Boondoggle averted?

A horrible recession is no time for reckless spending. It's sound advice for common citizens and businesses, but especially wise for governments entrusted with our tax dollars.

The city of Las Vegas finally appears to get it.

After irresponsibly charging ahead with plans for a brand-new, $267 million City Hall through a risky lease-purchase, land-swap arrangement, Mayor Oscar Goodman is gently pumping the brakes. On Thursday, he announced that the building might not be such a great idea after all.

It was a surprising twist, considering Mr. Goodman's relentless cheerleading for the project over the past eight months. Even though the city's tax revenues are in decline, its labor costs are climbing at unsustainable rates and the current City Hall will be perfectly adequate for decades to come, the mayor envisioned a sparkling new campus as a means of jump-starting downtown redevelopment.

He consistently assured the media and taxpayers that the city wouldn't have a problem coming up with annual lease payments to repay the investors who would fund construction. And he and the rest of the City Council grossly overstepped their authority when they quashed a referendum on whether the project should continue.

But terrible economic news piled on top of bad finally has the mayor rethinking the project.

"I've asked the city manager to have a manager's review concerning the feasibility of City Hall," Mr. Goodman said. "Everything's changed. It's a new world."

Mr. Goodman said tight credit markets might make the project unaffordable, and "the bond market is brutal."

The City Council is expected to re-examine the project at its July 1 meeting. We hope the council takes the mayor's newfound caution one step further and kills the project altogether.

Using redevelopment dreams to justify moving City Hall a couple of blocks while leaving taxpayers exposed to the possibility of huge liabilities, in this economy, is insane. Rosy predictions from government -- whether they involve ridership projections on mass transit, visitor counts at a publicly subsidized museum or construction budgets for government projects -- never come true. This project has had "boondoggle" written all over it since the day it was thought up.

This valley has seen too many public works disasters over the years, the Regional Justice Center tops among them. We don't need another one.