When Analogies Attack
Why Las Cruces could be like Wichita or Huntsville. Or maybe not.
By David A. Fryxell
In an essay on the People for Aerospace web site, co-chair John L. Hummer likens Las Cruces' opportunity to the way an investment in the aerospace industry transformed his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. Kitty Hawk, NC, fumbled away the opportunity presented by the Wright Brothers, he says, whereas Wichita seized it. (Actually, Kitty Hawk was selected strictly as a test site; the Wrights developed their airplane in Dayton, Ohio, which today is part of a corridor home to more than three-dozen aerospace firms.) "How crazy was it in the 1920s to think that a small farming town in Kansas would become the single largest producer of small personal aircraft?" Hummer writes. "North Carolina lost the opportunity. Wichita seized upon the opportunity."
Asked to explain how exactly Wichita did that, Hummer replies, "The support for the aircraft industry dates back to the 1930s, where a 100-person aviation committee of the chamber of commerce embraced and lobbied for the growth of the industry. In my opinion, Wichita has supported aviation on an even larger scale than what we are doing at the present time."
He points to the fact that Wichita has never annexed its massive Boeing, Cessna and Beechcraft sites, but rather grew around them. "The benefit to the companies was no property taxes as a result of the city not annexing. The amount of tax abatement over the past 80 years is staggeringly large. Why has the city done this? Because they responded to the logic that abating taxes for these companies would keep them in Wichita and they would expand and add more jobs, which would increase the overall tax base."
Wichita has also issued subsidized, tax-exempt Industrial Revenue Bonds, such as an $86 million subsidy for Learjet to expand its plant in 1996. The company also got a 10-year property-tax exemption.
"My point with Wichita is that different communities handle things differently and 'subsidy' is the common element," Hummer says. "Just as we have critics about our one penny for every four taxable dollars to pay our fair share of the spaceport, so too has Wichita had its critics of how the city and community leaders have embraced and provided subsidized/preferential treatment for aircraft companies. I can tell you one thing—Wichita has a thriving industry in areas that were nothing but rugged farms and ranches. It did not happen by chance but rather by community support and taking risks."
But is the risk of an entirely taxpayer-funded, $200 million spaceport really comparable to tax abatements and subsidized bonds? Skeptics might point out that Wichita never paid to actually build factories for Boeing et al. And most of the money Wichita taxpayers invested amounted to foregoing future taxes—if the companies succeeded. If the private enterprises at the spaceport—all but one of them startup ventures with no corporate backing and as yet only a handful of employees—flop, New Mexico will have already paid for a multimillion-dollar white elephant in the middle of nowhere.
Besides darkly reminding voters of how the software industry eluded Albuquerque ("Remember Microsoft!"), the other analogy spaceport-tax supporters like to make is to Madison County, Alabama, home to Huntsville and Redstone Arsenal. People for Aerospace's Web site even has a message from Brad Jones, chairman of the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce, who relates how Huntsville, today "Rocket City USA," lured Wernher Von Braun and his team of scientists away from Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in the early 1950s. "Since Von Braun's arrival, the greater Huntsville community has executed a consistent strategic plan and committed the necessary public investments which paved the way for what is today a world renowned high tech aerospace private sector.
"I say to Las Cruces, look at Huntsville today," Jones goes on. "Look at our economic indicators and our list of corporations. In doing so, you will see a vision of what you can create for your community's future. It takes a community committed to make the necessary investments. Spaceport America is your investment for an even brighter future. If it can happen in the former cotton fields of Huntsville, Alabama, it can happen in a community with a rich aerospace tradition such as Las Cruces."
Delano E. Lewis, former US ambassador to South Africa (see the February 2007 Desert Exposure) and another co-chairman of People for Aerospace, makes much the same argument in a Sun-News op-ed piece. Today, Lewis notes, Redstone Arsenal employs 14,601 people (versus 6,000 for WSMR) and Huntsville-area aerospace companies provide another 17,612 jobs. Madison County has a lower unemployment rate than Dona Ana, a much higher median household income and one-third the poverty rate, Lewis points out.
Much as the missile program invigorated Huntsville's economy, Lewis argues, "The spaceport will be the catalyst in the creation of jobs and in the generation of revenues to benefit all of our future citizens, including those at a lower level of income."
But how close is this analogy, either? Neither the taxpayers of Madison County nor the state of Alabama paid for Redstone Arsenal and an adjacent facility, which were built in 1941—when von Braun was still working for Hitler—for $85 million. Unlike the spaceport, Uncle Sam picked up the whole tab. With the end of World War II, however, the arsenal was shuttered.
How much did Huntsville really woo the ex-Nazi rocket scientist and his team? According to a history that Mike Ward, the Huntsville-Madison chamber's vice president for government affairs, is working on, the Army simply ordered the move to happen. Colonel Holger N. "Lutie" Toftoy, who'd brought von Braun to the US, learned his request for expanded facilities at Fort Bliss had been denied—the base was needed for the looming Korean conflict. Ward writes, "Toftoy visited North Alabama to check out the mothballed Huntsville Arsenal. Impressed with what he saw, Col. Toftoy had several members of the rocket team visit the Tennessee Valley site. . . . Attracted by the relatively new facilities and lush green rolling mountains surrounding the arsenal, Dr. von Braun quickly embraced the new Huntsville site."
It wasn't tax abatements or subsidies that attracted von Braun. It was something WSMR would have had a hard time matching—the scenery: "Oh, it looks like home! So green, green, everything is so green, with mountains all around!" he told his German compatriots.
On Oct. 28. 1949, the Secretary of the Army ordered the missile team to move to Huntsville. An official history of the Redstone Arsenal says simply, "Among those transferred were Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists and engineers."
Despite the subsequent development of surrounding private aerospace firms, Huntsville's boom was built on the US Army's rocket and missile programs—not the promises of a handful of private firms in a fledgling industry. Huntsville's economy grew because of the federal government's commitment to a Cold War missile defense. Spaceport America is largely a bet on space tourism, flying millionaires to the fringes of outer space at $200,000 a ticket. A couple of crashes couldn't deter the US Army's missile development; one disaster could doom the nascent space-tourism industry, just as the Hindenburg ended the zeppelin era and the supersonic airplane business could never recover from the Concorde crash. (See "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel," in the February 2006 Desert Exposure.)
A better analogy, in fact, might be to Pan Am, the airline fictionally seen flying into space in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1960s, Pan Am took reservations from more than 90,000 would-be travelers to the moon, including Walter Cronkite, Sen. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. None of those "First Moon Flights Club" members ever went into space. Following headline-making terrorist attacks on two Pan Am flights and the outbreak of the first Gulf War, Pan Am declared bankruptcy in 1991.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.