Accountability
TDC Members, Tourism Partners Say Clerk’s Office Reimbursement Delays Are “Unreasonable”
TDC Board member David Bear says he’ll keep raising the issue “every single meeting” as agencies wait months to be paid for approved tourism spending
The Escambia County Tourist Development Council spent part of its Tuesday, Aug. 18 meeting airing months, in some cases years, of frustration over how Clerk and Comptroller Pam Childers’ office handles reimbursements to the county’s tourism partners.
- David Bear told his fellow TDC members that outside agencies which received grants tied to last November’s Foo Foo Fest are still waiting to be reimbursed, nearly a year later, even as those same agencies try to apply for next year’s funding.
“It’s causing a lot of stress in the system. It’s causing us to have to continue to discuss it every single month… I don’t know what the intention is other than to flex, to cause stress and pain in the system that is an otherwise economic driver for our community.” — David Bear
Demands Go Beyond Receipts
Bear said the clerk’s office has begun requiring documentation that goes well past standard proof of an authorized, legal expenditure. In one example, he said an agency buying event posters had to submit not just receipts and matched invoices, but photographs of the posters actually hung in windows to prove the marketing occurred.
- He also pointed to a dispute over when advertising expenses can be reimbursed. Agencies that pay for a media buy upfront, he said, aren’t being reimbursed until the final ad in the campaign has actually run, sometimes months later, because the clerk’s office is applying an accounting standard governing when an organization recognizes an expense on its own books to the separate question of when the county reimburses its vendors.
ACE and Visit Pensacola Share One Appropriation
Bear explained that ACE (Art, Culture, Entertainment, Inc.) and Visit Pensacola operate under the same miscellaneous appropriation agreement. Visit Pensacola draws an advance against that shared appropriation and spends it down monthly, and because the two organizations share one pool of money, Visit Pensacola’s spending can leave ACE waiting even when ACE’s own expenses are legitimate.
Bear said the arrangement should be undone, with each agency returning to its own separate appropriation, as was the practice before the county’s unified budget was created.
- ACE is a 100% volunteer organization that spends none of its tourist development tax dollars on administrative costs; board members personally cover ACE’s audit, insurance and banking costs.
- Pensacola Sports, represented by Ray Palmer, said its normal staff of six is down to two, and roughly 30% of that remaining staff’s time goes to reimbursement paperwork. Palmer said the agency’s most recent monthly report, in what he called a relatively slow month, ran 900 pages.
- Visit Pensacola Vice Chair Maria Goldberg said her organization has added manpower to keep up with documentation demands and has held roughly five meetings with the comptroller’s office over the past six months trying to align expectations, calling it “a work in progress.”
Why?
Council member Mary Hoxeng pressed Bear on the underlying legal question: if the Board of County Commissioners has already approved funding, why does the clerk’s office have the authority to withhold payment?
Bear said Childers’ office has a statutory obligation to pre-audit expenditures to confirm they are lawful and authorized under Florida Statute 125.0105, which governs how tourist development tax dollars may be spent. As long as spending falls within that law and within an agency’s signed appropriation agreement, he said, the clerk is obligated to pay it. But he acknowledged there’s no deadline in state law governing how long that review can take.
Background: Bear said the TDC years ago flagged a list of what it believed were unauthorized tourism-tax expenditures and sent the list to both the county commission and the Florida Department of Revenue, but received no response from either. The Florida Auditor General later conducted an operational audit of the program and confirmed those same expenditures lacked proper documentation, after which the county stopped making them. Bear said the clerk’s office stopped presenting at TDC meetings after that audit.
Bear cited another example: when Visit Pensacola contributed matching funds to a regional tourism grant tied to Visit Florida, the clerk’s office took roughly six months to reimburse the fully legal, commission-approved expenditure, even as the other seven counties involved in the same regional program were paid.
A Meeting With The Clerk?
Hoxeng asked whether the TDC could simply meet with Childers directly. Bear said that would require the clerk to attend a TDC meeting, since any such discussion would be subject to Florida’s open-meetings law, and Childers stopped coming to TDC meetings after the Auditor General’s audit.
- County Finance Director Stephan Hall confirmed that every agency receiving TDC funding signs a miscellaneous appropriations agreement spelling out required deliverables, which forms the basis for the county’s reimbursement review before documentation is sent to the clerk’s office.
TDC board member Charles Bare, who also leads an organization that receives TDC funding, said his own experience with the clerk’s office has generally involved requests for additional detail rather than the more extensive demands described by other agencies.
- “It is interesting to me that we do sign this contract with the county, with the county commission, and then it can be just not, you won’t get funded,” he said. “So it’s frustrating.”
No resolution was reached. The item is expected to return to a future TDC agenda.