Here’s a question for Mayor Vision: How did he get to Fair Park for last week’s Texas-OU announcement? He didn’t need to take a signature bridge.
Nothing illustrates the short-sightedness that dominates the thinking of those who run the city better than Fair Park. They whine and bellyache about the need to build things — signature bridges, convention center hotels, toll roads in river levees. That we already have something that exists nowhere else in the world is something they seem to be happy to ignore.
Unless, of course, it’s budget cutting time, when they always notice Fair Park. It has lost 12 percent of its funding since the 2007-08 budget, though we’ve managed to build the bridge and the convention center hotel despite the budget crisis.
I’ve always wondered why the bosses downtown dislike Fair Park so much. Is it because it’s not in a “convenient” part of town? Is it because it’s not new, and the only way to have a world-class city is to have lots of new things? Call me a cynic, but I’ve always suspected that Fair Park gets short shrift because it doesn’t lend itself to the sort of real estate development that motivates the people who run the city. You can’t tear it down to build something new.