A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
We should be talking about Pillsbury, and how generations of local elected officials took the doughboy's plant for granted until the moment the division’s corporate office announced a closure, one that in all likelihood has been on the drawing board for years, with maybe – just maybe – a respite but only if the union happily eviscerates itself.
We should be talking about how our business-as-usual “fluff ‘n’ abate” economic development strategies are due for depositing atop the ash heap of history, so we can become more self-reliant and less beholden to far-off multinationals.
However, Jeff Speck’s Downtown Street Network Proposal arrived last week, so let’s talk about how Jeff Gahan’s hermetic City Hall is going to butcher it.
As expected, Speck’s proposals are two-pronged, with both thrusts closely linked and mutually reinforcing.
He offers a unified, comprehensive way of reorganizing downtown New Albany’s fundamental daily approach to streets and traffic so as to (a) best prepare us for the changed traffic dynamic when the Ohio River toll bridges come on line, and (b) facilitate what might be referred to as a civic lifestyle change, taking into consideration the multiple social impacts of street design.
Naturally, the proposals are far more detailed than this brief simplification, but I’m not doing Speck an injustice by reducing it. If you are reading my words today, and have not yet looked at the study itself, please do so. Details are exhaustive, and overall, the plan developed therein is masterful.
Unfortunately, it’s a beautiful blueprint likely to land on the trash pile far faster than our array of inflatable industrial park incentives. That’s because apart from the city engineer, and perhaps John “Machiavelli” Rosenbarger himself in rare and fleeting moments, when he’s on his meds … there isn’t a soul in the inner municipal circle able or willing to understand it. They don’t live it. Words on a page don’t make their hearts sing, but Dixiecrat voters do, and that’s why street reform backers will be sold downriver.
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Although some of us have been discussing the issue of pro-actively reforming the city’s streets for a decade or more, and in spite of periodically polite pats on the head by city officials aimed primarily at silencing advocates, City Hall’s interest in the Speck milieu goes back to mid-2013. Although the 2011 mayoral candidate Gahan told many of us in private that he backed street reform, he did nothing in 2012 and through most of 2013.
I believe that when Gahan at long last took an interest in downtown streets – having already decided to implement a plaque-ready Main Street redesign largely running counter to numerous of the principles explained in the present Speck proposal package, and thus poisoning the well prior to digging it – he did so only because he could no longer procrastinate as to the impact of future bridge tolls.
For the past year and a half, the nature of the relationship between proponents of reform and the mayor has been tantamount to extractive dentistry. We communicate publicly, while he transmits signals through underlings, gestural patterns and the occasional turn of scripted phrase.
We’re in a position similar to that of an earlier generation of Kremlinologists; lacking openness in Soviet regimes, analysts learned to look for clues to political behavior elsewhere. Gahan is the most secretive mayor in living memory, and we’ve been compelled to gaze at impervious 3rd Floor walls and infer the thought bubbles behind them – assuming there is discernible thought behind the bubbles.
I believe that most of the dissonance between well-informed proponents and Gahan’s unexcited and indifferent handling of a report he claims (privately, of course) to support, owes to the two-pronged nature of the proposals. To be blunt, Gahan is interested in Speck solely as the suggestions pertain to the minimum action required to address pass-through traffic cause by toll evasion, and no more.
I believe that the “walkability” component of Speck’s argument – economic, epidemiological and environmental – mean as much to Gahan and his merry band of unrepentant suburbanites as it would had I undertaken to explain them to my house cats.
I believe that if we reduce Speck’s 100+ plus pages to this one statement …
Against this backdrop, New Albany has the opportunity to encourage more healthy lifestyles by embracing national trends towards downtown living, walkability, and cycling.
… we’d be hard pressed to find a half dozen elected or appointed officials in the entire city of New Albany capable (read: willing) of understanding it, and if we were to locate a few, none of them occupy a place in the mayor’s inner advisory circle.
How can they implement a plan, which embodies a worldview that they’ve shown no aptitude in comprehending?
Consider the mayor’s most trusted sidekicks, and think: Would any of them walk three blocks to lunch, or would they drive? Have you ever seen them on a bicycle? Aren’t they the ones who visit a walkable city on holiday, then spend their time grousing about the absence of parking spaces, never noticing the net effect of reduced auto-centrism on the overall urban experience?
Aren’t they the ones reading these words right now, as they’ll hotly deny they did later, and feeling a mounting anger because I’m using big words they never bothered learning in school?
But it’s okay, now that they have a Twitter parody to speak for them, probably because city employees have too much time on their hands while at work.
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Those of us advocating Speck’s proposals need to understand City Hall’s coming strategy.
First and foremost, time is being measured not by Rolex, but by the political calendar. Gahan has no intention of revealing anything until the May primary is concluded. If David White defeats the incumbent, the city returns abruptly to Year Zero, for Gahan will do nothing during the remainder of a lame duck term.
If the mayor wins in May, he will survey the percentages in November. If they are favorable, he’ll stay the course ... and do nothing. After all, it he’s winning, then it ain’t broke. Why fix it until you have to?
If the harbingers are unfavorable in November, he’ll also do nothing.
Why bother?
His message to Speck proponents, whether stated overtly or more likely subliminally through backhanded code phrases inserted into the back forty of last month’s Redevelopment minutes, will be this: Me, or nothing -- and it's fealty time in Come to City.
Second, insofar as public “comment” on Speck is concerned, proponents will be pitted against opponents in what amounts to three stage-managed, reality-TV-caliber spectacles, the sole purpose of which is to create an atmosphere of “house divided” rancor, such that Gahan can finally come forward for the magisterial, straight-to-social media photo op, and intervene to resolve the dispute of his own creation by backpedaling on all social impacts of street design – the same ones advocated by so many people like us, long prior to bridge tolls being a factor in the equation.
Rather, Gahan will restrict implementation to minimum alterations that can be explained as necessary to combat pass-throughs. These will be terribly delayed and wholly inadequate, at which point David “Sancho Panza” Duggins will be dispatched to make the talk show rounds and blame escalating downtown merchant failure on the inadequacies of downtown merchants – as he already has done, openly and for attribution, in the past.
For those just tuning in, he’s the “economic development” director, by the way.
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Am I being overly pessimistic?
Perhaps, but in the absence of principle, visibility and transparency on the part of Jeff Gahan’s hermetic City Hall, we’re all looking at the same permutation of tea leaves. In my experience, silk purses seldom are seen emanating from sow’s ears.
But we all like bacon, don’t we ... and I'll be damned if I'm going to let the pointy-heads tell me how to avoid cardiovascular disease.
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