City Hall's $69,000 question: Does Kevlar protect the wearer from self-inflicted wounds?

Loyal NA Confidential readers will recall my brief conversation with New Albany City Attorney Shane Gibson, who laughed off my question as to the future of civil liberties in New Albany given the city’s efforts to prevent New Albany DVD (adult video) from opening for business on West Main Street.

In the wake of yesterday’s ruling by a U.S. District Judge that the city “erred in attempting to regulate New Albany DVD through a zoning ordinance that is too broad,” it emerges that we have spent $69,000 to date in the struggle to keep New Albany morally clean.

I repeat: $69,000.

At the same time, Mayor James Garner’s pathological obstructionism has exacerbated a yearlong territorial pissing match with the City Council, resulting in a pocket veto of the council’s efforts to enact an ordinance enforcement position.

Among the reasons cited by the Mayor for his stubbornness on the ordinance enforcement debate (beyond the obvious – that it wasn’t his idea) is his insistence that the part-time attorney Gibson will have too little time to handle the flood of complaints that will ensue when at long last city residents are forced at the point of financial loss to observe ordinances that have been on the books for years, and that would make the city far cleaner in the physical sense, perhaps leading in part to a rejuvenation that would make concerns about adult DVDs superfluous.

Which begs the question: Who is dirtier - an adult bookstore customer, the owner of a junked automobile on the street, or a supporter of the Mayor who owns a building downtown but won't use it in a way compatible with the public good?

But I digress. To repeat: $69,000 to wage war against civil liberties.

On the evening of January 5, an entire City Council meeting passed without mention of Smith Furniture’s forthcoming departure from downtown New Albany, or Randy Stumler’s recent Tribune op-ed piece suggesting that the scope of Scribner Place be broadened to include a new City-County office building (to name just two issues of potential significance).

Instead, New Albany citizens in attendance earnestly went to the lectern one by one, united in annoyance with Mayor Garner’s bizarre and unsupportable detachment from the issues that concern them: Ordinance enforcement, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey hiring practices, and thinly-veiled vendettas against whistle-blowing city employees ... to name just three.

Depressingly, City Hall already has begun to circle the wagons in preparation for what may be a protracted legal struggle with the demoted and ultimately deposed building inspector and whistle-blower Steve Broadus, a campaign the stands to further deplete coffers that already are symbolized by an image in the mind’s eye of the Mayor, pockets turned out, standing in front of a vacant downtown building owned by an upstanding local family with a jagged cardboard sign hand-lettered in crayon that reads “will doo know werk for somethin.”

And yet, in the midst of this ongoing chaos, the city of New Albany has the princely sum of $69,000 to flush on a rear-guard legal action necessitated by the city’s unpreparedness with respect to the same federal judge’s assertion that there is indeed a right to regulate adult businesses – just not the ex post facto, shoddily written variety predictably chosen by City Hall.

To attend a City Council meeting in New Albany is to observe a steadily growing disconnect between City Hall's opinion of its own public relations abilities and its actual performance when the red light come on.

Mayor Garner generally floats through the council proceedings like a discombobulated pixie on Zoloft, huddling theatrically with his team, forever oblivious to those members of the public who desperately seek to gain his attention to make a point that might well become the central theme of growing opposition to his shambolic tenure:

Mister Mayor, at some point in four years, something that remotely resembles vision and leadership absolutely must emanate from your immediate vicinity, or else you will not deserve the respect you incessantly demand, because respect derives from accomplishment, not the bathroom mirror.

It goes without saying that Garner will not deserve re-election.

Puzzlingly, the administrative firm of Garner, Gibson & Toran seems to fancy itself as master of political form over intellectual substance, and yet when tested (as last evening), it invariably emerges in a confused, unfavorable light when compared to a fractious City Council that itself does not bring to mind blissful visions of tulip tiptoeing.

At a crucial juncture in the city’s history, our helm is being manned by an empty suit.

If anyone can explain to me how this epic underachievement somehow constitutes a “different kind of Mayor,” I will buy you a beer.

But honestly, I think my money’s safe.

We do deserve better … don’t we?

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Ben Zion Hershberg’s Courier-Journal article (New Albany DVD ruling) of January 6, 2005:
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2005/01/06in/A1-dvd0106-8095.html