The report released yesterday by the city’s Independent Budget Office on the proposed Jets stadium on the West Side of Manhattan is a document that will be useful if it causes everyone to pause, take a deep breath, and step back for a moment from the headlong rush toward construction.

As it is, the city is in a race against the clock. The International Olympic Committee will select a host city for the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005. If New York City doesn’t have an Olympics-worthy stadium on the way to completion by July 6, 2005, the city’s chances of winning the Olympic games — and the bonanza in television revenue that would come with them — would dwindle.

We’ve got no objection to having the Olympics here. Nor do we object to a stadium on Manhattan’s West side, if the Jets turn out to be the high bidder for the land. But it is shortsighted to push the stadium without soliciting bids or proposals for other uses for the site. A vote by an IOC that includes representatives of Communist China, Castro’s Cuba, and Chirac’s France, plus Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, is certainly a gamble. Since the city and the state governments have essentially decided already that the stadium will be the use for the land, it is a gamble by the taxpayers, not only by a private developer.

After all, there are plenty of other uses to which the West Side land — now mostly yards of the Long Island Rail Road — could be put. Anyone trying to rent or buy an apartment in New York these days knows that there is enormous demand for housing. Retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Ikea are seeking sites for their stores. Plenty of New Yorkers with cars now head off to the suburbs on the weekends to shop at the Woodbury Common Premium Outlets or Stew Leonard’s supermarket. What if those stores were in Manhattan?

Nor are we persuaded by the argument that the Jets stadium isn’t merely a stadium, but is also a part of a convention center expansion that will draw giant trade shows to the city and boost the city’s tourism industry. If there is so much unmet demand for convention space in New York City, one wonders why private capital doesn’t rise to the task. The convention center is to be paid for by raising taxes on hotel rooms and airport rental cars here in a city and state that already have the highest state and local tax burden in the country.

The Independent Budget Office report released yesterday reckons that the Jets stadium would produce fewer jobs and less tax revenue than a study commissioned by the Jets from Ernst & Young had claimed. A better test is the marketplace of businessmen trying to invest their own money. The Jets are proposing to put $800 million into the project, which is not nothing. But the Jets are also asking for $600 million in public funds. Maybe there’s someone out there willing to offer more private funds for the site, with less of a public investment.

Some opposition to the stadium is reflexive or self-interested. Madison Square Garden, which has its own public subsidy through a property tax exemption, is backing an anti-Jets-stadium group called New York Association for Better Choices. The Garden’s owners fear losing business to the new stadium. Acorn, a left-wing advocacy group opposing the stadium, seems opposed to building anything anywhere with the exception of government-subsidized housing for poor families.

We’d distinguish ourselves from those stadium skeptics by saying that if the Jets emerge as the winner after an open, public, transparent, auction-style bidding or proposal process, we would wish them success and root for them and their stadium all the way to a New York City Super Bowl.

But first let’s hear from some other potential users of this West Side land. The best way for the city and state to measure the best use of this land is to find out who will pay the most for the rights to it.