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Should Tax Pay for Blunder?
Opinion · May 24, 2002

Key Largo's heroic efforts to salvage the U.S.S. Spiegel Grove, the world's biggest and most expensive artificial reef, is weighted down by a troubling and largely overlooked fact: Much of the estimated $1.2 million that it will cost to scuttle the vessel isn't really its money alone to spend. The funds belong to the taxpayers and, to some extent, the tourists who visit the Keys.

As all of South Florida knows by now, the Navy landing-dock ship sank halfway and rolled over a few hours before she was supposed to go down last week. If she settles on the bottom in her current position, the vessel will be unusable as an artificial reef for sport diving and thus incapable of bringing an estimated $14 million a year in new business to the area.

So project leaders at the Key Largo Chamber of Commerce launched an ambitious plan to float the vessel and re-sink her. The operation will reportedly cost a minimum of $250,000, but some think that the bill could come to as much as half a million dollars.

Who's paying for it? Some of the money is being donated by private groups, such as the Ocean Reef Club and the Friends of the National Marine Sanctuary. But it's not enough to settle the whole bill. About $250,000 has already come from loans backed by area dive shops in anticipation of selling special medallions that will be required to dive one of Key Largo's artificial reefs. If they have to borrow even more money it will represent a huge gamble that could backfire if the salvage operation flops.

Maybe the most troubling part of this story is that some of the money collected through Monroe County's 4 percent bed tax -- money that comes out of your pocket every time you spend a night in a Keys hotel -- will be used to cover the Spiegel Grove's costs. The Tourist Development Council, which distributes a portion of the bed-tax proceeds, has allocated about $500,000 for the project.

Not that it's automatically an inappropriate use of these funds; it might be a good investment. But neither the visitors who paid the bed tax nor the electorate of Monroe County have been adequately represented in the decision to pay for this ship to be put down. The TDC is regarded by some in the Keys as a Byzantine and immutable bureaucracy that resists any pressure to reform -- it fought efforts to allocate more money to much-needed capital projects, for instance -- and it's gambling with other people's money in financing the Spiegel Grove project.

What if the salvage operation fails? What will they tell the divers holding worthless medallions? What about Monroe County voters? And disappointed visitors?

It is time to prepare for the possibility that the forces of nature and fate will keep the Spiegel Grove in her current position, and that she'll settle on the bottom as a hunk of useless metal. That would be a massive disappointment to the tenacious volunteers who have given their time and enthusiasm to the project. It would be a huge loss to the local diving community. And it's all but unthinkable to the planners who have spent the better part of the eight years trying to secure the necessary permits to move the ship.

If the Spiegel Grove fails in her final mission, she could take more than the dreams of the Key Largo dive community to the bottom with her. She also could expose a system of funding tourism-related projects that is often incomprehensible, where few distinctions are made between special interests and the public interest and where there is little if any accountability to voters and visitors. (Just try to explain the TDC's labyrinthine decision-making process, involving multiple committees made up of appointees, to an outsider, and you get the idea.)

No one wants the planned salvage operation to fail. It would be one of the worst things to happen to Key Largo's tourist businesses in recent memory. But it might not be such a bad thing for Keys residents if it forces a second look at the community's dysfunctional relationship with the TDC.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.