By Nick Vaughn, Guest Columnist
My past articles have been pretty serious, more or less, so I thought I’d take a turn to the satirical. I hope you get a laugh out of this and find it as funny as I do.
Yesterday in New Albany it snowed around four to six inches, give or take. But the real silver lining in this is the fact that Jeff Gahan has been Mayor for over four years now and he still has not shown the leadership, the guts, or the initiative to control the weather.
I alluded to this a bit when I aired my grievances with the city this past Festivus, but seeing as the snow prevented me from going to school, from going to various political events -- from even going to the store -- I figured I should further express my concern and disdain in the most public manner I can.
After everything our Mayor has accomplished the past four years (the expansion of debt, degradation of credit ratings, and ignorance of poverty), I would have thought he would be making more of a push on this issue. Controlling the weather would pair very nicely with one of his golden projects he likes to brag about, the Aquatic Center. If he could merely control the weather in New Albany to a nice 78 or so degrees daily, then people would magically float to the Aquatic Center to ride down one of the underwhelming water slides or maybe swim a couple laps ... err, never mind.
In fact, I think attendance would increase through the roof. You know how building a park in a depraved area deep in poverty magically increases people’s wages and livelihood? Yeah, same principle here. A temperature increase would definitely increase attendance. Also, if we had Floridaesque temperatures year round, I’d bet people would just abandon their Disney World vacation and come visit New Albany! At that point it would basically be the same thing, right?
If Mayor Gahan wasn’t such an inept leader, he would walk straight into the City Council chambers and communicate his intentions to begin research, using a combination of TIF and EDIT funds to pay for (of course), the ability to control the weather. After all, maybe after 50 years or so we might see the budget become revenue neutral, maybe!
Of course, no one will be in the Council chambers during the Mayor’s fiery address, where he hopefully says something along the lines of: “We choose to control the weather, not because it is easy, but because this is New Albany!” How very Kennedy of you, Mr. Mayor.
I guess the real question is, is the technology there to be able to control the weather? Well, that depends on who you ask. Ask your local UFO aficionado and he/she will tell you the government has been controlling the weather since the Cold War. Ask your local scientist and he/she will tell you the technology, unfortunately is not quite there yet. Ask your local UN official and they will tell you it’s a war crime.
Sorry.
Nonetheless, I took to the streets to survey regular New Albanians like me and you to see if they would be in favor of Mayor Gahan controlling the weather. I walked around Market, Main, Pearl, and Bank streets to look for locals shopping around the area. Unfortunately, no one was there. I did, however, find a couple from Louisville who said they would be in favor of the Mayor controlling the weather.
“Yes, I think we would be in favor of that. We could bring our kids to the Aquatic Center more often,” said the clearly excited woman.
“Yeah, we’ve been to the Aquatic Center several times and brought quite a bit of our friends and family. We even ran into a ton of friends from Louisville while we were there over the summer,” explained the clearly freezing man.
I didn’t catch their names, but as they were walking away they let me know they were related to the Mayor and voted for him in the general election.
I hope they meant Greg Fischer.
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