3rd District’s CM Price: “I’m chasing nickels and dimes/ While the rest of the world passes me by.”*

Both local newspapers provide Tuesday coverage of the city council’s budgetary work session yesterday.

First, excerpts from the Tribune’s Council debates sanitation fate, by Amany Ali, City Editor.

Working through a proposed budget for 2006 for the City of New Albany was the intention of a work session last night, but most of the talk among City Council members was how jobs in the Sanitation Department could be saved. Last night's session was the third held by the council.

Councilman Steve Price thinks the Sanitation Department can be saved by making cuts in several areas, including contract services, travel expenses for some city employees and excessive cellular telephone bills. He also thinks the city can use about $265,000 of Economic Development Income Tax (EDIT) money to help bail out sanitation. By doing that, the city would reduce its EDIT contribution for Scribner Place by giving $137,000.

"I'm just knocking nickels and dimes off," Price said.

Over at the Courier-Journal, the regular reporter wastes no time in lending undeserved credence to the Gang of Four’s continually misleading assertion that the Great Sanitation Debate of ’05 and the Scribner Place project are linked:

Members of the New Albany City Council discussed cutting the city's 2006 budget yesterday to save the Sanitation Department from privatization, with some of the talk focusing on the city's financial commitment to the Scribner Place development downtown …

… "The cuts are here" if city leaders are willing to make them, Price said.

New Albany council looks for ways to save sanitation, by Ben Zion Hershberg, bhershberg@courier-journal.com (short shelf life on C-J links).

It’s a sad day when the council’s Gang of Four has become too numbingly predictable to satirize, but at some point the pervasive mediocrity of these time-serving obstructionists simply must be allowed to stand on its own lack of merit.

To my 3rd District CM: Can you articulate a vision for the city of New Albany that properly embodies the aspirations of your own district?

If you cannot, then why did you seek election in the first place?

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* with apologies to Social Distortion, the musical group, whose song “Nickels and Dimes” is quoted in the title.