The City of Omaha is putting business and money ahead of preserving its history.

The city wants to buy three historical buildings on Douglas Street and give them to the Omaha Prerforming Arts Center. According to a news release from the mayor, it would be $10 million to purchase the three buildings. The Omaha Performing Arts Center originally stated that it would tear down at least two of these buildings and make a parking lot. It’s overall goal is to expand the Holland Center and create a parking lot with extra space.

The three buildings that are part of this deal are Happy Hallow Coffee Shop, the Alvine Engineering Building and the Christian Specht building, according to the Omaha World-Herald. A big problem with this purchase is that these buildings are more than a hundred years old. In fact, the Christian Specht building is a registered historical landmark.

In order to make space for Omaha Performing Arts’s plans, it would require tearing down all three buildings. City Council would be required to remove the buildings from the list of historical landmarks. It is appalling that the city would think to remove the historical landmark title from any building that has already been registered.

The reason behind this is money. HDR, Inc.; an architecture, engineering and consulting firm. HDR wants to build its new headquarters, downtown and hopes to create more jobs by making this move, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

The area HDR hopes to acquire belongs to the Omaha Performing Arts Center and is currently used as a parking area. The city hopes by purchasing the three historical buildings and giving them to the Omaha Performing Arts that they will, in turn, hand the current parking area to HDR to build their new headquarters. Theoretically, they hope it will be an even exchange of land.

A year or two ago this option would have seemed impossible, yet with ConAgra Foods moving its headquarters out of Omaha, the city is desperate to keep big business here even if it means losing history in the process.The City of Omaha made a similar deal for ConAgra to move its headquarters downtown.

According to the Associated Press, two-dozen warehouses that made up Jobbers Canyon were torn down for ConAgra’s headquarters. This should be a lesson to Omaha on how fast businesses can change their mind. We can never get those buildings and history back now that they have been torn down. This may serve as a possible omen with the current plans and whether we can truly believe that big buisness is worth sacrificing historical landmarks in the grand scheme of things.

The only difference this time is that the city is claiming that they will make an effort to save the Christian Specht building. According to the Omaha World-Herald, Omaha Performing Arts may keep the Christian Specht building; however, if one looks at the lineup of the buildings it would seem impossible to do so because it is the building is closest to the Holland Center.

WOWT reported that a petition has been started to save the buildings. The public is not entirely supportive of the city council’s decision. With a massive purchase affecting taxpayers, public opinion will matter.

There are only 44 registered building left on the Nebraska National Register for Douglas County, which includes the Omaha area. The city must preserve these few gems. Different organizations and citizens are trying to protect them against the threat of big business. City council members cannot assume that citizens will support tearing down buildings for other businesses.

Omaha is desperate to keep big business in the city, (especially in downtown), despite not all of the public supporting it. As shown in the past, decisions were made with dollar signs in the city council’s eyes, suggesting preservation of the city is no longer as important to council members as they claimed it to be.