Memorial Stadium Consulting Contract is a Waste of Money

On Tuesday, the JG ran an editorial stating that the city, county and IPFW hired a consulting firm to try and figure out what to do w/ Memorial Stadium in the event that another stadium was built downtown. This was also reported a while back as the Harrison Square discussion was only beginning.

It's important to note the difference between these two stories. The original states that the study is to determine the costs for the stadium to be used as a college baseball facility - essentially to determine if IPFW could use the stadium:

IPFW has not said how much it is willing to pay to lease the stadium. Brown questioned Branson on Friday about where the university would find the money to pay for the space.

The latest story says that IPFW cannot pay for it:

He said IPFW would love to use the stadium, but the university plays only about 20 baseball games a year and will not be able to handle the operational costs on its own, which he estimated at $250,000 to $350,000 annually to maintain the stadium.

Of course, the BaseballPLUS committee already looked at this and said it would have no use. But that didn't stop the city and county from wasting more money by funding a study that I can only accurately describe as a complete waste of time.

Everybody w/ half a brain knows that this city can not support TWO baseball stadiums. We don't need to pay $60K to some out-of-town consultant to state the obvious. The Hardball Capital group understands that they will have a challenge finding uses for the stadium on non-game nights. There is absolutely no possible way that Memorial Stadium will be able to compete.

If the city continues to waste money on silly studies such as this can we really trust them to be fiscally responsible with a project like Harrison Square? And even if we are going to waste money on these types of studies why don't we choose to fund local consultants? City and county leaders continuously discuss economic development but when the rubber meets the road they come up short. Spend our money LOCALLY to create work for the local taxpayers. It's a simple concept...