Fort Osage: Impenetrable to the Last

By DAVID MARTIN

First the building was delayed. Now the audit is, too.

The Fort Osage Education Center opened late and over budget. The sleek facility, a companion to the reconstructed garrison in Sibley, cost almost $5 million more than expected and missed the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s exploration of these parts by three years. (Made a brigadier general upon his return from the expedition, Clark directed the establishment of the original Fort Osage.)

The Kansas City Star reported on the delays and cost overruns in April. Jackson County leaders pinned the fiasco on former Executive Katheryn Shields and ordered an audit to explain how a $3.6 million project became an $8.4 million project.

County Auditor Gary Panethiere told me in early August that his office should have the audit completed “in about a month.”

September came and went. In October, Panethiere said that work on the audit continued, and he’d get me a copy as soon as it was finished.

Alas, it’s December, my hands are still empty, and Panethiere has stopped returning messages.

The audit, whenever it materializes, may describe how county officials did not conduct a meaningful feasibility study when they decided to build the education center in 2002. Great care was put into the design and construction of an environmentally friendly building. But poor fund-raising efforts, a remote location and an unclear purpose sealed a disappointing fate. County officials were calling the education center a boondoggle before it even opened.

It’s unlikely that on-time delivery of the facility would have helped. The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial failed to produce the tourism that many communities along the route had hoped for. “It’s the great Lewis and Clark letdown,” a knickknack wholesaler in Lewistown, Idaho, told The Wall Street Journal last year.