PIERRE - Sturgis Mayor Maury LaRue says it's impossible to "physically determine" how many people attend the Sturgis motorcycle rally, but that doesn't stop reporters from asking the question every August.
LaRue spoke Wednesday during a session of the annual Governor's Conference on Tourism here. People packed the auditorium for the session, titled "Sturgis motorcycle rally, by the numbers?"
LaRue told a story that should give rally journalists pause. Flash back to sometime in the 1980s.
"Some of the boys were down at Weimer's bakery after the rally, having their morning coffee," LaRue said. "Someone called over from City Hall and says, 'We've got The Associated Press on the line, and they want to know how many were here for the rally.'"
LaRue said that after some "thoughtful contemplation and chin scratching," one of the coffee drinkers said, "'Tell them there were 123,895.' Sure enough, the next day on the national news …"
The line got a big laugh.
"I can assure you we've refined this considerably since then," LaRue said.
Still, the tale underscored the difficulty of estimating attendance at an event that has grown to include every town in the region.
LaRue said rally's expanding reach was confirmed in a recent survey that found the average biker spends only about two hours on Main Street in Sturgis. Besides, LaRue said, "The town of Sturgis, on a good day, can accommodate about 31,000."
The city of Sturgis does, however, use five statistics to gauge the size of the rally:
* The number of temporary vendor licenses
* Sales-tax revenue receipts
* Tons of garbage hauled
* South Dakota Department of Transportation traffic counts
* Motorcycle counts from Mount Rushmore.
The bottom line, LaRue said, is that somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million bikers attend the rally.
That number isn't news, but LaRue emphasized it to urge tourism operators throughout South Dakota to use the rally to market year-round activities in South Dakota to hundreds of thousands of rallygoers. "We've got 500,000 captured right here for you," he said.
Jan Talley, director of business tax for the state Department of Revenue and Regulation, also was a panelist Wednesday. She offered revealing sales-tax data.
For example, in 1997, the revenue department issued 876 temporary sales-tax licenses to rally vendors in Sturgis and the Northern Hills. The department issued 80 temporary licenses in Rapid City and the Southern Hills that year.
In contrast, in 2007, the department issued 1,123 licenses Sturgis and the Northern Hills and 203 in Rapid City and the Southern Hills.
The increase in actual sales-tax collections was even more striking.
In 1997, Sturgis and Northern Hills collections were $552,000 from temporary vendors; Rapid City and Southern Hills collections were just $9,138.
In 2007, collections in Sturgis and Northern Hills collections were more than $1 million, up 82 percent in a decade, and Rapid City and Southern Hills collections were $202,000, up over 2,000 percent from 1997.
(Total sales-tax collections were much higher because those figures do not include year-round businesses.)
Jeff Brosz of the state Department of Transportation, the third presenter Wednesday, has been monitoring rally traffic counts since the early 1990s.
Rally traffic is heavy for at least two weeks, but the Transportation Department focuses on the official rally dates - the first full week in August.
Brost said the department used 24 "tube counters" at eight locations in and around Sturgis. The black rubber tubes count vehicles by "axle hits" - two hits being one vehicle. The counters do not distinguish motorcycles from tour buses, so they don't count attendance.
Some of the results are in a 28-page Department of Transportation document titled "Sturgis Rally Counts: 1996 to 1997."
Last year's rally traffic was up 2.7 percent over 2006, according to the report.
Monitors counted 461,507 vehicles entering Sturgis last year, compared to 449,507 the year before.
Individual monitors also reveal trends.
For example, on Monday of rally week in 1996, a monitor in the eastbound lane of Interstate 90, just east of Exit 32 at Sturgis, registered 28,117 vehicles.
On the Monday of the 2007 rally, the monitor at the same location counted 36,043 vehicles.
The 2007 count was up from 2006 (35,287), but it was down from 2004 (37,889), 2003 (37,005) and 2000 (36,598).
In other words, traffic last year at that location, on the Monday of rally week, was up for all but three of the past 12 years.
LaRue said the rally numbers "mean absolutely nothing" if local governments can't recover the cost if the event. "We put that onto our taxpayers - ooh, not good."
The rally costs Sturgis about $1.2 million, LaRue said, and, so far, "We're still recovering our costs."
Rally costs
The city of Sturgis spends about $1.2 million on the Sturgis motorcycle rally. Here's a partial breakdown of costs from Mayor Maury LaRue:
* The Sturgis Rally Department: $386,750
* The Sturgis Sponsorship Department: $314,000
* Rally-related attorney costs: $24,000
* Extra city finance department costs: $20,546
* Rally insurance: $12,500
* Inspectors: $21,000
* Rally law enforcement: $300,806
* Extra dispatch costs: $10,000
* Fire and ambulance services: $14,200
Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com.
