Tara Servatius this week recaptures all the happy-talk that surrounded the concept of the Whitewater Center over five years ago. She names names of those who committed local government to spend $12m. on the venture heedless of dubious need and even more dubious financials.
But I would add a couple more names to Tara’s six-pack of infamy, to wit:
- Pat Rodgers — Rodgers Builders, which came straight off of turning the $25m. ImaginOn concept into a $52m. ImaginOn reality was handed the Log Flume ride project and proceeded to over-shoot the construction budget by 52 percent. Rodgers is current charging CMS crazy money — as in $500K for a concession stand — to build the new Cornelius high school. Who says it does pay to part of the Uptown elite?
- Ron Kimble — City staffer who mistakenly thought the city had to the right to route Center traffic past Hawfield Rd. Kimble evidently confused a utility easement with an access easement, a firing offense for any civil engineer out in the real world. Residents along Hawfield threw up a gate and extorted $240K in road improvements from the city, money that could have been spent to fill potholes elsewhere in the city. As near as I can tell, this expenditure of public funds over and above what was required by the financing guarantee agreement has totally disappeared from calculations of the public coast of the Log Flume Ride. Neat.
And there is no obvious way for the city and county to extract themselves from this mess. County Park & Rec could no more directly run the venue than it could run Carowinds. Unless the banks sell it off to a for-profit operator who has incentive to run a lean operation, we are looking at perpetual public subsidy. And that assumes there is such a thing as a potential for-profit operator of a giant log flume ride.
