HOLLYWOOD, Fla. -- Traffic is among the biggest threats to Florida's $57 billion tourism juggernaut, Gov. Jeb Bush said at an industry gathering here on Monday.

"We have to address the traffic in our major urban areas, or our visitors aren't going to be able to get to our properties," Bush told an audience of about 900 at this year's Governor's Conference on Tourism.

Also key: training, the governor said. Getting children to read at the level expected of them for a given grade is the first step to preparing the work force of the future, Bush said. "Every child should get a year's worth of knowledge in a year's time," he said.

Bush set his sights on tourism's long-term challenges because, in the short term, it is doing pretty well. Despite last year's bumper crop of hurricanes, 5.2 million more visitors came to the state in 2004 than the year before -- a 7 percent increase that Bush attributed to a diversity of attractions and quick action in getting out the message that Florida was still "open" after the storms.

This year also looks promising, with visitation likely to surpass last year's 79.8 million. April through June, an estimated 23.3 million people visited Florida, up 7.5 percent from the same three months a year ago.

"Under adversity, we really did define ourselves and test who we are," Bush told the group, which is meeting at the Westin Diplomat Resort. He said a red-hot economy has more than offset any fallout from the hurricanes.

Last year, taxable sales generated by lodging rose about 14 percent to $13.7 billion, while taxable sales at restaurants hit $24.1 billion -- almost an 11 percent gain, Bush said.

He said that, to sustain such growth, Florida should spend more on its airports and seaports, its interstate highways, its water-conservation system, on restoration of the Florida Everglades, and on beach renourishment.

He praised the Legislature for approving some of those expenditures this year. "It will be incredibly important for tourism that we have meaningful growth management," Bush said.

The state is spending $8 billion on highway construction and other infrastructure over the next 10 years, and $164 million to replenish eroded beaches.

"Tourism and visitors are our lifeblood," Bush said.

"There are a lot of people that think that, gosh, we don't tax enough in our state. . . . Those visitors make it possible for Floridians not to be overtaxed and for us to dream about how we diversify our economy."

Bush credited Visit Florida -- the state's tourism-marketing agency -- with acting right away to tout the state's tourism despite the damage caused last year by Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan. In Florida, those storms caused at least $19 billion in insured wind damage, with some coastal tourism properties sustaining serious damage.

Bush conceded he had been worried how the hurricanes would affect travel but added he was not necessarily surprised at the increase in visitors last year because of Florida's varied attractions, from Walt Disney World to South Beach to the Everglades.

"It's a tribute to the dynamic nature of our travel market that it happened," Bush said.

Donna Ross, chair of Visit Florida's marketing council, said $4.75 million was spent this year to address misperceptions that the state's ability to welcome tourists had been hampered by the storms and to inform tourists that Florida was "open for business." That was after the agency spent $2 million in emergency funds right after the storms.

Bush said strategies such as increased advertising, Web cams and media tours helped assure potential tourists that Florida was still worth visiting. Those seemed to help -- a March survey showed that only one in 10 potential visitors was less likely to visit Florida because of the hurricanes, down from one in five in October.

Speaking to reporters, Bush repeated his call for more gasoline reserves to prevent shortages after hurricanes.

He also said Florida may tweak its brand a bit. Visit Florida is studying whether to keep its 8-year-old FLAUSA logo. Many people identify Visit Florida, not FLAUSA, as the state's chief marketing message, Visit Florida Chairman Thom Stork said.

Bush said he personally doesn't have a problem with FLAUSA. "I like it, but I'm not sure some person in suburban Detroit knows what that means," he said.

Visit Florida's chief marketing officer, Dale Brill, said focus groups and other research are under way, with a decision expected in about six weeks.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Florida authorities offered a reward of up to $25,000 and established a hot line for receiving anonymous tips Monday to solve the slayings of Florida civil rights pioneers Harry and Harriette Moore, whose home was blown up on Christmas night 1951.

Moore, who formed the Brevard County branch of the NAACP in the 1930s and worked to register black voters in an area of the state then ruled by Jim Crow laws, died when dynamite exploded underneath his house in Mims. He became the first official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People killed during the modern civil rights struggle. His wife died nine days later from her injuries.

"Perhaps a surviving relative of the bomber or bombers would like to clear their conscience before they meet their Maker," Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist said at a news conference with the Moore's daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore. "That crime has never been solved. It needs to be even if the perpetrators no longer are living."

The reward offer comes as authorities across the South reopen unsolved civil rights murders. Earlier this year, former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was convicted in Mississippi of masterminding the 1964 slayings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Mississippi prosecutors also have reopened an investigation into the 1955 slaying of Chicago teenager Emmett Till.

In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers. In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted in the bombing.

"I'm very pleased that dad's and mother's cases have been added to the list," said Moore, a retired government worker who was 21 when her parents were killed. "I do think at this point and time ... something will come up and I will be able to rest knowing who did it."

The FBI and federal prosecutors closed a three-year investigation into the Moore murders in 1955, and then reopened the case briefly in 1978, without bringing any charges. In 1991, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducted an investigation and a subsequent review in 2003, but evidence was ruled insufficient to pursue any suspect. Crist, who is running for next year's Republican gubernatorial nomination, reopened the case late last year.

"Part of our focus in the investigation has been to try to get new and additional information," said Allison Bethel, director of the Florida Office of Civil Rights.

The reward money is coming from the Florida Association of Crime Stoppers, whose organization also is supplying the anonymous telephone tip line. Advertisements also are being taken out in the Orlando Sentinel and Florida Today, and brochures will be distributed throughout central Florida.

The investigation has taken government lawyers to Lake County, where in 1949 four black men were convicted of raping a 17-year-old white women based only on her word. Of the defendants, known as the Groveland Four, one was killed by a posse and two were shot, one fatally, by the notorious Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, who said the handcuffed men attacked him.

Moore relentlessly protested the treatment of the Groveland Four and called for McCall's indictment.

"Groveland, as well as his other activities with the NAACP, voter registration ... is what we're looking at to try to get some to answers to what happened," Bethel said.