Meriden City Center Initiative

Public Involvement Process
Commercial Center Market Assessment
Environmental Impact Analysis
Harbor Brook Realignment
Preliminary Design of Transportation Improvements
Conceptual Land Use
Design Guidelines
Fiscal and Economic Impact Assessment

	Fiscal Impact Analysis Results

	Summary of Impact Analysis Report

	Comparative Economic Impact Analysis

	Construction Phase

	Operational Phase

	Definitions & Methodology
Appendix A: Property Acquisition Plan
Appendix B: Residential Relocation Strategy
Appendix C: Preliminary Opinion of Cost Summary

Definitions & Methodology

Economic impact is the “umbrella” term for three subsets of specific impacts: jobs created, earnings generated and output.

Jobs: employment levels sustained by an entity’s current existence, or anticipated to be created by investment, such as construction. Jobs are annual, full-time equivalent.

Earnings: salaries and wages paid to employees (not corporate earnings or net profit); the second type of impact calculated. Construction phase earnings are spread over the life of the project and not repeated. Operational earnings are considered ongoing, annual impacts.

Output: the sum of economic activity associated with the development. In the case of the construction phase, direct output is the total development budget. In the operational phase, output is a projection of the sum of all operations expenditure for the businesses operating out of Meriden City Center.

The three types of economic impacts are calculated as direct, indirect and total:

Direct Impact: the annual amount of money put into the economy and jobs created by the project itself, in this case Meriden City Center. Direct jobs impacts include, for example, construction workers in the construction phase and retail workers during the operational phase.

Indirect Impact: the continuing annual flow of money as transactions take place after initially being put into the economy, sometimes informally referred to as the “ripple effect”. In order to calculate indirect impact, we used multipliers specific to the Connecticut economy from the RIMS II Regional Input-Output Modeling System, an economic model developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (1997 edition), which is widely used in measuring indirect impacts. Multipliers updated through 2002 for the State of Connecticut were used in these calculations. Indirect annual impact is the product of the direct impact times the appropriate industry multiplier.

Total Impact: the sum of the direct and indirect calculations for the three types of economic impact - output, earnings and jobs.

Expenditure Impacts: annual consumer spending by type occurring from project related direct wages.

Methodologies for calculations of economic impact were made in accordance with Development Impact Assessment Handbook, Robert W. Burchell, David Listokin and William R. Dolphin, Urban Land Institute, 1994.