A parking garage attendant for every car, and other job creation strategies.

Near the bottom of reporter Suddeath's piece is a tally of attendance: "Five of the council’s nine members attended the work shop, as Diane McCartin-Benedetti, Steve Price, Jeff Gahan, Pat McLaughlin and (Bob) Caesar were present."

We don't know what Jack Messer, Kevin Zurschmiede or John Gonder were doing, but rumor has it that Dan Coffey was campaigning door to door, albeit with a curious targeting strategy of only knocking on the doors of vulnerable senior citizens. That ol' copperhead's a real snake oil charmer, isn't he?

The scant majority listened to a description of the River View development project, and the concurrent necessity of building a parking garage. After the excerpt, I have an observation and a question.

New Albany City Council gets better view of $42 million projecy; Vote on city’s role in River View project will come Monday, by Daniel Suddeath (OSIN)
... The multi-use development would feature retail, office and residential space supported by a $12 million parking garage that would be paid for with New Albany tax-increment financing dollars.

Mainland Properties — headed by New Albany native Jack Bobo — is the private firm seeking to build the development. In order to dedicate TIF proceeds toward the project, the council must vote to amend New Albany’s downtown parking garage TIF district to include the River View development.

River View would include up to 300,000 square feet of condominium space, 40,000 square feet of office space and 4,000 square feet of retail space.

The development would be located downtown just east of the Floyd County branch of the YMCA along Main Street, and would include a 6,000 square foot public plaza.

Members of the Mainland Properties team estimated the development could bring up to 400 jobs to New Albany not including laborers who would build River View.

After the merchant's mixer meeting on Tuesday morning, during which the River View project was outlined, the conversation turned to the number of jobs that might be created by this development.

I observed that a major error committed by Ohio River Bridges Project shills was a propensity toward inflating such figures to ludicrous extremes. Remember the asinine 50,000 tout? It seemed for a while that every time the topic was raised, Bridges Authority noses grew longer, and the numbers pushed higher. When asked to provide evidence, the chirpy house of cards quickly fell.

With precisely this in mind, I asked the construction/contracting representative who was present Tuesday morning to estimate the number of temporary construction jobs required to build River View. The response, while approximate, was around 125. It strikes me as a solid and reliable sum.

Last night, Mainland told the council that 400 jobs would be created beyond those required to finish construction. While granting that if fully occupied -- all the condos sold, the vast expanse of retail space leased, the imagined top-dollar restaurant atop the central tower operating, and the conjectured hotel functional -- River View will create jobs, does the guess of 400 withstand serious scrutiny?

From whence comes this number?