A major national conference that would have brought more 4,000 visitors to Tampa next week, filling hotel rooms and restaurants and bringing together intelligence agency and military leaders and defense industry behemoths, is the latest victim of the government shutdown.
The GEOINT 2013 Symposium, billed as “the preeminent event of the year for the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities,” has been scrubbed, according to its organizers at the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, who say the inability of key personnel to travel because of the shutdown is to blame. The conference will be held in spring 2014.
“As you well know, we are operating under the significant constraints of a government shutdown,” organizers wrote in a letter Wednesday evening to those who registered for the conference, which was scheduled to take place at the Tampa Convention Center Oct. 13-16. “Recently the U.S. House of Representatives passed the ‘Pay Our Military Act,’ which allowed most Defense Department personnel to return to their jobs alongside the excepted personnel who were still working.
Source: The Tampa Tribune
