Earlier this year, when the Ann Arbor city council approved its annual $75,000 general fund allocation to SPARK, Skip Simms offered some numbers, specific to Ann Arbor (as contrasted with Smith’s figures, which are likely to include all of SPARK’s activity in Washtenaw County) that are somewhat more modest [from the June 18, 2012 meeting]:

[Sabra Briere] had posed some questions about the contract before the meeting, which Skip Simms, SPARK’s vice president for entrepreneurial business development, had answered. So at the meeting, Briere asked Simms to the podium to provide the answers publicly. Simms did not have the written material in front of him, and Briere ended up essentially reporting on the information she’d received.

In summary strokes, she’d been told that in 2011 SPARK specifically recruited 20 companies to locate in Ann Arbor, and of those 20, 12 had moved into the city of Ann Arbor. Of those 12, according to SPARK, five had no knowledge, relationships or inclination to locate in Ann Arbor before 2011.

The companies that moved to Ann Arbor employ a total of 143 people.

Briere asked what kind of companies these are that moved to Ann Arbor. Simms explained that they are primarily technology and IT-based – software developers, for example. Simms indicated that the reason such companies relocated to Ann Arbor is that Ann Arbor has that kind of talent. In most cases, Simms continued, the companies are expanding. That expansion is sometimes accomplished by transferring an executive to Ann Arbor, who then starts up a new location for the company in Ann Arbor.

Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) noted that the city has had this line item to contract with SPARK for several years, and noted that it had been increased a few years ago to $75,000 per year. She indicated she was happy to support the contract – because SPARK was able to entice companies to relocate to Ann Arbor with only a minimal amount of money. Simms contended that with $405,000 of city of Ann Arbor support over the last five years, SPARK had aided companies that had committed to $177 million worth of build-out, investments in projects and new equipment, and those companies have created 3,886 jobs, he said.

Yeah wait, let’s do the math there. If every dollar of $200,000 has “leveraged” 109 jobs, that’s… 21,800,000 jobs “leveraged.”* Or maybe he means “every job has cost $18.18″ in “leverage.”

I’m sure there are facts somewhere at the bottom of this pile of BS, but, as with all things SPARK, we’ll never know because of its complete lack of transparency.

*Unless he is using the $1.2 billion figure, in which case we’re talking $130.8 billion jobs, which would explain why we had to build another parking lot, at least.