Your readers need to know that, if Bend’s plan to develop the Juniper Ridge university and research park unfolds along the lines the city seems to be pursuing, the taxpayers of the city and of Deschutes County will almost certainly take a huge and never-ending hit to their pocketbooks.

The city is being wooed by dreams of grandeur and encouraged by those that have short-term financial interests. Well-intentioned people with longer-term interests also support the plan, but I suspect they don’t see or are ignoring the realities. As the lead agency, the city’s mentality seems to be, ”build it and they will come,” without fully thinking out the part about who and what will come, where will they come from, how long it will take them to get here, and who’s going to pay for all of this until it nets a positive cash flow.

The Bulletin’s current series on the Juniper Ridge development appears to ignore the essential ingredients of a ”research park”: the talent (scientists and engineers) and business and financial acumen to make it operate ”in the black.” A university does not become a ”research university” unless it has a viable research program. That means extraordinary people who have extraordinary ideas, the ability to communicate these ideas and, in today’s environment, working with extraordinary equipment. Where is all of this coming from?

A successful university and research park will have the talent to innovate and invent in various areas, and undertake the basic research in those areas to show that a viable output can be commercialized or otherwise ”sold.” (An alternative to a commercial product might be long-term research projects ”sold” to the government.) Then there must be the people who can develop the ”product” and take it to market. Stanford and UC Berkeley (the only two true ”research universities” in the San Francisco Bay Area) had their own top-caliber faculty and thousands of technical and business people in the surrounding communities available to grow that economy. But where will the Juniper Ridge talent come from? How long will it take them to get here? And who’s going to pay for them until they start generating revenue for the community?

While there are a few capable individuals in our local COCC/OSU system, the depth of knowledge and research skills required of a successful researcher go beyond that of the ordinary teacher. To compare a typical college-level educator to a successful researcher is like comparing a music teacher to a concert pianist. This is not intended to denigrate our local educators; they do an important job, but most are not capable of the demands of doing salable research and turning their results into something viable.

In my opinion, the city’s current thinking will result in great expenditures of time and money and turn the attention of the city’s staff from more pressing problems (such as growth planning and infrastructure development.) The current thinking will result in a small ho-hum ”college” facility and the industrial facilities that should be grown by the creativity of the university’s faculty will instead comprise muffler shops, boat and RV storage yards, cabinet shops, trade goods suppliers and coffee kiosks. Junked vehicles and rusty industrial blight will be prevalent.

The city’s inability to successfully undertake a project such as this is evident. Look at the mess made of parking and traffic congestion in the city by not doing any forward thinking. They can’t design a bridge without overlooking fundamental issues. Look at the Highway 20/97 intersection debacle. While this isn’t entirely the city’s fault, if they can’t design a simple highway interchange or plan a local park, how can they be expected to pull a miracle like Juniper Ridge out of their hat?

Before the taxpayers allow the city to go forward with Juniper Ridge, they should be shown that the city can tie its own shoes, and they need to be convinced that Juniper Ridge isn’t going to become a financial sinkhole.