From Kurt Zwanzig
Columbus
When the city of Columbus decided to compete in the retail marketplace by becoming both the developer and landlord of NexusPark, it told us that “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats.”
That meant NexusPark would generate enough visitors to benefit three groups:
1. The merchants currently inside NexusPark,
2. The merchants the city hopes will someday fill the large swaths of vacant retail space within NexusPark, and
3. All the other long-established Columbus businesses outside NexusPark.
This was sold with a simple pitch: There would be so many visitors from outside the community that customers would overflow out into Columbus. There was no mention it might take years.
Now, Columbus Mayor Mary Ferdon is saying it will take years.
So we ask, if city officials knew it would take years, why were merchants recruited into NexusPark without absolute certainty their customers would be there on day one? Did city officials knowingly expose these vulnerable businesses — and the people who own and work in them — to a high likelihood of failure? Do city officials understand retail and restaurants need steady customers from day one?
Or does the city simply assume these NexusPark merchants “would find their own way” and “borrow” customers from existing Columbus businesses? These NexusPark merchants never had a fair chance.
NexusPark and its earliest tenants were doomed from the day the project was conceived — because when it comes to spending taxpayer money, politicians aren’t very good with calculators. But NexusPark’s numbers don’t lie. From parking and access conflicts to shared facilities that limit event scheduling, those constraints have always made the city’s promise of “A Rising Tide” mathematically impossible.
Even if NexusPark were to become fully functional, it could never make good on “Lifting All Boats.” Failure is baked into the model. That makes NexusPark the retail equivalent of a bridge to nowhere. And like all such projects, government’s temptation is to keep spending other people’s money, moving the goalposts for “success,” and layering on costly fixes for problems obvious from the beginning.
In the meantime, all three groups are harmed — current NexusPark tenants, future NexusPark tenants, and existing community businesses absorbing the consequences. This is about more than one development project. It’s about a local government that will stop at nothing — including experimenting with small businesses and the livelihoods of the people who own and work in them — to impose its vision of Columbus.
Our leaders believe they know better than the free market and refuse to let the city evolve naturally. They want control so badly they’ll risk not just taxpayer dollars but livelihoods.
The questions now: Will Columbus call this a sunk cost today — not years from now after millions more taxpayer dollars are spent to prop up a flawed model? Will our leaders stop treating businesses like expendable toys in their anti–free-market experiments? Or will they keep spending until the next costly cleanup is inevitable?
