Today, Kyle Lowry, the New Albany Tribune’s County Reporter, contributes a front-page overview of Floyd County Commissioner Randy Stumler’s proposal to fold a new City-County Building into the Scribner Place project.
Stumler suggests that a new facility on the riverfront might combine city and county offices currently divided between the existing City-County Building and the decaying office annex on Grant Line Road.
The Commissioner also foresees some county offices occupying currently vacant older commercial buildings downtown, and intends to meet, whoopee cushion in hand, with Develop New Albany to discuss possibilities.
It is important to note that implicit in Stumler's proposal is a greater role for the county in the city's Scribner Place project. Consequently, according to Lowry, reaction to the embryonic relocation plan on the part of local officialdom has been favorable.
NA Confidential acknowledges all due concern for the looming presence of financial devils in the detail with respect to Stumler’s ideas, but wishes to credit Stumler for embracing the tenets of elementary political leadership by daring to think progressively with an eye toward future administrative needs.
Unlike so many others who are considered pillars of New Albany’s mover-shaker elite, Stumler seems comfortable with the notion of articulating his ideas and communicating them to the city’s and county’s citizens. City Hall might learn something from this novel approach, one that is rather refreshing, but has been attempted on very few occasions by the administration of Mayor James Garner.
In fairness, Lowry's article quotes Mayor Garner favorably, and he provides brief but solid guesstimates on cost.
Naturally, the traditions of jaundiced New Albanian inertia dictate that Randy watch his back.
Appropriately, Lowry’s article is accompanied by an oversized Kevin McGloshen photo of the current City-County Building, itself a bland and bureaucratic architectural abomination of the sort that once prevailed in the gray capitals of the East Bloc, and indicative of the errors in judgment made by a previous generation of mover-shaker “leadership.”
It has been suggested by some that the contrast between the beautiful old columns facing Spring Street and the prematurely aged socialist-realist cracker box behind them serves as an apt metaphor for New Albany’s peculiar illness.
It is to be hoped that if Stumler’s ideas take root, past mistakes aren’t repeated.
(Note: The Tribune’s web site is updated sporadically, and the link to Lowry’s story will be provided later)
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2 comments:
And where will the funds for this project come from? The already approved funding that Ceasars Indiana has appropriated for the Y project? I say not to that. Yes, the existing building that was fore mentioned is in need of repair/replacement, but my personal feelings are that the Scribner Place on a whole was convieved to use financing to bring some kind of commerce to the downtown waterfront area, not, unless I missed something along the way, to be used for new facilities for the City & County. If it is a seperate budgetory item then that would be okay, but this whole Scribner project to me is, build it(the YMCA,etc) and they will come. If this doesn't happen, then what draw is there for doing the project at all?
I repeat my call for Mayor Garner to inaugurate a regular forum for communications with the public, one during which he answers questions and is given the opportunity to display his grasp of the issues.
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