This is What Committees Do

Periodically, and for no apparent logical reason, the head squirrels at Enema U required every academic department to rewrite their mission statement.  Perhaps this was an attempt to sidetrack the faculty from noticing that the number of useless bureaucrats in the administration were multiplying more rapidly than rats in a sewer.

At the inevitable faculty meeting to discuss drafting the new mission statement, my suggestion that the department just resubmit the existing statement was immediately rejected.  When I offered $50 to anyone who could recite the existing statement, no one accepted my offer.  When I suggested that the new mission statement be the simple statement of “Teach”, I was ignored.  Well, to be honest, one of my colleagues—someone who also believed that such meetings were a waste of time—suggested that such a statement was too brief and should be amended to “Teach well”.  We were both ignored.

Eventually, after a long and pointless discussion, the department adopted a new lengthy (and still meaningless) mission statement, and promptly forgot about it.  Six months later, if I had repeated my offer of $50 to anyone who could recite the passage, the money would have remained safely in my wallet.

I am reminded of this by a story in the local newspaper about the city’s airport producing a new Strategic Plan.  I will warn you in advance that all of the following is based upon my own sketchy memory, a notoriously and increasingly leaky vessel.  There is no longer any supporting documentation as I gleefully burned all my notes several years ago.  As I have said before:  Everything in this blog is the absolute truth—give or take a lie or two.

My community is blessed with two very nice airports:  one that is maintained by the city and a slightly smaller one that belongs to the county government.  Since my community is not large enough to attract regularly scheduled flights from commercial airlines, neither airport sees the kind of commercial activity found at large airports.  Still, both airports were well managed and properly run.  As a private pilot, I have flown in and out of both of them without any complaints.  Please understand that I have no complaints about how either airport was managed nor am I aware of such complaints from other pilots.

At the recommendation of the manager of the county’s airport, I was appointed to a two-year term on the county’s Airport Advisory Committee.  For two years, I was part of a committee that periodically met, discussed various issues, and then reported to the County Commissioners who never actually listened to us nor cared in any meaningful way about what was happening at the airport.  The most frequent question from any of the commissioners was for clarification on which of the two airports the county government owned and operated.  Seriously, one commissioner asked me that same damn question four times in a single year.

The airport was due to renew its Strategic Plan, which is something the FAA suggests be done every five years, and the county actually did so every eight to ten years—a schedule that is not bad for New Mexico.  And there were a few improvements that would have been welcome at the airport.  The availability of internet, for example, would have meant that pilots would be able to check weather reports and would have meant that the airport manager didn’t have that daily drive of half an hour to turn in reports to the county government.  Some of the tenants were behind in their rent, airport lighting could always be upgraded and so forth.  Like any large ongoing concern, there were periodic problems to be fixed and upgrades to be considered.

Those were not, however, the kinds of things that got reported in the airport’s strategic plan.  I quickly learned that the county contracted the task of preparing the plan out to a large consulting firm, which would take months to eventually draft a professional report outlining the future of the airport.  Since the previous plans were still on file, I was astonished to learn that the airport’s true potential was to become a highly industrialized hub of air freight.  According to the previous plans, the airport was about to become an incredible source of tax revenue because of the rapid expansion of freight operations.

This was rather astonishing, since eight years after the most recent plan, the only evidence of air freight at the airport was an aging DC-3 parked on the tarmac while an engine was being replaced.  The two previously prepared plans had both stressed that the airport would inevitably become a busy hub of air freight—something that not only had not happened, but seemed extremely unlikely to ever occur.

After a little research, I was able to discover a few facts:

• The same consulting company that had prepared the two previous plans were likely to receive the county contract to prepare the new report.  Since the cost of such a report was six figures, the company was extremely active in lobbying the county commissioners for the new contract.  
• The majority of air freight travels on regularly scheduled airline flights.  Since no airline flights landed at the airport, there was absolutely no interest by the airlines in using the airport.
• The airport in El Paso, less than thirty miles away, had recently spent over $2 million dollars constructing new state of the art freight handling facilities.
• No airline company owned any land at the country airport.  Neither UPS nor FedEx was interested in pursuing even an option on land at the county airport.  Both companies had large existing hangars at the El Paso airport.
• No one at the county airport could ever remember any freight hauling company making any inquiries about leasing space at the county airport.

It became obvious that the consulting company was going to be awarded the contract, be paid large sums of taxpayer money to prepare it, and that the report would tell the county commissioners exactly what they wanted to hear:  that the county was about to rake in large amounts of taxes from the soon-to-be-realized booming freight company.

I tried.  I took a county commissioner to lunch at the Faculty Dining Room, and we discussed the proposed contract.  I produced the two previous reports, each of which were demonstrably incredibly inaccurate, and predicted that if the consulting company was successful in securing the upcoming contract, they would, like any well-paid prostitute, tell the customer exactly what he wanted to hear.

“I understand,” the politician answered.  “You know what the airport needs to do?  You should hold some kind a celebration, maybe an airport birthday party.  We can call in the press, and I’ll show up and make a speech.  Which airport is it, anyway?”

The contract was, of course, given to the same consulting company.  The resulting report predicted an imminent growth of air cargo, producing a flood of tax revenue.  The county commissioners published the plan as proof of their effective leadership.  Most importantly, according to Google Earth, the DC-3 is still parked on the tarmac.