If Hurricane Earl spared Connecticut a sodden Labor Day, the forecast was mixed on whether the sagging economic clouds are finally lifting for tourism venues.
The American Automobile Association predicted that Labor Day travel would be up 10 percent over last year”™s levels, thanks to an improving economy. That prediction was made before forecasters mapped Hurricane Earl”™s trajectory up the eastern seaboard, however, warning of a possible direct hit on Long Island and the Connecticut shore.
With heavy rains and winds initially forecast, many vacationers elected to stay home on Friday heading into Labor Day. As it turned out, the state enjoyed a mostly perfect weekend, but the uncertainty caused some to scrap weekend travel plans according to multiple agencies throughout New England.
The question becomes how Connecticut attractions fared throughout the summer of 2010, a hot sunny season that was welcome after the wet chill of June 2009 and the Great Recession. The U.S. Travel Association had predicted a 2.3 percent increase in leisure trips in the United States this summer, which would be the first increase since 2007. The Washington, D.C.-based group added that travel could top the estimated 331 million trips taken by U.S. travelers in 2007, which was an all-time high.
Despite the state devoting a token one dollar to tourism marketing this year amid across-the-board budget cuts, as of July Connecticut”™s leisure and hospitality sector had enjoyed the best year-over-year rebound of any major industry, with employment up an estimated 5.1 percent to nearly 60,800 jobs according to the Connecticut Department of Labor. That was twice the gain of the larger education and health services sector, which was an employment bright spot in the depths of the Great Recession.
In a Labor Day report on the jobs sector, New Haven-based Connecticut Voices for Children indicated the leisure sector was one of two in Connecticut to have increased jobs between 2006 and 2009, though only slightly at less than 1,000 jobs.
After a tough first half of the year, July contributions to the state coffers were up 6 percent from the casinos in eastern Connecticut, with those payments tied directly to gambling totals.
Other measures tell a different story, however. In July, tourists at major Connecticut attractions were off 14 percent, and information centers recorded a 10 percent drop in visitors, though at least part of that figure is likely due to reduced hours spawned by the state”™s budget crisis.
If state spending has been stilted, the travel industry appears to be in for another federal infusion, after President Obama chose Labor Day to announce plans to update the nation”™s infrastructure, in part by creating a permanent Infrastructure Bank that would leverage private and public capital to invest in projects ”“ a departure from the federal government”™s traditional way of spending on infrastructure through earmarks and formula-based grants that are allocated as much by political and geographical considerations. Instead, the Infrastructure Bank would base its investment decisions on analytical measures of performance, pitting projects against each other to determine those that produce the greatest return for American taxpayers.
Without providing details on the impact for specific states and regions, the White House also proposed:
Ӣ rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads;
Ӣ constructing 4,000 miles of new railways; and
”¢ rebuilding runways while installing a “NextGen” system to reduce travel delays. The NextGen proposal would involve moving from a national ground-based radar surveillance system to a more accurate satellite-based surveillance system.
