Originally conceived two years ago, the idea for the Landmark Challenge took a drastic change after the events of September 11. Instead of just being a way to beautify the rather unattractive exterior of the Ames Power Plant, it became an avenue to distinguish Ames from all of the other small towns in the world. It became a challenge to make Ames a”landmark,” hence the name.

Unfortunately, something that started out with a goal of some use has finished as a huge waste of money that quite possibly will not benefit Ames in any way.

Last week the city council approved a design known as “The Ring” as the winner of the competition. The winners, from Chicago, received a generous award of $10,000 from Ames Electric Services.

The other four finalists in the competition were awarded $1,000 each. Of those four, only one lives in Ames — Arpan Bakshi, a senior in architecture.

At the council meeting, it was made very clear that although “The Ring” was approved as the winner as recommended by a separate committee, the city had no intention at this time of implementing “The Ring” or any of the other designs.

It has even been questioned whether the winning design is environmentally safe. Council and community members expressed concern about the possibility of light pollution caused by the red ring the design calls for.

Money, as always, is the central issue. It costs money to begin projects, and with budget cuts and an economic downturn, funding is not readily available.

Interestingly enough, $14,000 was available to provide to the top finalists. Although it’s a piddly amount of money in terms of city use, a number of other projects could have better utilized the money provided. Even Iowa State could have used the money in their continuous battle with reduced funding. Although it would not likely make much of a dent in the economic woes of the university, it would still be $14,000 more that they did not have to cut from another project.

Also, this money won’t go back to the Ames community. Four out of the five finalists are from other parts of the country, and even world, which means $13,000 of the reward money is not going to benefit our economy. If the competition had been local, a larger portion of the award would have been spent in Ames. Now, Ames businesses lose out because most of the money will flow into Chicago’s economy.

The council now has in their possession roughly 115 different designs from all the participants and may well combine elements of the different ideas, or worse yet, use none of them because they don’t fit in with the community. If this is the case, the whole competition was a waste of two years and $14,000.

Talk, in this case, has not been cheap.

Editorial Board: Nicole Paseka, Amy Schierbrock, Alicia Ebaugh, Ayrel Clark, Lucas Grundmeier