Ames missed an opportunity last week to profit from Iowa City’s mistakes. (Hint for warring Cyclone and Hawkeye factions: This column has nothing to do with athletes and coaches of questionable character and everything to do with dubious development plans.)

After four arduous hours of discussion, a divided Ames City Council voted to change the city’s land-use plan and get on the malling-of-America bandwagon. It seems America, and Central Iowa in particular, can’t get enough malls. The Jordan Creek Town Center, scheduled to open in August, isn’t enough to satisfy our collective shopping hunger. Neither are those big-box stores that one critic of the Ames mall said are robbing Ankeny of its sense of place and will be prime targets for Ames mall developers. For the sake of symmetry, a mall should be added near the Highway 5 bypass and Central Iowa could promote itself as one big mega-shopping extravaganza.

Oh, but that would be obsessive. And dumb. Something’s gotta go, and history suggests it will be the structures that are oldest. It couldn’t play out any other way in the throw-away society Americans seem to worship.

Ames city leaders should have looked at what has happened to Iowa City’s Old Capitol Town Center mall after the shiny, bright Coral Ridge Mall was built. General Growth Properties Inc. developed Coral Ridge, which it calls “the premier shopping, dining and entertainment destination in the Midwest.” The same group is developing Jordan Creek and Ron DenAdel, the company’s vice president of development and lead developer for the West Des Moines project, says it will be “a premier entertainment destination for the state of Iowa.” Interesting redundancies, but beside the point.

Old Capitol was never a mall for wearing out the credit cards, but in the post-Coral Ridge days, it’s a hulking, almost-empty cavern. The stores that remained are uninteresting, typical mall fare: an Orange Julius kiosk and a half-dozen other fast-food outlets, three apparel stores (one featuring University of Iowa apparel), a department store, a drugstore and a few other uninteresting shops. The mall was purchased in October by a group of local investors for $12 million, and now they’re asking for tax increment financing to help pay for a multimillion-dollar upgrade that will add new retail and office space. Condominiums and apartments may be included in stories to be added later. But the government is going to have to invest its money to compensate for what may have been poor planning decisions.

There are lots of reasons the new shopping center in Ames is a bad idea, and to its credit, the Ames’ Planning and Zoning commission refused to recommend changing the land-use plan to accommodate the proposed mall. The only real winner, it seems, is Tennessee developer James “Bucky” Wolford. Ames and its citizens are losers. Approval of the land-use plan is bad governance.

As disturbing as the potential effect on existing retailers, both at the North Grand Mall and in the city’s downtown, where attempts are being made to fill 21 empty storefronts, is the cavalier attitude with which the majority of the council ignored the city’s land-use plan. It’s purported to be a blueprint for the city’s growth for the next three decades, but in practice, it appears to be a meaningless document that can be changed at the whim of elected officials and economic development prospects.

Beth Dalbey, editorial director for Business Publications Corp., can be reached by e-mail at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.