Columbia City Council work session Tuesday, May 5

By Temple Ligon

 

Oh, no, not that

In economic development circles the hospitality industry doesn’t get particularly high marks as a means to higher per capita income. Tending bar, waiting tables and changing sheets come across as career opportunities to some and maybe especially to the seasonal hourly farm labor following the tomato harvest up the Eastern Seaboard.

In the upper levels of the hospitality industry, on the other hand, the restaurant owners and the hoteliers can do all right for themselves while the low-level labor competes for job openings and takes the low wages.

South Carolina has plenty of well-tracked hospitality labor that can’t afford to live on the coast, but they can get onboard the bus one hour or more away for their daily rides to the job sites where the relatively well-to-do live and provide payments to the not-so-well-to-do.

There will always be bottom-level labor willing to work for bottom-level pay, just as there will always be the one percent at the other end of the pay scale, putting away fortunes in good times.

But somehow a way to get poor people out of their poverty is a permanent mystery. One way, certainly, is the usual pull on the bootstraps called education. Higher education brings the graduates closer to higher standards of living. The BMW plant between Greenville and Spartanburg, for example, hires only college graduates, even on the assembly line.

The state’s leaders are always chasing smokestacks because manufacturing pays well, and contractors and landowners love those big plants. But somehow our leadership thinks chasing hotels and restaurants is also a path to prosperity for their employees. Well, it beats picking tomatoes, sure, but maybe a look at other states can show how major industries carry the costs.

Not like it used to, but the automobile made Michigan. Wisconsin’s dairy industry did the trick. Pennsylvania’s steel mills come to mind. To follow the money, how did California and some states in the Southwest do all right beginning a hundred years ago.

They struck oil. And they expanded their economies by  transporting oil to the refineries while they also pumped plenty of money into their public institutions of higher education. As Texas Governor John Connally put it in the early ‘60s, “Brains attract industry.”  That was also about the time the University of Texas Board of Regents decided they needed “a university their football team could be proud of.”

Yeah, the refineries are nasty, and they look awful to the people who live nearby, where hardly anyone ever visits.

But their kids get a great education for very little money. The endowment here at the University of South Carolina, all campuses, is approaching $600,000,000, or almost $20,000 per student. The endowment at the University of Texas, covering the campuses where they teach more than 200,000 students all told, comes to $25,500,000,000. Texas A&M, now among our competition in the SEC, has an endowment of a little more than $11,100,000,000. The two Texas schools were gifted two million acres of West Texas desert prairie around 120 years ago, and, yes, they struck oil. More than $700,000,000 total in oil royalties last year came to UT and to A&M.

Oil royalties are running 15%-25% of the price of a barrel of oil, which is down to about $50. Oil wells can be expected to give out 100 barrels a day for 20 years, say. So for the first year, a well can be good for maybe $300,000 in royalties.

The way things are working with the EPA, new refineries are probably an impossible goal. Crude oil from the coast in the Southeast would likely take the pipeline to Philadelphia or Newark.

Pipelines are already under Columbia. In the late ‘70s the father of a friend was CEO at Transco, a huge Houston company in the oil and gas transmission business. The lines through Columbia connect the Southwest with the Northeast, and I don’t remember any problems. The CEO, by the way, contributed to help carry the costs of an art exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art. He came to the opening reception. His name was Jack Bowen.

The money and the jobs and the proven path to prosperity in the oil industry failed to make a favorable impression on Columbia City Council this week. Guess they see a lot of promise in the prospects of tending bar, waiting tables and changing sheets.  Columbia City Council voted Tuesday night to object to oil exploration on the South Carolina coast.

Council said in its resolution it would condemn any part of the petro-chemical industry looking at South Carolina, to include a search for oil: “exploratory and commercial drilling, extraction, and transportation of offshore oil and gas resources pose a significant risk of a spill… eventual offshore drilling may require significant onshore infrastructure, such as pipelines…”

Oh, no.