Times Record "Sustain Maine" op-ed series
Tourism and Sustainable Development in Vacationland
29 June 2001
David Vail
As the Fourth of July nears, Mainers again brace for the tourist onslaught. Each summer, we share our roads and parking spaces, as well as our favorite beaches, hiking trails, and night spots with an astonishing twenty-two million paying customers from away. Their spending is lifeblood for thousands of tourist-serving businesses, from motels to whale watches to gas stations. For the state, this unique export sector generates more jobs than any other (about 70,000) and more gross revenues (about $5 billion) than any but wood products.
After a soggy and slow summer 2000, tourism businesses and promoters have their fingers crossed that this year's tourist numbers and spending will not be jeopardized by wet weather, economic slowdown, gas prices, or highway congestion. This summer will provide clues whether tourism remains vulnerable to economic downturns, as it was in the 1989-91 recession. Proponents of sustainable tourism development have different concerns, emphasizing tourism's impacts on environmental quality, quality of life in host communities, and the quality of economic opportunities. A strategy for sustainable tourism would prioritize these qualities and recognize that more tourism is not always better.
Tourism at its best contributes to sustainable development. In economically distressed interior and Downeast Maine, for instance, tourist spending helps sustain a critical mass of demand for services, ranging from restaurants to variety stores. It strengthens governments' revenues and incentives to maintain amenities such as parks, museums, and boat landings. It boosts local income by generating thousands of seasonal and year-round jobs. And its fees and tax revenues underwrite environmental protection initiatives, from water purification to shorefront erosion control.
But tourism at its best will not come about through a wave of the market's invisible hand or a pronouncement of the Maine Publicity Bureau. Unplanned and unmanaged tourism growth has a downside that many Mainers will feel this summer -- and in the future.
Annual reports of tour bus congestion in Kennebunkport and brawls outside Portland pubs are reminders that tourism can adversely affect host community residents. In scores of Maine towns, unplanned tourism growth contributes to disturbing, often irreversible, strip development and sprawl; crowded public spaces; traffic congestion; real estate price inflation (loss of affordable housing); and replacement of mom'n'pop businesses by corporate franchises. Added local tax revenues often fail to cover tourism's full costs for waste disposal, road maintenance, parking space, and police protection. And the residents who endure tourism's downside often have little say in policy decisions.
Over the past decade, Maine tourism has been an awesome job growth engine, generating a 35% employment increase. Last year, one-in-ten Maine workers served tourists. Job quality is thus a key indicator of tourism's contribution to shared prosperity and sustainable development. Job quality has many aspects, including compensation, benefits, security, career opportunities, and work satisfaction. For thousands who make a living serving tourists, including many craftspeople, motel managers, chefs, fishing guides, rafting outfitters or performing artists, job quality is high.
But a crucial fact is that roughly three-fourths of tourism employees hold hourly-wage jobs in three sectors: lodging, dining, and retail trade. Data for 24 of these occupations show a median wage below $8.00/hour. Only a small minority receive health insurance benefits. Even with ultra-tight labor markets in recent summers, tourism wages fell farther behind Maine's average wage; in fact one-third of tourism workers suffered falling real wages. Meanwhile, the decline of affordable housing in tourist meccas like Bar Harbor has raised workers' commuting costs. Maine has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in workers holding multiple jobs to make ends meet; most involve tourism services.
Based on the Maine Economic Growth Council's "livable wage" standard, $10.01/hour in 2000, just one-fourth of tourism's hourly-paid workers and no more than 40% of everyone employed in tourism receive livable wages. That's far below the 67% statewide figure and truly depressing compared to the Growth Council's goal of 85% livable wage jobs by 2005. The prosperity that fuels Maine's tourist boom has failed to trickle down to most employees. And that won't change much without potent policy initiatives.
Whether tourists come for white water adventure on the Kennebec or lobster on a Boothbay wharf, Maine's stunning nature lures them and forms the backdrop for their vacations. By treating natural landscapes as free goods, as if carrying capacity were unlimited, we are in danger of loving special places to death. This is evident in trail erosion on Tumbledown Mountain, disruption of seabird nesting on coastal islands, and floating beer parties on the Saco River. Further, summer tourists boost auto emissions 40% during Maine's peak smog season. (Wordlwide, tourism is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.) Minimally planned leisure home building stresses transient water systems in many rural communities. And the growing tyranny of motorized recreation, from ATVs to jet skis, is crowding out recreationists seeking solitude and silence in nature
A vision and strategic plan for sustainable tourism can't be sketched in a few words. Visioning should begin with an honest assessment of tourism's benefits and costs, present and future. In a genuinely democratic dialogue, voices of caution, voices of tourism's potential losers, and voices speaking for future citizens would not be overwhelmed by economic interests and the Maine Office of Tourism advocating unchecked tourism growth. Well informed local and state dialogues require much better data and analysis than we have now, regarding tourism's social, economic and environmental impacts - a task for the State Planning Office.
Participants in framing a strategy for sustainable tourism should seek answers to questions like these:
- Can tourism benefit everyone in host communities, if it's carefully planned and managed?
- If tourism inevitably has a downside, how can the losers be protected or compensated?
- How can tourism employers be encouraged to adopt best management practices and their employees to acquire key skills, so solid profits and quality jobs can go together?
- Who is best qualified to speak for future generations and healthy ecosystems?
- How can we keep tourism within carrying capacity limits? How much is enough?
We need to start this dialogue soon.
David Vail is an economics professor at Bowdoin College and principal author of TOURISM AND MAINE'S FUTURE and LIVABLE WAGES IN MAINE TOURISM, reports of the Maine Center for Economic Policy.