THERE’S A LOVELY, MODERN BUILDING in downtown Macon that state taxpayers paid $6.5 million for in 1996 for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. In 2011, the state decided it couldn’t afford to keep it open. The other day it sold the structure to Mercer University for use by its medical school for ... $180,091.

That sure should make Greater Rome leaders sit up and take notice ... and demand equal treatment?

There’s a whole campus of buildings in central Rome that used to be Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital — about 70 of them and closed by the state because it couldn’t afford to keep it open in 2011. The state taxpayer investment there is probably 10 to 20 times larger ... and the whole campus has been declared surplus. Sounds like anybody with a couple of million of dollars should be able to pick it up for whatever use it desires, does it not?

Let’s see, in the college realm there are Berry and Shorter locally that always need more under-roof space. Always-expanding Floyd Medical Center certainly has the dollars to make such an offer, as does next-door Redmond Regional Medical Center.

If the state is going to run a flea market with public property and give it away for 3 cents on the dollar, Romans should get their share given that, as with the folks in Macon, there’s not even a need to put it in the back of a truck to haul it away.