella said he’s against the idea and would work to prevent Clay County specifically from dipping into TDT funds to cover the cost of projects usually covered by other departments.

The legislation is currently brewing in the Florida House and is bundled in with a lot of other tax legislation, Morgan said. Before it can come to fruition, it must first be passed by the House and then the Senate.

Cella said that the Senate has been great at continuing the funding of Florida tourism, especially in spite of a House that hasn’t been too keen on doing the same.