FIXING THE FALLS: Study results should paint better picture

Local News

March 5, 2011

By Mark Scheer Niagara Gazette The Niagara Gazette Sat Mar 05, 2011, 11:24 PM EST

NIAGARA FALLS — In a few weeks, the city will learn the results of a state-sponsored analysis of the economic and real estate market in Niagara Falls.

The concept didn’t sit well with our editorial board when it was first announced last year.

The general sentiment: Another $200,000 for another study?

Mayor Paul Dyster and representatives from the state-run USA Niagara Development Corp. argued the study would prove invaluable to the community, suggesting hiring an independent evaluator to gather real data on things like annual visitation, visitor spending habits, typical visitor characteristics, real estate values and other items would provide developers with the information they needed to be able to convince lenders to back expensive and, hopefully, worthwhile projects.

I didn’t get it at first and I’m sure members of the editorial board felt the way a lot of people around here do: There’s a lot of time and money spent on studies, but not enough concrete development as a result of them.

Well, we’ll soon see what comes from this go round as state officials say they’ve received some of the draft results from the analysis and plan to share it with USA Niagara’s board of directors and members of the community in a few weeks.

As a refresher, here’s a list of tasks that were to be performed when USA Niagara issued the request for proposals for qualified consultants:

• Updating, analyzing and refining estimates of annual visitation/tourism and developing estimates of visitor/tourist characteristics/spending patterns.

• An overall assessment of the competitiveness of the city of Niagara Falls to attract new development, formulated through data analyses and interviews with key stakeholders.

• Specific assessment of various sectors of the real estate market in Niagara Falls.

• Structuring the data analysis to feed into a new geographic information system tool being developed by the city of Niagara Falls on a parallel track.

“Having a solid set of updated metrics that tell the unique story of the market setting here will be an important element in attracting future investment,” USAN President Christopher Schoepflin said at the time of the RFP’s release. “Fully characterizing markets that can be capitalized upon — particularly the growing influx of cross-border shoppers — is going to provide us with valuable insight to provide to prospective developers and new businesses, as well as lending institutions.”

Translation: Companies and investors need proof of what the city has to offer so they can show the banks that projects in Niagara Falls are worth the risk.

In talking to members of our editorial board, I found that one of their main concerns about this work was that it wasn’t done years before.

How is it that a city like Niagara Falls doesn’t know, for example, how many visitors it gets each year, what they spend or why?

Seems odd, but then so do a lot of things around here.

The work’s been done now and the final results should be available soon.

We’ll report the findings as soon as we get them.

Contact Mark Scheer at 282-2311, ext. 2250.

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