New Albany's "Person of the Year" for 2014 revealed amid pomp, circumstance and fickle fingers of fate.

The votes have been counted, and now it's time to reveal New Albany's Person of the Year for 2014. This being New Albany, it's a purloined idea:

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Finalists for 2014, based on your responses:

• Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers ... Chalfant, Resch, Carters, among others. They're rehabbing buildings, and the city's industrial park-centric economic development team has almost nothing to do with it.
• Jeff Gahan … during three years on the job, municipal government's daily operations bear the mayor's stamp: Inward, paranoid and hermetic. Agoraphobia never had it this good, but his hologram is the hardest working computer-generated image in show business.
• Our local Democratic Party … but logically speaking, can non-corporeal bodies capture corporeal awards? Quick, someone find a theologian, a ham-fisted censor, Connie Sipes or even Walt Disney. Meanwhile, let your mind's eye conjure an ongoing implosion.

There were creative write-ins, but after all ballots were scrubbed clean of hanging chads, the winners are ...

Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers ... Chalfant, Resch, Carters, among others. They're rehabbing buildings, and the city's industrial park-centric economic development team has almost nothing to do with it.

Several voters commented that these genuine "doers" comprised the only real choice, and I agree.

Previous winners:

2011: The Sherman Minton Bridge.
2012: Bill Allen and his Dilapidated Main Street Paint Job
2013 (tie): Houndmouth and Quality of Life