"No progress at any price" faction may use New Albany's budget crisis as an excuse to target Scribner Place

Last Thursday’s City Council public work session was devoted to examining New Albany’s finances in the context of Mayor James Garner’s proposals to reshape the city’s budget in accordance with state-mandated directives.

There is no disputing the origins of New Albany’s current budget crisis, which has come about owing to fiscal bungling that occurred before Mayor Garner and the sitting City Council came into office.

In order to balance New Albany’s books, the state has ordered the city’s budget to be adjusted, and as City Controller Kay Garry remarked to the Tribune's Kyle Lowry, "we all know we're going to have to make cuts."

Perhaps the Mayor (then a member of the City Council) and other holdover councilmen should have taken notice at the time, and perhaps not, but that’s largely irrelevant at the current juncture.

By all accounts, New Albany’s elected officials now are working together to achieve consensus on strategy to cope with the crisis, and this is commendable.

Certain of their suggestions are not as praiseworthy, and the understandable pressure to resolve the problem might well lead to an upsurge in demagoguery.

Specifically, in her article, the ‘Bune’s Lowry notes that “council member Dan Coffey suggests that the Scribner Place project be put on hold.”

The city’s contribution to the Scribner Place project is coming in the form of land acquisition, preparation and infrastructure, and this is the money (for this year and next) referred to by Councilman Coffey.

Wear knee-high boots if you have them, because Coffey’s linking of the budget crisis with Scribner Place is an obvious signal that potentially divisive public grandstanding is about to occur.

As the perpetual ward-heeling politico who lacks vision the way that albino mice lack pigment, Coffey probably intends to glad-hand the city’s depressingly morose “no progress at any price” faction by arguing that the city’s budget cuts provide “proof” that thinking in the future tense is mistaken.

Instead of moving forward, New Albany must hunker down for a few decades longer, think always in terms of what we can’t do rather than what we can, remain forever unwilling to consider the multitude of ways that a progressive and visionary local government might help to create local conditions that enhance taxable revenue streams and contribute to economic development, and in the final analysis, promote the familiar change-resistant strains of fear, spite and envy that have defined New Albany for far too long.

To be sure, Scribner Place is not a panacea, but it is an acceptable risk, one that stands a reasonably good chance of succeeding at its limited goals and playing a role in downtown revitalization.

However, viewed against the tragi-comic backdrop of civic lethargy and serial underachievement that has characterized New Albany’s ruling class for countless decades, Scribner Place is transformed into a veritable Taj Mahal.

At present, Scribner Place probably is worth more in symbolic terms than anything else. Even if the project's revised scale remains too conservative by half, at least it is a starting point. At least it approximates vision, represents future thinking, and hints at progressive solutions to the city’s difficulties.

Those in our community who lack vision, who define the world according to narrow limits, who actively fear the future, who advocate regression, who have no plan of their own, who despise those who do, who do not understand that change is inevitable … can be expected to applaud Coffey’s reactionary sentiments.

NA Confidential does not.

Investment in New Albany’s future is too important to entrust to the same tired barbecued bologna cooked up by dime store populists who can't see beyond the boundaries of their own yards. The hope engendered by Scribner Place is unprecedented in recent New Albany history, and it is too fragile to be sacrificed.