Your Opinion: Untimely decision to conduct conference center study

Dear Editor:

You hired someone to do a market study? You mean like, to look at the Jefferson City market and determine whether or not a conference center was a good idea? Just when I thought this couldn't get any better. It's best/funniest to look back on our city government's actions step by step throughout this process.

Jefferson City government's conference center order of operations:

• Proposed a $20 million convention center.

• Passed a tax and pulled over a million dollars out of the local economy that would "completely fund it."

• Proposed upgrades to the "existing facility" and to double funding, taking another $10 million through Transformation.

• Acknowledged you were $10 million short and that there was no proposal.

• Solicited bids for a hotelier to build facility.

• Paid a consultant 30k to decide what you should be looking for in a proposal, then a month later

• Paid the same consultant 17k to conduct a market study to see if a conference center was viable.

Let me guess, you guys put all the steps to building a conference center on a dart board and then did them in the order you hit them?

You see my dear council representatives, the standard move is to go ahead and do that market/viability study before you propose and support a tax increase, before you pull a million dollars out of our economy, before you propose taking an additional $10 million out of our residents pockets through sales tax, before you solicit bids, and also before you hire someone to evaluate them.

No worries; it's a classic mistake that people who have no idea what they are doing make all the time.

In a closed session? Why now? Did the 30k consultant tell you something, did they advise this or were you just curious and looking for a place to blow 17k? What happens if the market study comes back and says that a conference center isn't viable in Jefferson City? Will you call the whole thing off if it requires perpetual operating subsidies?

Closed doors and "no comments" breed lots of questions. How about some insight for those of us who weren't behind the closed doors and who coincidentally paid for the doors we weren't behind.