Top ten local wish list for 2007

By John Temple Ligon

Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

1. Electricity

The largest utility in America is Charlotte-based Duke Energy. Duke recently spun off its gas operations into a whole separate company, as it did with its real estate arm, Crescent. Duke is a pure play in electricity. Scana's customer base is both contiguous and much smaller. The federal law prohibiting a contiguous expansion was lifted last year. The likelihood of a move by Duke to merge with Scana's electric power business is high.

2. Transit

A committee to study transit in the Midlands just formed. Elected officials are not wanted on the committee. Elected officials cut the dumb deal with Scana. Elected officials got us to where we are today. By November 2008 we have to hold a referendum to decide how to fund transit or we run out of money and consequently out of transit.

3. Hydrogen

Kudos to our community for rapidly moving forward on hydrogen power research development, but we need to move further forward faster. In 2007, we should see our first hydrogen service station because we should see our first hydrogen-powered automobile - at least, both should be announced.

4. Opera house

Newberry's downtown is going great guns thanks to a small, undistinguished opera house. Columbia once had an opera house on the corner at Gervais and Main. It was torn down for a hotel deal. The hotel failed after forty years and was torn down, too. If an opera house could locate on the west side of Main Street in the empty middle of the block between Lady and Gervais, it could back up to an existing 1,000-car garage unused at night. Still leaving plenty of room to develop a high-rise on the corner at Gervais and Main, the low-rise opera house roof would guarantee views for the tall buildings on either side. With 50,000 people within a reasonable walking distance, the opera house works beautifully as a meeting hall, a presentation hall, a conference hall, all to augment the convention center three blocks away. Seating capacity? Fifteen-hundred ought to do it. Money? Fifty million dollars ought to do it.

5. Senate Street

Designate Senate Street for statues of our heroes, people of substance in the sciences and the arts who never held elected office. Jasper Johns, the world's most successful and expensive living painter, is a South Carolinian and a good start. John Locke, who co-authored the proposed Carolina Constitution for our 1670 beginning, would fit fine on the median in front of the new law school between Bull and Pickens. The recently departed James Brown makes the grade, as does novelist Julia Peterkin from Ft. Motte, winner of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize. Althea Gibson, born in South Carolina, won enough tennis matches around the world in the 1950s to qualify. Joe Frazier won enough boxing matches. Robert Mills won enough architectural commissions nationwide. And so it should go.

6. Halloween

On a slow rebound from a puritanical policeman's preference for Bedford Falls, Halloween should rapidly return to its heyday in Five Points. People came from all over, and all over the people had a ball, albeit a frightening time for the puritans. The carnival atmosphere, obviously, is expected to erupt with some wrong-doing, but that's a matter for management on a par with how it's done in Rio, New Orleans, Venice, Nassau, Galveston, Pamplona, and everywhere else people try to have a good time. If you don't want to have a good time, stay away.

7. Second convention center hotel

The Hilton Hotel under construction on Senate Street should serve the convention center so well a second hotel will soon be in demand. Where to put it? Who controls the deal? How can we avoid the city-developed, city-financed fiasco that almost happened, that almost cost us Columbians millions in losses?

8. Taxis

Columbia's taxi fleet is under-populated because the drivers are under-paid. Take the regulatory authority away from the elected officials who don't understand the cab business any better than they know adequate transit and put it into a commission. The same group looking into transit should work fine.

9. Magnet school for the arts

The Governor's School for the Arts in Greenville is an amazing place, but what is more amazing is the school district there pushed for their own magnet school for the arts. Downtown Columbia, somewhere close to the Columbia Museum of Art and the Koger Center, which puts it tight with USC, is an ideal setting for a Richland 1 magnet high school for the arts.

10. Free bus passes for the kids

Issue a rider's license. The highway department can do it. Every kid enrolled in a Midlands school gets a rider's license to go anywhere at any time. Every school, then, is available to every student, so when choice kicks in, it's fair. By the way, taking advantage of the sunk costs of an existing transit system, no matter how inadequate, saves money for the school bus system.