Say Anything Blog

On Wednesday the Grand Forks Alerus commission released their brutal financial results.  While they claimed that they made a small profit they actually lost over a million dollars.  Their claim assumes that a payment they receive from a sales tax is a operating revenue that they earned and their losses on concerts don’t count.  Of course they have a word for private businessmen that try to claim such things; jailbirds.

Now the apologists are saying that the center was never about making a profit, it’s all about quality of life, and that must be better because attendance is up over last year. 

I don’t remember them making the claim that quality of life was declining when attendance was dropping year after year.  And if we aren’t supposed to expect the Alerus to make a profit, why are they misleading the citizens of Grand Forks about making money?
Let’s look at the attendance figures.  In 2008 they claim (I believe them, but with this bunch….) that 289,000 came through the doors.  In 2007 that number was 263,000.  That works out to be a 9.9% increase or 26,000 bodies.  Impressive?  But at what cost?

Operating losses (reported profit minus the hospitality tax subsidy minus concert fund losses) for the center were $1,093,000 in 2008.  In 2007 they were “only” $316,181.  It cost us $778,000 to bring in those 26,000 bodies.

But wait! There’s more!

Last summer the City Council authorized spending ANOTHER $614,000 on “capital improvements” in order to increase attendance.  For that the football fans got a couple “Home of Fighting Sioux Football” banners to hang in and out of the center.  I guess there was some landscaping work done as well.  I’m not aware of any other place that money went to. 

So you could say that we had to spend that in order to increase attendance as well.  So our 26,000 additional attendees costs us an additional $1,392,000 or $53.54 apiece.  How many events tickets even cost that much?

The sign of a healthy organization is one where more traffic means more profit (or at least less losses).

We can’t afford to increase attendance like this.  Why don’t they must pay me $50 for every time I stay home.

Why really was attendance up anyway.  Was it because we spent more money?  Or was it because we hosted the North Dakota Democrat convention this year?  It seems that they had a couple of pretty heavy weight speakers to draw in the crowds this year.  How much of the losses (if any) were attributable to the Democrat convention?  We’ll probably never know?

It seems to me that if that was responsible for the increased attendance the 1.4 million of expenses they blew to attract more people was even more wasted.

Finally I want to dispute the claim that the Alerus has created all of that attendance.  Most of that traffic was for events that we always have had.  The biggest draw at the Alerus is UND football.  It seems to me that we’ve had football for over 80 years.  The car and boat shows have always taken place.  The Alerus is going after private businesses by taking their wedding party business.  Those fools would still be getting married in town anyway.  Sioux Boosters has been going on nearly forever as have Chamber of Commerce events. 

Just because the venue changed doesn’t meant that the Alerus should take credit for any supposed economic benefit of the event.  It would take a very careful and in depth study of the various events to come up with an honest picture of what the Alerus is bringing to Grand Forks.  And an honest picture is something that we aren’t going to get.