Thiel has the rundown of the King County Council meeting from Thursday.
One point University of Washington Geography Professor Bill Beyers made a couple times was that "Seattle is the clear economic winner".
You see, whoever gets the arena has the thing that competing businesses will be losing business to. Figure it out, Seattle, where do you want people spending their money?
Bellevue?
Seattle?
Clear winner?
Do you need flash cards?
Neither were red flags sent up. Which, in this game, constitutes a stage win, as they say in the Tour de France. There were questions, concerns, request for deeper information, but no one shouted, “Bogus!â€
There was, however, this shot from Dick Conway, a local economist long experienced in the business of pro sports. It wasn’t directed at the arena.
“If I were at the Port of Seattle,†he said, “the arena would be the least of my problems.â€
After presenting report on the arena’s economic impact on the area (negligible) and market analysis (borderline over-saturated with two more pro sports teams), Conway also contributed an analysis of the claims by the port, the arena project’s most high-profile challenger, that the arena would be a “job-killer†by further congesting the already crowded front door of the port on First Avenue South and helping discourage customers in a highly competitive business.
Conway reported that the port identified 194,000 jobs statewide “associated†with port activities. Of those, 56,300 are seaport jobs, the rest airport jobs. Marine cargo handling, the task most directly impacted by increased SoDo traffic, has 12,400 direct jobs and 20,900 indirect jobs — or 1.2 percent of the state’s total non-farm employment.
In Conway’s worst-case assessment, he wrote that loss of all those jobs would have a significant but not devastating effect on the state economy, since the state is currently adding about 50,000 jobs a year. That represents zero solace if one’s job is flushed, but he wrote that, in the unlikely event that the port shuts down cargo handling, most of the jobs would migrate 30 miles south to the Port of Tacoma.
THIEL: ARENA DEAL PASSES SCRUTINY FROM EXPERTS
Mr. Conway asked for the Port to produce some facts to support their claims (sound familiar). It's on the Port to prove that they would lose even one job, according to Conway. He said that he could easily imagine and project that technological advancements could reduce every projected job gain to zero, 25 years from now.