On February 17, Greg Batton and Dan Diorio talked to Bradley professors Dr. Robert Scott and Dr. Joshua Lewer on the Greg & Dan Show on 1470 WMBD (listen to an .mp3 of the interview here). The two professors volunteered their time to conduct an “independent economic analysis” of the proposed downtown museum project. Let’s take a look at what they had to say.

As the interview began, one of the first topics they hit on was projected attendance at the museum. In response to Dan Diorio saying that museum attendance is down across the country, Dr. Scott countered, “Actually, most everything’s down a bit this year because of the recession . . . but there’s more museum attendance in the United States than there is at all athletic events combined.” He followed up by saying, “So, if you think about all of the activity that’s so prevalent on TV athletic events, there are a lot more people going to these kinds of venues.”

Museum attendance figures are relatively easy to come by; the American Association of Museums (AAM) website states that “American museums average approximately 865 million visits per year,” based on a 1999 study. But the tricky part is defining what is meant by “all athletic events combined.” A November 24, 2008, NPR story regarding museums gave this example, which corroborates Dr. Scott’s statistic:

If you add up the attendance for every major-league baseball, basketball, football and hockey game this year, the combined total will come to about 140 million people. That’s a big number, but it’s barely a fraction of the number of people who will visit American museums this year.

Museums are big business, attracting billions of tourist dollars, advancing science, and educating and amusing more than 850 million people annually.

As impressive as that comparison sounds, it’s not a fair comparison. The total attendance for major-league baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games more specifically comes to 139,474,548, according to figures available on Wikipedia. But there are only 122 teams (32 NFL, 30 MLB, 30 NHL, and 30 NBA). If you divide that out, you’ll see that it comes to an average attendance of 1,143,234 people per team. In comparison, according to both the AAM and NPR, there are 17,500 museums nationwide. If you take the 865 million visitors reported by the AAM and divide it by the number of museums, it comes out to an average attendance of just 48,914 people per museum. And we won’t even get into the fact that museums are open year-round, whereas sporting events have a limited number of games per season.

Next, Dr. Scott said, “And here in Peoria alone at Lakeview, they get over a hundred thousand — something like 110,000 — attendees a year.” This is difficult to verify. In a May 2007 presentation included in material the museum gave to Peoria County, the Museum Collaboration Group said Lakeview’s past four-year average attendance was 87,000. On the other hand, Lakeview Museum’s website now says they get 125,000 visitors per year. So, who knows what the real attendance figure is?

Next up, the John Deere Pavilion: Dr. Scott said, “They [John Deere] get over 200,000 attendees a year.” County Board Member and blogger Merle Widmer called the manager of the John Deere Pavilion and asked for their 2008 annual attendance. She said it was 175,000 to 180,000.

In fairness, Dr. Scott did say later in the interview, “Joshua [Lewer] and I did not go into a detailed analysis of the attendance. We talked to the people who had done the detailed analysis.” So his information is only as good as what was given to him by “the people who had done the detailed analysis,” which would be the museum group.

But here’s the problem: if the economic analysis was substantially based on attendance numbers provided by the museum folks, then the deck was stacked from the beginning. The success of the museum is inextricably tied to its attendance forecast. If they don’t get enough visitors, they can’t operate in the black, and the economic impact would be lower as well. By accepting the museum’s high attendance predictions, they’re conceding that the museum will be successful before they even start the economic impact study. It should come as no surprise that a rosy economic forecast resulted from optimistic attendance figures.