Talk about tone deaf.

Last fall, the doom-and-gloomers were gnashing their teeth over the proposed takeover of Belle Isle by the state.

Another of our jewels is being taken, some of them said.

Others cried racism. A bunch of white folks from elsewhere had no business getting their hands on the park.

Repeatedly, the city council rebuffed efforts by the state and Mayor Dave Bing to turn over control of the long-languishing park, with its shuttered bathrooms and perpetually overflowing garbage cans and dead trees and overgrown fields to Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources.

The complaining was dismissed by many as the same-old-whining about us-versus-them that goes on in Detroit. Especially by folks like me, who spend a lot of time on the island and were tired of the garbage, the broken picnic tables, the decayed buildings, the broken liquor bottles that never get picked up and the miserable little portable bathrooms that are always out of toilet paper out in front of all the grand bathhouses that have been locked for years for lack of maintenance.

Eventually, the City Council came to its sense, an agreement was made on a 30-year lease, and on Feb. 10, the 982-acre park became the 102nd state park.

And then my colleague here at Crain’s, Dustin Walsh, breaks the news that the island will be closed to the public from Sept. 7-11, in conjunction with an event at Cobo Center, the Intelligent Transport Systems 21st World Congress.

The closing is thanks to an offer by the state to the Congress to hand the island over, metaphorically, for four days in late summer.

The event is held every three years, and this is the first time it’s been in Detroit. As many as 10,000 business execs, researchers and politicians from around the world are expected to show up to see the latest innovations in transportation.

The expanded Cobo Center isn’t sufficient to showcase the technology properly. The Congress had been working with the city of Detroit to use some of the streets around Cobo to have live demonstrations of driverless vehicles, including passenger cars, commercial trucks and military vehicles.

But why restrict yourself to city streets when you have a nearby island?