Alexandria releases Caps/Wizards arena impact report that shows none of its math

The city of Alexandria followed up the previous week’s news dump of projected costs of a proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena by releasing a summary economic impact report of the project’s projected benefits, on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, which is the news-dumpiest of news dump times. Fortunately — or unfortunately, as we will see — the report from consultants HR&A Advisors is only seven pages long, and the economic impact numbers are restricted to the final two pages, so we can cut to the chase pretty quickly and see:

So that’s a projected impact of — wait, why have I blacked out all the numbers? Because there is absolutely nothing included about how the figures were arrived at, beyond a mention of being “based on proprietary Monumental Sports & Entertainment operations information,” the fact that it uses the not-highly-regarded IMPLAN impact-crunching tool, and that it applies a rather high multiplier of 2.6. So if we’re going to follow Alan Snel’s principle of not amplifying economic impact claim figures unless the consultants show their work, suffice to say that there are a lot of zeroes at the end, and the numbers in front of them don’t matter because they’re probably made up.

And if you’re wondering if “made up” is overstating it, actual economist J.C. Bradbury has even stronger words:

There are a lot of elements to the battle over sports venue subsidies, but an increasingly large one is about who’s entitled to their own facts. We’re way past “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those to own one“; at this point, you don’t even need to own the press, just the people who write the press releases, and hope that reporters are gullible enough — or overworked enough — not to care or to notice.

Other Recent Posts:

Share this post:

3 comments on “Alexandria releases Caps/Wizards arena impact report that shows none of its math

  1. I realize the Monumental scam is clear across the country from where he works, but this looks like some solid Agueronomics in action.

    Or inaction. Both work.

Comments are closed.