Yesterday’s “New Life for Old Factories” presentation in Madison was highly informative, and well attended by New Albanians (six of us, I believe). To make a long story short, North Carolina is ahead of the pack when it comes to offering tax incentives and other inducements for those seeking to develop archaic factories, mill buildings, schools and public utility structures into newly usable revenue generators.The results are stunning.
Indiana may lag behind, and one wonders why our governor did not accompany his Major Moves program with North Carolinian-style carrots/incentives for adaptive reuse of what we already have, but no matter.
Creative solutions actually do exist in Indiana, although you wouldn’t know it by observing the actions of Floyd County’s commissioners and council, our two governing entities, who continue to insist that the only way of improving the historic County Home (North Annex) building on Grant Line Road is to demolish it, ostensibly to allow the contemporary institutional, er, “grandeur” of its Timpermanesque replacement to be seen from the egalitarian confines of the Wal-Mart parking lot.
Speaking of lowest common denominators, currently the county’s leadership cadre doesn’t have the money to do even that, short of sending orange-festooned jailbirds with hammers to begin chipping away in the fashion of the Berlin Wall’s demise, or indulging in the time-honored local solution of summarily torching the edifice (moving the Youth Shelter kids away to a tent city first, of course), and this constitutes a rarely fortunate turn of events stemming from Indiana’s property tax class warfare.
Perhaps a thought process (is that legal?) somewhat removed from used car sales Philistinism will yet prevail, sensible options for adaptive reuse will be considered, and progress in the North Carolina sense -- savor the irony in that analogy -- might yet blossom right here in the domain of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness.
Meanwhile, before anyone jumps in here to passionately defend the Youth Shelter, let’s be clear about the gist. I'm for the Youth Shelter. My comments here are not about the Youth Shelter, not about its employees, and not about its inhabitants.
To my knowledge, there is nothing in the mandate of the Youth Shelter that says a historic building should be thoughtlessly demolished when all available facts suggest it is cheaper to renovate such a structure than to build a new one. Throughout the previous months of this discussion, council, commissioners and Youth Shelter supporters alike have consistently sought to shift the conversation away from the merits of County Home reuse to the emotional insinuation that anyone opposing the politicos’ shortsighted “resolve” is guilty of ignoring, rejecting and detesting troubled kids.
No, it isn’t, that particular argument is flagrantly invalid, and the people advancing it need to become better actors.
As with most other political failings locally, the suggested fate of the County Home has far less to do with thoughtful future planning than it does with an abject and egregious absence of imagination on the part of elected officials. Once a historical building is gone, it’s gone for good, but imagination somehow continues to cling to survival hereabouts -- if only it might be acknowledged and nurtured.
Ironically, the clients of the Youth Shelter might have a better grasp of imagination, creativity and adaptive solutions owing to their own unfortunate circumstances than the generally well-meaning adults who insist on skewing the argument illogically. That's too bad.
In the archives:
NAC: Sekula on the North Annex: "Clarify and frame this discussion and ensure that it is portrayed accurately."
NAC: New thread: North Annex, preservationists, youth shelter advocates and ... and ...
NAC: North Annex? It's time to address Floyd County's political culture and its congenital cultural amnesia.
And: Bass Ackward (Diggin’ in the Dirt blog)
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Photo credit: Floyd County Historical Association
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