Convincing city voters to approve a sales tax increase to build a $62 million downtown event center complex is a major challenge on cost alone. That’s a lot of money for what exactly?

The skeptics have already poisoned the well to the best of their ability, framing this as some sort of corporate welfare intended to benefit a minor league hockey team at the expense of building a recreation center. This is hardly the case, but it makes it doubly challenging for supporters to make a persuasive argument.

Not only do they have to explain the benefits of the project – the new jobs, the economic stimulus, the cultural enrichment and the ability to retain a millennial workforce – they have to change people’s minds about the misconceptions that have taken root – namely, that this is a boondoggle in the making.

That’s a heavy lift for two reasons. First, is Grand Junction’s historical resistance to both change and tax hikes. Sentinel columnist Robin Brown recently made waves by characterizing the community as suffering from low self-esteem. But she wasn’t the first observer to make this point. “Our self-sabotaging behavior built on decades of pessimism will continue to hold us back,” Sentinel columnist David Goe wrote in May of last year.