Still, it wasn't a crisis. It was simply annoying. And, thus, except for worrying a little, nobody did much about it
After September 11, however, this irritant became a calamity. Zefra resigned. And the ZCAA Board hired you to turn the authority around.
After all, you'd established some success fixing broken organizations. In your youth, you took the Zenith City Historical Society--a small club controlled by a few of the city's oldest families--and created a menu of programs that engaged schools, families, faculty at West Dakota University, senior citizens and corporate sponsors. Recently, you cemented your reputation when you drained the red ink from the balance sheet of the West Dakota State Hospital.
Unfortunately, you know nothing about airplanes or airports.
On the other hand, that might be an advantage. You aren't going to fly the airplanes--or have anything to do with flying them. And because you know nothing about airports, you are free to rethink what the airport should do, what it should not do, what it needs to do better and--most important--how it might do so.
The Zenith City airport isn't big. Yet its single runway has always had commercial jet service from at least two airlines. As both the capital and the biggest city in West Dakota, the city has been the transportation hub for the state. So even when airline deregulation freed the airlines to discontinue some service, only one airline pulled out.
Still, neither passenger traffic nor takeoffs and landings grew at the projected rate. The downtown civic center never attracted the large conventions that the city had assumed when it built the thing. Similarly, tourism in the West Dakota mountains has lagged even modest predictions. Nevertheless, ZCAA planning and operations continued to be driven by civic pride and old-fashioned boosterism.
In fact, the ZCAA Board and other civic leaders pushed Zefra and her predecessors to expand the airport's services and terminal facilities. "We'll never fill the civic center until convention planners are impressed with our city," went the local logic, "and these key decision makers will never be impressed when the first thing they see is a third-class airport."
Thus, no one dissented when the ZCAA unveiled its plan to transform the terminal. The mayor and the city council, the governor and the legislature, the Zenith City Tribune and the West Dakota Chamber of Commerce all endorsed the concept. So did the labor unions and the state's tourism industry. Several helped to convince the bond-rating agencies that the financial plan for the new terminal was sound.
It wasn't. Neither was the authority's overall strategy. In an effort to attract more conventions (and more tourists), ZCAA had added services and personnel usually found only at larger airports. For example, to attract two upscale restaurants, it offered contracts that were unusually favorable. And to make sure that the airport made an excellent first impression on visitors, the authority gave all new employees extensive customer-service training.
Unfortunately, airport traffic did not expand as fast as airport services--and thus airport revenues lagged airport expenses. The financial projections had always assumed that passenger growth would only follow improved services. But rather than decrease (and disappear), the deficit grew--slowly but steadily.
Then, after September 11, passengers disappeared, airlines discontinued flights, revenues dropped and the deficit jumped. Thus, when the authority needed to refinance some of its bonds and get an operating loan, it discovered that its interest rate had jumped, too.
That's when Zefra resigned. That's when the mayor and governor made some fresh appointments to the board. That's when you were hired. That's when people started thinking differently about the future of the airport.
Indeed, everyone accepts that something must be done. No one, however, agrees on what this something should be. The restaurants are threatening to leave unless they get a subsidy. The unions are threatening some kind of job action if there are any layoffs. And both the Tribune and the chamber are suggesting that the whole thing should be privatized.
A decade ago, Zenith City thought it could not survive without a modern, full-service airport. Now, many people think it can't survive WITH one.
