Memories amid the garbage: New Albany's Groundhog Day.

It's over. Downtown welcomes the resumption of its daily working world.

New Albany's version of Groundhog Day occurs in early October. When Harvest Homecoming is here, blinders are donned with a speed hitherto unwitnessed. City Hall (any one of them, actually, dating back to the Ford Administration) emerges with trepidation into Hauss Square, is predictably terrified of seeing its own shadow -- and then we get six more years of the status quo.

Ultimately, it needs to be understood that Harvest Homecoming's yearly occupation of downtown is a steadily worsening issue that city government alone is capable of mediating. It should do so in a transparent, public manner. The festival takes place where and how it does only because the city allows it, but always under Harvest Homecoming's own terms of engagement, and with what amounts to infrastructure subsidies (street department work, police and fire overtime, etc.) for the festival that are not consistently applied throughout the remainder of the year to the rest of the city.

City Hall might begin by placing a dollar amount on this subsidy. Numerous claims are advanced each year to justify Harvest Homecoming as currently constituted. Have these claims ever been studied and substantiated?

Lest we forget, nowhere -- neither in an ordinance nor on a granite tablet -- are there laws stating that Harvest Homecoming must occur as it does. With downtown having come back to life, each passing year brings with it escalating conflicts between Harvest Homecoming's imposition of its own business model on downtown, and the optimum way for downtown to function for the remainder of the year. Downtown no longer is a vacuum, and arbitration is desperately needed. City government can broker solutions any time it wishes; approval for Harvest Homecoming is at city government's discretion. But no communication is facilitated, and the rancor grows. This year it has been particularly nasty.

Independent local business operators downtown have long since started looking past the silence as it pertains specifically to Harvest Homecoming, and grasping with escalating dismay that the city's inaction is more institutional than we ever imagined. What we must begin asking is why the city in effect invests so much yearly in a temporary, imposed, alien business model dedicated primarily to extracting value for its own self-perpetuation (that's Harvest Homecoming as 800-lb gorilla), but has no systematic plan for downtown investment for the other 360 days of the year.

For those interested in no-brainer "big pictures," here is one: Given the downtown advances of the past decade, as driven by entrepreneurs, private investment and volunteers, the city of New Albany has done next to nothing to deserve its downtown revitalization. In point of fact, talk is cheap. The city has been fortunate, and perhaps now it feels as though nothing needs to be done for the bounty to continue.

I disagree. It’s time for the city to ante up and put skin in the downtown game equivalent to its “economic development” plans on the periphery, and equal to what is devoted to Harvest Homecoming's ever more fallacious argument: "We bring people downtown and showcase the city -- and that's economic development."

Exactly what the new generation of downtown business is doing, all year long.

Twelve months versus four days ... let me do the math. Allowing Harvest Homecoming to continue the way it currently operates absent substantive reform is an abdication of duty on the part of the city, plain and simple.