City Council, by a 4-1 vote on Tuesday, chose to spend $27,100 in taxpayer funds to hire a Youngstown, Ohio firm to study potential options for Clay School — a building that just about everyone who’s toured it over the past decade agrees needs to be demolished.

That’s a perfectly acceptable outcome, particularly if Tipping Point, the firm hired by city leaders to analyze the structure and provide ideas for what could be done, also provides options as to what the site could be if the building is demolished.

The Clay School site is an important piece of East Wheeling’s future. The 80-year-old building encompasses a city block at 15th and Wood streets, after all. A plan for its future must be in place, sooner rather than later.

But here are some realities. The structure, as it currently stands, with windows busted out and debris littering the sidewalk, is a liability to taxpayers and it also is an embarrassment not just for the neighborhood but all of Wheeling. It is the falling-down, decaying building many visitors to our city see when they come to watch their children take part in sporting events at the adjacent J.B. Chambers 16th Street Memorial Park.

Clay School presents a false narrative of the good things happening elsewhere in Wheeling. It is a dilapidated, decayed and neglected structure that allows people to see another sign of what the city’s doing wrong, instead of focusing on all the progress currently taking place.

That can’t be allowed to continue.

Council now has a starting plan, one taxpayers will spend $27,100 to fund. Let’s make it count.

“We’ve never had a professional firm of experts like this go in and really do some cold, hard analysis on whether this building makes more sense as a tear down or a rehab,” Mayor Glenn Elliott said. “I think it is at least worth doing an analysis.”

We agree. But don’t get in over your head, Mr. Mayor. The city already has itself stretched thin financially, with a parking garage being built downtown, the Downtown Streetscape Project, potential monetary help with a new Life Hub, taxpayer assistance with the work in the 1400 block of Market Street, and much more. A prudent approach to the Clay School site’s future is necessary, particularly given the outside forces that, if they had their way, would see taxpayers fund a total rehab of this structure. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen.