A reusable model for weighing civic events — the Kite Festival first. It compares complete, auditable scenarios instead of arguing them, and keeps three questions apart that are usually mixed together: economic impact, City fiscal impact, and public value.
Preliminary Counterfactual Value Assessment · v0.1 · figures in 2025 dollars
Read this first. Every number on this page is an illustrative default, not a measured fact. The Kite Festival last ran 2017–2019 (2020–2022 were COVID-disrupted and are not valid no-festival controls). Values are modeled or stipulated placeholders pending the evidence register and its data gaps. The model’s job is to make the structure of the decision auditable — plug in real records and it recomputes. It never reduces the choice to one dollar figure or labels the event simply “profitable.”
1Decision summary
Pick a scenario. Each panel shows an expected value, an 80% uncertainty range, and the comparison with doing nothing.
City finances — the Marina Fund line
—
Revenue minus incremental City cost
Local economy — incremental, not gross
—
IMPLAN total output · RIMS II cross-check
Community
—
Attendance · free admission
Transportation & environment
—
Peak-hour vehicle arrivals
2Scenario laboratory
Move any assumption and the entire scorecard updates. These are the levers the City actually controls or can survey for.
Spending is made incremental before it counts: incremental = observed × festival-attribution × Berkeley-retention, then displacement is subtracted (deterred waterfront customers, crowded-out park users, purchases merely shifted to the weekend). That gross-to-net step is the difference between an ordinary impact study and this one.
3Full scorecard
Eight dimensions, never collapsed into one number. Compared against the no-festival baseline.
4Money flows — where the dollars actually land
Gross attendee spending is not a benefit. This traces it: how much would have happened anyway, how much leaks out of Berkeley, and only what remains is new activity that the multiplier acts on.
5Waterfront — schematic footprint
A schematic of the operational picture at Cesar Chavez Park & the Marina — event footprint, parking pressure, access routes, and sensitive habitat. Not a survey drawing; a placeholder for a real GIS layer.
6Public value — kept as indicators, not fake dollars
Some benefits shouldn’t be forced into questionable dollar estimates. They’re measured by a structured post-event survey and shown on their own terms. A willingness-to-pay study could come later — deliberately excluded from this first release, because a contingent-valuation number is too easy to hide behind.
Distribution is its own dimension: — Who receives the benefits and who bears the burdens is reported separately from any total.
7Evidence register
Every consequential input carries a source, a confidence rating, and whether it was measured, modeled, or stipulated. The historical festival is evidence; the future festival is a counterfactual inference — this table keeps the two honest.
Input
Current value
Source / plan to obtain
Confidence
Basis
Open data gaps blocking a firm answer
Recommended first decision — not “restore the festival.” Under central assumptions the event is expected to require a modest City subsidy while producing a much larger amount of incremental local activity. Whether that is favorable depends on Berkeley’s public-purpose and distributional criteria — not on this model. The defensible next step is to authorize a one-event pilot specification (one day, managed parking, strong transit and bike provisions, sponsorship requirements, and a pre-approved measurement plan) that collects exactly the records this register is missing.