Now we’ll see whether our elected leaders have what it takes to deal with a nearly impossible situation.

The back-to-back shutdowns by Aloha Airlines and then Mainland carrier ATA is nothing short of a body-blow to the state, its economy and the political process.

The state says the shut-downs could punch a 500,000-person sized hole in the visitor count this year. That would be huge. Now, it is likely that other carriers and other options will step up and the falloff in visitors might not be quite as dramatic as those first estimates.

But for state lawmakers and the governor, just now getting down to the fine work of building a new state budget, this situation has to be treated realistically.

The tax consequences of a 500,000 fall off in visitor arrivals would be catastrophic. Even something far short of that throws existing budget and tax collection projections out the window.

And prudently, lawmakers should use the bigger, and more dire, numbers as they figure out what the state will collect and what it can spend over the next year on schools, services, welfare and the like.

That means many of the “nice-to-have” items that were surviving the budget process may have to drop out. But let’s hope our elected officials go beyond simply cutting the budget back to meet diminished expectations.

 This is a time for creativity and fresh ideas for economic ideas that can produce dollars, jobs and some of the taxes those hundreds of thousands of tourists would otherwise have paid.

Tags: airlines, budget, burris, legislature

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Akamai politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.