As so many times before, NA Confidential happily recommends that you go directly to today’s Volunteer Hoosier and read Randy Smith’s “Running Scared.”
Here’s are excerpts:
“Faced with an ingenious solution provided by city controller Kay Garry, a majority of the (city) council is preparing to thrust the city into peril …
“This council is prepared to thumb its nose at the state-approved solution, prepared to avoid making the tough decisions needed to address the state-ordered budget restrictions …
“There is a constituency in this city that supports the Garry Plan as presented. It is not partisan. It is not factional. It is not driven by support for any individual. It is driven by sound policy. It recognizes the city's real problems and will rise up to support leaders who offer solutions and reject 'leaders' who run scared. Boasting about ignorance is running scared. Deferring important decisions is running scared. Bowing to the perception that New Albanians are frightened fools without any vision for the future is the definition of running scared …
“If you hold office only to 'run scared,' just step down now and save yourself the humiliation of rejection by this city's constituency for progress.”
From Running Scared, in today's Volunteer Hoosier.
Before reading the following local media pieces on the Sewer Board’s role in the budgetary showdown, bear in mind that the board is composed of five members, one of whom is Mayor James Garner.
Of the remaining four who are relevant in the present tense, one is Mark Seabrook, the City Council’s lone Republican, and the other is veteran City Council representative Larry Kochert, a Democrat and a legendary wielder of back-room power in local circles.
Most emphatically, NA Confidential is not recommending that there is any connection between City Council factions, or concurrent political jockeying, or the many and varied coincidences that owe to the presence of certain councilmen on other boards and committees during a time of fiscal crisis, when skeptics among us might catch the faintest whiff of … nah, couldn’t be.
No. Not at all. Never should have watched that “JFK” flick.
Sewer Board balks at loan idea; New Albany mayor asking for $500,000, by Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal.
Mayor's request for sewer loan comes up dry, by Amany Ali, Tribune City Editor.
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3 comments:
gee why does'nt Garner just steel the money like he did the first time when he wanted a new SUV?
I find it curious that His Honor the Mayor asked the city council to approve a $500,000 loan from the Sewer Board the night before it was announce that a sewer contractor was filing suit over a change order. As you so brilliantly pointed out Mr. Baylor the Mayoe is the Chairman of the Sewer Board shouldn't he have known that this lawsuit was forthcoming? Can we as taxpayers really afford to pay the Mayor an extra $7500 a year to not be informed of the sewer utility developments. When he got his sewer board reorganiation ordinance he stressed how important it was that the Mayor needed day to day oversight of the sewer utility and how important it was for the city to have the Mayor be the Chairman of the Board. Seems to me we havent gotten our value from that yet.
I for one and more than happy to see the city council have two representatives on the sewer board , maybe the ordinance ought to rewritten to remove the Mayor as chairman.
Most progressive cities do not have the Mayor on thier sewer Board, now I know you may not consider me part of the "Creative Class" Mr. Baylor, but I do know a few things about the NA sewers, I spent 9 years working in it.
As I have posted earlier, I still do not understand how the sewer utility (which has no budget) has supported the sanitation dept. over the past three years to the tune of over 2.5 million dollars in loans that have not been paid back and also has a current balance of 4.8 million dollars. HAVE WE, THE USERS OF THE SEWER UTILITY BEEN OVERCHARGED????
Or, perhaps the utility is set up as a profit making utility to finance other depts.---which I do not think is legal (at least that is what I have been told when I asked local officials).
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