UPDATED: Scribner Place: Who's for it, who's against it, and who hasn't decided

Note to readers: For whatever reason, incessant error messages have precluded us from including links to other web sites. See "InfoLinks" further down the right margin of NA Confidential for some of the relevant links.

Today, Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal writes, “The last two businesses (Schmitt Furniture & Retailers Supply warehouses) at the site of the Scribner Place project in downtown New Albany are moving this weekend, clearing the way for the buildings to be demolished.”

Scribner Place site is being vacated: last businesses are moving out

Hershberg makes no mention of the future, if any, for the former railroad freight depot at State Street by the floodwall. Perhaps Ted Fulmore of the Historic Preservation Commission can enlighten readers with respect to the current status of that topic, which was last discussed here on April 14.

Louis Schmitt closes the Courier-Journal article by observing, “We're really excited about the Y."

Schmitt, by all accounts a successful and respected local businessman, obviously is a proponent of the Scribner Place/YMCA project.

This fact would be entirely unremarkable if not for the incessant hue and cry from the city’s blinkered flat-earthers, grandstanding Brambleberries, petty obstructionists and unrepentant Luddites, who demand variously that the city of New Albany operate according to the dictates of their own admittedly threadbare household finances, but beyond even that, from the trustworthy perspective of good business practices.

Moving circuitously from these questionably compatible planks, the “no progress at any price” rabble breathlessly reach to conclude that Scribner Place is a catastrophic boondoggle designed by pointy-headed, soccer-playing, porno-viewing, tax-and-spend do-gooders to bankrupt our fair city – when all we really need is to save a couple hundred dollars a year by making public officials pay for their toilet paper.

And yet …

It seems to be the case that a large number of local businessmen echo Louis Schmitt’s support for the Scribner Place/YMCA project, and these are the same businessmen whose bread-and-butter principles of accountability are referenced by the alarmists as so crucially applicable to local government as a whole.

Numerous other civic organizations and media outlets have joined these local businessmen in supporting the Scribner Place/YMCA project.

So, our goal today is to compile a list of who’s for it, and who’s against it, one based on public, on-the-record pronouncements.

This list is by no means complete, and readers are both invited and urged to add to it.

FOR SCRIBNER PLACE/YMCA PROJECT

City Hall

The administration of Mayor James Garner.

Editorial endorsements (media, newspapers):

Business First of Greater Louisville (October 8, 2004) ... archived on-line.

Louisville Courier-Journal (June 6, 2003) ... on-line pay per view.

New Albany Tribune (October 5, 2004; May 12, 2005) ... not archived on-line.

Civic endorsements

Caesars Foundation of Floyd County ... donating millions of dollars for the project.

Develop New Albany

New Albany Historic Business District Association

YMCA of Southern Indiana ... raising millions of dollars for the project.

Neighborhood Associations

East Spring Street

UNDECIDED/UNDOCUMENTED/UNKNOWN

Neighborhood Associations

Main Street
S. Ellen Jones
Silver Grove

Political Parties

Floyd County Democratic Party
Floyd County Republican Party

AGAINST SCRIBNER PLACE/YMCA PROJECT

3rd District Councilman Steve Price ... as stated on Tuesday, May 17, at the meeting of the S. Ellen Jones Neighborhood Association.