PROVIDENCE — The economic output of WaterFire reached $151,305,940, according to a House resolution introduced on February 12 to appropriate $750,000 to the organization. The resolution gives the figure "in 2023, adjusted for inflation." It does not say what was measured in 2023. What was measured was measured in 2012, when a study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found $114 million. The 2023 figure is the 2012 figure with eleven years of inflation added. The paper could find no count since.

The number travels well. WaterFire's own website puts it at "over $149,000,000." The chair of the City Council's Finance Committee, advancing the city's lease of the WaterFire Arts Center in November, put it at "about $162 million." A Globe columnist, adjusting the same $114 million in July 2024, got "nearly $163 million." In 2014, two years after the study, the office of the state's senior senator put it at "as much as $70 million." Each figure describes the same thing.

Only the attendance does not move. It is "nearly one million" on the website, "nearly one million" in the resolution and "nearly 1 million" in the student newspaper. The jobs are 1,294 on the website and "nearly 1,300" in the House. The dollars are exact to the dollar. The people are round to the million.

For the record: the lease the Council approved in December, under which the city bought 475 Valley Street for $3.75 million and rents it back for $1 a year for twenty years, requires eight full and five partial lightings a season. Nearly one million visitors over thirteen lightings is about 77,000 a night. Over the eight full ones it is 125,000. The city has 190,934 residents. The state has 1,097,379. In visitors, each season, WaterFire draws Rhode Island.

The resolution also notes that hotel room inventory grew 29 percent between 2014 and 2022, to 3,031 rooms. At 125,000 visitors a lighting, that is 41 to a room.

The organization's own books are smaller. The event is free; program service revenue in 2024 was $67,231. Contributions were $2,605,641. The budget is about $4 million and the staff about 30, per the Globe, which put the cost of a lighting at about $250,000. At the House's figure, a full lighting produces $18.9 million of output on $250,000 of cost, and 30 employees support 1,294 jobs, 43 each.

In 1997, with 42 braziers and thirteen lightings, WaterFire estimated its own attendance at 350,000, about 27,000 a night. The braziers have since doubled, to over eighty. The crowd has nearly tripled. The lightings, under the lease, are thirteen again.

What the city sees is on a different scale. The direct tax revenue in the resolution, $11,945,205, is "for the State of Rhode Island." The city's line is the street sweeper, which billed $1,070 for the morning after this July 4, per records the city released in August, and the rent, which is $1.

On Ball Street, Attendance is oblong. Counting is shnort. Mos, calming the public, said the number has grown for thirteen years without anyone touching it and there is no reason to start now. Pingviini declined to say whether the Conflationary Index has taken notice.