Your Opinion: Wasteful city spending on poor ideas

Dear Editor:

Bad ideas just continue to circle in the toilet bowl of suggestions on how to spend our public money and never seem to get flushed or go away.

We just paid several million dollars of parks sales tax plus a potential $1.5 million loan of other city general funds for a recreation center at Lincoln. While we were told this would serve as a municipal athletic facility, it will barely be available for public use, if at all. This seems like a bad use of funds by the Parks Commission and Jefferson City.

Now our mayor and some council persons have dreams of resurrecting the idea of a conference, convention, civic, events, or expo center. No matter the name; it is a bad use of our tax dollars. Other cities have built such facilities and found they sit idle while being a financial drain to maintain. They also take business away from existing private sector facilities. We have a hotel occupancy tax for tourism with $2.8 million available. We should use these funds to promote tourism but not waste the tax dollars on this project.

There is the recurring push to use several hundred thousand dollars of capital improvements sales tax funds to help finance the building of a "bridge to nowhere" (Adrian's Island). We already have river access via the walk bridge over the river, Katy Trail, and Noren Access. Do we really need more?

We could have put the parks sales tax funds from the Lincoln facility, the tourism tax money, the city loan and funds for Adrian's Island together and built a city-owned multipurpose facility. The facility would have been available full time to all residents. Instead we have limited use of the Lincoln facility and a bunch of bad ideas on how to spend more money.

In August, we will be asked to renew the city capital improvement sales tax. I contend we need more prudence in expenditure of our tax dollars. We should repurpose these funds to maintain our streets, existing facilities and equipment instead of wasting funds on new and needless projects. If you agree, tell our mayor and City Council representatives.

If wasteful spending and bad ideas continue to be put forth for use of the capital improvements sales tax funds, vote no on the sales tax renewal in August.