A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
On Monday morning, we awoke to a familiar phenomenon in the annals of New Albany.
Without fanfare, a timbering operation suddenly began spewing sawdust downtown. In the absence of advance discussion as to why this was happening, it appeared that mature trees were being felled in order to build … a park? Among the victims: An evergreen tree once planted as a veteran's memorial, an early warning sign that hereabouts, institutional memory is a safeguard best erased, lest conscience intrude.
Unsurprisingly, an overdue public conversation began.
Was it true that what will amount to a pocket park the size of many back yards was going to cost $750,000 to construct, when all was said and spent?
Could it be that the city’s only recently re-animated Tree Board was entirely unaware of the logging, even though two of its members also sit on the Bicentennial Junta promoting the boondoggle park scheme?
Exactly why does councilman Bob Caesar persist in believing that three-quarter-million dollar pocket parks across from this business, $2 million dollar multiple road rebuilds leading to his house on Silver Hills, and $200 dollar bicentennial “fundraising” tomes that were his brainchild somehow constitute fiscal rectitude, even as he screams poverty in response to other more worthy aims, such as a complete streets program?
And: Did they really think we’re so eager for Harvest Homecoming’s elephant ear of a sugar buzz to begin that we’d refrain from asking these questions?
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By Tuesday morning, city government was in full scattershot reactive mode, and the press releases began flying – except that none of these typically belated explanations landed where the clear-cutting story actually originated on blogs and in social media, because the impetus for the civic dialogue that our elected officials had imperially judged unnecessary clearly came first from the grassroots, and only afterward was picked up by traditional media.
By Wednesday, the saga was being reported in the main local newspapers, and the city was hastening to explain that the trees in question were diseased, or perhaps just unhealthy, or unsightly, something like that; oddly, the diagnosis apparently was proffered not by the city’s own arborist, but one in the employ of the engineers chosen to design the over-priced Caesar’s Folly park project.
As the criticism continued, yet another talking point emerged: The bad condition of the felled trees owed to chronic trimming butchery on the part of Duke Energy.
(We pause here for an announcement from the blog’s founder: NATIONALIZE THE UTILITIES NOW)
All the while, the city’s own social media outlets exuded a serene, oblivious and detached calm, sticking with their daily output of public service announcements and links.
Just like Pravda during Chernobyl.
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In 2013, the city of New Albany will celebrate its 200th birthday, and it’s impossible to imagine a more symbolic bicentennial chapter than this week’s muddled events.
But one must begin the story in the 1960’s, as the presumed Greatest Generation stepped up to the task of remaking its downtown sandbox in its own triumphant image.
Accordingly, an architecturally magnificent post office building was destroyed to create a parking lot and drive-thru window for a bank, itself constructed where the architecturally magnificent court house building stood until it was bulldozed.
When the bank was able to level yet another aging marvel to bring its parking lot a few feet closer to the vault, the post office lot became a perennial afterthought, housing a cement block Harvest Homecoming reviewing stand used variously as skateboard ramp, graffiti easel and homeless shelter, before eventually being purchased by a slumlord intent on extracting parking rentals from nearby business employees.
The parking lot was chronically neglected, the scraps tossed to other slumlords, until finally the providential moment arrived for the last slumlord standing to deal his ilk out of the shell game by flipping the parking lot a final time, to the city, and of course for far more than it was worth, because by now the stated imperative had become the city’s birthday party – and golly, we need to move fast seeing as we’ve waited so long!.
Assembling the usual upstanding citizens, those habitually populating every known committee in town (remember the Howard Johnson scene in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles”?), a commission was formed, and soon it was solemnly decreed that we must celebrate the bicentennial in the “proper” white-bread way, or more succinctly, just as those community pillars from the 1960’s – the ones who demolished the post office in the first place – would themselves have enthusiastically endorsed:
By designing a tea and crumpets pocket park, sailing it through a disinterested, exurban-minded council eager for nothing more than to be left alone, leveraging the Horseshoe Foundation into tithing a few dollars to make the deal appear cooperative, felling the trees already there without any notice, and then reacting with dazed confusion when residents voiced their concerns.
Anyone else care to join me in wondering how much of this story appears in the mercenary Crutchfield’s “official” $200 coffee table book?
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It is not my aim today to savage or malign hard-working, well-intentioned, civic-minded people. After all, I’m one, too.
Rather, it is what they do when banded together as committees that I find worrisome.
Allow me to advance the notion that in this numbingly predictable bicentennial miasma – the absence of transparency, the indefensible expenditures, the clique-driven picking of favorites who “know best”, and their ensuing “official” party line about the city’s past – we’re once again perpetuating the dysfunctional aspect of our municipal history in the direst need of invasive, corrective therapy.
And, lastly: Well-intentioned or otherwise, none of them seem to be able to grasp the irony of it. What we really need most to mark our bicentennial is city-wide psychiatric help, and a new marketing slogan: City On The Couch.
Unfortunately, we can’t pay a shrink because the money’s all spent on a book, a park and the same old scene.
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