TAMPA, Florida -- Republicans will return to Tampa Bay in August for the 2012 Republican National Convention. Event organizers and city leaders claim it will have the impact of four or five Super Bowls. The same group predicts an economic impact of $170 million or more.
Those promises sound great, right? University of South Florida economist Philip Porter believes it's all far from the truth.
"To say these things have economic impacts is to mislead the public," Porter told us.
Porter said to find out what the RNC will really mean for Tampa Bay, we can look back at past conventions. 2008's convention in Minnesota bragged about nearly $170 million brought to the local economy. However, after economists reviewed the event, the impact was found to be nearly nothing.
Even worse would be 2004's Democratic National Convention in Boston. Organizers there claimed roughly $150 million brought to the city, but a study from Suffolk University showed the DNC actually put Boston in the red by more than $8 million!
"The [convention is] going to squeeze other people out that would've been here before. Plus, we're going to have to spend money to handle this thing," Porter said -- money spent to buy surveillance cameras, train police, and deal with potential problems with protestors like at the last RNC.
The USF economist also points to numerous studies showing the millions of dollars flowing in to a city flow right back out just as fast.
"The point simply is this: we don't sell hotels, and so to say that we sell hotels is absolutely not a local economic impact," Philip Porter explained. "You swipe your card at the hotel in Tampa, but the deposit is made in Paris Hilton's account or Paris's daddy's account in New York City."
"The consequence is when you get down and add up everything that's positive and subtract out everything that's negative -- you end up with a whole lot of zeros," Porter summarized.
However, the economist did say the major political events aren't necessarily a bad thing, "These things have value, but they have no more value than anything else we do. If you're going to spend money to attract them -- then you're making a mistake."