In an editorial called "Stay Focused," published on July 24, 2009, the Idaho Mountain Express offered measured support for Sustain Blaine, but stopped short of supporting the organization's request for funding. The Express advised instead that city monies be directed at tourism marketing alone.
"The valley needs to stay focused on its core tourism business or risk doing it harm," the Express said. The editorial cited a "landmark study that followed a recession in the 1980s," which proved that "businesses that cut marketing during a recession fared far worse when recovery arrived than those who didn't."
The editorial is sound business advice from a small-town paper that is understandably committed to growth. But the editorial missed a key distinction: Ketchum is not a business. It is a town. And towns should have entirely different motives than businesses.
Towns are biological. They have DNA codes that determine their character. Towns are spiritual. They have souls that cannot be saved by dollars alone. Towns are aware. Towns know what they are, regardless of their tax revenue.
Sustain Blaine is the result of a decade's long community introspection and the costly advise of a succession of consultants. It is the result of dozens of people collaborating passionately for something they believe in: the economic and social health of a community increasingly unsure of its own identity.
Yet the Express writes off Sustain Blaine as little more than a nuisance to the great machine, and a hobby for a bunch of smart-alecky yuppies with nothing better to do than disrupt the tried and true tourist trade with their far-fetched ideas about diversifying the business of the valley.
The tourism-only trade has taken us this far: to the brink of economic infeasibility, peering into the abyss of a amusement park future, a town of empty gondolas, carrying air from one stop to another, high above streets powered, swept, financed and peopled by folks who live elsewhere. Sustain Blaine is working to change that, to give the year-round residents of the Wood River Valley a fighting chance.
The Express should lend a supporting hand.
Michael Ames
Ketchum
