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Local Government / Tourism
TDC Members Push for Clearer Communication Between Clerk’s Office and Tourism Agencies
Reimbursement delays and unexplained payment cuts prompt council member David Bear to call for direct dialogue with Clerk Pam Childers.
The Escambia County Tourist Development Council convened Tuesday, April 21, and members discussed a persistent problem: tourism-funded agencies struggling to get reimbursed for work they’ve already done on the county’s behalf—and often can’t find out why.
TDC member David Bear raised the issue, telling fellow members that organizations funded through tourist development tax dollars are seeing reimbursement checks that don’t match what they submitted, with little or no explanation attached.
“They’re working on behalf of the county, and they can’t seem to get reimbursed. So now they have what I’m going to call a tax, which is an interest rate on top of a line of credit to be able to operate.”
— David Bear, TDC Council Member
Bear’s concern centers on agencies like Visit Pensacola, which must take out lines of credit to cover operating costs while waiting on reimbursements. He argued that when the Clerk’s office withholds or reduces payments—even for expenditures that are contractually approved and budgeted—it imposes a financial burden on organizations whose mission is to promote Escambia County as a destination.
What’s Getting in the Way
Commissioner Ashlee Hofberger, who sits on the TDC, acknowledged the problem and outlined what her office has learned through meetings with the Clerk’s office and Visit Pensacola. The core issues:
- Reimbursement submissions sometimes arrive with missing documentation from the required checklist, resulting in returns without a clear explanation.
- Some contracts have come through with a different logo or subcontractor name at the top—raising questions that the Clerk’s office has not consistently communicated back.
- The Clerk’s office has been requesting deliverables attached to approved contracts as additional documentation—a requirement that hadn’t been clearly spelled out to submitting agencies.
Hofberger claimed that progress has been made, and recent submissions appear to be moving more smoothly. She agreed to request a copy of the Clerk’s reimbursement checklist and share it with TDC members so all parties can see exactly what’s required.
A Call for Direct Dialogue
Bear pushed further, noting that years ago, the Clerk’s office would send a representative to TDC meetings to answer questions directly. He said routing everything through Hofberger as a liaison isn’t sustainable—and Hofberger agreed.
- TDC Chair Jason Nicholson said he would reach out to Clerk Pam Childers to gauge her willingness to attend future meetings or send a dedicated staff member. Hofberger stated Childers has at least one—and possibly two—staff members specifically assigned to TDT-related work, making a direct presence at TDC meetings a practical option.
Bottom line: The council aligned on three next steps—sharing the Clerk’s reimbursement checklist with all submitting agencies, pursuing a direct Clerk’s office presence at future TDC meetings, and continuing to improve the communication process so that organizations can focus on destination marketing rather than chasing payments.
No formal vote was taken on the matter. The checklist is expected to be distributed ahead of the next TDC meeting.
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Asking Ashlee Hofberger to help sort out the Clerk’s megalomania is like asking Kristi Noem to set the criteria for a cosplay pageant. I’ve been soooooo enjoying the collective, County-wide sigh of relief that this absurd theater has reached its limits, all this beautiful day long.
Countless people, myself among them, now have real hope that their days of being subject to the Clerk’s retribution whims have reached their FAFO moment. Personally, I have not a small amount of curiosity about how I landed in a DoR audit scrutinizing whether I paid the appropriate amount of taxes to the State of Florida on some online furniture purchases, when they audited me as if I was an antique business. Somebody clearly put DoR on the trail of investigating me, and as the Clerk likes to tell people the false information that I get paid for my advocacy under the table, she is certainly a likely candidate. (Whoever did it, it must have been such a disappointment that all they could scrape up was a couple of FedEx shipments clearing customs, for which I promptly turned over my tax receipts–I actually overpaid them.)
We are *legion*, those of us who are hugely grateful to Alex Andrade, Marty Stanovich, and the ladies of WEAC for finally standing up to this nonsense. For those who aren’t aware, WEAC is a Warrington charity off Navy Boulevard that provides essential and tireless service to those in need, especially through their food pantry. (Note well that the Clerk doesn’t consider providing poor families and the homeless with jars of peanut butter so they don’t starve as having any County benefit.)
Thanks be to God that someone has *finally* had the courage to point out the obvious: the Clerk can’t have her discretion and eat it too. Actually, it’s likely that a Court would say she can’t have it, at all, especially if her luck with judges that allow her attorneys to lead them around by the nose runs dry. However this plays out, it looks like we just might be witnessing the beginning of the end of a truly historic reign of terror, even by Escambia standards.