EDR Group's San Francisco International Airport Study Results in Award for Airport
SFO was honored with the Kaiser Permanente Economic Development Award for job creation in the area. The award recognizes companies or organizations that substantially contribute to the economic vitality of San Francisco. Awards were presented on October 3, 2013 at a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce event celebrating the Bay Area’s visionary entrepreneurs, business leaders and exemplary corporate citizens.
In 2012, EDR Group led a team to provide a detailed and comprehensive estimate of the contribution and roles of SFO to the Bay Area economy and to the nine counties in the region: Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. The study documented the role of SFO as an economic center in the Bay Area, and also documented how the airport contributes to economic development in the region. The latter included: (1) the distribution of jobs and personal income according to county of residence of airport workers; (2) visitor spending by county; (3) the role of SFO in supporting indussties in the Bay Area that ship goods by air; and (4) the distribution of “multiplier” impacts by industry across the Bay Area.
Research for the study included conducting a 1,500 person visitor survey, analyzing annual air traveler data to count visitors and identify those from domestic and international locations, administering a survey to account for all tenants, developing an air freight cargo analysis, estimating state, local and federal aviation tax revenues in the Bay Area and by county, and assessing the economic impacts of potential new air services. EDR Group also used the Bay Area Council as a technical review committee.
The study found that in 2012, SFO directly accounted for $5.4 billion in business activity, supporting 33,580 jobs at the airport.
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Operations at SFO in 2012 generated a total of $2.5 billion in state and local tax revenues.
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Off-site business activities directly dependent on Airport services raised the Airport’s economic contribution to the whole Bay Area to $31.2 billion in business sales, with 153,000 jobs.