Editor’s Note
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Archive for July 17th, 2008

So, HOW many people saw the fireworks?

2 comments July 17th, 2008

Story this morning on Register Star’s front page (was on rrstar.com yesterday): Upswing in tourism: Area visitors’ spending in 2007 the most in six years. Good news, indeed.

But the attendance numbers for the top five 2007 events struck me as odd. Odd? Wrong word. I wanted to say “lies,” but that’s a tad harsh for these worthy organizations. Think about this for a minute: The Fourth of July fireworks and related patriotic events drew 400,000 people in 2006 and again in 2007.

Now, those fireworks are popular; Joe Marino and his committee do an awesome job, but there’s no way under God’s blue sky that 400,000 people came downtown for the Fourth. Not even if we counted them twice, and probably not even if we counted each person three times.

There are 298,759 people in Winnebago County (current Census data). There are 53,531 in Boone, and another 55,011 in Ogle. If every single man, woman and child in Winnebago and Boone counties attended the Fourth stuff, there’d only be 352,290 attendees. Toss in Ogle, you get 407,301.

If you added in every living soul in Stephenson and DeKalb counties and Rock County in Wisconsin, we’re up to 717,226. If 50 percent of all those people attended, we’d still not be at the 400,000 claimed by the Fourth of July folks.

The numbers are almost as dreamlike for the others on the top four list, though they can all claim the numbers over multiple days: On the Waterfront (302,641 in 2007); the Winnebago County Fair (185,000); the Festival of Lights (150,000) and AirFest (100,000).

Crowd estimates are notoriously off the wall and without a formal ticketing-and-taking process, there’s no way to get an accurate number. So, where did these top five numbers come from?

Ah, there’s the rub: These are “self-reported” numbers. The event organizers say how many. We should have made that clear in the story, because it looks like we verified them. We didn’t. We relied on the event organizers.  Come on now, guys, if you’re going to tell us what the crowds were, at least make ‘em realistic.