SHOW ME CENTER HERE LIVES UP TO OBLIGATIONS

The Show Me Center remains a showplace for this city. Reports of declining attendance at the center during the last year should not be viewed as a reversal. The facility is living up to its obligation to serve Southeast Missouri State University and the citizens of Cape Girardeau, and it is doing so in grand fashion.

The case has been made before but is worth a retelling. Built by the largess of Missouri and local taxpayers and opened in 1987, the Show Me Center has become a magnet for the community. Just as it draws events that were previously without a suitable local venue, the campus facility attracts people from outside the community who avail themselves not only of the center's entertainment but of restaurants, retail stores and other business establishments. It is, in short, an economic blessing.

List the advantages. It enhances the community's quality of life through the staging of top-notch entertainment, cultural, academic and sporting events here. It raises the community's visibility; suddenly Cape Girardeau is on the tour itinerary of diverse acts like Randy Travis, the St. Louis Symphony and the Ringling Brothers circus, not to mention the facility hosting a nationally televised women's basketball championship game. It also opens the door of opportunity: Southeast's move to NCAA Division I athletics, with its associated benefits in student recruitment and higher visibility, would not have been possible without the Show Me Center's success.

Still, the numbers are instructive. The Show Me Center has drawn as many as 398,568 people in a fiscal year; that was in 1989-90. In the 1990-91 fiscal period, the attendance at the center was 329,826. The decline should not be ignored, nor should it be exaggerated. Economic pressures weigh on these matters at several levels. At the local level, entertainment dollars have been stretched thinner and people might not attend as many events as they would in more prosperous times. At the national level, financial stress means fewer acts take to the road, reducing the talent pool for promoters looking to book entertainment here.

In contrast to the attendance decline, the building is being used more than ever ... but for smaller events. There were 456 events at the center from July 1990 to June 1991, more than double the number of four years before. The Show Me Center is an ideal structure for gatherings of various sizes, yet it was not financed and built with the idea of becoming an oversized meeting facility; its planners envisioned events of grander dimensions, and the current managers have not lost sight of that.

We might reduce this to a "Field of Dreams" argument: "If you build it, they will come." The Show Me Center was built and more than 1.4 million people have come in four years. Those are numbers we can applaud.