January 24, 2005
Dear Councilmember:
I am writing to express my concern about the upcoming renewal of the subsidy being paid to AirTran Airways. You may recall that I appeared before the Council last May and spoke in opposition to the subsidy. Since then I have learned more about the Fair Fares program.
As an example, Mr. Troy Carlson, then Chairman of Fair Fares, wrote a letter that was published on September 16, 2004 in the Wichita Eagle. In that letter he claimed $2.4 billion economic benefit from the Fair Fares program ($4.8 billion for the entire state). I was curious about how these figures were derived. I learned that the basis for them is a study by the Center for Economic Development and Business Research at Wichita State University that estimates the economic impact of the airport at $1.6 billion annually. In this study, the salaries of the employees of Cessna and Bombardier, because these companies use the airport’s facilities, are counted as economic impact dollars that the airport is responsible for generating.
To me, this accounting doesn’t make sense on several levels. For one thing, if we count the economic impact of the income of these employees as belonging to the airport, what then do we say about the economic impact of Cessna and Bombardier? We would have to count it as very little, because the impact of their employees’ earnings has been assigned to the airport.
Or it may be that someday Cessna or Bombardier will ask the City of Wichita for some type of economic subsidy, and they will use these same economic impact dollars in their justification. But these dollars will have already been used, as they were attributed to the airport.
My primary opposition to the AirTran subsidy is based on the superiority of free markets to government subsidies. But I believe that if the Council should consider a subsidy, it should have sensible information at its disposal. The arguments the Fair Fares supporters make seem to be based on an overextended assessment of the airport’s economic impact.
I have written more about this in on my website “Voice for Liberty in Wichita” at wichitaliberty.org.
Sincerely,
Bob Weeks