House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Gov. Rick Scott have started to exchange some not-so-subtle jabs about the future of the state’s business-recruitment and tourism-marketing agencies.
Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes, has repeatedly expressed opposition to Scott’s focus on providing money to Enterprise Florida for business incentives and has questioned the need for tourism-marketer Visit Florida to even exist.
And last week, Corcoran dragged one of the governor’s favorite businesses into the mix: Wawa convenience stores.
“We gave incentives to Wawa gas stations to come here,” Corcoran said on Preston Scott’s show on WFLA radio in Tallahassee. “At the same time, RaceTrac made the exact same investment in the state of Florida.
“RaceTrac has more gas stations, more investment and more employees and they don’t get any money,” Corcoran said. “But their competitor right down the street is getting millions of dollars from the taxpayers. That’s a distortion of the free market.”
Wawa has opened 100 stores since Scott went to Orlando in July 2012 for the ribbon cutting on the first Wawa in Florida.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta-based RaceTrac has opened doors to 78 new stores in Florida since 2012, pushing its number of locations in the state to 201, according to a company spokeswoman.
But it should be noted that while some of the new Wawa store locations have received local tax incentives, and Scott attempted in 2015 to woo Wawa to relocate its headquarters to Florida, a Department of Economic Opportunity spokeswoman said, “Wawa has not received and is not scheduled to receive any (state) incentive money.”
Still, the comment by Corcoran is part of the early jabs among lawmakers and Scott about Visit Florida and Enterprise Florida. Corcoran also maintains tourism is more reflective of the strength of the economy than marketing efforts by Visit Florida.
Scott has also taken his own shot at the House.
“Visit Florida and its work to advertise our state supports our tourism industry, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs all across our state,” Scott wrote in the middle of a letter that called for head of the Visit Florida to step down.
“Anyone who disputes that fact or argues for no longer using Visit Florida’s advertising to promote tourism here simply does not understand the business world or the nature of our economy,” Scott wrote.
Corcoran’s response to Scott, in a series of tweets, included, “Our job is to decide if Visit Florida should exist and if so how much should it be funded,” and, “We’re not engaged in their hiring and firing decisions.”