Harper Things were looking good for Northwest Florida in early spring, but they took a nose dive within days of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, a fact that University of West Florida economist Dr. Rick Harper says is well supported with data.

“What are the economic affects of the oil spill?” Harper challenged. “It’s January in July for our tourism sector, and there has been a trickle-down effect for every tourism dollar lost.”

Harper listed the loss in sales tax revenues and bed tax revenues as “significant.”

“I think that the day the oil is finally stopped, BP will start to play hard ball,” Harper warned.

“We cannot truly recover from this. We cannot get everything back that we’ve lost. This is going to be a long, drawn-out process.

“This was the year we should’ve been in full- blown recovery and seeing a vast improvement over 2009,” he said. “Our feeder markets of Birmingham, Atlanta and Baton Rouge looked healthy and were feeding into our market with their tourism dollars. The numbers, instead, are staggering.”

Gulf Coast Community Bank CEO Buzz Ritchie echoed Harper’s findings. “We literally felt that things were getting better,” Ritchie told the group of and bank customers gathered for the discussion with Harper, “and within two weeks of the oil incident we felt the brakes slam on. The bank is only as good as our customers are doing; we feel this latest setback with every one of our customers.”

Ritchie hosted the meeting last Wednesday in the bank’s Palafox Street branch.

“Banks are the financial oil that lubricate our economy,” Harper said, “and when businesses are affected, banks are affected, we all are affected.”

Harper cited a one-half billion dollar hit to tourism sales over the season. “As to the magnitude of the spill in coastal metro areas, it is easy to predict there’d be $150 million per month decrease in taxable retail sales in what we think of in the traditional tourism sector. In short, I call it January in July. We are seeing winter trough kind of spending levels when we should really be in the peak of our season, which always comes in July.”

Resort Realty realtor Gary Michaels agreed. “Spring was busy with sales and listings and then when the spill hit in May – the beach went dead. With recent news of some capping success, properties are being shown again. Contracts

After suffering economically for five years, Harper reported that data shows the “great recession” affected Northwest Florida hard in 2008 and 2009. “We really only had one normal season in 2007 because in our area we had seriously depleted and damaged inventory of places to rent following Ivan and Dennis… out of the past 5 years we’ve really one had only one year that you could think of as normal.”

Harper reported that the greater Pensacola area is not “the most tourism-intensive economy” in North Florida. The tourism industry is a huge business in Florida, where a significant economic impact is felt from visitors. In 2008, approximately 84.2 million visitors to Florida generated $65.2 billion in taxable sales, $3.9 billion in state taxes and employed 1,007,000 Florida residents. Over 956,000 workers were employed in leisure and hospitality jobs in 2008, or about 12.5 percent of all working Floridians. Leisure and hospitality consistently ranks in the top three industries employing workers in the state.

Harper warned the group that with each $1 million in lost tourism revenues, hundreds of thousands of dollars less in real estate activity takes place, affecting also that market.

“From the economist’s point of view, all those businesses, properties have a claim,” Harper said. “Already distressed properties are being constantly undervalued to market. If these coastal properties are devalued again, it could be catastrophic.”