Wizard of Westside to Dalby: We don’t need any stinking outside world – poverty was good enough for our forefathers, and it’s good enough for us!

Thursday’s city council proceedings offered the citizens of New Albany a clear and unmistakable preview of the year to come.

Assuming you have long observed, as we have long explicated, that during the three previous years, the council’s obstructionist Gang of Four* has been vigilant in preventing the council from discernable forward movement, then kindly be aware that with 4th district councilman “Slippery” Larry Kochert at the council helm, and with all the Gang’s council seats up for grabs in the forthcoming 2007 election, we’re in for twelve months of a do-nothing Ice Age with banana republic dimensions.

Sugar will be allocated to gas tanks, spanners tossed in nearby works, and heels dug in "well" below the water table … but not, of course, if you take the unctuous new kingpin at his word. After the Thursday session’s work was concluded, its newly elevated president read aloud his list of agenda items for the coming year.

And, to be fair, most are worthy, although it must be noted that President Kochert’s three years of stubborn gang-related intransigence are a major part of the reason why these issues have yet to be tackled conclusively, and politics being what it is, he now is in a position to take credit for any successes.

What’s the over/under on the number of phone calls Slippery Larry will make to at-large councilman Donnie Blevins in the year to come?

At any rate, Kochert’s stated council wish list includes maintaining service for a second ambulance, resolving hiring issues at the police and fire department, finishing sewer projects, funding the street department, and delving into inaction at the building commissioner’s office.

But make no mistake: Kochert’s agenda is purely reactive, and while New Albanians understand the importance of efficiency in the city’s basic services, they have not failed to grasp that money will remain exceedingly tight, a fact that in turn illuminates the council’s inability to develop a coherent strategy with respect to economic development, downtown revitalization, wealth creation and proactive planning for the future, which in turn, and to put it mildly, threatens even the best intentioned of reactive decay management plans.

Want proof?

Consider the muddled reception given 1 Southern Indiana’s Michael Dalby, who attended the Thursday council meeting to explain his organization’s mission, and to support a resolution before the council calling for the city to become a funding partner of 1SI to the tune of $92,000 per annum.

Having just finished an inelegant and embarrassing procedural kneecapping of local Montessori advocates, and with the council’s reactionaries deliriously in their cups over the public bloodletting, progressive minds on the council somehow momentarily prevailed, and the 1SI resolution actually was accorded a second. This permitted a relieved Dalby, who looked as though he was only beginning to comprehend the unfathomable density that lay ahead, an opportunity (denied Montessori) to at least present a case for his position.

As with Montessori’s artfully evaded request for money, there are numerous legitimate questions that the council might ask of people like Dalby, and of bodies like One Southern Indiana, and credit Dalby with being prepared. His outline of the rudiments of 1SI’s job matched that available to us on the Web:

One Southern Indiana is the combined Economic Development Council and Chamber of Commerce for Floyd and Clark counties on the Indiana side of the Louisville, Kentucky metropolitan area. One Southern Indiana proactively works to grow our regional economy through business attraction, retention and expansion; through encouraging and supporting entrepreneurs; and through providing government and workforce advocacy, business education, networking opportunities and other business services to our investors. We are one vision, one voice for business.

Dalby’s brief presentation introduced such topics as non-partisanship in expanding the tax base, the educational and training needs of the global economy, local cooperation toward regional economic development, and aggressive marketing of the area to industries interested in establishing operations in Floyd and Clark counties.

As Dalby spoke about a complex and inter-related planet, where ever-changing paradigms require nimble thinking, the Gang of Four’s eyes began to glaze. Visions of simple pleasures, childhood, white bread, light beer, kickball, bedtime stories and that first kiss behind the incinerator – all began crowding into the already filled meeting room.

Most prominently, CM Coffey fidgeted uncomfortably, obviously troubled that such an upstart – hell, he’s not even from here! – would stand before him on the Wizard’s own hallowed 1st district turf and pretend to know more ‘bout makin’ cold hard cash than he – a successful businessman and “antique” dealer, for chrissakes – has learned out there on the hard streets in the grammar school of hard knocks … well, anyone who’s watched the council before could guess that an objection was being molded and prepared for lobbing toward Dalby like a Molotov cocktail filled with liquid envy.

“They’ll benefit more than we will,” intoned the Wizard.

Excuse me?

“Charlestown will be the biggest beneficiary,” CM Coffey continued.

Out came the venom.

“We” have less land than “they” do. “We” have less industrial potential than “they” do. “We” already have an economic development person detested by CM Coffey, and hardly need for “they” to have one as well, since he’d have to split his spite between the two. “We” can’t, “they” might, and so “he” wanted no part of it.

Dalby went on to explain that 1SI is headquartered in New Albany and that much of its recent work has come at New Albany’s industrial park. He noted that the suggested funding partnership level was based on population alone; also, that other communities in Clark County were being asked to join, too (and some already had), and finally, that joining 1SI merited an advisory position to be filled by a council delegate.

CM Coffey was adamant, and understandably, Dalby was confused, having not been briefed that in the fevered, clannish brain of the Wizard, and by extension, his sycophants and the remaining three-quarters of the Gang of Four, there exists no metropolitan Louisville area, no unified Southern Indiana, no Floyd County outside the flood plain, and perhaps not even a city of New Albany.

However, there is such an entity as his fiefdom of an impoverished council district, his own street, and the perimeters of his own yard. The probability of a New Albany resident seeking employment at an industrial plant in Clark County apparently does not figure into the famed ward heeler’s equation. Perhaps such cognitive achievements have been displaced by ambition, or spite; certainly their absence is why CM Coffey has never had, and never will have, a plan for the future of the city of New Albany, at least one extending beyond the narrow limits of his own ambition.

Once again, those seeking future vision from the Gang of Four are left with smoke, mirrors, posturing, and the art of the grandstand.

Hard as it is to imagine, considering the depths already observed, it stands to get even worse before it gets better.

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* If you’re just tuning in, the Gang of Four is made up of councilmen Coffey, Kochert, Price and Schmidt.