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Shore wars
By MARK ALBRIGHT, Times Staff Writer When Pinellas County tourist promoters staked their claim to the title of "Florida's Beach," they weren't kidding. For six months the county has been quietly lodging protests with counterparts in Hillsborough County for posting pictures of a Pinellas beach on their Web site (www.visittampabay.com). The Hillsborough group was trying to show Tampa's proximity to the gulf beaches and take another small step toward marketing the Tampa Bay area as one tourist destination. Not so fast, the Pinellas protesters said. Since November, the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau has sent two formal letters of protest to the Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau in Tampa in the dispute over beach bragging rights. The feud started when the Tampa group identified Pinellas County's Fort De Soto Park as a "nearby" beach on its Web site. That free exposure didn't satisfy the Pinellas group, which spends millions of dollars promoting the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area as "Florida's Beach." Posting a non-Hillsborough beach is "misleading" to vacation prospects and undermines the Pinellas bureau's ability to market its home turf, the bureau maintained in its first letter. Ironically, the accusation came from the same visitor's bureau that a year ago distributed a poster ostensibly showing a Pinellas beach but actually using a stock photo pulled from the files of a national advertising photo service. Hillsborough tourism officials replied they couldn't see what the fuss was about. "We weren't trying to claim ownership of the Pinellas beaches," said Paul Catoe, president of the Tampa visitors bureau. "We were just trying to get more people to go to them. People who come here don't care which county they are in." By February Pinellas County Commission chairwoman Barbara Todd was pulled into the fray. She summoned the chairwoman and chief executive of the Hillsborough group to a session in her Clearwater office where she insisted Fort De Soto be identified as part of the "St. Petersburg/Clearwater area." Instead, the Tampa group last week posted a map of both counties. It shows the gulf beaches, St. Petersburg and Clearwater and offers the phone numbers for 14 Pinellas beach patrols. Two idyllic new gulf beach photos also were installed. Both were shot at Egmont Key, an island a few hundred yards from Fort De Soto that's within the boundaries of Hillsborough County. "It's better than what they had up there, so I'm not going to fall on my sword over it," Todd said. "I'm still not thrilled they are trying to use our beaches." Said Catoe: "They don't own all the beaches in Florida." -- Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8252.
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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