PNJ reports
Escambia County commissioners Thursday agreed to contribute $150,000 toward a monument honoring Don Tristan de Luna, the Spanish conquistador who founded Pensacola in 1559. The vote was 4-1, with Commissioner Kevin White opposed.
The $150,000 in tourist development tax will go to lay brick pavers around the monument, which commissioners believe will create tourism.
Statues and pavers don’t put “heads in beds” so using the bed tax – also known as the tourist development tax – seems to be a real stretch here.
The reality is that the money can’t be raised from the private sector to pay for it. Many of the charities are reporting that they are having tough times.
Having a statue to commemorate the 450th anniversary is a good idea. Government paying of it….not so sure. Using bed taxes to pay for it is not a good idea – when we need tourism promoted to help our economy.
Couldn’t McNesby donate his left over campaign war chest?
Popularity: 1% [?]
If Pensacola had representation in the state legislature, we could probably get some attention at the state level.
Oh well, looks like Pensacola can keep it’s motto: “Pensacola, where we never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
I don’t understand why anyone would not want to join in this wonderful celebration of Pensacola’s heritage. Bringing the eye of our nation to Pensacola can only help all of us.
I guess it is easier to sit back and condemn, critisize and complain than to step up, volunteer and help our beloved city recieve the positive attention it deserves.
Please, for the our sake and the sake of our nation, join in this celebration. Give to a cause greater than yourself. Give to your community. Give to your city. Give to your state. Give to your nation. Give because you have been given much. Giving is true living.
I think we are all missing a major point and that is that St. Augustine won’t celebrate it’s 450th Anniversary until 2015, eight years away, but they already have their ducks in a row and have a marketing budget of $2 for just this year to promote St. Augustine nationally and internationally.
Pensacola is America’s FIRST Settlement and will celebrate its 450th anniversary next year, but did the City and the County stop and think that this would be a good time to tell our story to the world? No, a local group of business people did. This is the type of event that can bring national and international press to Pensacola and the City and the County aren’t even involved with the exception of giving money for a statue. How lame is that?
This could have been an opportunity for the city to step up and put Pensacola on the map, but instead it didn’t even occur to the council to think about what this could do for Pensacola nationally and internationally.
There is a bill going through the Senate (St Augustine 450th Commemoration Commission Act of 2007) to commemorate this.
The full story can be found here – http://www.staugustine.com/stories/091208/opinions_news_023.shtml
Another lost opportunity for Pensacola, but not really surprising, given how oblivious the local political leaders are in regards to opportunities to showcase Pensacola to the outside world.
We are the FIRST settlement and our own governments are content to take a backseat to St. Augustine and letting them get all the glory and the press rather than promote Pensacola.
We shouldn’t be playing catch up to St. Augustine. We are the city of Five Flags, the place where it all began and yet we are letting this anniversary approach without the support from the City and getting the community excited about living in America’s First Settlement.
The fact that we can’t even get the City and the County to realize that this is a big deal for Pensacola much less allocate funds to market Pensacola as America’s First Settlement national and internationally speaks volumes.
Sadly I figure we might as well do something to make this “450th” celebration look like we cared. We should do as best we can to fake off the outside world and hope they accidentally relocate here with their money. We’d like to spend it.
Tourists can go down, see the statute and get a drink at the new concession stand.
The restaurants with umbrellas and tables, retail shops, in the original pics aren’t there.
Maybe they will enjoy looking in the windows of closed offices or through the chain link fence at the boats in the marina taxpayers built.
Pavers around the statute with names on them sold for a few bucks.
Won’t that look pretty?
Yes, but the statue of Christ the Redeemer was paid by private church donations, not the Rio de Janeiro city government. If Celebrate Pensacola can raise the money, I’m all for it. They’ve got something like 150 board members; maybe they could each chip in a couple thousand. Bingo!
Joke about the “enlivening public spaces” thing, but that’s paying for activities that are actually getting people downtown (Palafox Market, Evenings in Plaza de Luna, First Friday, the outdoor movies, etc.). I regularly go to these with my family, and it’s definitely money well spent.
For what it’s worth though, I agree that the new downtown library should remain the library system’s headquarters. But since the county is going to be taking over the library for the most part, they get to decide where it will be headquartered.
Uh, Mr. Lewis, there’s a just a slight difference between a 120 foot statute of the pillar of Christianity and a 55 foot statute of an infamous, third-rate, conquistador. Put your cup down and step away from the Kool-aid, sir.
The 120 foot Christ the Redeemer statute in Rio de Janeiro sure seems to be pretty popular with tourists. You see a picture of that monument and it just says, “Rio.” (My grandson’s name is Rio too.)
So I liked the idea of the 55 foot monument. Laugh all you will about whether or not it would attracts tourists but having just lived in Washington DC for six years I believe it would definitely attract visitors downtown.
They might just initially stop by for a photo op but then stick around a while and spend some money.
Our monument “downsizing plan” is another example of Pensacola thinking “small,” after a lot of hand wringing and naysaying. It’s this same thinking that has us headed us towards building a “not-main” downtown “branch” library that is smaller and with fewer books. I like books and I”m not happy about this. As my 8 year old grandson Rio would say, “It’s ridiculous.”
And it’s not like the money the council is not spending on the monument is being saved or put to a productive use. Next year they’re spending $425,000 for “Enlivening Public Spaces” that presumably includes reshowing “Horton Hears A Who!” and paying overtime to a Palafox Market city staff “supervisor.” We’re spending $3.15 million to expand the Police HQ while cutting the size of the police force (9) and with city-county consolidation probably taking us in the direction of shutting down the building in a few years.
If the three senior executives on city staff getting $6,400 in increased compensation this year ($$$$) kicked in and if the council gave up their pension, and maybe also the $1,500 overtime, and and maybe the $10,200 for Dues, Subscriptions & Memberships, etc. then maybe we might in a few weeks scrape together enough money to build the original 55 foot monument.
Maybe the city residents don’t want the monument but I’m confident they would when they learned how their money is going to be wasted in the alternative. They might as well get something that will last for generations if not centuries for their hard earned money collected by the city as taxes and fees.
That’s why I’m running for Mayor, so I can at least ask my bosses what they’d like me to do for them. Right now there’s apparently not a big interest in the monument, or a grand main downtown library, among the regular big campaign contributors and that’s why we’re in this whole mess in the first place.
As someone who grew up in Pensacola, has traveled extensively, and now lives in DC, I can tell you that monuments and pavers do attract tourists. No one is going to say that they vacation at Seaside because of the nice trashcans or take a trip to Disney because of the flowers, but these details matter. Good parking, clean bathrooms and a few other things like this can be all that it takes to make folks want to come back to Pensacola over other costal towns
Yes, this is a waste of fundage. I am against the entire De Luna project on moral grounds, it’s bad enough we have made a cartoon-like lovable character out of this creep without putting up enormous statues of him.
The facts of De Luna’s life are there. Ask President Bense of UWF about the man and she will give you facts and figures and let you decide for yourself. The man was a murdering coward and a bungler. After the Pensacola fiasco he was busted down through the ranks, ending up a stooge to a more competent Conquistador in Mexico, where he continued to murder natives and his own men. Like many of history’s losers, he died broke and alone back in Spain and being the good Catholic he was, I am sure he was convinced he would go straight to Hades upon exhaling his final breath. Let’s hope he was right.
just another example of our community’s twisted priorities. Heads in beds – wasn’t that term coined in 1986? Has our tourism effort failed to keep pace with the rest of the world when measured by more relevant indicators than bed tax collections?