COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY’D THEY LET THE ASTRODOME ROT? “. . . It doesn’t have to just sit there and waste our tax dollars, but unfortunately taxpayers are letting that happen by not pressuring the county to take immediate steps towards making it useful. Instead of doing nothing while waiting on what it will be in its grand ‘next life’ they should be getting it up to code, bit by bit, step by step so that it can be used, or at least parts of it be used – like maybe just the field – to start bringing in revenue. Before the doors closed permanently, a family paid around $18,000 to rent the field for a bar mitzvah. Don’t know how much director/producer John Lee Hancock paid to lease it for his movie Friday Night Lights (Sport & Convention Corp. wouldn’t tell me) but it wasn’t chickenfeed. If the county had been doing stuff like this all along the building would still be inhabitable and probably be at least paying for itself. It certainly would be a lot more attractive to potential investors. Taxpayers need to be pro-active and tell their commissioners to start fixing it up NOW and not wait another month or six months (at $300,000-400,000 a month) or a year! They should put that money to work and not down the drain. Taxpayers should show up at Commissioners Court and insist that the process to get the building operational, even in some small way, should start NOW.” [Cynthia Neely, commenting on How To Demolish the Astrodome: No Dynamite, Please]