The spokesman for United We Can in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Ramon Trujillo, has asked the local government on Monday for information on the costs of the Rodin Museum that is planned to be set up in the capital.
Trujillo, in a statement, has indicated that only its benefits have been made public, so it will ask about the costs of the initiative in the next municipal plenary session.
Likewise, he has stated that the visitor forecasts, prepared for the Rodin Museum in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, may have a bias of optimism because they are established from the Picasso Museum in Malaga, which, in 2019, received 9.9% of travelers staying in the province of Malaga.
However, in the same city, the Carmen Thyssen and Pompidou museums received 2.4% and 2.5% of travellers, respectively.
On the other hand, the spokesperson for United We Can not see clearly that the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is the most appropriate reference to estimate the economic impact of the Rodin Museum because “it will hardly reach a centrality in Tenerife comparable to that of the Bilbao museum in its context”.
Although reduction coefficients have been applied, an economic impact for Santa Cruz de Tenerife, induced by the Rodin Museum, is estimated to be between 61.4 million euros and 158.8 million, he indicated.
This economic impact would mean sustaining between 1,100 jobs and 2,860 jobs if the employment impact ratio applied in the Bilbao data were applied.
In the most optimistic assumption, he continued, the Rodin Museum would account for 2.2% of Social Security affiliations in the municipality.
The forecast of impact on employment, in the study available to the Santa Cruz City Council, “is not done, perhaps sensing that the economic impact is less than what is being said.”
The municipal study attributes to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao an annual economic impact of 440 million euros and, likewise, estimates that it maintains some 11,500 jobs in the municipality, that is, 6.3% of Social Security affiliations in Bilbao.
For United We Can, it is important to have reliable cost and benefit analyzes to rigorously evaluate the proposal made by the government group.
