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Somewhere in this country right now, a town manager is staring at a budget spreadsheet and trying to calculate whether the fireworks show is worth it. Not the cost of the shells — that’s the easy part. The hard calculation involves overtime for every department, portable toilet rental contracts, the road resurfacing that keeps getting delayed, and the informal cost of the dozen longtime residents who’ve told her personally that they’re thinking about selling.
Fireworks tourism is one of the most studied and least understood economic phenomena in American small-town life. Every summer, hundreds of small municipalities put on shows that function less as community celebrations and more as large-scale visitor attraction events, with all the complications that implies…