The New York Times recently published an article about big museum building projects that’s a must-read for all Peoria residents, leaders, and voters. The good news is, we haven’t actually built anything yet here in Peoria, so we still have time to correct our mistakes.

Within months of its opening in 1997, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had given the language a new term and the world a new way of looking at culture. The “Bilbao effect,” many came to believe, was the answer to what ailed cities everywhere — it was a way to lure tourists and economic development — and a potential boon to cultural institutions.

Municipal governments and arts groups were soon pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into larger, flashier exhibition spaces and performance halls.

Now the economic downturn has reined in a lot of these big dreams and has also led to questions about whether ambitious building projects from Buffalo to Berkeley ever made sense to begin with. Some are arguing that arts administrators and their patrons succumbed to an irrational exuberance that rivaled the stock market’s in the boom years. […]

“Museums, when they saw how much money other museums were raising, said, ‘Oh, we can’t miss out on this,’ ” said Terry Riley, a former head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design, who helped oversee that museum’s renovation by Yoshio Taniguchi. In many cases, he added, “it’s almost as though money drove the decision.”

Later in the article, this observation is made by Adrian Ellis, introduced as “executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the founder of AEA Consulting”:

“Cultural buildings became the way in which cities articulate their identity and vitality — they were driven not by the artistic community but by a civic agenda,” he said. Now the economy is pushing organizations into “deep reflection about what their purpose is and how best to realize it,” he said — reflection that can lead back to an arts-focused agenda, and to a renewed concern about “protecting their capacity to take artistic risks.”

“When you overexpand, you limit your ability to take those risks,” Mr. Ellis said. “Although expansion is usually seen as a sign of health, it is not always a sign of vitality.”

It’s time for the city, county, and arts community to wake up, abandon their “irrational exuberance,” and start working on a realistic, sustainable plan either to expand their current operation at Lakeview, or to build/renovate a smaller space downtown that is within their means. It’s painfully obvious that the stalled project they’ve been trying to build for the past five years is decided unrealistic.