Excess Capacity

Any smart business owner would try to unload his or her excess capacity before increasing production.

This city is drowning in excess capacity.  The school district has 17,000 students and an infrastructure for 60,000. We have streets with less than half the structures they were intended for. We have streets that are just as sparse by design. We have buss routes that run at half capacity. We have some of the shortest commutes of any large metropolitan area in the nation. Yet we're widening our arteries. We're twenty years behind the rest of the country when it comes to mixed-use developments. And after seventy years of single-use zoning, we have large sections of the city that have wide swings in usage within a single twenty-four hour period. To top it off, sitting in middle of the plane means we have a ridiculous amount of land making it cheaper for developers to build than reuse.

Any smart business owner would try to unload this excess capacity before increasing production. Why? Excess capacity is the product of investment already spent. The cost of unloading it is minimal compared to the cost of increasing production. (Does anybody remember if any of the business owners who've run for City Council or Mayor have ever made this a campaign issue? I don't remember every hearing it even though such candidates usually want to run City Hall like a business.)

Meanwhile, every time someone has a new idea in this town, city leaders try to find exclusive funding for it and it alone. Since we have all this excess capacity, shouldn't every project begin with this question: what are we already paying for that we could use? I was thinking about this when I heard this week that a sub committee of the Convention Hotel Steering Committee has voted 6 to 2 to recommend the block surrounding the Power and Light Building for the proposed 1000 room convention hotel.

By my calculations, we have room for at least 17 more conventions every year. That's not mentioning the fact that existing conventions have room to grow. The last time I made this point an anonymous poster said, "They're run by local churches, or they attract such small crowds they don't really affect the hotel industry." Regarding the first, 60-some percent of Americans are regular church goers. That's at least 180 million people. Yet I'm supposed to believe that a religious convention can't attract enough out of town attenders to help the local hotel industry? Regarding the second, how much would it cost for the Convention and Visitor's Bureau to help small conventions attract larger crowds? In other words, doesn't the anonymous comment support my point rather than rebut it?

Tomorrow, I'll discuss a few other ways that we might apply our excess capacity to the convention problem.