4. With downtown normality almost restored, there's hope: Here's a three-point economic development plan for downtown. The ball's in your court, City Hall.

By the time Harvest Homecoming descends on downtown New Albany in 2015, there'll be even more businesses located there, and if current trends continue, we'll also see a new generation of downtown apartment and condo residents, a population sure to increase in coming years.

Currently, the city of New Albany has no concrete, delineated economic development plan to assist these downtown efforts, only a scattershot and reactive system of ad hoc. However, there are at least three ways for the city to help. Here's the outline.

1. Complete, calmed streets with two-way traffic, transforming the street grid into a supportive, not self-defeating, daily mechanism. This is the ultimate goal of daily infrastructure management, isn't it?

2. Focus on the riverfront and amphitheater, with comparatively inexpensive infrastructure improvements to make the area usable, so that is can be used as a permanent specials events area complementary with downtown. History clearly shows that if the amphitheater is used correctly, and quality events staged there, the people will come.

3. Bring Harvest Homecoming's unrestrained 800-lb gorilla to heel by leading an effort to reformat the annual celebration for the future. Each year that passes with downtown becoming more productive, while Harvest Homecoming continues to eschew change, is a year lost. We can't afford to keep losing these years.

The preceding constitute positive suggestions for better results, contrary to the criticism of those who insist that nothing can be done -- although customarily the real problem isn't an absence of suggestions, but a reluctance to listen to them.