Feedback Wanted About The Stories Project In Coralville

From the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

It will take a "patchwork of financing" to pull off a proposed $90 million Stories Project center celebrating literacy and great authors at a spot along Interstate 80 for which Coralville officials have high hopes, organizers said here Friday.

How they'll raise that money will be determined this summer and will likely include a mix of government grants and private donations from national and corporate sources, Iowa City/Coralville Convention and Visitors Bureau President Josh Schamberger said.

But first, organizers want to know what the public thinks of the idea. "We're just really anxious to hear what the community's review is of the plan," Shamberger said.

$90 million is a ridiculously insane amount of money for this project. Especially since you expect Federal and State taxpayers to fork over most of the money.

Your consultants are liars if they believe that 500,000 people will annually visit this place. If it were open every day of the year, you'd need 1370 paying customers per day to make your projected attendance. That includes winter. $7 million a year to run the place would mean that you'd have to charge $14 a head for each of those 500,000 people.

More from the Gazette's story:

The University of Iowa, which has been working to build its reputation as "The Writing University", has also participated in the planning. "Partnership and collaboration are the reasons this is going to happen," UI President Sally Mason told the crowd of about 150...

Um, I'm sorry.... but who in the literary community doesn't think the University of Iowa is THE writing university for graduate work?

Seriously.

This is the Iowa Writers' Workshop entry in Wikipedia, in case anybody ever doubted the University of Iowa's reputation:

The program began in 1936, with the gathering together of poets and fiction writers under the direction of Wilbur Schramm. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts in English; Iowa was the first program in the country to offer this degree...

...Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni have won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes (most recently Marilynne Robinson in fiction in 2005, and Michael Cunningham in fiction and Mark Strand in poetry, both in 1999), as well as numerous National Book Awards and other major literary honors. Four recent U.S. Poets Laureate have been graduates of the Workshop. In 2003, the Workshop received a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was the first Medal awarded to a university, and only the second given to an institution rather than an individual."

Is Sally Mason doubting the University of Iowa's reputation as The Writing University on a graduate level?

Is that what I'm reading in the Gazette story?

And without this $90 million taxpayer-paid temple to "flying video screens" and "holographic projections" of people reading stories, somehow the University is going to become second-class???

There's more:

Shamberger told The Gazette partners will form an organization to raise funds, work with architects and get it off the ground if area people like The Stories Project. Under the best case scenario, he said, the doors could open in four or five years but it could take longer, depending on funding.

Like the Rainforest, this group is going to drag their feet for years, if not a decade. Why not? One of the people behind it is Iowa City Chamber of Commerce President Nancy Quellhorst, the same person who used to get paid to cheerlead the Earthpark Rainforest scam, and who was likely paid from the $3 million in taxpayer money that Senator Chuck Grassley allowed con artist David Oman to spend before the $50 million pork grant had gone through final approval (which failed, of course).

And I'm sure all along the media will be constantly priming the pump since Cedar Rapids Gazette CEO and President Chuck Peters is affiliated with this taxpayer scam.

This whole thing is just all wrong.

Doesn't anybody have a built-in BS detector?

Doesn't the initial cost, ongoing expenses, and attendance projections all seem more than a little excessive?

But do you think anybody in the media is going to question any of this?

Don't bet on it.