A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
I’d love nothing more than to attend tonight’s council meeting and use my scant moments of speaking time for some necessary, well-chosen truth-telling about the future of the farmers market, as directed toward the perpetually self-aggrandizing, self-interested, self-obsessed usual suspects within Develop New Albany, which currently seem unable to function honestly and transparently in any appreciable way apart from lately comprising what amounts to an ad hoc “Re-Elect King England for the Nth Time” committee, as opposed to the non-profit it pretends to be in normal circumstances, when it yawns ever so deeply in its enduringly (note my failure to use the word “endearingly”) geriatric way while instructing our dear sweet Vanna to spin the wheel again, and again, and again until at long last, the desired and fully politicized “non-political” knee-jerk result clicks finally into place.
I’d love to, but I cannot.
You see, I have a previously scheduled beer dinner at 610 Magnolia to emcee, and a chance to be overfed by Chef Edward Lee’s crack culinary team while sipping on some wonderful brews from NABC, Three Floyds and Against the Grain.
Understand that compared with a beer dinner at 610 Magnolia, New Albany city council meetings generally resemble squalid time spent face down in a stagnant pool of leftover snow collecting around the muddy edges of a moldering Main Street tree stump across from the VFW, with John “My Way IS the Highway” Rosenbarger slouching beneath an umbrella nearby, quoting cost estimates for gently used trolleys to run from the vicinity of the body shop on Spring Street to one or the other fundamentalist churches near IU Southeast, or harkening back to the installation of a couple of bump-outs on State Street for only $200,000 and declaring it "completed" – and mind you, bilge like this violently invading one’s sensitive apertures comes before Develop New Albany begins yet again to misrepresent the whole farmers market question.
Reckon now’s the time for my written statement … not that the superannuated DNA cadres ever read actual words, or anything.
But God, do they know how to host one wicked restaurant seminar.
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A digression: Do my railings constitute ageism?
Yes, they do.
I’m 53 years old, and understand quite well that already, it’s no longer about me; it’s about people thirty years younger than me. What’s more, I know how utterly hopeless folks my age (and older) can be when it comes to gauging precisely that: Their own passé and hilarious irrelevance. If grasping reality makes me an ageist, then so be it.
The envelope, please.
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The farmers market’s current location on the corner of Bank and Market may or may not be the best spot for anchoring it into place, for the foreseeable future, through the expenditure of a somewhere between $270,000 and $340,000 for the build-out of a structure that cost only $17,000 in 1984 (adjusted for inflation at a factually compounded 30-year rate of 125%, as opposed to 2,000%, that’s $38,273 in 2014).
Visit The NewAlbanist for a more detailed rendering of the issues at the corner of Bank and Market.
At very best, the farmers market’s location is a toss-up, and so is the market’s very conceptual nature. It is a valuable amenity so long as it makes dollars and sense, although it is not as essential to everyday living as sewer pipes or unenforced parking ordinances. A private green grocer downtown open six days a week throughout the year, as opposed to the farmers market’s 40 or so prime Saturday dates, quite possibly scores more economic development points as a recipient of municipal subsidy than an expanded farmers market, which would remove a potentially valuable piece of corner infill property from future use.
To calculate the relative merits of any such claim, cities like ours customarily consult useful mechanisms known as economic studies and development plans, but since the city of New Albany fails to possess any of these, adhering instead to the random political payback generator to channel its efforts, and because no known economic development plan exists for a central downtown business district rapidly escalating in importance owing to the lone-wolf efforts of unsubsidized entrepreneurs, there is no template for reference.
In fact, we don’t even have a plan to have a plan, even if we’ve deforested most of the city by now … according to a plan.
Instead, probably owing to the timeless wisdom of the Thrasher Theorem (“We’re all here because we’re not all there”), we’ll now rush off to don our gaily painted pantaloons for yet another performance of the perpetual petitionary pageant before the council – which possesses plenty of ways to waste valuable time without enduring another drooling floor show.
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A forever petulant Develop New Albany is demanding to be paid back, and to be given collective credit, for volunteer work performed by individuals who needn’t have been affiliated with DNA from the start; in fact, the impetus for the farmers market as we now know it came from the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association prior to the at-the-time-moribund DNA’s involvement.
In fact, there is no eleventh commandment stipulating that the farmers market “belongs” to Develop New Albany. The fact that the market’s winter component currently is housed in the Marktmeister’s own business less than a block away? Merely coincidental, entirely apolitical … and the size of Pinocchio’s protuberance means absolutely nothing, neither now, nor in the era of the infamous $108K solution.
Right. Nothing at all.
Some members of the city council cannot even recall where the 2014 farmers market appropriation of $275K originated, and instead of breaking into what’s needed most – a study group – it will sit, stone-faced and riveted, through another silly, shrilly, staged mass demonstration, as the prospective ruin of the farmers market is documented amid crocodile tears and canned inanities.
(Given that DNA is stacked to the rafters with real estate agents, you’d expect one of them to venture the question of what the current market property might be worth if a building were constructed there. Then again, they’re mostly peddling residential property out in the soulless ‘burbs, aren’t they?)
City Hall, which has expressed full support for the mysterious appropriation, and seems intent on sacrificing as-yet valuable downtown urban corner property on the basis of a coin flip as to whether it’s the best place for a farmers market to become rooted forever, now serenely stands to the side as the idiotic squabbles mount, unwilling or unable to exercise that quality periodically known as leadership, and say:
“Whoa. Let’s cool this off, slow this down, and decide via transparency and consultation what’s actually best for the city as a whole.”
The same good old boys and girls club, the same tired and scripted procedure, and the same dully repetitious civic dysfunction. This is déjà vu, Groundhog Day and Cocoon rolled into one huge cow pie about to be liquefied, poured into a water cannon and used to hose all of us down … so that DNA, for reasons unknown to faux deities, Bicentennial ghost writers or surviving Scribner descendants, can … can …
Can do what, exactly?
Pretend a little bit longer that it matters, like some washed-up main character in a Tennessee Williams play?
There exists no good reason why the farmers market question must be settled rightnowhurrypaymebeforethemoneygoesawayoohoohI'mcomingand going.
It can and should wait, while the many viable options existing outside DNA’s stultified comic book duality are studied in a larger and more precise context. It is ridiculous to waste council time on this matter by organizing the usual petition parade on Thursday night.
It likely will occur, anyway, and once again New Albany will look really, savagely, innately dumb.
Can someone remind me why I invested my life savings here?
(psst … quality homes in Cobbler’s Crossing, cheap … ask for the DNA realtor’s discount)
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