EXCERPT:
This is where the “market solution” logic starts to run into problems. Because if you assume that Nampa and Idaho Falls do need this kind of organized convention and visitor effort, whether public or private, then someone will have to pay for it. If a coalition of motels, restaurants et al wanted to undertake the effort, it would cost them. And they would have to do what businesses usually have to do under such cases when their costs of doing business rise: In this case, raise room rates and meal costs. Same end result. Except that the businesses would have to be responsible for making the tourism effort work – the risk would be concentrated among them, rather than spread through a community that would broadly, one would think, be getting some benefit from larger visitation.
There are, after all, reasons why these business people aren’t doing it. It may not pencil out as an immediate profit-generator. There may be difficulties getting the various businesses to work together in a mutually agreeable way. Plenty of reasons come to mind, but most of them wouldn’t advance the case of the one-size-fits-all “market solution.”
123 Idaho 