Thursday, November 11, 2010

It's deja vu all over again: "While Finn did not directly answer the question ... "

I am touched by the spirit of compromise, coming only a day after I publicly asked Jerry Finn to consider the possibility that Southern Indiana small business owners might have justifiable concerns, based on their own everyday experience, with various publicly minted proposals to toll Ohio River bridges long before ORBP construction ever commences.

Someone get the muzzle: Roger's spreading myths about bridge tolls again. Get him some of that Kool-Aid, fast.


Last night, playing his strange but by now sadly customary role as eager toter of Kerry Stemler's lunch pail, our myth-busting local Bridges Authority member confided the real numbers to Clark County's commissioners ... well, "real" insofar as wishful thinking is concerned.

"With tolls, I for one believe if it’s any more than a dollar a toll then we are in serious trouble ... Our hope is that it will be significantly less than that. I know $3 tolls would be devastating to this community.” Finn added that he would never vote for imposing a $3 toll for each trip.
You can't imagine how much better I feel today. It's Finn's hope that only $2 will be added to the price paid by Kentuckians for each pint of NABC beer. Certainly that's better than $6, in roughly the same way that suicide by kitchen oven takes slightly longer than a shot fired through the temple.
Clark County Commissioners say no tolls more than $1, by Braden Lammers (News and Tribune)

After previously delaying a decision on whether or not to approve a no toll resolution relating to the Ohio River Bridges Project, the Clark County Commissioners picked up the issue again at their meeting Wednesday night and ultimately passed a resolution supporting tolls as long as they don’t exceed $1 ...

... “I ask you not to pay attention to those who would want you to believe that this project would have a negative impact,” (Finn) said. “I also ask that you not let the negativity of a few guide your decision on the resolution that you’re talking about tonight ...

“ ... My concern is if they see all of these elected groups voting [for no toll] resolutions they’re going to say, ‘why should we invest the political capital as well as the financial capital in this project?’” (Finn) said of state officials from Kentucky and Indiana."
At least Paul Fetter wasn't bowing to the ricocheting bullshit of unelected officialdom. Yet again, Paul clearly stated the no-tolls case in a manner that Finn did not even try to refute, and won't, and essentially refuses to, and as time passes without so much as an attempted refutation, one must conclude irrevocably that the Bridges Authority truly has nothing to say other than to demand that we trust them as our betters.

Paul Fetter, local anti-toll representative and president of the Clark County Auto Auction, said any toll would hurt business on the Indiana side of the river.

“In the last 25 years we have made leaps and bounds to have our whole community to travel on both sides of the river freely,” he said. “If you start putting a toll up there you take freely right out of it. We cannot charge admission to come to Indiana.”

Fetter also said that imposing a toll of $1 or less would not be enough to pay back the loan needed to construct the project.

“You can’t pay the loan back charging $1 on all the bridges — it doesn’t figure,” he said. “Southern Indiana is going to be the victim of this multi-billion dollar hijacking.”
Hijacking. That's a wonderfully descriptive phrase, isn't it? Thanks, Paul.

7 comments:

Randy said...

Most times you send the nice guy, someone whose religious and philanthropic employment lend a righteousness to his words. Jerry's just doing his job. What doesn't make sense is using up his credibility on such an unsupportable tissue of lies. The Wall Streeters and asphalt contractors must want this awfully bad to fritter away Jerry's reputation like this. Do you think he realizes that it is his reputation they are depleting?

edward parish said...

I dig that you are against the bridge tolls, for once can you leave you and the "Mc"sisters formula out of the equation - it is getting old. Perhaps something positive in all of this might help NA/SI and your beloved "beer empire". All we read is the negative from you and the gang of wanting to better the north side of the Ohio. So, take it and run with it and do something positive. Enough of the negative already. Be a true leader and make it happen for what we all are proud of, instead of constantly being negative. This community has had way too much of that for how long?

Jeff Gillenwater said...

Insisting that we can do better than ORBP and tolls is positive, Ed.

Ironically, it's Mr. Finn who insinuates that we're incapable while simultaneously complaining about negativity.

lafyetteblues said...

If you wanted the bourgeois and elite of Louisville to drink your beer you should of built it in Louisville.

I thought you were against urban spraw.

Even though I live in Louisville now I still can't get over how un New Albany NABC beer is; Falls City beer would parallel the average downtown inhabitant.

Great marketing works well when you have hindsight, otherwise your ideas of grandure dry up with your taps.

The New Albanian said...

I dig that you are against the bridge tolls, for once can you leave you and the "Mc"sisters formula out of the equation - it is getting old. Perhaps something positive in all of this might help NA/SI and your beloved "beer empire".

Ed, can you please elaborate?

The New Albanian said...

Great marketing works well when you have hindsight, otherwise your ideas of grandure dry up with your taps.

I'm unclear as to what grandeur and hindsight have to do with marketing, which is a future-oriented process that proceeds on a daily basis.

Iamhoosier said...

Mr. Finn,
Has it ever occurred to you to actually provide answers/proof to your accusations of myths? Would that not be the logical course of action instead of just popping in on Roger's FB page, saying that his facts are wrong and then never answering when he asks you which facts were wrong?

Come to authority meetings and get my information, you say? Uh, it would be nice if you held them when people with jobs could actually attend them. Not all of us are in glorified positions that the authority members apparently are to just leave work when we feel like it.

By the way, have you ever read the KY report that said building one bridge(East End)would provide 98% of the traffic benefit? You know, the one that was brought up that night at Bank Street and you said that you would look into it and get back to us? Well?