The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 41

DDTDSLmi Sunday, June 30, 1996 THE TAMPA TRIBUNE K. n.i acuta Ma n- i 'i t- 1iY Aimvtt r2JiS fi'm til mTii out hotel Theme parks check i i iu Reminiscent of oceanside resorts of the 1930s, Disney's Boardwalk combines a hotel and entertainment complex along the shores of Crescent Lake between Epcot Center and Disney-MGM Studios. An array of shops, restaurants and clubs line the boardwalk. Walt Disney Co. photo business ESSEX JAMESTribune map Disney's look-alike BoardWalk complex opens Monday.

PLAKE BUENA VISTA leasure Island charges $16.95 to mostly 20-somethings who are looking for a wild night of dancing at a disco, jazz club or rock n' roll bar. Disney's BoardWalk is free for families and conventioneers seeking a quiet evening at a brew pub, a state-of-the art sports bar or an old time dance hall. That's the chief difference between Walt Disney World's two nighttime entertainment areas. The 45-acre BoardWalk complex, which combines the entertainment promenade with hotel and time-share units, is set to open Monday. Designed to look like the turn-of-the-century New Jersey shore complete with carnival sideshows of unicyclists and jugglers, the BoardWalk provides a more subdued alternative to Pleasure Island.

Given that most of the guests who stay in the 4,300 rooms in the Epcot resort area where the BoardWalk is located are between 35 and 44, such entertainment was needed. Besides, Pleasure Island is packed on the weekends, said Lee Cockerell, Disney's senior resort operations. "They get through their meetings and dinners and they don't feel like going over to Pleasure Island," Cockerell said. General Manager Charlie Hardiman describes Boardwalk's atmosphere as festive, but not as crazy as Pleasure Island's. Pleasure Island tends to lure a younger crowd with its disco and rock n' roll themes.

Boardwalk's See DISNEY'S, Page 3 photo (CX Epcot BuenaVWaC V7 'Walt Disney yi -World i Disney-MGM Studios theme park property more than one day, a consideration that's growing in importance as competition between these destinations intensifies. Disney will add a live animal park in 1998, extending the length of time it will take to see all the Disney parks to four days. Universal Studios will add a second gated attraction in 1999 and two more hotels by the year 2005, doubling the park's size and the length of time it will take to see it. The longer a theme park keeps a visitor on its property, the less likely he or she will stray to competitor parks. In addition, the longer they stay, the less they cost, said Ross Bierkan, vice president of the Southeast region for Tampa consulting firm The Plasencia Group.

"Say the fixed cost of running Epcot is $1 million a day, once you get enough visitors through the gate to cover that cost, any incremental guests are pure profit," Bierkan said. Even if Disney charges convention guests less to stay at its hotels as part of package deals, it's still making money off of them at the theme parks, he added. That's the chief attraction for rival parks thinking about getting into the business. Thorn Stork, vice president of marketing for Busch Gardens, wouldn't comment on plans for the hotel except to say that a consulting group is helping the park assess the viability. Possible sites for a hotel include the 17 acres on which the park's brewery sits.

Parent company Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. closed the brewery late last year. If Busch Gardens decides to get into the hotel business, consultant Bierkan figures it needs to have at least 300 rooms and more than 10,000 square feet of meeting space. "You probably want at least 10,000 square feet of meeting space to put you in a competitive position in Tampa.

Not many hotels in Tampa have more than that," he said. The Busch hotel shouldn't charge more than $125 in season and $100 off season, which is considered expensive for Tampa where average room rates are in the $70 to $80 range. The Grand Floridian, Disney's poshest hotel, charges $250 a night. See THEME, Page 3 Attractions are making big money in the hotel business. Tampa's Busch Gardens is studying the idea.

Stories by LISA BACKMAN Tribune Staff Writer TAMPA wenty five years ago, Walt Disney World changed the way people vacation. Now the entertainment giant is altering the way they do business. When groups decide where to hold conventions, they increasingly the theme park mecca near Orlando with its half dozen heavily themed convention hotels and more than half a million square feet of meeting space. Disney's success as a convention destination has spurred theme park rivals to consider it. Busch Gardens in Tampa has hired a consulting firm to review opening its own lodge and convention facility.

Universal Studios in Orlando announced in May it hopes to open two luxury hotels with a quarter of a million square feet of meeting space by the end of the decade. They're going to have to play catch-up with Disney. The Mouse's convention business is expected to explode next year when it opens the Coronado Springs hotel, its first moderately priced convention hotel that offers 100,000 square feet of meeting space. Add Disney's BoardWalk, Disney's newest heavily themed lodge and entertainment area, and the sky's the limit. "We get all we want," said Lee Cockerell, senior vice president of resort operations, referring to Disney's convention business.

"We have more demand than we have supply because we have so much demand from leisure travelers." Disney hotels stay 90 percent occupied around the year, a testament to its ability to effectively fill its lodges with leisure and convention travelers. Revenue at Disney theme parks and hotels jumped 14 percent to about $4 billion last year, spurred in part by a $127 million increase in occupied hotel rooms at Florida hotels. Gene Marlowe Misery index signals likely Clinton win WASHINGTON Robert Barro telephoned a London bookmaker last week for odds on the U.S. presidential race. He was told Clinton's chances of winning are 5-to-l.

Barro knows things look bad for Bob Dole, but that bad? "They wouldn't let me open an account over the phone and place a bet," Barro complained. Even if the odds at Ladbrookes favoring Bill Clinton are excessive, the president still has a lot going for him especially the economy. Of the 12 most recent presidential terms, Clinton's ranks fifth in economic performance, says Barro, which is pretty good. Barro, a Harvard economist and a conservative, ranks presidents using the so-called "misery index." The index tells how miserable or good the economy should be making people feel. It was devised by one of Lyndon Johnson's economic advisers and measures inflation, unemployment, interest rates and economic growth.

Barro says the index "provides a clear verdict on the worst and the best of the 12 presidential terms." He discussed the rankings at a reception here last week at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Reagan is first Ronald Reagan comes in first and second. Reagan's first term, 1981-84, produced the best economy on record by beating inflation, according to the index. His second term, 1985-'88, brought interest rates down and it was second-best. "The economy really did well in the '80s," Barro said.

"I don't know how anybody can deny that." Many people do. The wages of many middle-class workers stopped growing then, and the deficit soared. Those things aren't measured directly in the misery index. The two worst administrations as Barro also explains in "Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society" are the Carter administration, 1977-'80, and Nixon-Ford, 1973-76. The problem of both those administrations was inflation, which was partly caused by rising oil prices, but also was brought on by themselves.

Jimmy Carter tried to offset rising prices during his term by persuading the Federal Reserve to increase the money supply, but this only made matters worse with double-digit inflation. Clinton locks good Richard Nixon had similar problems, which he, too, made worse with what Barro regards as bad ideas, including price controls and a dramatic increase in non-defense spending especially for Social Security. Among administrations with good ratings, Kennedy-Johnson, 1961-'64, ranks third, and Harry Truman's second term, 1949-'52, fourth. Next is Clinton's first two years, and Clinton has probably done even better since then. "The economic outcomes have been pretty good since Clinton took office," Barro said.

George Bush ranks sixth. The Republicans are wishing that Clinton could somehow be made to look like another Carter or denied credit for the economy's strength. While an individual president's impact on the economy is arguable, the economy's impact on elections isn't. Analysts have found that, barring some scandals or calamity, people vote for a president on the basis of the economy. Also, Clinton has been careful not to repeat Carter's mistakes.

"The big thing that distinguishes the Clinton administration from the Carter administration" says Barro, is Clinton's hands-off approach toward the Fed. "That's paid off for them." The results of the misery index are nonpartisan, says Barro. But "liberals who readily applaud the failure of Nixon and favorable outcomes for Kennedy and Truman" dropped the index after Reagan got high ratings. Now that Clinton is scoring high, Barro says hfe" expects the index "will again be widely accepted." Walt Disney Co. photo ESPN Club at Disney's BoardWalk will offer live broadcasts, sports notables and casual dining.

Disney's Wilderness Lodge, Disney's All-Star Sports Resort and Disney's All-Star Music Resort opened in 1994 and 1995, contributing to the increase. With the opening of Disney's BoardWalk Inn July 1, the number of Disney-owned hotel rooms will top 16,000, slightly more than the 15,000 hotel rooms in all of Hillsborough County. Combining business with pleasure is a key reason for Disney's booming convention business and other theme parks' desire to get into it. And when conventioneers hold their meetings at a theme park, they don't usually come alone. "I don't think you can go to Walt Disney World and not tell your kids.

And if you don't take them, you'll have a mutiny in your house," Cockerell said. Convention business is often booked years in advance and is a sure way to fill the parks during slump periods between busy tourist seasons. It also ensures that a visitor will stay on Gaylord Entertainment Left and above, a hotel next door to country music theme park Opryland U.S.A. has more than 600,000 square feet of business meeting space. i Workers shortchanged $19 billion as firms deny overtime Gaylord Entertainment photo nies violating the law.

He says his workers are confusing times they were on breaks with times they were working. These days, his employees are getting an extra $35 to $60 a week, for an average 10 hours of overtime. "Everybody is a lot happier now," says Miguel Chan, the head counterman. "We get paid properly for the hours we work." While employees like overtime pay, a lot of employers don't. Violations are so common that the Employer Policy Foundation, an employer-supported think tank in Washington, estimates that workers would get an additional $19 billion a year if the rules were observed.

That estimate Is considered conservative by many researchers because it assumes A Wall Street Journal Report William Shinbane was seething. The workers at his Fisherman's Outlet restaurant in Los Angeles had just joined a union and wanted to be paid overtime. At a meeting last year, he pointed to a time clock, said their hours now would be recorded precisely and vigorously suggested they would regret giving up a life not tied to punching a clock. "This is what you want, this is what you're going to get!" he shouted. "You're going to get it!" The workers had accused him of evading overtime rules and also requiring them to sign blank time cards.

Shinbane, who had paid mem for a six-day week of up to 60 hours without any overtime premium, de that only 10 percent of employees not getting overtime should be. The U.S. Labor Department, which is in charge of enforcing the regulations, figures that two-thirds of all workers are eligible for overtime pay. But it doesn't know how many are illegally deprived of it, and it has never tried to estimate how many violations it is missing or to track repeat offenders nationally. "We know we're missing something.

We don't have any way of knowing how extensive it is," says Maria Echaveste, chief of the department's Wage and Hour Division. "Because we have such limited resources, we could literally just sit in our offices and take complaints." The department opens rdughly 20,000 cases a year, mainly stemming from com- plaints, and wins settlements for workers about 90 percent of the time. But it has only 800 investigators, down 15 percent from 1990, and they also handle minimum-wage, child-labor and other workplace rules. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 74,514 cases brought by the department from October 1991 to June 1995 found that some industries, such as railroad and tobacco, had almost no violations, while industries such as construction and apparel were cited for illegally denying overtime to one out of every 50 workers during the period. Overall, nearly eight out of every thousand workers, or 695,280 employees, were covered by settlements, even though en-See EMPLOYEES, Page 6 mhi rTTTinii lit- c-- wiiihfinrilii'Wl-ll-l, Ss Ijithllllllfcirtfrijillii i in tkn tui.