Since I don’t get downtown in Amarillo as much as I used to, I find myself getting caught up with normally “routine” sights.

Take the Barfield Building, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Polk Street.

It’s still a battered hulk of a building shell. It remains unoccupied. It’s ground-level floor is boarded up. Nothing’s going on there.

I keep hearing some faint rumblings about the place, but I keep wondering: When will something ever happen to the place, either good or bad?

The developer who’s owned the building since the 1990s keeps saying he plans to round up investors to help finance its renovation. Into what remains unclear.

Another investment group of Amarillo wheelers and dealers sought to foreclose on the building, seeking to wrest it from the developer. It didn’t work. He dodged the foreclosure bullet nicely and retains ownership of the 10-story structure.

It’s been vacant for as long as I’ve lived in Amarillo. That would be 19-plus years. A lot of good things have happened around downtown, particularly in recent years. The Barfield eyesore remains one of the critical negative elements of a downtown district seeking to remake itself.

Potter County officials have told me over the years that as long as taxes are being paid on the building, that’s all that matters to them.

Should it be all that matters to city planners who want to piece together a shiny new downtown business and entertainment district that is attractive to those who — such as me — don’t visit downtown on a regular basis?

I think not.