Mostly it was a languid gathering tonight, although our colleague Volunteer Hoosier promises to provide his usual thoughtful and factual summaries as time permits. We'll direct readers there, and to the Tribune's coverage, as links become available.
Tuesday update: Volunteer Hoosier's detailed commentary
Tuesday update: Tribune coverage by Amany Ali, City Editor
However, there's always time for a few personal observations, and at this point in time, I'm too annoyed for satire. Disgust seems a more appropriate choice.
Judging from tonight's council meeting, and with a long grace period behind him, it must now be said that our 3rd District Councilman Steve Price is not only gaffe-ridden and abjectly confused. Politically, he is becoming an embarrassment to the district.
Taking Price in tandem as Tweedledee to Dan "Wizard of Westside" Coffey's Tweededum, or as Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd to Coffey's Edgar Bergen -- and given the sad propensity of both Price and Coffey to admire the dulcet tones of their own voices for periods of time far longer than that required for Hannibal to march elephants over the Alps -- I am quite frankly apologetic for ever having castigated Mayor James Garner for his periodic difficulties in communicating.
It would seem that Mayor Garner at least knows when not to speak, and that even if his words aren't always ideal, he at least knows the material.
Price can lay claim to neither of these virtues, and to make his performance even more unfortunate, he refrains from butchering the syntax only when Coffey pauses to take a drink of water.
Tonight, Price contributed another of his cult classic quotes, this one coming after ten bewildering, very public minutes of inability to understand certain obvious features of the parks department budget ... and having stumbled further even as he was being corrected by the ever-exasperated (but on this occasion remarkably patient) Councilman Mark Seabrook, Price apparently then resolved to spend the rest of the evening digging a deeper hole by endlessly qualifying his malapropisms, finally blurting, "I'm not anti-park, and I'm not anti-progress -- I'm just anti-excess."
Really.
And: "I just think we should be looking at the worst case scenario."
Well, we're looking at it, all right, and he's my councilman until 2007.
Readers, there is absolutely no doubt -- none -- that New Albany's future prospects are tied to "being smarter" in educational performance, in style of governance, in lifestyle choices, in business, in pleasure ... it's our only hope.
Tonight's dispiriting performance by a self-aggrandizing ward heeler obsessed with locked public park toilets (Coffey), and his fawning 3rd District acolyte Price ("we won't get no riverboat money") serves to remind us of how far we must travel before genuine change takes root and grows.
Barring an eleventh-hour reprieve -- perhaps Price will leap forward to spearhead a drive to smite absentee landlords, or earnestly propose that we finally bury those war veterans who gave their lives to continue gambling at the Legion -- then it's never too early to begin the search for competent representation, which in this case would be a non-Republican with a pulse.
Anyone?
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3 comments:
Anne: Obviously, it isn't a question of being a Rhodes scholar or resorting to blatant Coffeyisms like "snob."
Shouldn't a councilman know the difference between the General Fund, non-reverting funds, and accumulative funds?
I suppose it may take a wee bit of spine to question what are nickels and dimes in a budget of many millions.
While those nickels and dimes undoubtedly add up to real money, and we'd all be foolish to deny it, it's also true that waving Oates Flag Co. receipts in the air and shifting into full demogogue mode does nothing to explicate the larger issues that are at stake.
But it's easier and far more crowd-pleasing to grandstand than it is to understand.
Just a quick note: Anne had double posted the same comments, so I deleted the second. Nothing was edited or omitted.
RAB
RAB...Thanks for keeping me informed. Without getting in to the details, we don't get the details in the daily papers like you report to us. Kind of like the difference between the CJ and The Nation or Z Magazine.
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