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| EDITORIAL: Magic Numbers of Ever Increasing Success, Part Two |
| Bill Hudson | 3/4/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
As I noted in Part One, Pagosa Springs could really use some good news about now. And at Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, Town Tourism Committee coordinator Jennie Green did her very best to provide some of that good news.
To do so, however, she had to use some magic numbers.
Magic numbers are a branch of “magical thinking,” a form of irrational thought that puts unwarranted weight on correlations and coincidences.
 As we human beings move through life, we all use magical thinking on occasion. Instead of looking objectively at the actual facts life presents to us, and then rationally determining the best course of action, we sometimes decide in advance how we want life to play out and we then carefully, but irrationally, consider only those "facts" that support our wish or perspective — and we conveniently ignore all the other facts that might challenge our ideas.
Magic numbers — sometimes known as “statistics” — provide a wonderful tool to support magical thinking.
The local government that has made the most regular and effective use of magic numbers as been the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District. When PAWSD decided to ignore the wishes of the electorate and proceed with the controversial Dry Gulch Reservoir project after the voters turned it down in 2004, they needed to develop some new statistics to justify their new Water Resource Fee impact fees. Those impact fees were supposedly based on future water needs — but the ordinary statistics, like the ones used by the Colorado Demographers Office, didn’t quite fit the bill.
Some magic numbers were needed.
When Dry Gulch was first proposed back in the 1990s, Archuleta County was seeing a dramatic growth spurt — with a local population growing at over 6 percent per year, and our real estate and construction industries were thriving. But that was during a decade when residential lots were selling for under $8,000 and average home prices were still under $200,000. By 2005, however — the year after the voters rejected Dry Gulch — the average lot price was hovering around $40,000 and the average new home was in the $300,000 range.
As a result, about the only people who were buying or building in Pagosa Springs in 2005 were wealthy second-home owners. So although Archuleta County was seeing a lot of construction and real estate activities, the actual population growth had slowed considerably — because second-home owners don’t actually move here permanently; they only vacation here.
PAWSD was determined, however, to prove the need for a Dry Gulch Reservoir — in spite of Pagosa’s impending conversion into a second-home, resort community. So PAWSD developed a needs assessment based, not on population growth, but rather on the growing number of “EUs” — equivalent units.
A large second home, according to PAWSD, constitutes one or two “EUs” — even if the owners use the home only one week out of the year.
So by focusing everyone’s attention in the growing number of “EUs,” the water district could conveniently ignore the facts that per capita water use was actually falling, population growth was coming to a halt, and Dry Gulch was no longer a clear necessity (if it ever was a necessity.)
Of course, now in 2010, even second-home building has come to a basic halt. But PAWSD continues to claim an ongoing need for Dry Gulch — facts be damned.
The magic numbers used by the Town Tourism Committee are of a similar nature, in the sense that they are cleverly based on a number that seems to show growth — tourism growth — without actually needing to be based on growth. Since the TTC has spent, since 2007, close to $1 million in taxes to promote Pagosa tourism, it’s certainly in the committee’s best interests to show that they’ve had some positive effect on the tourism industry. Magic numbers can help.
In particular, the TTC seems intent upon proving that they didn’t waste tens of thousands of dollars subsidizing the glossy 2009 Pagosa Springs Official Visitor Guide.
“I think we are all in agreement that the Official Visitor Guide is a very attractive document,” claimed Town manager David Mitchem at Tuesday’s meeting. “And I think this data says that it is not only attractive but it’s also effective in drawing more tourists to our community. Kudos to the Town Tourism Committee and the Pagosa SUN for development of the Official Visitor Guide. It’s an excellent tool, and it seems to be resulting in a good response from our tourists.”
Unfortunately, the “data” to which Mitchem was referring was shot full of magic numbers, developed by the TTC.
There are many real numbers the TTC could use to determine tourism visits here in Pagosa Springs. They could, for example, actually ask our lodging and restaurant owners for numbers of rooms let, and numbers of meals served, while promising to keep confidential the numbers related to specific hotels and restaurants.
The TTC could also use the statistics available from the Pagosa Springs Visitors Center, such as the number of visitors coming through that facility.
But the numbers the TTC has been using are slightly more magical than those real numbers.
The "data" which Town manager Mitchem was praising Tuesday night was based on the TTC’s own tax collection records — not on actual visits to Pagosa Springs. According to that data, the TTC collected almost 5 percent more Lodgers Tax revenue in 2009 than they did in 2007 — a difference of about $16,500.
That translates to approximately $330,000 more, spent on lodging in 2009 than in 2007.
Supposedly, that TTC number shows an increase in tourism. But does it really?
In 2007, the TTC was collecting Lodgers Tax from 19 properties. In 2009, the revenue was being collected from 27 properties. Could that difference account for some of the 5 percent “growth” in Lodgers Tax collections? We don’t know, because the TTC doesn’t tell us.
Have our lodging properties increased their room prices since 2007? If the average room rate increased by 5 percent since 2007, wouldn’t that, all by itself, account for the 5 percent “growth?” We don’t know, because the TTC doesn’t tell us.
In 2009, the Springs Resort opened its new Springs Hotel — with 29 luxury rooms priced as high as $600 a night, about ten times the average Pagosa hotel room rate. If you added the Lodgers Tax now being collected by the new hotel, might you expect an increase in revenues over 2007? How large a percentage did the new hotel, by itself, add to the TTC’s magic numbers? We don’t know, because... well...
For all these reasons, the "5 percent increase" in Lodgers Tax reported by the TTC is relatively meaningless as a true measure of success, because we don’t know exactly what caused the increase.
So what’s the real story? Has the $1 million in taxes expended by the TTC resulted in increased tourism?
In the three years of since the TTC began spending our tax monies, from 2007 through 2009, the downtown Visitors Center hosted a total of 111,472 visitors.
The total from the previous three years, from 2004 through 2006, the downtown Visitors Center hosted 111,394. I suppose that qualifies as an increase — of 78 visits — though maybe not an increase worth $1 million in taxes.
But how about those glossy Official Visitor Guides? The ones Town manager David Mitchem was extolling at Tuesday’s meeting?
Those guides first appeared in May 2009 and have been mailed out, free of cost, to every potential tourist requesting one through the TTC website — as a “fulfillment package”. The popularity of these glossy guides has apparently been fabulous. Fulfillment requests were up 181 percent in the second quarter of 2009, compared with 2008; up 239 percent for the third quarter; and up 166 percent for the fourth quarter.
Pretty impressive, huh?
All totaled, the number of fulfillment packages mailed out for 2009 came to 20,241. The cost, in Town tax dollars, was about $2 per glossy package, plus the cost of contracting with the Chamber of Commerce to mail the packages.
Back in 2007, the Chamber was mailing out its own fulfillment packages — a motley collection of miscellaneous, cheaply printed brochures and pamphlets, which cost the Town taxpayers nothing at all, as I recall. They mailed out 6,982 packages that year.
In 2009, while mailing out 20,241 glossy, expensive fulfillment packages, the downtown Visitors Center attracted 39,781 tourists. That's about two actual visitors per fulfillment package mailed.
In 2007, while mailing out 6,982 cheap bundles of mismatched brochures, the downtown Visitors Center attracted 39,294 tourists. That's almost 6 actual visitors per fulfillment package mailed.
Let’s do the math. It appears that the cheap, mismatched brochures were approximately three times more effective than the glossy Official Visitor Guide — per mailing — in terms of actually enticing tourists to visit Pagosa Springs.
But maybe those numbers are too real. It’s apparent that the Town Council, and the Town Tourism Committee, vastly prefer magic numbers that seem to tell them what they want to hear.
If the TTC had invested our $1 million in Lodgers Taxes, since 2007, on improving our local amenities — instead of on magazine advertising and glossy guides and websites that were outdated before they were completed — we would now have $1 million in beautiful new amenities to be enjoyed by locals and visitors alike.
Now that would be magical. |
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