One person's rendering of public records, not the Washington State Convention Center Public Facilities District's, the State Auditor's, or an accounting firm's. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Every figure opens the page it was read from, so check the number against the page.
Counts as of 2026-09-13; the last full certification run was 2026-09-13.
What the accounts hold
| Documents | 30 | 15 audited financial statements, FY2011 through FY2025, plus two records-request responses, two management actual-to-budget reports, three board and committee decks, a food-and-beverage contract excerpt, a King County memorandum and an email reply, RCW 36.100.040, a bond official statement, a utilization dataset computed from the event log, and the two floor-plan booklets the buildings book is read from |
|---|---|---|
| Fiscal years | 15 | FY2011 to FY2025, the audited operating series, none held back |
| Statements | 3 | net position, cash flows, operations |
| Figures | 2,976 | each one cites the document and page it was read from |
| Accounts | 254 | labels kept as printed; a line that changes its name across audits becomes two accounts tied by a recorded alias |
| Notes | 68 | |
| Movements between audits | 185 | 184 restatements and one presentation change, each registered by name rather than absorbed |
| Findings | 6 | each a route through the books, step by step |
How it was built
In fixed order: seed, extract, load, fix, build. Hand-transcribed tranches are seeded with their page citations. The three statements are read out of each audit PDF with pdftotext, anchored on printed row labels; both year columns are captured, so every fiscal year is extracted twice and the two readings are compared. Nothing is inferred: a file that does not parse is reported, not guessed at. One audit with a broken font map was recovered by OCR, and every figure taken from it is marked as an OCR reading.
Corrections made by hand were converted into named, re-runnable scripts, so the database is rebuildable from the documents plus the scripts. Where an account alias could not be settled automatically, a person read the statements and the decision is recorded with its reason. Everything derived, account edges, aliases, adjustments and page images, is regenerated from the loaded data.
What was checked
A test suite of 6,034 checks runs against the database. One test per figure opens the cited document at the cited page and looks for the dollar amount printed there, in any of the ways an accountant might print it. On 2026-09-04, 2,889 of 2,976 figures were found on the page they cite. The remaining 87 come from five sources with no page a reader can open: two management reports, two decks, and a computed dataset; they are skipped and named, not counted as passed. Other suites check that each statement foots, that every disagreement between two audits is a registered movement, and that derived numbers still match the analysis they were built to check.
These checks establish that a figure is where the database says it is. They do not establish that the figure is right. A number transcribed accurately from a page that is itself wrong will pass every provenance test in the suite.
What is not settled
- $3,318,593 of the FY2025 gap between management's expense figure and the audited one is unexplained. It is left as a residual, not plugged.
- Whether a $439,912 movement in the July 2026 report is an error, a reclassification, or an exclusion is not held either way.
- The gross-to-net difference on food-and-beverage sales is unknown; the defining section of the contract was not produced.
- Three sources give three figures for King County's 2025 lodging-tax share, differing in the last dollars, and the 2023 figure differs by $100 between the District and the County. Unresolved, and not reconciled silently.
- Projections are designed, not built. No table, no figures.
- Twelve of the 30 documents have no page image a reader can open here; their figures carry the citation and the text read off the page.
How to check a figure
Click any citation. It opens the page image the figure was read from, at full size, with the document's title, author, date and page number, and the text read off the page. 2,883 of the 2,976 figures open a page image; the other 93 open the citation and the text alone. The documents are public records of the District, the State Auditor's office, and King County; they are not hosted here, and the citation tells you which one to ask for.
The rows themselves are readable at /api/data/, one table per path, read-only. The database schema and the queries are shown; the generator that produced the pages is not published.
The six findings
- Operating revenue is past where it was before the shutdown. $37.1M in 2019, $61.3M in 2025.
- A block of the income statement stopped being printed. Marketing was its own subtotal for six years, then wasn't. The money did not necessarily move.
- The same line under two names is still one line. An audit renamed "Investment purchases" to "Purchases of investments". Read literally, that ends a run and starts a new one.
- A reporting code moved $3.3 million a year from King County housing to the convention center. King County's half of the extended tax is earmarked for affordable housing. A state review corrected a self-reported code, the same dollars moved into the District's regular line, and the District's audit reports the fall without the cause.
- The cost base more than doubled in one year. $52.3M of operating expenses in 2022, $120.2M in 2023.
- The operating loss is five times what it was before the Summit. −$14.1M in 2019. −$71.0M in 2025.
Built by Ivan Schneider. The reporting on the convention center is at dispatch.conventioncityseattle.com; the front door is conventioncityseattle.com.