I got your networking, guys: Two way streets.
But you must want to learn what the possibilities mean, and stop planning prom parties.
For a full eight days after Jeff Gahan’s vest-hugging, muffler-dragging politburo peeked timorously out of its down-low bunker and at long last allowed Jeff Speck’s Downtown Street Network Proposal (which it had possessed for a whole month) to be seen by city residents, Develop New Albany remained silent.
Nothing unusual there ... and that's the big, recurring problem.
Finally a link appeared on DNA’s Facebook page. Previously, the best our formally chartered Main Street organization could manage was a bizarre web poll asking if we’d rather have bagels or two-way streets downtown.
Unsurprisingly, the National Main Street Center, DNA’s purported policy parent, has not stated a position on bagels versus English muffins or whole wheat toast.
However, it has been interested in one- to two-way street conversions since at least 2006 – and DNA has been avoiding discussion of this and other matters of genuine significance for just as long, citing ad nauseam its non-profit status as proof of an inability (read: unwillingness) to follow its own organizational mandate and take a stand for something that supports its mission.
Of course, there are embarrassing exceptions. When the topic is Susan Kaempfer's quarter-million dollar farmers market build-out, DNA hurriedly sheds ballast and tramples napping house cats in a rush to the front of the queue in support of politically-motivated pork-barrel expenditures.
Somehow, that's different -- and the "somehow" never manages to get explained.
Again and again, one witnesses the mind-numbing conceptual numbness, thinking that surely by sheer law of average even DNA’s perennially stopped clock has an outside chance to be right twice in a decade, give or take a leap year, but somehow it succeeds in forging consistent group-thought capable of freezing time dead-ice solid.
Instead, DNA functions as a random billboard generator, merrily touting whomever will pay it, from churches to retail, and from eateries to realtors, although precisely one retailer is represented at the board level, and no restaurant or bar owners or managers can be found seated there.
Come to think of it, that's no coincidence, is it?
After all, small indie retailers and food service businesses are the entities that have by far done the most for downtown with the least governmental assistance (is there a number lower than zero?) They simply have no time to coddle bad actors.
Indies also are the ones that might finally get some help from City Hall if Gahan can bring himself to lead for once, and implement Speck’s proposals in a timely fashion, instead of dragging feet of concrete through an election season that stands to place progress in an even colder deep-freeze than New Albany's unenviable historical standard.
It's just my opinion, and feel free to disagree, but the advent of Speck's street network proposals is last call for DNA, which must support street reform explicitly and publicly, and contribute to advocacy for implementation. Anything less, and it's time to dissolve DNA and start from scratch.
The city needs a Main Street organization with cojones, don't you think?
Put it on the platform.
The problem with DNA is bad genes, (IE leadership) It has been and always will be a political tool for whatever Rasputin is in charge at city hall. Gahan is just the prime example of the symbiotic incompetence between the two entities. I say dismantle it and cut the city funding from it and instead look for a professional whose expertise is in downtown development.
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