Posted on 02/17/2003 1:54:08 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
TALLAHASSEE -- Florida needs to persuade more retirees to move to the Sunshine State because they are a motor for economic growth, a state commission reported.
The Destination Florida Commission report released Friday suggested that other states are actively wooing the nation's older residents, many of whom have traditionally picked Florida as their retirement spot.
Two decades ago, onefourth of retirees who left their home state came to Florida. Now that proportion has dropped to one in five, the report said.
With industries such as health care and construction depending on older customers, a continued migration drop of even 10 percent would cost the state 42,000 jobs by 2005.
Florida needs "to start focusing on what we have so long taken for granted -- a healthy retirement industry," commission chairman T. O'Neal Douglas said.
Gov. Jeb Bush created the commission last summer to make recommendations on how to attract retirees and provide them with services.
Among the commission's proposals:
Those are ambitious, pricey goals, but justified by retirees' potent economic impact, the report suggested.
It cited a private study released last year that reported people 50 and older made up one-third of the state's population in 2000 but accounted for 55 percent of consumer spending.
Older residents do cost the state more in health care, but they use fewer schools and commit fewer crimes, the study said. They also paid $2.8 billion more to state and local governments than the governments spent on them.
If the Legislature takes up the commission's recommendations, it may renew debate about how many residents Florida can absorb.
"Does it make sense that the state is going to spend money to encourage people to come down here when we have to build a desalination plant on Tampa Bay in order to provide drinking water for the people we have now?" AARP executive director Bentley Lipscomb said.
Anticipating those issues, the commission included recommendations such as: "Continue to protect Florida's natural resources and parks so they may continue to attract future generations."
Couple frozen property taxes with a mandate to keep the blue hairs off the roads! Yessss!
Either that, or require annual license renewals (both visual and driving tests) after age 70. Sun City Center renewed a driver's license for six years---for a man who was 102! Two weeks later, he plowed through a hair salon.
Oh yeah, THAT'LL encourage no one under 50 to move in. Brilliant. And the lawyers will set up dummy transfer mechanisms before the law is posted on the web.
Mass transit should be available everywhere.
Clever of them to get the transit workers union behind them. The affluent retirees *I* know, worked very hard to be able to live in a place most mass transit users can't afford, or reach without a car.
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