Tuesday evening’s City Council work session, a gathering designed to share information with no votes proposed or taken, wasn’t two minutes old when 1st District Councilman Dan Coffey stepped to the plate, waving his bat menacingly, spitting on his hands, and pointing to the exact spot in deepest right center field (i.e., the water fountain in the corridor) where he proposed to plant the fat pitch coming his way.
But what followed could hardly be termed a mighty cut.
In fact, it was more like a tentative checked swing, producing a weak little dribbler to the mound – and when Coffey’s time at bat was mercifully concluded, and he returned to the dugout to punch the water cooler, the fans in the stand sighed and said yes, he deserved his chance to bat – now maybe we’ll score some runs.
Just as the sum of a half dozen zeroes is still zero, so the impact of the Coffey Plan, as presented by the councilman to an audience precluded by accepted protocol from speaking, and illustrated with poster board, magic marker and hastily assembled snapshots of dilapidated houses and potholed streets, was no more than that of a balefully muted fart at a rock and roll show.
Of course, the primary consideration of the Coffey Plan is that the proper name “Coffey” is affixed right where the councilman thinks it should be, in front of that other part, but the curious motif of Councilman Coffey’s typically egocentric performance on Tuesday night was an almost desperate appeal to arcane legalism – not the breathtaking, soaring flights of sheer semi-literate nonsense that so often characterizes his pseudo-professorial pronouncements on matters ranging from advanced hydroponics to the sexual habits of equatorial hedgehogs.
Amid the clutter of unrelated clauses, Councilman Coffey seemed to emphasize three main points.
1. The YMCA should remove the burden of Scribner Place from New Albany, since the city is far too factionalized by the Gang of Four’s obstructionist tactics to know how to use it, and then the city should take the money it saves by privatizing Scribner Place and use it to repair streets, sewers and other things that have remained stubbornly broken throughout Councilman Coffey’s long tenure on the City Council.
2. It is vitally important to realize that there might be any number of financing plans yet to be conceived over cigarettes and Captain Crunch, and we mustn’t forget this potential plethora of plans, even if it means a plan other than the Coffey Plan is adopted as the plan of record.
3. Just as Bill Clinton before him, Councilman Coffey will have you know that he has read the fine print of the Caesar’s Foundation grant agreement, and two years and forty pages later, it is crystal clear about the meaning of “is,” although “it doesn’t say ‘and,’ it says ‘or.’” This is crucial, and means that the city is free to sell its piece of the action to anyone foolish enough to accept the offer.
As a tactical rearguard action, the Coffey Plan remains a confused muddle of disparate components that cynically tosses a sliver of red meat to the clamoring “concern” yokels in the form of the aforementioned string of nulls, but has all the weight of a flea’s handkerchief when it comes to his chances of influencing the decision-making process with respect to Scribner Place, the lumbering machinery of which already is well removed from Councilman Coffey’s sweaty and perpetually conniving palms.
This leaves a modicum of obligatory strategic posturing for the next election, and a few stickpins in the household bulletin board for saying “I told you so” if alien spaceships elect to vaporize the YMCA a quarter-century from now.
That’s about it. It wasn’t at all clear whether he believed any of it himself.
By the work session’s end, Councilman Coffey was reduced to complaining about the condition of city streets, noting “I’ve still got a broken front end of my truck because of a hole in the road,” and smiling wanly as City Hall looked in his direction and thanked the council for helping them work things out.
By then, almost no one was listening.
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In Wednesday morning coverage, the Courier-Journal correctly focuses attention on signals that county support for Scribner Place is on the way, relegating Councilman Coffey's tiresome bid to be seen as the contemporary Henry Clay to a paragraph near the bottom.
Floyd warming to Scribner Place; County officials join city meeting on plan, by Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal (short shelf life for C-J links).
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