Rink

At our facility in Minot, North Dakota, a community of 36,000, we quickly recognized the need to show our taxpayers what the return is for the portion of the Park District tax dollars that went to the operation of the Maysa Arena. When the proposal to build the twin- rink facility started in 1998, there were many individuals who felt that the arena only served special interest groups and did not benefit the entire community. But through cooperation with the Minot Park District and the Minot Area Youth Skating Association, the facility did get built and opened in October 2000. In keeping ice rates low, the arena's operation is subsidized by the property tax collection of the Minot Park District. Both ice programs — figure skating and hockey — had an economic impact on the community. With tournaments, travel games, figure skating competitions and ice shows, a large number of people come to the arena and spend nights in the community to attend the events. But that impact had never been measured, so it was difficult to assure the public that the arena contributed back to the community. The economic experts have an in-depth survey for gathering information on a facility's or event's economic impact, but we felt the more questions asked, the less returns we would get. We needed to keep our survey simple, so we developed five questions to be asked of each visiting team or group user of the arena. We did not survey local teams and did not get any information during public skating or drop-in hockey sessions. The local users and public sessions have an economic impact, but I believe the term for that impact is "toilet bowl money;" it is money that just flows around the community from one user to another. We felt it was important to show the "new money" economic impact to the community: the "new money" dollars our facility and programs were bringing to town that was not and would not be here if not for the construction of the arena. The questions were: • Where is your group from? • How did you travel here? • How many are in your group? • If you are staying overnight, how many rooms are you using? • How many nights are you staying? These questions were simple enough to ask when giving out a locker room or dressing room. If the individual did not have the answers at that time, once we explained why and what we were doing, we had the information when the room key was returned. When you explain to a fellow ice user that the information is being collected to show the community the significance of the programs, the normal response was, could we do this at our facility? Of all the visitors the first year, we had one group not return the survey answers. We developed an Excel spreadsheet and entered the data at the end of each weekend. We had initially assumed we would have to figure out daily food costs, gas costs, room rates and so on. However, after approaching the Convention and Visitor's Bureau, we discovered they had a simple formula to calculate the economic impact of events. Each person per day is multiplied by a dollar 34 R INK MAGAZ INE may/June 2008 With tournaments, travel games, figure skating competitions and ice shows, a large number of people come to the arena and spend nights in the community to attend the events. But that impact had never been measured so it was difficult to assure the public that the arena contributed back to the community. Ice impact

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