Smith: "New Albany city money for 1SI can be better spent."

One Southern Indiana supports the Bridges Project, a boondoggle that reinforces dependence on automotive transport at a time when civilized areas of the planet spend time and money seeking alternatives.

For the Bridges Project, itself profoundly mistaken and tied to special interests, mistaken, to even get off the ground, there must be tolling on existing bridges -- and 1SI supports that, too.

Such tolling will have a tremendously adverse affect on small businesses, particularly those in downtown New Albany, although 1SI never has supported non-chain endeavors, anyway. 1SI is about converting green fields into industrial parks, not adaptively reusing existing infrastructure.

Bob Caesar is a councilman who owns a downtown business. He has just voted to give 1SI, of which he is an enthusiastic supporter, money to continue advocating tolls, which in turn will damage Caesar's own business and all the ones around it.

Not only is doing so injurious to every New Albany resident, but as Randy Smith makes clear in his op-ed piece, 1SI member Caesar's "for it" vote to clean out the economic development fund to suit a single entity was a conflict of interest. Of course, it also was a conflict of his own self-interest, and if he can't grasp that, how could he ever see the larger implications?

If you're looking for reasons why New Albany is the place that brains forgot, look no further, and consider which council members got this one right. Gonder and Messer ... Coffey and Price.

Alice in Wonderland's got nothing on us, does she?

SMITH: New Albany city money for 1si can be better spent

... But this appropriation to One Southern Indiana isn’t designed to do that. It is nothing more than a subsidy — a dues payment, if you will — to a private membership organization that just doesn’t get what we are trying to do in New Albany.There is a clear question, too, as to whether a “dues” payment is even a legal council expenditure.