City Council seeks "leadership" transplant; donors scarce in New Albany

At last night’s City Council meeting, a surprisingly contentious debate arose over an ordinance that would alter the procedure for hiring fire department personnel.

Fire Chief Ron Toran addressed the issue by noting that in recent years, written test scores have come to be given disproportionate weight in the hiring process.

Toran accepts the veracity of test scores as a requirement, but seeks more latitude to discern a quality that’s impossible to measure on paper.

Heart.

When Toran said that in the case of a fireman, “heart” matters as much as “smart,” he might have been echoing the same mockery of educational attainment so readily indulged by certain perpetually sensitive members of the City Council seated before him, but it didn’t come off in this manner.

Rather, Toran was trying to say that while education matters to the specific position of firefighter, intangibles do, too.

A more perfect forum for Toran’s observation could not be found, for if there were such an illness as being intangible-deprived, the current City Council, as a group, would be eligible for immediate emergency assistance.

This is not to say that the individuals comprising the City Council lack redeeming qualities, or that they ignore their constituents, or that they’re “bad” in any way. It’s simply wrong to assume such things. Obviously, all nine are interested in public service, or else they would not have run for office.

However, taken collectively, there is little in the way of chemistry or cohesion within the current City Council. As a group, there is an intangible missing.

Call it “vision,” or call it “leadership.” Call it both. If either of these intangibles exists to any appreciable degree within the ranks of the current City Council, might we be provided evidence of it?

Councilman Bill Schmidt asks solid questions about the city’s finances, but Councilman Steve Price follows with a line perhaps cribbed from Yogi Berra: “We need to live on less than we make.”

Councilman Mark Seabrook, the council’s lone Republican, wears an expression of palpable frustration suggesting that he has been mistakenly institutionalized.

President Jeff Gahan sits motionless, his gavel gathering dust, as self-styled “majority whip” Dan Coffey uses most of each meeting to prattle, pontificate and insert himself into every conceivable nook and cranny that might someday come in handy to further the pursuance of his partisan political agenda, whatever it is.

And so it goes.

The same tired attack dogs are trotted out, meeting after meeting. Like some Pavlovian experiment gone haywire, the same stimuli prompt the same responses, meeting after meeting. Observers can predict almost to the second when the imaginary red light flashes, the salivary glands take their cue, and one or the other council member launches into their time-tested grandstanding routines.

The fire chief seeks “heart” in selecting his firefighters.

We seek “leadership” from this City Council.

Yes, it is an intangible, something that does not reside in every human being, but sometimes it arises from the least expected places.

Without an injection of some of it, the city of New Albany stands to continue along its lowest-common-denominator mud path of bizarrely prideful underachievement.

This is not about the budget crunch or the city’s financial woes, although these are real and must be addressed.

It is about whether this city is going to amount to anything, or conversely, we are going to remain beholden to the “no progress at any cost” school of stagnation and ultimate decay.

We believe that there are decent, responsible City Council members who grasp the nature of the disease as it spirals out of control.

It is well past time for these and others like them to step forward and at least make an effort to put an end to the poisonous posing, plotting and hypocrisy.

As a side note, let it be understood that NA Confidential came into existence for a number of reasons, one of which definitely was not to acquiesce in being used as a tool to assist in the partisan flagellation of any one politician or public figure.

That's because New Albany’s absurd sickness is not confined to one man, one party or one electoral district.

Rather, It is epidemic.

There are a number of reasons why it was unfortunate that Mayor James Garner’s first year in office was a continuous, self-inflicted public relations disaster, but as time goes by, it becomes increasingly evident that in the wake of his problems, the city of New Albany has seen no sign whatsoever of a creative pulse emanating from the supposed pool of prospective replacements.

Words to the effect that New Albany’s citizens are being served by the current political “class” count for far less than actions, and insofar as there has been action, it has been consistently regressive.

And unless you’re a Visigoth, regressive just isn’t going to cut it any longer.

Perhaps rather than constantly stooping to the lowest, easiest and cheapest form of “villainous educated egghead vs. downtrodden common man” populism at the first sign of an emerging idea, those citizens of New Albany styling themselves as the “political elite” would do well to embrace the notion that the only way this city is going to even begin solving its problems is by getting smarter.

It may require self-improvement … even reading a book.

Heaven forbid.

Is that legal in New Albany?

The Louisville Courier-Journal covers the City Council meeting

Controller: budget problems were years in the making, by Amany Ali, Tribune City Editor