GOP convention will have minimal economic impact in Jacksonville

Jul 27

Published in the Florida Times Union, Jul 12, 2020.

The Texas Medical Association has put out a chart about which activities are most risky during COVID-19 pandemic.

The following four were classified as having the highest risk: Attending a large music concert, going to a sports stadium, attending an event (religious) with more than 500 people and going to a bar.

If the Republican National Conventions makes its way to Jacksonville during August 25 to 27, it will have all four risky elements combined in one giant event. Seen from a purely public health perspective, it makes virtually no sense for the convention to come to town. One mitigating factor cited by Mayor Lenny Curry is the $100 dollar economic impact from the convention. But has anyone asked Mayor Curry to provide details on how he arrived at that number?

Economists Robert Baade, Robert Baumann and Victor Matheson studied the impact of 50 major political conventions from 1970 to 2005 and found “that the presence of a national political convention has no discernable impact on employment, personal income or personal income per capita in the cities where the events were held.”

A more recent study by economists Lauren Heller, Victor Matheson and Frank Stephenson found that assuming a citywide hotel capacity of 29,000 beds, the economic benefit from increased hotel revenue is approximately $20 million. However, Jacksonville has far fewer hotel beds available than cities that hosted other major political conventions. Using Jacksonville’s available hotel bed count of 18,000, the increase in hotel revenue is likely to be approximately $15 million.

The average conventiongoer’s expenditure on food, entertainment and local transportation will have to be five to seven times the amount they spend on hotels for the city to reap the benefit of a $100 million economic windfall. Given that lodging constitutes the largest share of convention going expenditure, any large economic benefits to Jacksonville from the RNC seems like a mirage.

Missing from all the breathtaking projections of an economic windfall, are considerations about how the convention impacts the average city resident. Most of the spending on hotels from conventiongoers will accrue to the major corporations not local individuals.

Any impact on the city’s tax revenue will likely be offset by increased spending on security and sanitation. Moreover, spending on normal economic activities may fall during the duration of the convention as some city residents may leave town fearing additional health risks from pandemic or reduce spending because of limiting themselves to indoors unwilling to deal with snarling traffic.

Additional labor wages from filled-to-capacity hotels will also not benefit Jacksonville as much because to deal with the surge of guests, hotels typically import workers from out-of-town, not hire them locally.

With a pandemic raging, also missing from rosy projections are the increased burden on our health care system, after the Republican National Convention leaves town. Locally, COVID-19 cases will inevitably rise, no matter how much wishful thinking the president or his supporters indulge in.

These increased cases will disproportionately come from hospitality workers, who tend to be poorer and mostly brown or black. Our health system already suffers from widening racial disparities. The system will be burdened further.

Given that the city and its residents have much more to lose than gain, it is not surprising that 58 percent of residents oppose the Republican National Convention coming to Jacksonville, according to a poll by the University of North Florida.

Even without the benefit of expert advice, ordinary folks intuitively understand that bringing large numbers of visitors to town, during a pandemic, is simply a bad idea. Why can our leaders not show that same common wisdom? It is not too late to cancel.