Little League snorer: Gahan's tiny tot baseball analogies argue against his own swimming pool fixation.

Mayor Jeff Gahan's argument that underprivileged inner city children stand to be disenfranchised by a county-dominated Little League park on the outskirts appears almost reasonable at first glance. There are grains of truth to it. And yet selectivity always applies, doesn't it?

Baseball for a  relative handful, vs. recreation for the many children who won't ever play organized sports?

An ongoing obsession with parks, vs. everyday infrastructure improvements that would benefit the quality of life for more children than just those playing sports?

Can we do things to help improve their minds, too? Might this lift the community in ways that extend slightly beyond civic pride when a team miraculously advances in the tournament?

Embarrassingly (and predictably), Gahan's pro-inner city baseball argument eloquently weighs AGAINST the stated justifications for his own aquatics center, which is intended as the crowning glory of a parks-first "quality of life" program that no one can remember ever being part and parcel of Gahan's mayoral run.

Clearly, a city parks empire has been the main thrust of Gahan's term to date. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, apart from its gaping absence during the campaign, and of course the multitudinous contradictions inherent in declaring certain areas deserving of special park-related QOL TLC, while the possibilities of deploying the city's entire street and road system toward precisely the same purpose are pushed to a seemingly perpetual back burner.

Frankly, it's also disappointing that Jeff Speck would choose this of all situations to lend his prestigious voice. Perhaps he doesn't yet understand the timidity with which this administration is likely to "implement" his recommendations, and the cowardly politics of heavy pass-through trucking fellatio currently driving City Hall's non-street passivity. It would be interesting to know Speck's view on the aquatics center.

Yet again, plans and expenditures are calibrated on "bread and circus" assumptions: You'll forget all about the annoyances of daily life in New Albany if you're given a few part-time bells and whistles: A park here, a concert there, Harvest Homecoming's annual pillage of downtown, a "dilapidated" building's removal in favor of cheaply built houses that City Hall couldn't bother telling us about until after the fact.

There are opportunity costs associated with these backroom decisions, and because they're kept as non-transparent as possible, too little public input is received. What might have been done differently for greater gain? It's never about the daily undertow, and always about "special" achievements of the sort upon which plaques can be affixed and Democratic Party fundraising prefigured.

Plastic whiffleball bat, meet Felix Hernandez.

Gahan: Little League struck out looking with new park; City offered essentially same plan at no cost to Little League, by Daniel Suddeath (Jeffersonville Examiner)

NEW ALBANY — If the goal of New Albany Little League is to better serve the entire city by constructing a new complex outside the municipal limits, the organization has struck out, Mayor Jeff Gahan said.

In fact, it was essentially “rung up looking,” to use a baseball analogy, by moving forward with a plan that will isolate disadvantaged kids from Little League’s main facility, he said Friday in response to recent approvals by municipal boards of the organization’s proposal.