Accountability
Tourism’s Money Is Stuck — And Nobody Can Get Paid
TDC member David Bear says Clerk Pam Childers’ reimbursement demands have snarled $1.3 million meant for the agencies marketing Escambia County. Is her overregulation threatening to kill tourism?
Tourist Development Council member David Bear joined me on Rick’s Blog Live to explain a mess that’s been building for months: Visit Pensacola has roughly $600,000 in cash on hand, but Escambia County Clerk Pam Childers owes tourism marketing agencies $1.3 million in reimbursements with another $1.7 million in placed advertising still to be paid for.
The county appropriates the money, agencies run the campaigns, and they’re supposed to get reimbursed once they submit cleared checks and invoices. Bear says that used to work smoothly. Now checks sit for 30, 60, even 90 days with no explanation, while Childers demands documentation Bear calls excessive—proof ads actually ran, photographs of printed posters, and more.
“Are people going to have to take pictures of themselves eating a sandwich to submit to the clerk’s office? We make a joke about it, but it’s not funny.”
The fallout is spreading. Two nonprofits have already sued Childers over withheld grant funds. ECAT’s temporary staffing vendor is owed more than $360,000. And Pensacola Sports CEO Ray Palmer told the TDC his last invoice packet ran 900 pages.
- Visit Pensacola: ~$600,000 cash on hand
- Owed by the Clerk’s Office: $1.3 million
- Advertising already placed, unpaid: $1.7 million
- Reimbursement wait: 30–90+ days, unpredictable
Bear stressed no one has found evidence of theft or embezzlement. This is a documentation standoff, not a scandal of missing money. But tourism is booming, with record year-over-year numbers, and Bear warns the paperwork fight could choke off the very growth it’s supposed to fund.
SteveJ,
All of the outside agencies submit 100% of the evidence of the work and the expenditures. That’s not the issue. The issue is the clerk is demanding much more than not only what is required by law to document the expenditures, but an unreasonable amount of documentation just to bog down the system. What the clerk is doing is creating a bloated bureaucratic system to build her own empire and bully the entire tourism industry. If anyone doubts that her antics are about building an empire to overly burdening and bully, they should question why her budget increased from $3.5MM in 2022 to over $5.7MM in 2026, an increase of 63%.
In October 2020, when Clerk Pam Childers tried to bully the TDC about not fulfilling its statutory obligation to continuously review the expenditures of TDT, we gave her the benefit of the doubt and asked her to audit the program. FYI – the clerk retains up to 3% to administer the program, i.e., ensuring the expenditures are authorized uses under the statute. She said the county already audits the TDT and refused to do anything else. Annually, the county does a financial audit and we were asking for an operational audit (two completely different types of audits) to ensure the TDT was being spent on legally allowed uses. In the February 2021 TDC meeting, we discussed a document that identified possible unauthorized expenditures of the TDT being approved by the former county administrator and funded by the clerk. On April 9, 2021, the TDC issued a letter to the county commission and the FL Department of Revenue letting them know we believed there were unauthorized expenditures of TDT being made – the TDC’s statutory obligation. Because the clerk refused to perform the TDC’s requested audit, on the same day, we asked the FL Auditor General to perform the audit. The TDC’s request was co-authored by our local state legislative delegation (Rep. Salzman, Rep. Andrade, and Sen. Broxson) because we were all interested in the lawful development of tourism and spending of the TDT. On April 30, 2021, Pam sent the Auditor General a letter telling them they didn’t need to perform the audit because she already provided the TDC with a “3-year desk audit” (no one knows what an accounting “desk audit” is). She has been nothing but an obstructionist to the transparency and lawfulness being sought by the TDC and outside agencies performing the work. Thankfully, the Auditor General ignored her weird letter and performed the operational audit anyway. Their findings? The expenditures identified in the letter to the county commission and FL Department of Revenue were unauthorized expenditures. Some of those expenditures may have been for tourism development, but the clerk did not have the proper documentation to issue warrants for payments of those expenditures. She made those unauthorized expenditures in violation of FL Statute 129.09 and is personally obligated to pay them back. The clerk had been making these unauthorized expenditures since her first day on the job.
Here we are today with an overly bureaucratic system completely out of whack of the reasonable level of checks and balances because it was revealed through the operational audit that the clerk was in violation of the law. She didn’t review and ensure the documents being provided were sufficient for issuing warrants for the payment of tourist development expenditures and now she is overly burdening the tourism industry with documentation beyond a reasonable level in retaliation.
Additionally, she is conflating the GAAP expense recognition principle with timing for reimbursement by the government to a contracted outside agency. GAAP requires the recognition of the expenditure when the expenditure actually happens not when the payment is made. So, when Visit Pensacola places an ad in a national magazine that will run in 6 months, Visit should not show that expenditure on its P&L statement until the ad runs. However, the magazine publisher requires Visit to make the payment to secure the spot when placing the order and the clerk will not reimburse the cost until after the ad runs in the magazine. There is no law, ordinance, or accounting principle that requires waiting for the reimbursement for the expenditure to align with the GAAP expense recognition principle. It’s nothing more than the clerk putting strain and stress into the system just because she can. That’s what bullies do.
With each reimbursement submission, the agencies provide all of the excessive and unreasonable amount of documentation to prove the expenses. Eventually, the clerk make a partial reimbursement without letting anyone know what was reimbursed and what was not. Intentionally, there is never communication from the clerk to explain what reimbursements are being withheld. The agencies just have to spend more time and money to figure it. If the clerk’s actions were about transparency and proper governance, there would be clear communications and instructions rather than the shroud of secrecy where the clerk operates. Commissioner Hofberger committed over a year ago to help improve the communications with the clerk and the process for reimbursement, and even with her alliance and allegiance to the clerk, it has only gotten worse. Now, she has also become part of the problem.
SteveJ
Did you have to provide photos of posters in windows? There’s reasonable and unreasonable documentation. What proof do you provide for your marketing?
So. We dont need organizations getting public tax dollars to show their work? And prove the expenses? C’mon maybe be a journalist and dive into both arguements. Working in marketing, I’ve always had to show proof of campaigns and receipts for all expenditures. Its not outrageous, its business.