Greater Harrisburg's Community Magazine

Some Very Good Numbers

The National Civil War Museum in Reservoir Park.

The National Civil War Museum in Reservoir Park.

In a report before the Dauphin County commissioners Wednesday morning, representatives of Harrisburg’s National Civil War Museum made a detailed case for the museum’s continued receipt of a county subsidy that has funded between one-quarter and one-third of its budget for the past six years.

CEO Wayne Motts, reciting what he referred to at one point as “some very good numbers,” told the commissioners that museum visitors spent an estimated $5.7 million in the region last year, representing a nearly 2,000-percent return on the museum’s $296,000 share of county tax dollars.

Where did these numbers come from? It’s a well-worn truth that numbers, manipulated in just the right way, can tell whatever story you want them to. As the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have said (he was quoted, quite possibly apocryphally, by Mark Twain), “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

The statistics in the museum’s report this week are not lies, but they aren’t the whole truth, either. They were obtained by a series of simple calculations, performed on a relatively small set of figures from three main sources.

The first two sources come from the museum itself. One is the museum’s annual visitor tally, which clocked in at 38,688 in 2013-14. (The museum reports figures corresponding with its fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30.) Of these, 4,664 were school-age visitors who came in groups, and another 472 were people who self-reported as having come from Harrisburg zip codes.

The second source is survey data collected and tabulated by the museum from a subset of visitors. Last year, according to Motts, 601 visitors responded to the museum survey; over the past four years, there have been a total of 2,099 respondents. Of last year’s 601 respondents, 39 percent said they had stayed in a hotel, which matches pretty closely the figure for respondents who stayed in hotels over the past four years (36 percent).

In its report, the museum filters these visitation numbers through a third source, provided by an outside party—the most recent “Economic Impact of Travel and Tourism in Pennsylvania” study, performed by the consulting company Tourism Economics. The study, which is commissioned each year by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, aims to give a detailed picture of how tourism impacts the state economy. Last year’s study, released in December, analyzes data from 2012.

Using these sources, the museum calculates what is meant to be its “direct economic impact” on the region. Here’s how it works. The museum subtracts school-age visitors and Harrisburg residents from the raw visitor total, arriving at an estimated number of tourist visitors of 33,552. Then, using the percentages from its in-house surveys, the museum sorts these visitors into “day-trip leisure” visitors (20,326) and “overnight leisure” visitors who stayed in a hotel (13,226). Finally, the report multiplies each of these subgroups by average spending data from the Tourism Economics study, which is conveniently already sorted along the same lines ($111 per day-tripper, and $265 per overnight visitor per trip).

Based on these calculations, the report arrives at a “direct economic impact” for the museum of $5,761,076: the sum of the $3,504,890 and $2,256,186 spent by overnight visitors and day-trippers, respectively, in 2013-14. The visitors spend their money, the Tourism Economics study tells us, on lodging, food and beverages, retail, entertainment and transportation.

How reliable are these figures? Christopher Pike, the director of impact studies at Tourism Economics, told me that, for the most part, the museum’s calculations were reasonable. He noted that the museum used average spending figures from 2012, which, preliminary research shows, were likely 1 to 3 percent lower than the corresponding figures for 2013. Combined with the decision to exclude school-age visitors, this meant the museum’s estimates “maintained some conservative-ness,” Pike said.

On the other hand, the museum’s calculations assume that the museum—and not other regional attractions—is the primary draw for tourists who walk through its doors. “If you wanted to be an academic stickler, you’d want to break out visitors they attracted to Harrisburg,” as opposed to people for whom the museum was merely a side attraction, Pike said.

Nonetheless, it was Pike’s conclusion that the museum’s report presented, on balance, a respectable analysis. “It’s much more detailed than what I’ve seen from a lot of other places,” he said. Given that museum staff did the calculations themselves, “they’ve not done a bad job.”

There is one notable exception, however. That is the museum’s purported rate of “return on investment,” which the report tabulates at an eye-catching 1,942 percent. The museum arrived at this figure by dividing the $5.7 million it says it generated last year by the $296,646 in hotel taxes it received. (These taxes come out of the $500,000-or-so portion of hotel taxes designated for marketing the city—which, speaking of numbers, is not “one-quarter of one percent” of hotel tax revenues, as is often cited elsewhere, but one-quarter of about one-fifth of them, or about 5 percent.)

Returns on investment, or ROIs, “can be calculated in many, many ways,” Pike said. He declined to give an opinion on the “right” method, though he did laugh when the museum’s reported figure was quoted. Another way to come up with the museum’s ROI would be to compare the hotel taxes it receives with the hotel taxes it generates—which, if you follow the assumptions of its other calculations, comes out to around $36,801. That leads to the rather dismal return of 12 cents for every tax dollar received, meaning the museum cost the county nearly $260,000 last year.

On Thursday, Motts responded to the suggestion of this less flattering figure by saying the museum had followed the ROI-calculation method of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, the county tourism promotion agency which serves as a pass-through for the museum’s tax funding and to which the museum reports on its marketing activities each year. The museum should be “held to the same standard” as other regional tourist draws, which calculate their impact the same way, he said. (Motts also reiterated Pike’s points about the comparatively high level of detail in the museum’s visitor data and the conservative nature of its estimates.)

But there are yet other ways to measure return on investment—ways that have less to do with tourism money today, and more to do with history. The museum began receiving its dedicated share of hotel taxes from the county in 2008, when its annual visitor base was nearly 44,000. The money was to be spent on marketing and promotions, which the museum says it is, although Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse, who catapulted the museum’s tax funding into headlines by asking the county to freeze it, has challenged this. In any case, despite the boost to marketing, the museum’s visitor total this year represents a decline of 5,000 people—and that’s in a year that included the sesquicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg.

Or what about another measure of return on investment, which would compare the city’s share of the costs of the museum’s creation with the city’s share of its rewards? The building itself, as museum leadership likes to point out, was paid for with $16.2 million in state money. But the state money required a city match, which was supplied by at least as many millions in Civil War artifacts acquired on the city’s dime. The museum now leases those artifacts—and the building, whose fair market rental value is estimated at $633,000 per year—at an annual rate of $1.

There are other numbers to consider, too. Seven, for instance, which is the number of City Council members (that is to say, all of them) who voted last month to back Papenfuse’s request to cut the museum’s funding. Or 25, which is the number of years on the museum’s lease, extended by former Mayor Stephen Reed in the last two months of his 28-year reign. Or how about 1.2 million—the number of dollars the city has paid the museum directly since 2000, for employee benefits and construction costs and any number of other things.

These numbers, not surprisingly, were not part of the museum’s presentation to the county commissioners this week. Yet they tell an important part of the story, too. It’s for the commissioners—and for city residents, in assessing whose interests the commissioners represent—to decide how many of the numbers to listen to. Will it be some of them, or all of them, or none?

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the museum’s proportion of hotel taxes. The figure “about 5 percent” refers to the portion of county hotel tax revenue designated for marketing the city, not only the portion spent on the museum.

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