There was genuine excitement four years ago when Jamestown received a $10 million state Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant.

Unfortunately, as some projects that received DRI money fizzled, so has that excitement.

Priority projects included $1 million to help redevelop the former Key Bank building at Second and Main streets. That project will not happen, though whoever purchases the building could still receive the DRI money.

And, let’s not forget the $830,000 that was spent to help turn the former W.T. Grant Department Store building on Third and Washington streets into the Jamestown Brewing Company, which opened for less than a year before closing its doors while being the subject of a nasty court battle between the developer and the chosen tenant.

About $970,000 of DRI money has been reprogrammed. Nobody could have seen, four years ago, that COVID-19 would make the final $275,000 in the Fund for Downtown Programming a pot of money that couldn’t be spent. Another $670,000 for excursion train infrastructure support has also been reprogrammed into the renovation of the Warner Dam with the reasoning the work on the dam enhances the Greater Jamestown Riverwalk. At least that money found a use, but dam improvements are the sort of project that draws people downtown.

If you’re keeping score, that’s roughly $2.8 million in DRI money for projects that either never got off the ground or sputtered to a halt. Surely, COVID-19 has played a role in the last year, but we shouldn’t be lulled into blaming the pandemic for the failure of some of these projects.

Some pieces of the plan seem to have been longer-term projects that needed a lot to go right to ever happen. Assembling a riverfront hotel site, which was one of the city’s original priority projects, would have been contingent on both moving a longtime city business and the property owner wanting to sell in the first place. Another priority project was the Furniture Mart, a project for which $1 million in state money is a drop in the bucket toward the cost needed to return the building to its former glory. Spending $830,000 on the Jamestown Brewing Company involved betting on two newcomers to the area, those newcomers’ ability to draw from an established competitor and an increase in foot traffic from the National Comedy Center.

The Key Bank project involved both a lengthy and expensive renovation project going off without a hitch before the project had to prove itself worthy of enough interest from visitors to make the project fly financially.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo bet on Jamestown four years ago when he and his staff awarded the city a DRI grant. It appears that bet may have been a longshot that will never pay off.