Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all.

Strathmore, a 2000-seat music hall and home-away-from-home for the Baltimore Symphony, is the latest attempt to force fine arts down the throats of a public too ignorant to know how vital PBS is to their lives. [See: Funding PBS and NPR]

The price tag? $100,000,000.00, of Montgomery County and Maryland taxpayer money.

According to the Gazette,

The North Bethesda project, now estimated to cost $96 million, will be owned by the county and operated by the nonprofit Strathmore Hall Foundation. It has run $9.6 million over budget due to unexpected building costs.

I'm fairly confident that my property tax money will be falling somewhere in the "unexpected building costs" category.

According to WTOP:

The $100 million center is set to open Feb. 5 with a concert by the BSO with the famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The grand opening comes nearly four years after construction began, a process that was nearly derailed by ballooning costs and funding shortfalls. The center gives the BSO a chance to expand its audience and fund-raising power beyond the Baltimore region.

Oh, well, as long as Yo-Yo Ma approves.

And it gives the nearly 1 million people of rapidly growing Montgomery access to arts once only available after a long drive into downtown Washington.

From the Strathmore, one can be in downtown Washington in twenty minutes by car, and thirty minutes by subway. It's only a "long drive" if you happen to be listening to NPR during an election year.

Montgomery County Executive Commissioner and socialist champion Doug Duncan says that "it's one thing to sell [an architectural] drawing, it's another thing to take people in and see it and hear the music." So after one hundred million dollars, how does this arts-brought-to-the-suburban-proletariats program sound?

Not so good, apparently:

"Sound falls short of dazzling in $100M Concert Hall"