Here is what Tourism provides to DeKalb County by John Dersham

On September 22nd my staff and I attended the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association annual meeting. We are members and I am currently on their board and am presiding as Co-Chair for these next two years.
At our meeting we had as our guest speaker, Dr. Steve Morse from the University Of Tennessee (no bad words please). Dr. Morse is an Economist for the university with his specialty being Tourism. He came equipped with the economic impact numbers for each of North Alabama’s sixteen counties. It is very impressive to see how big tourism is to the income of Alabama. In fact, Tourism is the largest non-agricultural business in the state. Tourists last year spent nearly 94 billion dollars in Alabama and 171,000 people make all of or most of their living in tourism.
DeKalb County generated 62 million dollars in spending by tourists in the county last year. We have 1,000 full time tourism employees and 400 part time. Tourism generated $16,150 per day in tax revenue to the county and to local municipalities. DeKalb County tourists provided $9,358 to the state daily. In 2010 DeKalb County had 29,390 households. If every household in DeKalb County had to pay extra income taxes because there were no tourists, it would mean every house hold in DeKalb County would have to pay $201 more per year. Tourism is a clean industry whose jobs cannot be outsourced to another country. It does not require infrastructure to have tourists. No garbage collection, no schools and very little direct repair costs are caused by tourists.
Tourists are people who come from outside of our local economy and spend their money that was earned elsewhere, in our local economy on their visits. In recent years, as the rest of the economy has declined tourism has helped rescue the bad economy. People still travel. They need a break and a change of scenery and we are a tank of gas here and back for eleven million people. Tourism has become a favorite topic among federal, state and local governments as more effort is being placed nationwide to grow the economy through tourism.