City council president Larry Kochert admits to breaking the law, but had fingers crossed behind his back at the time.

Your correspondent approached city council president Larry Kochert at 11:00 p.m. last evening, just after his atrophied and erratic gavel signaled the conclusion of New Albany’s latest shameful exercise in legislative ineptitude.

I asked: “Do you have any intention of running a meeting fairly while you’re still here?”

The question was repeated to him at least three times.

Kochert’s response: “What did you do with your leotards since you’ve lost weight?”

As mating rituals go, it was almost endearing. I have decent legs, I guess, but this come-on almost qualifies as a “hunka-hunka burnin’ love.”

Moments before, in a startling eye-opener, CM Kochert had openly admitted to breaking the law, the therein lies another instructive story pertaining to his escalating unsuitability for office.

It helps to know that last night’s designated set piece of amateur troglodyte theater (parts are assigned on a rotating basis) centered on providing Kochert’s old friend, DICK STEWART, with ample public speaking time to air a self-serving complaint that he is the victim of calculated political persecution stemming from his own questionable decision to blatantly plant numerous of his political yard signs in public rights-of-way, which according to clear and specific passages in the city’s ordinances, is plainly illegal.

STEWART helpfully provided the audience with photos that showed the universally improper places where his signs had been planted prior to being uprooted by the city after complaints, the latter almost certainly phoned in by STEWART’S antiquarian cohorts in the Coup d’Geriatrique bad thespian troupe.

The drama of STEWART’s typically buzzing, gnat-like lamentation of victimization was delayed from his original target of public speaking time at the council session’s beginning, when only agenda items are to be addressed, to non-agenda public speaking at the conclusion of the plodding, rancorous demonstration of native dysfunction – but not before president Kochert, in the first of at least two dozen abject instances of failure to exercise control over the meeting, sought to allow his incontinent lapdog territorial pissing rights.

Hours later, when public speaking time resumed, the whole spectacle finally played out, and city operations director Tony Toran came to the end of a forceful defense of his decision to enforce the law on the books in response to the complaints, Toran pointedly asked Kochert how the council president knew that signs had been planted in the spots depicted in STEWART’S photos, when none were there any longer to be seen.

“Because I helped him put them there,” responded Kochert, whose contempt for ordinance enforcement – while well documented over a period of decades – certainly has never been so brazenly (and breezily) conceded in public.

That’s your council president, folks. Rest assured that the civilized world isn’t laughing with him.

A full catalogue of the evening’s many grating reminders that our sitting city council, as currently constituted by people who can’t get along, and artlessly “administered” by a president who has no desire to administer, is beyond my ability to relate this late in the evening, or perhaps ever.

Verily, you’re read it all before.

Another bizarre and contrived conspiracy theory, this one pertaining to the city’s sanitation contract, was excitedly unfurled, duly refuted, and the resolution calling for immediate action tabled with recommendation of cowardice. The resolution’s sponsor, CM Donnie Blevins, subsequently melted down publicly and began predicting reprisals, famine and locusts. In default mode, CM Steve Price prattled nonsensically about carts, horses and doing things little by little. CM Dan Coffey, an uncharacteristic voice of reason for most of the meeting, lost his religion in an outburst against STEWART, but for once, you can’t blame the Wizard of Westside. Candidate STEWART’s pneumatic prodding is a pestilence of Biblical proportions.

Unfortunately, most ordinances requiring substantive decision making were endlessly debated sans direction from the chair, then unceremoniously tabled so that the whole, endless, vituperative process of unregulated foolishness can flare up right where it left off. One that did come to a vote was defeated. It was the second reading of an effort by CM Coffey to overturn the savagely debated recent firefighter hiring ordinance and revert to previous practice.

The crowd in attendance openly hooted and jeered these diverse and assorted travesties. The gavel was silent as unreconstructed trogs heckled public officials. Voices were raised, screaming sessions erupted, and through it all CM Kochert remained utterly devoid of the slightest considerations of impartiality and subtlety in openly playing favorites in his role as presiding officer. By the standards of my well-deserved and uncontested ouster earlier this year, half-a-dozen could have been ejected last night, and were not.

As with Kochert’s sadly characteristic decision that breaking the law if perfectly fine so long as it enables him to score political points, his increasing unwillingness to exercise control and do something about the escalating chaos during council meetings reinforces a legacy of astounding underachievement that would be laughable if not so harmful to any hope of progress in the city of New Albany.

There is nothing novel or surprising in any of this. To consistently enable disruption and dysfunction is to expect disruption and dysfunction in return, and so it is. We can hope only that the cleansing power of the forthcoming elections will remove those impediments to professionalism that currently control the council.

The last thing Larry Kochert said to me Thursday night presumably was meant to be facetious: “You’re a fine citizen.”

I can’t say that I disagree with the councilman, seeing as one obligation of citizenship beyond the obvious imperative of obeying the law is the exercise of free speech -- to point in the direction of ward-heeling political hacks whose historically exaggerated powers now are diminishing, and to say clearly and without reservation:

“They're a big part of the problem, and they need to go away if we’re ever going to accomplish something in this town.”

But, barring a miracle, this council is not going to accomplish anything of substance for the remainder of the year -- unless one views fisticuffs as a form of legislative victory. The stakes for the city are far too high, but that’s the way it will be, in spite of well meaning efforts by a few council persons to reverse the trend. The obstructionists are too old to learn, too angry to compromise, too dense to “see the big picture,” or all three at once.

There’s no love coming from the current group, and if you care about the city of New Albany, it may be time to go to the mattresses.

It can no longer be doubted that we’re on our own.