Convention Center Madness

Controversy has once again fallen on Nashville, Tennessee's planned convention center, this time over the city government using eminent domain to obtain five acres of unimproved property (at the moment a parking lot but where the current owner Tower Properties intended to construct a hotel complex of their own using private funds) for more than fourteen million dollars. I am not concerned at the particular details of this beyond my innate preference for private rather than public projects- those that make economic sense without the need for taxpayer subsidy and whose expense is borne by developers who spend their own and their investors' money on an effort they believe makes economic sense and avoid raiding the public coffers. What concerns me greatly though is the construction of a new billion or so dollar convention center at a time when convention business is drying up nationwide. Las Vegas with every conceivable tourist facility and amenity available is suffering the largest drop in convention business that city has ever experienced. Hotel and casino construction there has largely been put on hold, with massive planned projects postponed or canceled. Our President, Barack Hussein Obama has himself warned of the possibility of a double dip recession which may be overly optimistic as we may be on the precipice of economic depression if we have not already entered said catastrophic downturn. Why continue a massive unnecessary expenditure of public funds (read money confiscated from taxpayers), when there appears to be no prospect whatsoever of robust convention business in the US in the foreseeable future? Why squander so much on a project of choice when so many other needs from funding the schools to repairing potholes already and always exist? Why spend so much now for a short-term boost in construction jobs, many of which will likely be filled with undocumented workers (read criminal aliens) when all you are creating is a continued expense for the community of Nashville to maintain with property owners ultimately burdened with higher property taxes when the tourism and convention business city leaders, the politicians who are pushing the project forward, never see the hotel tax revenue they are expecting to fund the project materialize and leave the general fund exposed with bond obligations to pay for, by necessity producing a rise in every tax and fee the city can muster to pay for the mistake of building now in the teeth of what is at least a recession? Why not use prudence and delay the new convention center until the economy improves?