Don't play games with the city's No. 1 driver of revenue The Record readers Keep tourist taxes at work Preserving the current permissible uses of tourist development taxes is absolutely essential to our county’s tourism promotions efforts. Those efforts create jobs and generate tax revenue that help fund critical services that benefit our residents, such as public safety, education, affordable housing and infrastructure. Proposed legislation that would sweep those funds away from something we know works to instead let local government redeploy those dollars for other uses is a terrible idea that is bad for our economy. Tourism is St. Johns County’s top industry and top employer. Just like everywhere else in the state, the tourism industry here was hit hard by the pandemic. Like many other tourism-reliant businesses, our museum temporarily shuttered our doors from mid-March until Memorial Day weekend.