Thompson Contests Mayor’s Rosy Picture of RNC Week
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Comptroller William Thompson Jr. disputed Mayor Bloomberg’s rosy analysis of the economic impact of the Republican National Convention, saying yesterday he didn’t think the event generated the several hundred million dollars in economic activity the mayor crowed about a day after the convention ended.
“If you can’t come out with hard fast numbers, if you say this is an estimate, then that’s legitimate,” Mr. Thompson told The New York Sun in an interview in his office. “But the mayor didn’t do that.”
What the mayor did instead was say at a press conference outside Madison Square Garden on September 3, the day after the Republican gathering ended, that the convention was an “extraordinary” economic engine to the city.
The four-day session generated $255 million in economic activity for the city, Mr. Bloomberg said, supported more than 2,200 jobs, and brought in more than 47,000 visitors – not including protesters.
Mr. Bloomberg said 87% of the hotel rooms were occupied during the convention week, compared with 74% during the same week in 2003.
Mr. Thompson said the numbers have no footing in solid economics.
“I think this was their best guess, but they didn’t present it that way,” the city comptroller said. “The only way they can say if the city made money or lost money would be to look at the tax revenues and do a real honest assessment. They didn’t do that. I don’t think the mayor’s numbers are accurate.”
Mr. Thompson and Mr. Bloomberg have tangled on the issue of convention economics before. The New York Sun was the first to report in August that the comptroller estimated the city economy could lose as much as $281 million during the four days it would play host to the Republican National Convention. Analysts in the comptroller’s office also projected that added security costs borne directly by city government, and not federally reimbursed, would subtract another $28 million. Taken together that meant the city stood to lose as much as $309 million.
The comptroller’s office came to its estimates by focusing on gross city product, or GCP, which measures goods and services produced by people who work in the city. The mayor’s office said using that as a guide was at best a back-of-the-envelope guess.
It is unclear whether the comptroller thinks the $309 million figure still applies or whether he intends to revise his calculations now that the convention is over. He declined to answer questions about future analysis of the convention’s impact.
What is not in dispute is that ever since the city won the right to be host city for the Republicans, Mr. Bloomberg painted the quadrennial assemblage as an economic boon in what would otherwise be the dog days of summer.
Even analysts outside the office of the comptroller – who has said he may seek the 2005 Democratic nomination for mayor – said Mr. Bloomberg was being overly optimistic.
The Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut said city leaders often focus on the economic activity provided by visiting conventions without taking into account what the city might have taken in anyway. City officials also often neglect to calculate productivity losses and other issues that take a bite out of regular economic activity.
Mr. Thompson said the anecdotal evidence suggests the city didn’t fare as well as predicted.
“Too much has come out in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “Hotel rooms that went unfilled and particularly cancellations. Businesses in and around the area didn’t do as well. Even the Shopping Week, the back-to-school week, which is a huge shopping week, it appeared places were down and things were off across Manhattan. It wasn’t just limited right around the area.
“There were some restaurants that said they did better than before,” the comptroller said. “Lots of them said that they didn’t. Anecdotal information drives you into saying that we did not do as well as hoped.”
Bloomberg aides said the comptroller was being a doomsayer.
The mayor’s office said the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped Mr. Bloomberg compile his September 3 figures, used a well-accepted economic analysis methodology to come up with the numbers. The quasi-public agency, a not-for-profit corporation, took into account actual spending by the Republican National Convention, the Police Department, and the Host Committee, a mayoral spokesman, Paul Elliott, told the Sun. The estimates of visitors’ spending that the mayor announced were based on the city’s well-researched estimates of daily spending for delegates, business travelers, and leisure travelers, Mr. Elliott said.
“The criticism comes from the same office that estimated that the impact of the blackout by multiplying by a hundred dollars the loss of refrigerated food by the total population of the city,” the spokesman said. “Not the most scientific approach.”
The Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University pulled together an independent estimate of the economic benefits of the convention in June. It projected the convention would provide an economic benefit of some $163 million, about $90 million less than Mr. Bloomberg’s figure but still very much in the black.