Saturday, March 23, 2019

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The My Scratch & Dent building has not changed ownership -- at least yet, but Loop Island luxury might depend on it.


The Green Mouse awoke to a tip.

Here is something for the Green Mouse to look into. Rumor has it the My Scratch & Dent property on Silver Street recently was bought by the company who built the Breakwater.

That'd be Flaherty and Collins out of Indianapolis, and this rumor almost surely reflects tangible back-alley spitballing on the part of forever secretive Team Gahan operatives and profit-seeking companies located elsewhere.

However, as of this precise moment the My Scratch & Dent property and the one immediately to the east of it (outlined in blue above) are owned by a company called Nickelin LLC.



You'll see that Nickelin LLC is Joe Zeller; Zeller owns Tiger Trucking, and uses these two properties for truck parking and all-purpose filth distribution.

2015 photo.

On the one hand, Tiger Trucking is no fan of Gahan's; on the other, everyone has their price. It appears that Nickelin LLC purchased these two properties in 2004 for $2.4 million. It's hard to imagine Flaherty and Collins, or any other well-heeled developers, buying these on their own dime. Tax Increment Financing? That's another story, even before the sewer tap-in waiver gifting.

To complete the overview, here are a few seemingly random news items from the past few years.

1. Mayor Gahan seizes the New Albany Housing Authority and includes NAHA's Riverside Terrace apartments -- the housing authority's newest and best units, outlined in yellow above -- on the wish-to-demolish list, confusing even Ben Carson, whose HUD agency wags a prohibitive finger.

2. After long, grinding years of 2:00 a.m. phone calls and drunk texting, the Horseshoe Foundation agrees to give Gahan a few million bucks if he'd just stop harassing it. Part of the lucre goes toward purchasing the Loop Island Wetlands (outlined in red) to be the next crown jewel for the city's quality-of-life, loss-leading parks system.

3. Taking control of the wetlands property, city officials conclude (connive?) that the major impediment to luxury development is the historic brick Moser Tannery building, which would be cost-ineffective to renovate by the matchstick 'n' sheet rock developers of the contemporary. With the city's historic preservationist contingent distracted and bedazzled by the ongoing Reisz Mahal high end city hall project, Moser Tannery doesn't stand a chance, and conveniently is torched -- presumably by the very same homeless people Gahan claims don't exist in his city. One of them probably is named Dmitrov.

4. Clark County finally succeeds in completing the bridge over Silver Creek, connecting the Ohio River Greenway to Clarksville and Jeffersonville, and enhancing the value of every projected "luxury" development in the vicinity.

Nothing against My Scratch & Dent, where we've shopped in the past, but quite obviously Nickelin's/Zeller's two poorly maintained properties are the next barrier to Gahan's skin-deep dreams of Loop Island opulence, as the Moser Tannery and NAHA's building were before this. The tannery is dust; give him another term, and he'll probably come up with a work-around to displace the Riverside Terrace occupants.

Or, conversely, you can #FireGahan2019 and restore a modicum of sanity to the existing megalomania and power trips. 

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