UEA decapitation: Different tactics, same desired outcome, and still just as wrong as before.

Following is the unedited text of the remarks I'll be making at today's hastily convened Urban Enterprise Association meeting (9:00 a.m., 3rd floor planning conference room -- not the council chambers). I read yesterday's post aloud during public non-agenda speaking time at last night's city council meeting: ON THE AVENUES: A decapitation, coming tomorrow.

If today's ritual truly is pre-ordained, as was suggested to me, and if the votes already are in place to achieve the new administration's abrupt and invasive surgery, let's just hope there is a physical quorum present, and that the new board is not asked to conduct business by proxy vote. After all, it'll be the first time for being in the same room together. Here's what I plan to say, if permitted. 

---

I’d like to thank David Duggins for explaining the current administration’s point of view with respect to the Urban Enterprise Association. As I’ve told him, I understand this position, and I respect it. But I disagree with it.

I was a member of the UEA from 2008 through the summer of 2010, roughly two and a half years, so I speak from experience in saying that when the UEA is allowed to function as chartered, it does much good according to its specific mandates within the delineated zone. The best and most widely known example is the UEA’s façade grant program, which provides matches for exterior improvements, but it isn’t the only one.

In fact, during my tenure on the board, a more ambitious program of work evolved. Unfortunately, this program of work ran afoul of purposeful politicization, and not only is it important for us not to forget why this happened, but one also would imagine that we would be united in not wanting such counter-productivity to be repeated.

Isn’t that why we study history?

Early in the third England administration, Indiana’s inventory tax revenue stream for the UEA was ending, and the legislature had begin issuing annual hints that it might disband the Urban Enterprise program altogether. Then, just prior to Harvest Homecoming in 2008, the UEA was strongly pressured by the England administration to fund non-bid, downtown temporary landscaping projects for the stated benefit of Equinox Gardens, which needed the work. This was unhappily approved amid much disgruntlement. Soon after, we learned that the company had purchased equipment unrelated to the landscaping, using monies provided by the UEA.

It's a good thing we checked the receipts, don't you think?

Beginning in 2009, the board resolved that this sort of featherbedding wouldn’t happen again, and we began putting together the previously mentioned program of work, along with a budget clearly spelling out the limits of what would be financed outside the parameters of the existing works program, and recognizing that we’d have to be careful with our money owing to developments at the state level.

Now, why is all of this important?

It’s because the former administration poisoned this well, and now the current administration is asking you to make a clean slate out of the very same materials that dirtied it in the first place, and my view, this makes no sense at all.

Roughly the last two years of the third England administration were spent in a state of siege warfare, with City Hall regarding the UEA as its personal ATM machine, continually hectoring the UEA for allotments falling outside its budget and works program, but with precious little voluntary participation on the part of the UEA with respect to the expenditures being demanded of it.

Today, in 2012, the current administration asks that you move forward, and erase this past – ignore the complete absence of UEA input into the decision to bill the organization for 8th and Culbertson, look the other way when it comes to the tactics used to secure the required “yes” vote, and set aside the presumably “joint” marketing program with DNA, which was assembled by a marketing firm largely absent the UEA’s presence.

The new administration would like for all of us to forget history because it wasn’t in office way back then, and isn’t responsible for these painful aspects of history, but with the entire plan of action as formulated for today’s meeting, it is asking you to proceed in exactly the same way Doug England once “asked” the UEA to fund Equinox, and the way various powerbrokers in outside organizations “asked” the UEA to participate in their projects, which is to say, it isn’t a request at all. It’s more of the same top-down, non-grassroots approach that voters rejected by electing the current mayor.

Surely he grasps this?

How can history’s lessons be understood and heeded, and its mistakes avoided, by collective amnesia? Mr. Duggins has assured me that in this brave new UEA world, the coercive errors of the England years will never be repeated, and I believe he’s being sincere. And yet, without publicly discussing what the errors actually were, do we even know what we’re referring to?

Moreover, isn’t the way that Mike Ladd and this whole new board being treated at the present time representative of discredited old ways of thinking, and not new, fresh ones?

I see more than 50% turnover on the current board from the last one, and much of the UEA’s institutional knowledge has departed. In the very best of times, you’re going to miss Ron McKulick and Daniel Meyer. Yet, here you are, at your very first UEA meeting, and you’re being expected to forget about what happened before you arrived, and then, with history conveniently erased, you’re to roll ahead with drastic changes in the UEA’s structure and operations, including terminating its director, even when it previously had been intimated that his job was safe.

In your own businesses, would it make sense to ask a colleague, employee or partner to make far-reaching decisions absent research and experience? Would you ask them to do it precisely because they have no facts upon which to base the decisions? Would you do so yourself?

This is what the current administration is asking you to do today. The current administration says that it can handle the administrative tasks, zone recruitments and paperwork otherwise performed by the director – a full-time job by any definition – in house, freeing monies that can be used for programs. On the surface, this is the mantra of the present belt-tightening age, but wouldn’t a better first step be to reduce utilities, rents and office expenses by moving the incumbent director’s desk from the Elsby to the already overcrowded City County Building, where too few workers try to perform too few … well, I think you get my drift.

The current administration has expressed concern over timely UEA meetings not being held, but apparently not so much so that either it or the city council have been in any great hurry to make appointments, or until very recently, to so much as hint aloud at what their visions of the UEA really are. As of today, March 16, the council still has a final appointment to make. It’s the opposite of the military: Not hurry up and wait, but wait and then hurry up.

So, why the urgency?

Because, by its own admission, the administration’s economic development team has grown weary of non-elected officials at the Horseshoe Foundation and Indiana Landmarks pestering them for monies pledged under duress by the UEA toward the restoration of the 8th and Culbertson property, and by DNA for its share of the marketing program that culminated in the widely discredited and hilarious in all the wrong ways “Come to City” idea.

As we’ve seen, these are the very controversies that poisoned the well, the ones you’re supposed to forgive and forget. Has anyone seen the receipts? Verified that the work billed was performed? Shouldn’t these questions be answered before the checks are cut?

Furthermore, shouldn’t the whole shoddy record of the past two years be vetted and discussed publicly and transparently, so everyone can see and hear it, so that there can be actual closure, as opposed to virtual closure, and so that you genuinely can move the UEA forward into a new era?

I look at it this way.

The UEA is in a recovery ward. It was attacked by a nasty infection, but it can be nursed back to health, and it stands to reason that to get better and go back to work, it will need time and a full time staff person to do the nursing. What the current administration proposes today is not rehabilitation, but a lobotomy, which amounts to punishing the UEA and its director for contracting an illness that was not either one’s fault.

When you look at it this way, isn’t it the case that far from being something erasable by whim, history’s actually the very best course of study to see into the future?