“That was nothing more than a kangaroo court going in there,” Coffey said.

The ironic thing about yesterday's carefully choreographed Urban Enterprise Association "reordering" was that apart from the presence of all nine board members (a council-appointed seat remains unfilled) and four members of the public, five other public figures past and present were very much a part of the proceedings:

Doug England (former mayor), Carl Malysz (former deputy mayor, current housing domo), Jerry Finn (Horseshoe Foundation), Greg Sekula (Indiana Landmarks) and Ed Clere (state representative).

The meeting wasn't about them, and yet in many significant ways, it was entirely about them, to wit: Is the UEA's work to be conducted from within by its board, with or without a full-time director, or is it to be directed from without, by elected/appointed/self-appointed arbiters of the Commonweal?

I'm excerpting the newspaper's coverage in two sections. In the first part, the main points are correct, but some of the details are not.

New Albany UEZ head gets axed; Mike Ladd relieved from duty at special meeting, by Jared Clapp (News and Tribune)

NEW ALBANY — The executive director for the New Albany Urban Enterprise Zone Association was relieved of his position at a special meeting of the UEZ board on Friday morning.

Mike Ladd’s termination came from a 4-0 vote with two abstentions. Dan Coffey, board member, left the meeting before a vote was taken.

David Duggins, board member, said those abstentions came from new board members who said they would have otherwise voted in favor of the measure.

Perhaps because the reporter was not actually present at yesterday's meeting, the vote totals are incorrect. I reported it correctly yesterday via Twitter:

Norrington, Dillman, Norwood, Duggins and Howie vote yes. Streckfus, Bergman and Schmitt abstain. Coffey left mtg. Mike Ladd fired #nauea

On Saturday morning, board member Ann Streckfus added this, also at Twitter:

The Trib has the UEZ story wrong. I've contacted them, but for the record, I did not vote to terminate Mike; I didn't state I would have.

Other than that, the article is substantially correct. The city council representative to the UEA board is Dan Coffey, and he gets the final words, as reported by Clapp:

Coffey said he didn’t think Ladd had done anything wrong, which is why he left before a vote was taken to relieve him.

“That was nothing more than a kangaroo court going in there,” Coffey said. “That was a decision I assume was made before any board members got in there, so I wasn’t going to be any part of that.”

He said he thought the money going into the UEZ was sought by other city governing entities for purposes that didn’t mesh with the state’s intentions for the UEZ — job growth and promotion of business within those zones.

“When you take money out to advertise with Develop New Albany and you take money out for a building that was dilapidated... I don’t care if it was $12,500 or $2,500, you’ve got money that could help fix those up through the parks department and they don’t want to look at it,” Coffey said.