TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – May 18, 2010 – British Petroleum (BP) agreed Monday to give Florida $25 million to pay for an advertising campaign promising that the state's beaches remain open and fishing is going strong as the company struggles to staunch a massive oil spill off Louisiana's Gulf Coast.
The cash is on top of $25 million the company pledged earlier to offset the state's costs for preparing coastal regions for a possible landfall of the oil. The spill continues to grow roughly 350 miles from the St. Petersburg shoreline.
The announcement came following a meeting at the Florida Capitol between BP chief executive officer Tony Hayward and Gov. Charlie Crist. Hayward also said $15 million each in tourism grants will be distributed to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
"The big focus now is on how do we get the people of the Gulf Coast back to normal operations, the normal way of life," said Hayward, who admitted to a British newspaper last week that he assumes his $6 million-a-year job is on the line over the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig disaster.
Hayward echoed Crist in suggesting a theme for the state's post-spill marketing campaign: "Florida is open for business. The beaches are open and clean. The fish are biting, and everything is normal down here," said Hayward.
Last week, Crist said the company should pay the state almost $25 million for a marketing campaign and another $10 million grant to help Gulf Coast counties respond to the sharp drop in hotel bookings and visitors since the April 20 rig accident. Last week, Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association President Carol Dover said summer bookings along the Panhandle coast had dropped from their usual 90 percent occupancy levels into the teens, despite industry efforts to calm fears by waiving deposit deadlines and making cancellations easier if oil actually came ashore.
Dover said that with tourists staying away, "businesses have truly hit the 911 button."
The grants BP announced Monday come on top of the roughly $525 million – about $17.5 million a day – the company has spent trying to cap the broken well and cleanup efforts along four states' coastlines. During the first quarter of the year, London-based BP's profits averaged $93 million a day, according to media reports.
Hayward, however, was buoyed by signs Monday that the company had begun to contain the leak, which has been pumping more than 200,000 gallons of oil daily into the Gulf. BP said it is drawing about one-quarter of the escaping oil into a tanker ship, using a mile-long tube as a funnel. It also is preparing to attempt to "kill" the blown-out well in coming days, using mud and debris as a cork.
"We have achieved some considerable success," Hayward said. "We are very confident we have contained the spill in the vicinity of the leak … I do feel that we have, for the first time, turned the corner in this challenge."
Researchers, however, remain concerned that the oil congealing in the Gulf could reach a major ocean current that carries it through the Florida Keys and along the East Coast.
Kathy Torian, a Visit Florida spokeswoman, said the state had already planned a $2.5 million advertising buy to promote the state's Gulf beaches chiefly to a "drive-time" market stretching through much of the Southeast. But she said the additional BP cash will allow the state to expand the campaign into major national metropolitan markets, with online, newspaper and television advertising in the U.S. and international markets, primarily Great Britain and Germany.
Source: News Service of Florida, John Kennedy
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