The latest ripple: the business community has organized $600,000 in public money to go to a “Save Low Fares Richmond” campaign to keep carriers such as cheap fare carriers as JetBlue and AirTran from continuing to bolt from the capital city’s anemic airport.
Now comes the latest twist. JetBlue has the chutzpah to ask Greater Richmond to pay subsidies so that JetBlue will restart its now discontinued flights from Richmond to JFK Airport in New York. The carrier ended the flights in November because of low ridership. You heard that right — if Richmonders want cheap air service, the public will have to come up with millions of dollars to bankroll a private air carrier.
Richmond’s “behind-the-scenes” business elite such as Kim Scheeler, president and CEO of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, says he wants to sit down and talk with JetBlue whose CEO pitched the goofy subsidy idea. “If someone asked me to raise X million dollars, I’d be hard-pressed to do it, just because of the economy”
Just because of the economy? Whatever happened to the free market which all these denizens of Adam Smith say brings out the best, the most creative, the most robust ideas? Naturally, the Richmond Times-Dispatch floated the idea as its lead story on its front page to prepare the public for local and regional subsidies.
After all, its publisher, Thomas A. Silvestri, is also chairman of the Richmond Chamber and loves to work behind the scenes out of public view being a “Leader” and making decisions about public money. If the public has something to say, they can write a letter to the editor or attend one of Silvestri’s gong shows called “Public Square” which is another gimmick to make the public believe they are getting information and their voices are heard. From Silvestri’s point of view, it is a lot cheaper to hold these Oprah shows than hire real reporters to do real reporting given Media General’s penchant for valuing profit margins over public service.
The giant hypocrisy here is that the Richmond business elite and the politicians they back, such as soon to be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are all rock-ribbed, free market Republicans. We get to hear lots of speeches of how capitalism and the survival of the fittest is the best way to go.
Until it hurts their travel budgets, that is. Air travel in Richmond has been hitting major turbulence. The business elite expanded Richmond International Airport with more than $250 million in new terminals and parking lots. During the go-go economy of George W. Bush, low fare air carriers entered the Richmond market and broke the stranglehold on high prices demanded by U.S. Airways and Delta.
All was well for a few years. You could fly for a couple of hundred bucks instead of a cool thousand. But then the Bush economy blew up. In Richmond, chip-maker Qimonda shut down because of world chip trends. Bad management folded mass retailer Circuit City. The financial mess imploded LandAmerica. Racked by health-related lawsuits, Philip Morris split itself up into separate domestic and international firms. The former doesn’t travel as much because Philip Morris USA has consolidated cigarette making in Richmond after shutting plants in North Carolina in Kentucky. The international company makes higher tar and nicotine products for unsuspecting foreigners out of Switzerland.
This is a long winded way of saying that the free market economy, at least in Richmond, knocked the legs out of the rationale for low priced carriers.
In response, our free market local leadership is considering going the statist route, sort of like the USSR’s former Aeroflot or Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore Airlines — government subsidies to help out business. They make the same arguments for higher speed rail, which will cost billions of dollars just so executives can zip to D.C.’s Union Station in 90 minutes rather than fight Interstate 95 traffic. And, supposed free market champions like Cantor work behind the scenes to get those government subsidies.
Somehow, the public seems left out of the deal-making. But they can always go to a Public Square.
Peter Galuszka
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.