Develop New Albany silent as tolling Machiavellians giggle.

A couple months back, I asked Develop New Albany's president if the organization, which I once happily served as board member, would be taking a stand on tolling existing bridges to finance the ORBP boondoggle. He said it would.

I'm waiting, Mike.

It is my belief that given the Ohio River's historic role as wall between communities on each side, tolls will devastate small businesses on the Indiana shore. There will be an immediate decline in discretionary traffic from Kentucky to Indiana (how many Hoosier have little choice but to work in Kentucky?), and even if the decline reverses itself over time, the damage already will be done.

As noted many times previously, I have dedicated my life in small business to the establishment of some movement that will unite the metro area and bring Kentucky money to Indiana, not just to my own business, but to Indiana, period.

The single most insulting phenomenon about the high-powered wagons circling around the boondoggle's outmoded, solution-for-yesterday imperative is that not a soul in favor of tolls will considered my objection, that tolling will cripple small businesses in Indiana, publicly.

Not Clere, not Grooms, not Dalby, not Stemler, not Saint Daniels, not the Bridges Authority. Not a single one of the suits are willing to discuss this aloud with someone like me ... but in their eagerness to prattle about business, and to glorify people in business ... well, I fit that description. Don't I have sufficient sweat equity as a businessman to ask as much? Isn't two decades in business enough to get a seat at their table, to not to be deleted, ignored and spat upon? To not be patronizingly treated like a child?

Isn't it, Ed Clere?

Mike Kopp, are you there somewhere?

I assumed DNA would find the topic interesting. Wouldn't you? DNA damned well should be considering the prospective blow to downtown revitalization from tolling, don't you think? Isn't it why DNA is a Main Street organization in the first place? To protect, to defend, to be a collective voice?

Am I asking too many difficult questions of an organization whose silence now appears little more than meek, tacit support of the shifty dissembling and the blatant lies about tolling (it isn't in the plan; it won't be that bad; shut up and respect your betters) that we can clearly see, three days after the election, to be as obvious as the noses on our faces?

Maybe noses are not evident when blinders are required wearing. I find it shameful, and once again, glaring evidence of NAC's observation that in the absence of principled action, "behind the scenes" diplomacy and polite posturing are little more than the muffled death rattles of the doomed.

You are in the process of being sold down a tolled river. Can we at least detect a pulse before the lemmings are herded over the edge?

Anyone?