by: Diane Benjamin
According to the City of Bloomington: http://www.cityblm.org/index.aspx?page=18&recordid=1177&returnURL=%2findex.aspx
Coliseum 1st Quarter Impact Over $2M
Total economic impact in 1st quarter $2,026,789
Posted Date: 9/8/2014
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The Coliseum lost $139,667, but you are supposed to believe losing money is good because of the impact it has on the local economy.
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I’ve reported before on how they calculate “Economic Impact”. They don’t look at tax receipts following an event. They don’t have spreadsheets of actual data. They guess.
The document below was received under the Freedom of information Act. They merely assume what attendees at the Coliseum spend locally. They think they can throw numbers out and you will believe them. Of course, most of the local media never questions them.
See the bottom of this form – click it to enlarge.
How do they calculate the number of attendees? The couple times I have gone for a game they tell an attendance figure of number of tickets sold which is usually more than double the number of people who actually are at the game.
So the $140K loss still does not include bond repayment, depreciation, etc. –correct? By the time you take that all into account, the bloated economic impact still doesn’t cover the cost.
You are correct! It also doesn’t account for the changes the auditors are going to make to their numbers.
Web staff. According to your past informative posts, it looks like the audit is done once a year so they will not have to worry about the auditors report until next fall (for Q1) Pretty slick way to get around anything..come up with numbers that you want, the City doesn’t question or correct.
The 2014 year ended (I think) April 30. I believe it’s the same as the City’s Year End. That means reports should be out by October at the latest.
Even with all the questions of calculations the end of July YTD economic impact of just over $2 million is deplorable for a venue of that size. Considering the size and upfront investment needed there are many locally owned businesses that contribute better numbers than that, way better than that. What a joke!
Mudd, you aren’t thinking right! You are suppose to love that they can lose money but still contribute SO much!
Yikes! They have only sold 11,000 tickets to events YTD? The attendance goal is 300,000? Let’s see, when you spread the debt service and the operating loss over the number of tickets sold the tax payer is subsidizing each ticket sold by more than $100.