Build it and they will come.
Meh. Come? Where? This is an area where the #1 place locals take tourists is Wegmans' Grocery Store. I kid you not. This is not a place people go to, and this is not a place people come back to. This is a place where people aren't going anywhere in a hurry; those who do have left for good.
Rochester has nothing to offer tourists. Not a bad place to live, but nothing notable to visit.
Buffalo is, well ... it pretty much just isn't. Best it has is nearby Niagara Falls, which is fascinating for about 10 minutes.
Batavia and the adjoining intermediary region is, as noted above, a place of more cows than people. People live there because they started there and are not inclined to go anywhere else.
If the former, not likely. If the latter, absolutely.
“Build it and they will come.”
My reaction exactly. This is the inherent problem with tax-financed “investments.” Politicians are quite skilled at over-promising and under-delivering—not because they are bad people (though some surely are), but mostly because of the incentives built into the system. Unlike entrepreneurs, who are either putting at risk their own personal capital or trying to convince someone to VOLUNTARILY invest capital, politicians are using taxes that are forcibly extracted from taxpayers. Americans especially don’t particularly like paying taxes, so politicians have every incentive to underestimate the amount of taxes required for a project and/or to bury the true cost in a complex system of cross-subsidies (e.g., Obamacare personified).
Conversely, politicians want to get re-elected, so they always are prone to exaggerate the future benefits of whatever they’re spending the public’s money to provide. Think about the contrast about all of Obama’s absurd promises about what he would do and how responsibly he would spend our money (”I’ll go line-by-line through the federal budget to cut out programs that don’t work”) versus how things turned out in real life after he was elected.