Another Good Editorial on RenSquare - Maggie, put up or shut up
The D&C followed up on their last editorial and writes a scathing piece today. (my emphasis)
Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks must not allow today’s overdue meeting of Renaissance Square stakeholders to end without providing the public with vital details about the project’s future.
[snip]
Take concern about costs. While Brooks has insisted she won’t spend a dime over the $230 million that was the estimated cost in 2004, she still needs to update the price tag.
What are her contingency plans? Maybe it’s time to move on without the performing arts center. After all, the MCC campus, state-funded four years ago, could have been finished by now.
And what about the $30 million or so needed in private contributions for the performing arts center? It’s time for Brooks to produce donors. Remember, more than $175 million in taxpayer funds has already been committed to the project.
And where’s the estimated $900,000 a year in operating costs going to come from? And how reliable is that estimate anyway?
Or maybe it’s time to scrap the idea of a transit center altogether and use the earmarked federal transit dollars to build, say, a new Amtrak train station.
These are just some of the questions that Brooks should either start answering in public today or start making plans to pull the project’s plug.
So, Maggie Brooks - put-up or shut up and pull the plug on RenSquare. Convince the public that after literally years of planning work on RenSquare we are really no further than when we started. Convince us that, as our Monroe County taxes and fees rise, we can actually afford this. Convince us that this is simply not a landlocked version of the Fast Ferry and that we, the Public, will not be left holding the bag. We don’t need you to cry us a river and play victim to the forces that are looking for accountability. The public wants real results, real assurances, real accountability, real oversight and real transparency.
Time to look at a different teleprompter Maggie Brooks - this one, with words supplied to by the public.
Related posts:
not sure why the d and c hates rensquare so much, but whatever the motive, i am glad to see they are finally starting to demand answers from officials. if this is such a good project, where are the investors? why the secrecy? if the d and c asked these types of questions for all issues, our county might be in better shape.
Mr. O’Brien: as I read that snippet above from the D&C editorial board, its not that they hate the Ren Square project, they hate the Ren Square process.
i see what you mean. but they srutinize this more than big projects in the past. i was wondering if it was because they don’t like the project or maybe they feel burned for not paying closer attention in the past.
I’ll go on record as saying I hate this project. Combining a bus depot , satellite college and downsized performing arts center using huge amouts of public dollars is not a good idea.
That is a very good question about why this project gets closer scrutiny than other projects. I don’t know, as I can’t speak for the D&C editorial board, but nevertheless I will throw out a guess based upon zero evidence: this project has been going on for four years or so with almost zero progress, and on top of that the D&C has begun realizing the shenanigans of the Rethuglicans who run our county government.
Does anyone have more specific information about why Ren Square gets more scrutiny than the Fast Ferry or Paetec Park or High Falls?
I expect that the quarter billion dollar pricetag naturally leads to more scrutiny. It must be about triple the amount of all three of those previous projects combined.
What I don’t understand the need to combine MCC, Bus, and Theatre into one humongous project. It seems to me we should let the projects each stand on their own merit and ability to get public / private financing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s a lot of people that ride the bus to RBTL shows.
[...] on this front, but more recently, even the milquetoasts at the D&C editorial board have taken a tough stance on the [...]
[...] written, numerous times about the lack of transparency and oversight-here and here and here (the list goes [...]