Say Anything Blog

Of course that’s counting the hospitality tax as operating revenue and ignoring interest and depreciation costs. Somebody needs to teach Tu Uyen Tran what a profit is. 

Grand Forks’ Alerus Center earned a hefty profit in October that cut the year’s losses up to that point by more than half.

What made October extraordinary, Hyman said, was four UND home football games, the Larry the Cable Guy show and several conferences. He said he thinks this past weekend’s Trans-Siberian Orchestra show, which had the biggest attendance it’s had in Grand Forks, will boost November numbers.

In October, attendance shot up to 56,000, which is a significant improvement over Octobers the past four years. Last year, October attendance was 38,800.

Because attendance determines economic impact, the events center estimated it added $227,900 in sales taxes to the city coffers both in what its visitors spent and what the center itself paid. That’s more than a third of the total sales taxes it estimated it had generated in the year to date, $632,900.

Well I think we should all be glad that the Alerus didn’t continue their month after month of dismal results.  But really one month doesn’t excuse them for the 20 months of losses we’ve seen during the Hyman regime. 

I have to laugh at Tu Uyen Tran characterization of all of this as being new business brought here by the Alerus. 

The biggest number of people that attended events at the Alerus were UND football fans.  This may come to a shock to the people at the Grand Forks Herald’s newsroom, but nearly all of the football fans live in the area or are such diehard fans that they came to the games when the games were outdoors.  There is no economic impact or additional sales tax paid by these people who would have spent their money in town anyway.

The same thing goes for the vast majority of the people that went to Larry the Cable guy.  The great majority of people would have spent their money in town anyway. 

One of the conferences that were held here in October was the teachers convention.  I would say that certainly was by and large true economic impact.  The people that came here for the convention wouldn’t have been here otherwise.  And I’ll acknowledge that without the Alerus we wouldn’t have that event.  Still one honest event like that doesn’t make up for the eight million dollars that we spend on the place.

Tu Uyen Tran makes a big deal about all of the sales tax that is allegedly brought in by the Alerus.  As I’ve already shown, that’s not additional sales tax when the person is from the area.  Of course that won’t keep Tu Uyen Tran and the Alerus gang from repeating that lie.

But since they’re going to claim this sales tax as a benefit let’s look where it’s spent.  City sales taxes break down in four different categories.  First we have the three-quarter Alerus sales tax that goes to pay for the construction of the world’s largest grain bin.  Then we have the one-quarter hospitality tax that goes to the Alerus to keep up the facility and to subsidize their losses.  Unfortunately Alerus managment has decided to burn through that money on operations so needed maintenance isn’t being paid out of that.  Third we have the 3% hotel tax.  Fourth we have the original 1% city sales tax.  That goes for infrastructure, “property tax relief (they really just spend more)” and economic development. 

The three-quarter percent sales tax is going 100% to the Alerus.  In fact the greedheads on the city council are spending the surplus that tax brings in on more improvements taking away from the promised use of paying the bonds off so the tax can go away as promised.

The hospitality tax is also going 100% to benefit the Alerus.  One of the things that keeps me blogging on the Alerus is the dishonesty of those guys calling that money “revenue”.  They want us to believe that if we go out to eat that the Alerus brought that tax money in. 

The hotel tax has two purposes.  The first is to pay for the visitor center on the west side of town.  Their mission it seems has morphed into supporting the Alerus and CanadInn.  The rest of the hotel tax money used to go to advertise the city.  However one of the things the Alerus Gang Used entice the CanadInn people to build here was using the money paid by all the hoteliers to advertise the Alerus and CanadInns.  So that sales tax stream is almost all going to benefit the Alerus. 

Finally we have the original city sales tax.  How much of the infrastructure money has gone to build infrastructure around the Alerus?  How much of the economic development money has been drained to support losses at the Alerus?  I think in 2009 alone the city council has approved writing off a million and half dollars that were transferred out of this fund to the Alerus. 

So when Tu Uyen Tran makes a big deal about the sales tax that he attributes to the Alerus remember that the numbers are greatly inflated and the greatest beneficiary of those taxes whether or not the person came here because of the Alerus or not.

I’d like to tell Tu Uyen Tran that those taxes are an Alerus expense not a benefit.