To any of you who missed it, a notable thing happened Sept. 26 when the Metro Market opened its doors.

There was, of course, the palpable excitement of having a new place to go, and the recently renovated building was stuffed full of tasty items, including handmade cannolis, elk steaks (I bought four), award-winning barbecue and Chicago-style Vienna Beef hot dogs.

The market began to great fanfare that Friday morning (there was an insiders’ party Thursday night), and by noon on Saturday, the 80-car parking lot was packed and one of Metro Market’s owners was spending his time directing traffic up and down the streets of Sherman Hill.

There was energy and it was a good place to be. What was exciting to me was that the market opened at all – and that it did so financed entirely with private money. It is striking how different that experience is from the one that has (not) been unfolding downtown.

About 22 months ago, I stood on the corner of Fourth Street and Court Avenue on the site of what was supposed to have been a blockbuster entertainment center, complete with a multiscreen movie theater, a bookstore and lots of other businesses. It was very cold that day and the wind was sharp.

Mayor Preston Daniels and other city planners got in front of The Des Moines’ local press and told us that plans for the entertainment center had been scrapped. In its place, they would strive for an indoor year-round market. The Downtown Community Alliance, a private non-profit organization that works to revitalize downtown Des Moines, would spearhead those efforts.

In the seasons that followed, government leaders spent a lot of time conducting “public feasibility studies,” gathering focus groups and “soliciting public input” over the best way to approach a market.

Meantime, Metro Market entrepreneurs Michael Kiernan and David Schlarmann were busy drumming up $380,000 from investors, renovating their building and lining up vendors.

Today, the corner of Fourth Street and Court Avenue looks a lot like it did on that January afternoon: like a gravel parking lot that could stand some grading. And out in Sherman Hill, you can walk into the Metro Market and buy what they have to sell.

This isn’t to say that our elected officials aren’t doing their jobs very well. Chris Greenfield, the Community Alliance’s president, says what is currently planned for a downtown market differs from what the Metro Market offers and that his group has been working to set up relationships with farmers and other vendors and as it tries to get a deal sewn up.

I would argue that this is an example of how government isn’t set up very well to be in the business of starting new businesses.

The government is supposed to be a good steward of our collective resources (taxes). It can’t afford to lose that money in some risky scheme. In the effort to do a good job, elected officials go overboard making sure the money is well-spent. This is a good reaction but a bad process. It causes a sort of expensive paralysis.

After all, while the city was spending money trying to decide how it could get a market to town, the Metro Market got its financing (at no cost to the general public) and has begun injecting dollars back into the economy in the form of taxes and employment.

Rather than do the jobs that entrepreneurs should be doing, city leaders ought to think about ways they can remove barriers for businesses, perhaps by requiring fewer permits and less paperwork or by streamlining the decision-making process.