I’ve been a critic of Whitewater’s multi-million dollar, publicly-funded Innovation Center. Unsurprisingly, my invitation for a visit of that project hasn’t arrived, and so I did not participate in a recent bureaucrats’ tour of the construction site. No matter, a simple camera with a zoom lens, I was able to stand in the street and take some illustrative photos.
At first it looks impressive:
Then one sees that for all these millions, it’s not that large:
There are many public school buildings bigger.
There’s much talk about how innovative this Innovation Center is. In funding, there’s nothing innovative about using taxes and municipal debt to pay for a project. In design, talk about how green all this is would be persuasive only to someone who didn’t look a bit farther beyond the construction site:
The genuine green one sees is not at the site, but all around it, in those fields not yet torn up. I’d support private construction, but I’d also be clear that talk about a solar-powered sign, etc., doesn’t change how disruptive a new building is to the environment. This building isn’t green and sustainable; it’s brown and wasteful.
Finally, as a aside, I would note that a bureaucrats’ tour of this site, as though it were the farthest Amazon, is silly. Those touring aren’t working people, and donning construction helmets and vests — in a place on which they’re doing no labor other than spending tax dollars — only highlights how out of place they are.