Today’s Dayton Daily News had two related articles on the front-page today-

“Theme Park on Aviation Centerpiece of Area Plan” and “Fountain Blasts into Courtroom.”

Both should go in the feeble ideas category.

If there is one thing that “inventing flight” should have proved back in 2003- it’s that marveling about the Wright brothers is only something about .00001 of the population cares about- unfortunately, they are amount to a very squeaky wheel in Dayton and get far more face time than they deserve.

People barely notice when a Space Shuttle launches these days- this isn’t 1969 when the world stopped to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. This idea needs to go away fast- before we have another expensive fiasco on our hands.

Expensive fiasco is what the RiverScape fountains have become. Besides the insanity of throwing quality well water in the air in huge quantities- which then mists and coats everything with lime, the fountains don’t fire often enough to be any kind of attraction at all. If we had spent the fountain money on a white water park- we would have had people flocking down to INTERACT with the river- instead of be irritated by it.

The lawsuit against the fountain designer, EAW, is just another example of why we need to institute IQ tests for our local elected leaders. I think I was one of the few dissenters on this plan- the other was the now exiled, Leigh Allan of the Dayton Daily News.

Aviation tourism as an economic development tool is a long shot gamble. We’ve had the Air Force Museum here and failed to support it for years- if we are dead set on doing something along the lines of an Aviation theme park- it better be right on the grounds of the museum.