City Councilman Dan Coffey has suggested that the city of New Albany negotiate to purchase the building owned and remodeled by Adult DVD, which was barred from opening for business last year by a series of “too little, too late” city maneuvers that were laughed out of court earlier this month.
Following the court decision allowing Adult DVD to open, it was disclosed that the city of New Albany really had chosen to tackle its ongoing sewer problems by throwing vast sums of money at them – in this case, flushing $69,000 down the commode in order to fight Adult DVD, which by all accounts had broken no laws in its quest to operate.
Coffey and others now propose to send hundreds of thousands more to a final resting place in the Gulf of Mexico by paying Adult DVD to go away rather than recognizing that this is one fight the city has lost, period, and that other strategies slightly more clever than spending them into oblivion will have to be devised and pursued if the greater public good is to be served.
If Coffey’s viewpoint prevails and the city buys the building, then a pattern for future extortion will have been established.
Besides, if the city seeks to enter the real estate game full time, perhaps a better use of the money would be buying old commercial buildings from their non-civic-minded owners and leasing space at reasonable terms to entrepreneurs whose activities would improve the overall value of New Albany’s neglected downtown and generate the sort of buzz that would make Adult DVD superfluous.
Yep, it’s the vision thing again … that, and New Albany’s cataracts.
Adult video site aims to open: New Albany looks at its legal options, by Ben Zion Hershberg
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