An invigorating City Council meeting at the Palace of the Republik

Tonight’s City Council meeting was a rollicking affair, with ample entertainment seamlessly woven around the serious parts.

Epitomizing the evening was the earnest leadoff testimony of a elderly ex-fireman, who with great emotion described the lamentable state of New Albany’s fire hydrants and implored someone to do something before another family dies. Evidently, he’d witnessed such a tragedy, and still sees ghosts. The old man left the room to applause.

Much later, the attending fire chief was asked whether there was a problem with fire hydrants. He shrugged and smiled in a professionally competent way. Yes, sometimes in winter they freeze, it happens, but you just use the next one, and if we see anything wrong, we check it out and report the problem to the water company. In short, all part of a day’s work, and not to worry. All is in order.

Interesting juxtaposition.

Public testimony then was proffered on behalf of ordinance enforcement, and no one on the Council saw fit to disagree.

Mayor Garner himself had surprisingly coherent thoughts on the matter, to the effect that the enforcement officer should answer to the building commissioner on a regular basis, with contacts maintained to the City Council. All seemed pleased, and the first reading of the ordinance passed unanimously.

I noticed that City Attorney Shane Gibson generally stands close by Garner when the Mayor is required to address the Council. They don’t speak at the same time. Perhaps this is a coincidence.

On a different matter, Councilman Dan Coffey engagingly stirred the pot by asking that a letter from demoted building inspector Steve Broadus be read publicly. This action caused Gibson to bolt to the lectern to denounce Broadus’s unwillingness to bring his concerns directly to the Mayor (who docked Broadus in the first place) rather than air them publicly, which in turn led to an exchange between Councilman Larry Kochert and Garner over how many inspectors with which qualifications were needed to do what and when.

Kochert and Garner’s “who’s on first” routine prompted Councilman Donny Blevins to state that such discussions should take place behind closed doors and not in front of the public, and it is a measure of the comedic decline at this juncture that no one in the room took Blevins to task for his advocacy of secrecy.

To return to tonight’s period of public discussion on the proposed addition of an ordinance enforcement officers, and disregarding the concerns of another elderly gentleman who sought to ensure that his pick-up truck wouldn’t be towed away because it runs fine, it’s just that the tires won’t hold air … he indeed was reassured … the gist of the position held by New Albany’s neighborhood associations is precisely that mentioned yesterday in this space.

Absentee property ownership and the associated mismanagement of rental space are prime culprits in the degradation of neighborhoods. But this is something that has been obvious for such a long period of time that its truth borders on the axiomatic, so then one must ask why it has taken so long for something so simple as ordinance enforcement to be recognized.

Someone help me with this one. Who’s into whom?

Who’s on first?

In the meantime, NA Confidential believes that it would be useful to know who owns properties suffering from chronic neglect. Many “slumlords,” and perhaps even most of them, may well prove to be absentee owners, but some may not. And that would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Why should the ordinance enforcement officer have all the fun? Schedule permitting, I intend to take a trip soon to the City-County Building, not to admire the socialist realist architectural style and breathlessly pine for the halcyon days of Communist East Berlin, but to hit the record books.

I’ll let you know what I learn.