Florida: triple car-rental fees
Florida wants to triple car-rental surcharges — It soon could cost more to buy, own and rent a motor vehicle in Florida if state legislators adopt a transportation advocacy coalition’s proposal. Saying Florida desperately needs more money to maintain and build roads, Floridians for Better Transportation is proposing large increases - doubling or tripling, in some cases - in vehicle registration, title and impact fees, and rental-car surcharges.
Cruise industry sues Alaska over initiative — State officials say they plan to vigorously defend Alaska’s citizen initiative process in the face of a lawsuit by the cruise ship industry and its supporters. The North West CruiseShip Association, based in Canada, sued the Alaska Division of Elections in state Superior Court last week, challenging the state’s process for verifying voter signatures on proposed ballot measures.
Fuel prices push projected airline losses even higher — The airline industry’s pretax loss for 2005 is expected to be more than triple the previous estimates of one investment bank. The culprit: rising fuel prices. Merrill Lynch analyst Michael Linenberg believes that the industry’s losses for 2005 will balloon to $3.4 billion from $1 billion.
San Francisco hotels stay open for now — The 60-day cooling-off period in The City’s hotel labor dispute expired Sunday with no agreement between the union and hotels, but both sides said workers would stay on the job — for now. The San Francisco Multi-Employers Group, which represents 14 hotels in The City, offered a new proposal Friday that included a $1.30 raise over the next four years for non-tipped employees and a 65 cent increase for tipped workers.
Southwest arrives in Pittsburgh with a splash — It won’t be hard for customers and rival US Airways workers to find Southwest Airlines when the airline launches service at Pittsburgh International Airport in May. That’s because the nation’s largest discount carrier will get a prominent spot in the airport’s boarding terminal, occupying at least one gate on the A concourse, now the exclusive domain of US Airways.
Excuse me, there’s a body in my pool — Two people watching a late movie Sunday night in a Myrtle Beach motel room discovered the body of an unidentified woman at the bottom of a pool on Withers Drive. Mercury Polite, who was visiting his cousin’s room at the Breeze View Motel, was preparing to leave the room about midnight when his girlfriend, Gail Stuckey, stepped outside. Stuckey glanced at the hotel pool and thought she saw a chair floating in about 8 feet of water, she said. She looked again and saw it was possibly a person in the water.