Tom Dennis At the Grand Forks Herald Needs to Learn What Risk Means
Right on the cue the editorial board of the Grand Forks Herald is defending the Alerus Center’s losses on the Britney Spears Concert:
There’s a fine line between being aggressive and foolish.
But what the Alerus is doing is incompetent and stupid considering the current management can’t make a profit with any concert.
The Alerus Center didn’t make money. But neither did it lose its shirt. That could have happened if Spears had drawn only, say, 3,000 or 4,000 fans. Not only would the center have wound up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also the concert’s economic impact on the city would have been slim.
Well now we know the Herald has a definition of failure. It’s not selling 6,000 seats less than they planned, it’s selling 16,000 less seats. Way to set the bar so low that the Alerus could never be a considered a failure by the editorial board.
As it was, the bad news is that the center lost $97,000. The good news is that 13,019 fans attended the concert, and some fair share of them spent money in town. In fact, the fans are estimated to have spent at least $1.9 million, said UND economist David Flynn.
The UND economists was paid to produce a glowing the report of the Alerus and events held there. How much [he was paid] we don’t know. Heck Herald readers don’t even know that the study was paid for because the Herald is keeping them in the dark. [This glowing report seems to be deeply flawed rather than giving the public a true picture.]
It has recently come to light that this study apparently is counting people living in East Grand Forks as out of town consumers that wouldn’t have spent their money in Grand Forks without Britney bringing them in there. Yeah, that’s unbelievable and makes one think that the entire study is worthless. Come to think of it, the same could be said on the Herald’s Alerus coverage.
Granted, losing nearly $100 grand hurts, especially when center managers spoke in June of the prospect of making $300,000 or more. If the Spears concert had drawn 18,000-plus full-paying fans, the profits would have been huge.
That’s too funny. And if money grew on trees we’d all be billionaires.
The Britney Spears concert was a calculated but reasonable and ultimately worthwhile risk.
Where did the public get a chance to weigh in on whether or not we wanted to foolishly squander our money on Britney Spears. Generally the system works in that our elected officials use the delegated powers that we gave them to make these decisions. They make these decisions in open forums where the public has a chance to give their opinion.
So we’ve wasted $100,000. How did that happen without going through the political process.
This is bad enough that the editorial board would mislead us. It’s much worse that the news side of the business isn’t giving the public the facts.
This was an unmitigated disaster in that we lost money and the city leaders are lying to us by using a manufactured study. Judging by what I hear around town, nobody’s buying it either.
