The chairman of One Southern Indiana surely must be ranked higher than mere “reader,” shouldn’t he?
Readers should know that Kevin Hammersmith, the chairman of One Southern Indiana, and I grew up together. Our fathers worked for a time at the same local independent dairy, and we were best buddies as children. We’re still friends. Kevin went on to become a higher-up at Duke Energy, the friendly neighborhood utility monopoly, and I eventually opted to sell better beer for a living while exposing the shenanigans of area Stemlerites in my spare time. Kevin likes better beer, so at least we still have that in common.
Now that Kevin’s added the responsibility of steering 1Si’s political endorsements to his workload, it will be fun to thrust and parry with him on issues like this one, but let’s at least hope he doesn’t eagerly crawl into bed with Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), as has previous 1Si regimes. Entrenched economic elites are enough of a challenge without adding repressive social crusades to the list.
Kevin's letter to the editor is entitled, “Reader: Bridges don’t build themselves.” I suggest that in addition to my response here, he might enjoy Matt Nash's piece last Friday.
Kevin: A recent half page ad in the News and Tribune editions attacked our local elected officials for not taking a stand on the Ohio River Bridges Project. They have taken a stand — after years of delay and false starts, they want to see the bridges built!
Roger: We know they’re in favor of the billion dollar boondoggle in the breach, but it’s hard to posit their cowardly prevarications as active support. Perhaps Steve Stemler, an oligarch himself (and a so-called Democrat, though reclining with grapes and fiddle somewhere to the right of Newt Gingrich), actually would throw himself on the rails to save the unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem. Both Ron Grooms and Ed Clere continue to deploy the Dan Coffey Defense: They’re waiting for the elusive new information, which somehow never surfaces – although, as we’ve seen, Grooms likes to mouth this platitude from one side while supporting top-down “no further discussion” dictates with the other. On the hand, Clere says much of nothing, just as No2BridgeTolls depicted him doing in its ad.
K: The Project, involving the construction of a new East End Bridge (whose first Indiana exit will be the gateway to Jeffersonville’s River Ridge Commerce Center), a widening of the I-65 crossing and a revamping of the I-65, I-71, I-64 intersection, will bring thousands of construction jobs and a huge economic benefit to Floyd and Clark counties (in terms of companies choosing to stay and/or relocate jobs to Indiana for first-class transportation access).
R: Virtually everyone with the exception of River Fields agrees with Kevin’s assessment of the East End Bridge’s undeniable merits. Unfortunately, he persists in floating the unverifiable “thousands of jobs” mantra, albeit wisely refraining from using precise numbers like the 55,000 once tossed out by project supporters to see if it would stick. It didn’t, because it’s imaginary, but I bet Kevin still uses it in private over cocktails, where it’s just as unverifiable as it is in public.
K: These bridges have been “in the works” for too long. It’s a huge and complex project, but essential to our regional transportation infrastructure. Yet some are working to scuttle the project. They want it their way or no way. Who wants to see the politicians and community leaders kick this project down the road to the next generation without any action? How long until the Kennedy Bridge is weight restricted (like the Milton- Madison Bridge) and off limits to the truck traffic that feeds our local industry? What kind of economic impact would that have?
R: “Their way or no way” is a curious choice of phrasing coming from someone whose job it is to advocate top-down oligarchy protection plans with scant or no public input permitted. Kevin, very few critics wish to scuttle the whole project. However, they’d like to see proposed mobility/transportation solutions intended for the year 2050 to actually correspond to that future’s reality, not to the outmoded strategies of the 1960’s that prefaced the current outlandish plan.
K: Bridges don’t build themselves. It takes negotiation, innovation and action to make bridges come to pass. The “no tolls” group has morphed from no tolls on all bridges to “no tolls on my bridge.” Their short-sighted attack ads do nothing to move the project forward and instead jeopardize a process that is finally getting somewhere.
R: Kevin obviously has paid no attention to the position taken by No2BridgeTolls. If what he alleges is true, then why do I remain opposed to tolls on all bridges when the ones on “mine” (the Sherman Minton) supposedly have been removed from play – not that I trust Daniels, Beshear or Fischer for one second to stick to the letter of their “peace in our time” propaganda about freeing some of us from an unjust burden while imposing it on others. That’s divide and conquer tactics, and weak ones at that.
K: We’ve said this 100 times, nobody “wants” tolls, but our region will go backward and never progress if we don’t get these bridges built. With two states and multiple municipalities involved, progress requires a careful balancing act. If we want the economic growth, we may have to pay some tolls. The effort should be to find every way possible to reduce bridge costs (which I hear no realistic ideas coming from the opposition) and still get the benefits to both Kentucky and Indiana.
R: Only 100 times? Not 55,000? The opposition has a central, realistic idea: Build the bridge we both need and can afford, and then analyze the results. Here Kevin refers back to the resigned argument I heard him advance at the Riverfront Amphitheater last summer, when tolls were still being suggested at the $3-per-trip level. He actually shrugged as Bluegill and I listened to him say (a) that no one was proposing saying tolls should be at any specific level, even though it was a clear matter of public record at Bridges Authority meetings, and even if so, (b) absolutely, positively nothing could be done to change the scope of the project without an act of Congress, because “they” (read: us) had already made irrevocable decisions. Since then, the Bridges Authority has openly and often contradicted itself on the matter of both tolls and the size of the project itself, after the armada of big-time Indiana and Kentucky elected officials finally realized that opposition was coalescing into something threatening to their playpen for oligarchs.
K: If, after all the negotiation and value engineering tolls are necessary, then we will push for them to be as fair and minimal as possible. But to say “no tolls or no bridges” is not helping. The truth is that One Southern Indiana and many others in our community are saying “Yes” to transportation jobs, to economic growth and progress. Others are saying, “no, we like things the way they are,” and that is a road to nowhere.
R: Another of those straw man arguments from 1Si, proving only that proponents in Kevin’s unsympathetic eager-sycophant-to-power-elites position cannot risk a fair effort to understand the nature of the bridges project opposition because to do so would be to erode the “we’re the best and brightest” assumption that underpins everyday existence at a business like a utility monopoly that is entirely lacking in competition – unlike a business like my own, which brings me to my final words to my old friend: Where the hell is that study of the the effects of tolls on small businesses in Southern Indiana?
Jerry Finn, if you're still reading, that’s one for you to answer, too. And Grooms, Stemler, Clere ...
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