Seeds and Greens opens for business, although City Hall wouldn't know it.

Seeds and Greens Natural Market & Deli opened yesterday with a 9:30 a.m. ribbon cutting. I'd estimate the crowd to be 75, perhaps more. State Representative Ed Clere gave a short and appropriate speech, contrasting today's downtown with the situation only a few years ago.

Read about the building housing Seeds and Greens.

First, congratulations and best wishes to the Freiberts, and everyone who helped them put this ball into the air. We'll be shifting a percentage of our shopping to this locally-owned store.

Next, a side note: I'm often criticized for suggesting (and repeating) that the city of New Albany has no discernible economic development plan for downtown. Yesterday, City Hall offered a typically vacuous reply of sorts, because not one of its elected or appointed officials attended the Seeds and Greens opening.

That'll show me, won't it?

The inattentiveness doesn't end there. Zero council persons were spotted, and no political party chairmen or functionaries, though the absence of the latter surely qualifies as a blessing. In fact, Rep. Clere was the only elected official of any sort, unless I missed seeing someone.

City Hall constantly pleads monetary poverty when the subject of downtown economic development arises; the proper time-honored, good-old-boy tools just don't exist outside the industrial park, officials always repeat, indicating they remain mired in the same old abatement and direct subsidy rat trap inhabited by generations of "experts".

Shouldn't it be obvious by now that a chronic absence of creative thought and improvisational skill constitutes not fiscal, but intellectual impoverishment?

We got nuthin', they mutter ... and all the while, our one-way, auto-centric, plainly unsafe street grid remains a neglected afterthought, one seemingly incapable of principled adjustment until a paid consultant assuages municipal timidity with dollops of political cover.

Yes, of course Seeds and Greens has a parking lot, and people driving cars will come there to shop. But the speed with which they travel, the way the street grid is designed -- the overall downtown milieu -- is subject to immediate adjustment to reinforce the downtown commercial climate, not urinate on it.

An example:

Must we wait for a traffic study to slow traffic and put crosswalks at the corner of Main and W. 1st?

Apart from when the city winks and hands its infrastructure to Harvest Homecoming's junta each year, the city does control its streets and sidewalks. The city can alter these so they're conducive to better business. Right-sizing, completing, calming, converting streets ... slowing traffic speeds, enforcing crosswalks, enhancing walking, biking and a human-scale district ... all these factors are favorable for the new generation of downtown independent business, major pieces of which might have been commenced years ago.

City government taking action to improve business prospects.

That's economic development, isn't it?

Why, then, isn't any of it happening?