Recreation Visitor Spending Profiles and Economic Benefit to Corps of Engineers Projects

Abstract

Abstract : The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (CE) is the largest federal provider of water-based recreation. It manages over 450 water resource development projects throughout the United States. These lake and river projects provide significant recreation opportunities and benefits to visitors and local residents, accommodating over 385 million person visits in 1999. The purposes of this research are to develop visitor spending profiles and to estimate local and national economic effects of spending by visitors to CE projects. A visitor survey was conducted in the summer of 1999 through early 2000 at 16 CE projects across the nation. The survey was administered by the Engineer Research and Development Center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Park, Recreation and Tourism Resources at Michigan State University, with assistance from managers and staff at all 16 participating CE projects. Segmented spending profiles were developed that can be tailored to project-level spending based on regional visitation data. Total recreation visitation was estimated by using information gathered from this study and from the Natural Resource Management System database. Economic effects of CE visitor spending were estimated by applying visitor spending and use data to regional economic multipliers generated from economic input-output models. These results provide a database for further analyses and improvements in future studies like these.