Seattle Center Foundation board members, outgoing Center director Virginia Anderson, and local economist Bill Beyers lured reporters to the Skyline conference room at the Space Needle this afternoon to talk about two new economic impact reports on Key Arena and Seattle Center. Beyers, the same economist who brought us the oft-cited, though flawed, music industry economic impact study released in 2004, found that the economic impact of the Center was $1.15 billion - an astonishing figure, until you consider that “economic impact” includes both direct economic impacts (like ticket sales and salaries paid to Center employees) and indirect impacts (like jobs in every industry from chemical manufacturing to education). (It also distinguishes economic activity that would have happened anyway from so-called “new money” specific to Seattle Center; when just the “new money” is considered, the impact drops to $813 million.)

Beyers, a small, disheveled man with glasses and white hair and a rumpled suit, was unflappable and easygoing even after an hour-long interrogation by a phalanx of TV reporters. (The TV-radio-print media hierarchy being what it is, we had plenty of time to space out and stare at the abandoned Fun Forest 100 feet below before we got our turn with Beyers.) I asked how much he thought the Sonics contributed to Key Arena (whose total economic impact, according to Beyers’s report, was $353 million). Beyers said he had “guaranteed anonymity” to everyone who participated in the report, offering only that he didn’t buy the Sonics’ claim that they add $234 million to the economy each year. “I don’t have a clue” how they came up with that number,” Beyers said. “They certainly didn’t use the methodology that we did.” One difference is that the Sonics’ analysis included players’ salaries in their estimates of the team’s economic benefits. Beyers says this is dubious, because even those Sonics who live in King County don’t spend most of their salaries here.

One thing no one was hyping about the report is the fact that Key Arena, in direct revenues, is a money-loser, taking in $122 million in 2005 but spending $125 million: a $3 million loss.The money isn’t bleeding from Paul McCartney and U2 shows: According to Beyers, concerts make a profit of between $6 and $7 million. “I think it’s no secret that the Sonics are losing a lot of money,” Beyers said.