It’s been more than a week since Mayor Paul TenHaken announced his “2050 Vision,” a two-step plan to put a brand new convention center in downtown Sioux Falls and turn the city’s aging convention center into indoor recreation space.
But let’s get one thing perfectly clear: Everything about this project is in the earliest possible stages. It’s all speculation at this point.
TenHaken and other high-level members with the project have been open about that fact, to their credit. The phrase that keeps going around is that “the cake is not baked,” which somewhat understates where the city is in this process.
Of course, the cake is not baked. We haven’t made the batter. We don’t have the ingredients. Where we are, roughly, is that we’ve looked up a recipe online and thought about heading to the grocery store sometime next week.
Here’s a short list of the things we don’t yet know about this project:
Who is going to buy the land? How much is the project going to cost? How large should the new convention center be? How long will building it take? Will we have any hotels attached to the convention center? How many rooms will those hotels have? Will there be some sort of a public vote regarding the project?