CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Tension may be building between what’s become one of Central Florida’s largest economic engines, and the city it calls home.
Cape Canaveral’s mayor said some locals are getting fed up with almost a million visitors nearly every month who go on a cruise at Port Canaveral.
As the city opens up about the strain on infrastructure, the port, itself, celebrated what’s expected to be another record year for revenue.
At the annual state of the port address Wednesday, CEO Captain John Murray said the port’s expected to welcome more than 9 million cruise passengers in the next 12 months.
The port just set a record of more than 8 million passengers in a year between 2024-2025.
“Twenty seven percent of cruise passengers spend at least one night in a local hotel,” Murray told the audience. “That’s helpful to our local economy.”
But as exciting as that is for the port and visitors, the port’s growth since the end of the COVID-19 shutdown isn’t everyone’s favorite news.
Mayor Wes Morrison talked about Cape Canaveral’s challenges handling the port’s popularity.
“It’s reached a breaking point that I’m sensing in the community,” the mayor said at a town hall Tuesday.
The meeting at city hall was about the Brevard County school district possibly closing the city’s only school because of low enrollment.
Morrison said if Cape View Elementary closed, the city would effectively lose its identity as its own community and become just a resort town.
“From traffic, from safety, from the transient population, and it’s caused a lot of stress on this community,” the mayor said.
A local fisherman since the ’70s, Greg Gough recalled a time before hotels and the world’s largest cruise ships made up the port’s skyline.
“Before, it wasn’t really touristy. This is just where the locals came to fish,” Gough told Cape Canaveral Community Correspondent James Sparvero.
Unlike some other locals Sparvero has talked to in the past few years, Gough thinks the port has grown responsibly.
“I don’t have a problem with it as long as we still have access to the facilities, access to the fishing, and everything’s clean and maintained and not polluted,” the fisherman said.
During the state of the port, the port also showed a video update of how its modifying cruise Terminal 5 so it can handle the largest ships the port has to offer.
Captain Murray also talked more about being in the planning stages of an entirely new cruise terminal.
The terminal is still planned for the port’s marina district.
You can check out the slideshow from the state of the port here: