New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Them paranoid Gahanites are getting testier by the day. They need to rediscover the tranquil joys, as described in this book review in The Economist (from which the Getty Image in the meme above was copied).
And finding tranquil joys. Or so Epicurus thought. Is he right?
How to be an Epicurean, by Catherine Wilson
In Catherine Wilson’s manual on “the ancient art of living well”, her guide is the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who advocated a calm life of modest pleasure. By explaining how the world was, he thought philosophy could show people how to live. Ms Wilson, an Epicurus specialist, agrees. Her intelligent and readable book lies, she says, somewhere between technical philosophy and “advice columns”.
Last week was Harvest Homecoming, and my city's favorite festival kept me pinned to the tarmac, but now we're back to what passes for normal here in New Gahania, where "We're All Here Because We're Not All THERE."
There was no time to conjure a column during Harvest Homecoming, so this week as a run-up to Decision 2019, I'm headed back into the ON THE AVENUES archive for five straight days of devastatingly persuasive arguments against four more years of the Gahan Family Values Personality Cult.
I've already made the argument for Mark Seabrook as mayor here. Now let's return to the voluminous case against Gahanism in five informative and entertaining installments.
GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Monday) The Reisz Mahal luxury city hall, perhaps the signature Gahan boondoggle.
If someone ignored the "no soliciting" sign on your porch and clambered up to the door, breathlessly offering to sell you a gizmo with the promise that the mere fact of owning it will save you all kinds of money, there are many good questions you might ask.
Of course, you might also command the huckster to vacate your porch, or else. I generally do. But in order to determine whether the peddler's product is a sound investment, one specific question tops the list:
How much does it cost?
Mayor Jeff Gahan is a former veneer salesman with a well-honed, thoroughly greasy sales pitch, and he thinks you're too stupid to ask how much a new city hall is going to cost you -- in tax dollars.
The (Reisz) project will save millions of dollars over time, as the city has paid costs in its current location for over 57 years. It will also help the surrounding businesses see their private investment backed up by pubic investment.
Take a magnifying glass to the undisguised gloating amid yesterday's city hall press release, stating that the multi-million dollar Reisz renovation is a done deal and a fixed formality, and further opposition from the likes of YOU is plainly useless, and you'll find absolutely no mention of the price tag.
Please allow me to fill in this blank.
The Reisz cost commitment already has topped $10,000,000 in a city where perhaps a quarter of the residents live below the poverty line; where Gahan and his new unofficial deputy mayor and slavish devotee David Barksdale are eager to demolish half of the city's public housing units; and where city hall has yet to mention aloud minor details like the opioid epidemic, the accompanying rise in thievery and petty crime, homelessness, and the worsening plight of our city's working poor.
The sloganeering is so oppressive that a Trump rally seems like the knitter's circle coffee klatsch by comparison.
Government lives matter!
(so, let's literally quadruple the size of municipal government)
Buildings not people!
(because elite cliques need historic fetishes, too)
If you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it!
(it might be the only truthful statement yet uttered by these purported Democrats)
Team Gahan and affiliates can do the math, all right, so long as most of it is concealed. What eludes them is simplehuman empathy.
---
Last week the News and Tribune's most inconsistent editor got to work defending the imperatives of government buildings over those of residents.
He begins by inferring an economic ripple effect from a single government-occupied building, without bothering to try to interpret economic conditions and trends downtown.
MORRIS: Reisz rehab would give downtown a boost, by Chris Morris (Where Multiple Tom Mays Roam)
... But the area needs another boost. Some businesses have closed recently while others are struggling. Just think what could happen with a vibrant city hall in a refurbished Reisz building, in the heart of our downtown. With life put back into a building that has sat empty for years, others may decide to invest and open a business, or at the very least visit the downtown. The downtown needs this project.
Morris saves his weakest argument for last.
I am a fan of uni-gov — otherwise known as one government for New Albany and Floyd County, and being in favor of adding another government building to the tax rolls goes against that theory. Uni-gov would eliminate duplicated services, there wouldn’t be these power struggles or personality conflicts, and it would save taxpayers money. Too much government only gets in the way of people trying to live their lives ...
... So why would I support spending money to rehabilitate this building, guaranteeing two separate government buildings just blocks apart? Even with a uni-gov the City-County Building will be needed for office space and to allow the courts to expand. That building is also in need of some renovation, but that is for another day ...
... It’s a big move but one I think the city needs to take. There are no other options on the table for the building and this makes the most sense. The downtown needs a boost, and putting city hall inside the Reisz Furniture building may be exactly what is needed. It’s worth the gamble.
Worth the $10,000,000 (or more) gamble, like it's Monopoly money?
If there is a consistent theme to the prevailing Reisz apologetic, it echoes the immortal words of Basil Fawlty: "Don't mention the cost!"
Or: Don't mention the opportunity cost, because we'll be spending an extra $400,000 a year for one government building when the money might be combined with private sector investments to assist dozens of other deserving historic structures downtown and those small businesses and residences occupying them, as well as incentivizing infill construction to fill vacant lots.
Alas, we've long understood that Morris's veneration of "respectable" authority is such that he'll automatically take the side of anyone and anything he's loosely capable of identifying as a selfless community pillar.
Morris comes perilously close to openly acknowledging that this fact-free approach is contradictory as it pertains to uni-gov, and yet he churns out the logic sausage as predictably as Team Gahan and HWC Engineering render Jeff Speck's walkability into more of the same car-centrism.
I asked the newspaper for a similar word count in rebuttal. To my mild surprise, the offer was accepted, and I wrote the following. It was published yesterday; this is the "Director's Cut," leaving intact two passages I was asked by the editor to remove. You'll probably be able to guess which ones.
---
Last week the News and Tribune’s Chris Morris supported governmental intervention ostensibly aimed at “saving” the Reisz Furniture Warehouse by renovating it into a lavish new city hall. I’d love to see Reisz put to use, just not like this. To understand why, let’s follow the money. Dating to 1852, the Reisz building has been a flour mill, funeral home and shirt factory. Purchased by Schmitt Furniture in 1988, it served mostly as cheap storage. At any point during three decades, Schmitt might have opted to “save” Reisz but didn’t, and so a central point of Mayor Jeff Gahan’s case for adaptive reuse is a suddenly urgent need to rectify the "dilapidated” building’s “neglect” (his words). Apparently there are no penalties in New Albany for structure abuse. Last August the Redevelopment Commission authorized funds for Gahan’s relocation project, at the time neither subject to an RFP (request for proposal), nor approved by city council. Detailed explanations were offered by Denton Floyd Real Estate Group, with whom Gahan is partnering, as though the deal already had been sealed. Perhaps this occurred when former redevelopment tsar David Duggins accompanied Denton Floyd last fall for a limousine junket to Keeneland. By May of 2018, the RFP formality was hurdled. $750,000 passed from Redevelopment to Denton Floyd, including the purchase price of $390,000, with the remainder to empty the building of junk. Denton Floyd would complete the 23,000-square-foot buildout for city hall’s relocation (currently City Hall uses 6,500 sq. ft. at the City County Building), with a 15-year “rent to own” lease. Yearly payments will be $570,000, or $8,500,000 over 15 years. By comparison, $200,000 during the same period in the City County Building totals $3,000,000. Another $500,000 is approved for office furnishings, surely a low estimate. Ten months ago the city’s combined yearly cost at Reisz was estimated at $215,000. It’s more than tripled since then, with just shy of $10,000,000 committed to the project. The total cost of ownership inevitably will rise; in addition to inevitable price hikes, county officials insist the city remains bound to its current landlord. Lawsuits are likely. 20% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line, yet Gahan, who concurrently seeks to demolish half our public housing units, wants to spend an additional $370,000 - $400,000 yearly on city offices, citing the ripple effects of economic development that relocation will generate. We should be asking whether these ripple effects are real or imagined. The most persistent advocate of the Reisz project is David Barksdale, historic preservationist and city councilman, who thinks Reisz must be renovated at any cost, and presumably, since limitless costs are government’s responsibility, seeks largess from a bottomless well of cash. Barksdale touts the project as “skin in the game,” a way of showing downtown stakeholders that City Hall stands with them. After all, entrepreneurs and small independent business owners have invested $60 million or more into downtown during the past decade, while enjoying few of the subsidies available to suburban industrial park occupants. Barksdale’s argument is flawed. Private investors spend their own money, but the money required for the municipality’s funding of a single speculative historic preservation project isn’t cash from Gahan’s or Barksdale’s pockets. Rather, this “skin” belongs to the city’s taxpayers – and they haven’t been asked. Naturally downtown stakeholders need functional “skin” in the game, this being shared, collective infrastructure, including streets, sewers, police and firefighters. These are grassroots needs, citywide. City Hall spending almost $10 million on itself? That’s a top-down want. Some compare a new city hall with the YMCA. It’s absurd. The YMCA brings people downtown who might not otherwise come. Moving city offices three whole blocks changes nothing. The same workers come to work, and they eat the same lunch. There is no net gain. Furthermore, a relocated city hall threatens to bump Harvest Homecoming’s kiddie rides from its current location, posing a financial hardship for the city’s premier annual festival. As for the exaggerated rhetoric of historic preservation, $7 million for one additional restored historic building won’t be diverting tour buses. Numerous structures of historic significance lie within a five minute stroll of Reisz. No study has been conducted to determine whether one of them might be suitable as city hall. No other options even have been considered. If floated as a referendum, this relocation boondoggle probably would lose 70%-30%, or worse. Ironically Morris, a proponent of unified city-county government (uni-gov), can’t see that Gahan’s interest in city hall relocation is politically motivated, having nothing to do with historic preservation or the Reisz building itself apart from the utility of prying away Barksdale’s council vote to restore Gahan’s control of an otherwise lapsed majority. City hall’s relocation addresses Gahan’s pathological hatred of uni-gov. He’d secede from the county if allowed, and he’d relocate HQ to a suitably luxurious pole barn if one existed. Plainly, the aim is political preservation for Gahan and Democrats, and Reisz is just one move in a chess game to stave off power-sharing with the county. Shouldn’t we wait until municipal elections in 2019 to discuss moving city hall? Let your councilman know this mandate (if any) should come from the people, not the city’s ruling elites.
Every time I hear the words “hard truth,” I reach for my song list.
George Jones knew quite well of which he sang.
You don't know who I am But I know all about you I've come to talk to you tonight About the things I've seen you do I've come to set the record straight I've come to shine the light on you Let me introduce myself I'm the cold hard truth
The only difference? In New Albany the self-lubricating clique knows good and well who we (the principled resistance) are, which makes for constant amusement as the enriched Gahanist Leading Element denies any and all acts of reading -- in the larger sense, we must take them at their word -- all the while snarling while issuing edicts and threats based on the words they didn’t see.
It’s like magic, the flawless intuition of C-minus students, and speaking of cold hard truth, here’s an admirably succinct pre-election summary of the incumbent mayor’s record from NA Confidential’s co-editor, Jeff Gillenwater.
Jeff Gahan, in conjunction with concurrent city councils, has doubled the city’s budget in eight years, saddled us with tens of millions of (often long term) debt, paid out millions in no-bid contracts to campaign donors, and refused to release and/or demand the release of project related financials. To make matters worse, the mayor regularly misleads and lies about it - campaigning on having “balanced” the budget (as legally required of every mayor), getting us out of debt (sewer debt, per former Mayor England’s plan that Gahan voted against), touting a fair to middling credit rating as top notch, and trying to take credit for the investment of others that he had nothing to do with. Any Democrat running for office who is not addressing those issues head on, out loud has no business squawking about “excessive” spending from others.
Specifically, excessive spending by Floyd County government, which for municipal Democrats serves as a convenient catch-all bogeyman of Godzilla-like dimension. Meanwhile the actual cold hard truthfulness of the charge would fit comfortably in a discarded peanut shell on the floor of the chain steakhouses they adore.
---
As noted previously at NA Confidential, it was instructive last weekend when years of bunker-bound non-engagement gave away to bile and rancor when a handful of Tricky Dickey's robotically programmed Democratic Party candidates suddenly veered from their canned scripts and began improvising out there on the digital hustings.
Surely Squire Adam worried that one of them might actually slip up and be truthful, and sure enough a fair measure of testy bile oozed through the cordon. It appears the Democrats genuinely do picture themselves besieged in the sacred Alamo, with barbarian enemies steadily closing in, endangering Jeff Gahan's only true masterpiece during a career of consummate time-serving mediocrity: Slick Jeffie's Astroglide-Driven Pay-to-Play Political Patronage Viagra Superstore.
It was exciting, but we knew it couldn't last. Among them was at-large city council candidate Sam Charbonneau, and I must commend Sam (and later Matt Nash) for venturing outside the Democratic Party’s traditional cordon of non-transparency.
No solutions? I'll shrug as you search NA Confidential’s 15-year-long back story for terms like Strong Towns, Jeff Speck, Institute for Local Self Reliance and AMIBA, and watch the solutions coming down like the rain we had been getting this year prior to the month of August.
The hard truth; the cold hard truth ... well, Sam’s not the only one trying to carry this particular tune across the street without being struck by drivers speeding unchecked through New Albany’s increasingly hazardous streets.
There is a city we both know I think you know the one I mean She gave her heart and soul to you You gave her only broken dreams You say you’re not the one to blame For all the heartaches she's been though I say you're nothing but a liar And I'm the cold hard truth
---
The second instance of a Democratic Party candidate dipping his toes ever so carefully into the churning water of genuine, open dialogue -- the very act of which reminded me of the days after the Iron Curtain disappeared, when all at once those stodgy brown-suited bureaucrats started ducking the microphones thrust at them by the now extinct breed known as “journalists” -- came when incumbent 5th district councilman Nash made a surprise comment on a Facebook post.
Matt Nash
I've seen prominent Republicans, even office holders with a (Dan) Coffey sign in their yard
Roger A. Baylor
Pray tell ...
MN
I just stated an actual fact, every other comment on here is speculation
Tim Deatrick
Name them if it is fact Nash come on back it up
MN
I'm not your green mouse, do a little detective work yourself. I'm out knocking doors in my district...and anyway my "handler" advised against it
RB
As a New Albanian politician, you're obviously under no obligation to back up your facts with evidence, as when you voted for the Reisz Mahal without uttering a single word aloud apart from "aye." It does seem a tad passive-aggressive to advertise your facts here, then duck and cover, but I'm glad you violated Adam's universal gag order against public discourse. Enough pin pricks and at some point THAT prick will deflate. Then again I always forget: no matter the topic or the logic, Republicans are worse, which justifies any political patronage excess (especially in hiring) or violation of common decency on the part of pretend Democrats. Is it lunchtime yet?
MN
Pretty disingenuous of you to say that since we had a couple hour conversation on the matter the night before the vote. As for proof of the only actual facts in this thread, I have reason for not announcing publicly, which will be clear if you figure out who it is.
RB
That's fine, but please don't make the mistake of thinking a barroom conversation with someone, (explicitly) off the record and the night prior to an important vote, satisfies your responsibility to explain your reasoning. Every other council member did, PUBLICLY. You successfully wrote a column for years; I commend this because I know how hard that is, but consequently it's also a higher standard for you as public official and I believe you're too smart not to know this.
Frustrated by the tone, Nick Vaughn sensibly followed up with some very good questions.
Instead of spreading unsubstantiated rumors, I’d prefer if our elected officials and candidates would answer some questions:
1. What do you plan to do/what should the city do when/if the Sherman Minton Bridge closes (at least partially)? How will you help mitigate the economic impact?
2. Do you support public/affordable housing? What will you do to ensure people who want to live in New Albany are able to?
3. What are your budgeting priorities? Rank your top 4 budget priorities in order.
4. How do you plan to be accessible to those who elected you (or didn’t)? How will you respond to constituent questions and concerns?
5. Council members and candidates: how will you use your power as a co-equal branch of local government to curb executive overreach? Do you support council approval for mayoral appointments (where law allows)?
At this point Sam returned to characterize these perfectly reasonable questions as being just the sort of vile trap a nasty Republican like Vaughn might set, and the train left the rails, but Ozzy Ozbourne isn’t No Show Jones, is he?
You think that you're a real mayor But you're nothing but a fool The way you run away from us The way you try to play it cool I'm gonna say this just one time Time is running out on you You best remember me my friend I am the cold hard truth
As an atheist I can't swear to God, but I can swear to Pete Townshend's songwriting oeuvre or the sheer olfactory glory of Pilsner Urquell that I do not personally dislike Sam, Matt or any of the other council candidates in this year's election cycle.
This said, I cannot support Democrats who support Gahan and contribute to the veneer king's absurd cult of personality.
Can New Albany withstand another four years of Gahan's cold hard self-deification?
Where do we start? Just in the past year we've seen TIF lotteries, the Reisz Mahal luxury city hall fix, the death of a skateboarder on uncalmed city streets, a planned sixty-mile recreational trail to nowhere, David Duggins' piece-by-piece dismantlement of Riverview Tower, the Colonial Manor public relations catastrophe -- and Gahan leapfrogging $500,000 in career earnings from pay-to-play political patronage.
NA Confidential has documented Gahan's bullying of a street department worker and a policeman, abetted by the News and Tribune abdication of its responsibility to cover cold hard news in New Albany, as opposed to the fluff human interest stories now choking the newsprint.
There have been Kool-Aid blackouts and loaded Rice Krispies Treats freakouts, and all the while the insider Democrats keep doubling down on Dear Leader -- and why not? They're at the apex of a cliquish and privileged pyramid, looking down their noses at the people they're supposed to be serving, but they have been too busy implementing Gahan's luxury enhancement program to give a damn.
And speaking of the breathtakingly unethical back-alley fixes that led to the Reisz Mahal malarkey, does anyone know how much a breach of contract settlement might save us in the long run?
Because if Team Seabrook wins, perhaps the unnecessary city hall can be cancelled. This would be the strongest possible message a New Municipal Order might send to inform the community that the adults at long last are back in the saddle.
You best remember me my friend
I am the cold hard truth
On Wednesday afternoon just a few hours before the listening event sponsored by Colonial Manor Redevelopment Visioning, City Hall released a propaganda video aimed at (a) exaggerating Jeff Gahan's role in the Colonial Manor redevelopment process, and (b) insulting the grassroots community group that came into existence precisely because Gahan and his crack team of minions hadn't been doing anything about Colonial Manor.
As Bluegill succinctly observed:
In which Mayor Jeff Gahan uses city tax dollars to produce a highly biased, politically charged propaganda piece that distorts the story to make himself look better for re-election.
Amid the din of Kool-Aid slurping, let's take a closer look at the video with the aim of exposing Gahan's shameless whoppers.
1
1. It's true that on April 18, Mayor Jeff Gahan's administration brought plans to city council for the purchase of Colonial Manor. Gahan himself yet again refused to attend to take ownership of his brilliant redevelopment instincts, second only to Robert Moses in scope and coolness. However, no plans for redevelopment were brought to council -- while six "test" designs had been hoisted up the flagpole at the non-input public meeting (see below), redevelopment director Joshua Staten insisted the administration would do some listening of its own after the purchase of the property.
Truth meter #1: Half credit.
2
2. Colonial Manor has been moribund for so very long that Team Gahan displayed not one jot of interest in its redevelopment for seven whole years until the "deserving neighbors" began organizing themselves, thus holding out the prospect of interfering with Team Gahan's usual top-down, pay-to-play monetization arrangements.
Truth meter #2: Half credit.
3
3. An essentially meaningless claim. The city's new comprehensive plan explains theoretical development goals for the entire city, not any one area.
Truth meter #3: Irrelevant.
4
4. Number four is a doozy. A public meeting was held, but only Team Gahan's operatives were allowed to speak, and requests for public "preferences" were limited to six hastily concocted "options" from one of Gahan's campaign donor engineers. Duh: Of course neighbors "want something done to the property." You could glean as much from Facebook. After all, they'd already assembled a grassroots lobby group to drive the conversation, hence the need for Gahan's non-input meeting: to squelch this conversation and take back control for his Indianapolis corporate campaign donors.
Truth meter #4: Bald-faced, faked-fact lie.
5
5. In which Gahan refers to $2.6 million in tax increment financing (TIF) bonds as "cash reserves" when in essence they're credit cards, then further asserts that TIF is not a form of borrowing. Among other problems, these "cash reserves" deprive schools of property tax revenue, leading to school corporation referendums like the one responsible for the Slate Run school construction taking place behind Colonial Manor. Do you think Gahan lies like this about his own household finances?
Truth meter #5: Egregious, bald-faced, faked-fact lie.
6
6. The city did vote 5-4 against something, but whether it was an "effort to bring new life" cannot be known because the vote pertained only to acquiring the property, not to future plans (if any) to redevelop it.
Truth meter #6: Half credit.
7
7. We saw the first such "exploration" of options at approximately 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, when the video being dissected here was released. By his choice of timing, Gahan chose quite consciously (and with obvious malice) to undercut the grassroots efforts of the very same "neighbors" he'd already refused to allow to speak at the non-input public meeting he held for his own benefit.
With friends like Jeff Gahan, who needs enemas?
Truth meter #7: Perhaps the only truthful statement of the bunch.
8
8. Gahan closes with his trademark messy verbiage. He "encourages everyone" (they're no longer "neighbors," are they?) to "encourage" -- that's right, the same verb twice in one sentence, attesting to the sloppiness of writing herein -- city council to "support revitalization efforts for Colonial Manor."
Note the first use of "revitalization" as opposed to "redevelopment," and also consider that Gahan doesn't specify which revitalization efforts "everyone" should support. Is it Gahan's politically motivated boilerplate or the efforts area residents already had started on their own with absolutely no help from the mayor or his flunkies, including their council person Matt Nash, who attended Wednesday's neighborhood meeting but couldn't muster the gumption to address the crowd, identify himself and let them know that he's listening.
Truth meter #8: See how Gahan acts when he can't have his toys?
Summary: Today's City Hall video shambles depicts Gahan at his self-interested, narcissistic and bullying nadir, with a truthfulness tally of roughly 25%, and still no apparent interest in the needs of people as opposed to the fix-is-in, play-to-play patronage boondoggle that local "pretend progressives" tolerate and seem to feel is justified as long as local Democrats mouth platitudes about other issues.
How many lies does Gahan need to tell before Democrats see the handwriting on the wall?
There's a solution. Vote David White for Mayor in the Democratic primary, and let's give the governing clique a purifying flush.
Some people play euchre for fun, but during the coming weeks we'll be plucking highlights from eight years of the Committee to Elect Gahan's CFA-4 campaign finance reports. Strap in, folks -- and don't forget those air(head) sickness bags.
Let's pause the accounting to let this sink in. Another average fundraising year for Big Money Gahan, and he'll pass the $500,000 mark in donations since running for mayor.
Roughly 25% of this engorged total has come from just a handful of key donors, perhaps as few as six or seven in number. When this research series concludes, we'll be able to see the exact breakdown. What does all this money buy Gahan4Life?
Following are a few random expenditures from 2015. The middle column to the right is Year to Date. Just look at all those mailer air strikes from Way Out West.
Well, there was at least ONE local recipient of the gravy. How much money does one vacuous fraud need, anyway?
Rebuttals are welcome and will be published unaltered -- so don't forget spellcheck. If you have supplementary information to offer about any of this, please let us know and we'll update the page. The preceding was gleaned entirely from public records, with the addresses of "individuals" removed.
The disconnect between wants and needs is particularly vivid.
From the listing:
"A fantastic opportunity in Downtown New Albany. Maybe you're not looking for a church home, but what about living space? Something cool, hip and funky with a millennial vibe. We also need more senior housing with some independent living. You could mix it up with co-existence of space that caters to all walks of life. This property offers lots of creative uses. What about a boutique hotel?"
What about a homeless shelter? From the story:
Centenary does its share to feed those in need by opening its food pantry from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every Tuesday. Free meals are also served at the church twice a week — at 6 p.m. Thursday and 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Centenary serves 18 percent of Floyd County residents through its food pantry where those in need are allowed to take items once a month. Akins-Banman also said more families are coming to the weekly free meals. "Yesterday [Tuesday] we had so many veterans come in who needed food," Akins-Banman said. "There is so much need."
Hopefully one of the other churches or organizations downtown pick up those Thursday and Sunday free meal times, because that's going to be a huge loss for the community.
Good point, Jim. Very good point.
But we must remember that City Hall as presently occupied will not publicly acknowledge the existence of unsightliness, whether homelessness, hunger or opioid addiction. The mayor believe irrefutable truth reflects badly on his hermetic "special interests first" kingdom, and so he stares resolutely in the opposite direction. Take the proposition to the city's top leaders, and boutique hotel wins in a landslide.
City Hall's remarkably poor stewardship of this property over a period of two years can't be laughed away with an insurance payment.
Consider this: if the investigation -- let's hope it is conducted by insurers and not the vandal's appointees -- echoes that of the Reichstag episode and concludes the fire at Moser Tannery was set by communists squatters (read: homeless people), how does the mayor wiggle out from his own oft-stated belief that homeless people don't exist in New Albany?
Were they bussed in from Jeffersonville?
That's it! Mike Moore dunnit.
For critics of the administration, it may be time to shift locales for a few days until a scapegoat is found, but posterity is advised to keep its eye on the central point of the city's purposeful neglect of the Moser grounds.
"I felt like the city was being maligned back then and I thought this would be a vehicle to stop that criticism. The complaints against the city were all unfounded."
-- Warren Nash
Chris Morris has done us a great service by capturing this breathtaking quote, which reveals the politically-motivated, self-serving conniving that has characterized Warren Nash's whole career as a self-appointed mover/shaker in New Albany.
Plainly, the human rights commission means nothing to Nash in any sense of furthering the cause of human rights.
Rather, it's just a vehicle -- a purely cynical propaganda jalopy -- to thwart criticism, which at the time of Nash's single term as mayor almost 50 years ago (he was mercilessly crushed seeking a second term and never won another race) was criticism directed against Nash's own incompetence as the worst mayor this city has ever endured ... until Jeff Gahan, Nash's eager pupil, who subverted the current human rights commission and now has doubled down on the damage by appointing his unspeakably dull Svengali to serve on it, so as to perpetuate the do-nothing fix for a new generation, one that deserves far better than either Nash or Gahan allowed anywhere close to a decision-making post.
But it's plenty good for Gahan's campaign war chest, isn't it? In New Gahania, money has more rights than humans. Maybe we need a Campaign Finance Rights Commission.
Thanks, Chris.
The city needed to see exactly what Warren Nash is, and how he operates. In 2019, we can retire Nash by firing Gahan, and in the process, free ourselves from the reign of vendor cash and the stifling yoke of the C-Minus Clique.
Mayor Jeff Gahan's pathological need for complete civic thought control has manifested itself in the form of institutional inbreeding in building and design.
A shockingly narrow (and yes, noticeably white-male-dominated) number of engineering, consulting and contracting companies increasingly are responsible for the city's design template, which appears to have been derived from frequent Bud Light Lime-soaked vacations at Disney World.
How we pay for it is another topic, for another time.
The same old inner circle suspects are contracted, and the same tithes magically appear in Gahan's exploding slush fund. The worst part of this isn't the shameless corruption, or the Dickeyesque complicity of the DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party.
It's the numbing uniformity of design results, and to make this point, consider that to this very day in a place like Italy, the eight-decade-old fascist architectural legacy is so glaringly obvious that visitors barely need to look twice before thinking, yep, that's a Mussolini building, all right.
New Albany is being designed to be New Gahania, and these principles of design emanate from the C-minus mind of a Babbitt-grade veneer salesman.
City Hall should be encouraging diversity in design, but alas, design monoculture better serves the interest of campaign finance, and so we're becoming a theme park --and this theme is dismally bland, indeed. Read this wonderful essay about diversity in design, and remember:
Architecture’s lack of diversity shows in environments created by people who never need step-free access or to take a bus
... Lately I’ve found myself imagining what the world might look like if the people who designed it – politicians, planners, developers and architects – were more diverse. I don’t believe that men and women design differently, or that poverty and ethnicity inform architecture, but lived experience is a great teacher. The regeneration projects of the past decade are more about planters and cappuccinos than access to free drinking water, public toilets, cheap groceries and a post office. They appear to solve only the first-world problems of the monocultural illuminati who created them.
What would our cities be like if mothers had more of a role in designing them? There would be ramps everywhere, for a start. Schlepping a pushchair around makes you think differently about stairs. I cried when my nearest station was revamped without the inclusion of a lift. To stand at the bottom of that flight of steps with two kids and a newborn in a pram is to experience the kind of despair usually reserved for rat-infested dungeons. Any station or public building undergoing refurbishment should by law be made step-free.
But I’m unlikely to find many sympathisers among architects. According to a recent survey by the Architectural Review, 75% of women in architecture don’t have children. Most architecture graduates think they’re designing access ramps for the odd wheelchair, not every child under three ...
We can't possibly be progressive unless the truth about street safety for all users is told aloud, and make no mistake: if the speed-through status quo works for you, that's not progressive at all.
In fact, it's embarrassingly regressive.
Of course, rule of law would be helpful on widely scattered occasions.
The U.S. has been falling behind its peer nations on traffic safety and now life expectancy as well. There's a connection.
Driving is driving us to the grave.
Life expectancy at birth declined steeply in the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, a new British Journal of Medicine study reports — a finding that was attributed partly to the opioid crisis, but also to America’s ongoing traffic violence problem.
In 16 peer nations studied, life expectancy at birth was fairly steady over the same period, but dropped by .2 years in the United States — a decline that is two-and-a-half times worse than the dip in 2012.
The researchers said that about 42 percent of the shortfall is due to the opioid crisis. But the leading cause for declining longevity remains “external factors” such as traffic fatalities, which is blamed for 44 percent of the decline, the study said.
Study author Jessica Ho, a gerontology professor at the University of Southern California, didn’t address the role of traffic accidents in this study, but told Streetsblog that an earlier study found that traffic fatalities accounted for 18 percent of the “life expectancy shortfall” for men under 50, and 16 percent for women in the same age range between 2006 and 2008 compared to similar nations.
So while the opioid addiction grabs headlines, cars have quietly remained a leading killer. In 2015, for example, the U.S. traffic fatality rate jumped 9 percent. And in 2016, it jumped again 5.6 percent, wiping out nearly a decade of improvements. It was the biggest two-year jump in 50 years.
Traffic fatalities have long been a leading cause of death of Americans, and in 2015, they were the 13th leading cause of death in the U.S. overall. But because cars kill a disproportionately high number of younger people, they rank seventh in total years of life lost.
Other Western nations have been making far faster progress on reducing traffic fatalities than the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control sounded the alarm last year, reporting that between 2000 and 2013, traffic deaths per capita in the U.S. dropped at just under half the rate of 19 peer nations. Our death rate per capital is roughly double that of Canada and France ...
This post was edited on September 7 to correct an unfair bias against HRC appointee Cliff Staten. For the explanation, go here.
Mayor Jeff Gahan has released the winning entry in his Human Rights Commission Mayoral Art Project, which posed the question: Can you take this strange idea ...
... and make it palatable to Democratic Party voters?
Predictably paranoiac and suitably suspicious, and unable to find any symbolic minorities to co-opt with Human Rights Commission seats, Gahan appointed two old straight white males tied to the local Democratic hierarchy, so no, he's not exactly artistic, our Jeffrey.
The bunker-bound mayor seeks only to control the HRC, and we need to understand that assigning political cronies like Nash to an HRC kept inert on blocks by Gahan himself over a period of YEARS reflects absolutely no commitment to human rights.
Gahan barely understands the concept, much less cares to pursue it. Rather, it's about appointing loyal Democratic sycophants to keep CONTROL over the apparatus -- in short, to try to ensure the HRC remains dormant.
The last thing Gahan wants is an autonomous, principled and active HRC, because the first order of business for an autonomous, principled and active HRC would be investigating Gahan's record in office.
The good news? It's a malfunction that we can repair, very soon.
$10 million to alleviate "inhumane" working conditions in the City-County Building, but not a farthing to spend on real people or living trees.
These really are absolutely horrid functionaries. Just horrid.
Three red ribbons have been wrapped around three trees in front of St.Mary’s school on Elm Street. I’ll bet you a dollar against a dozen doughnuts that Councilman Barksdale and Mayor Gahan have them slated for imminent amputation. And our City Forester is ready to comply.
Sad sad sad. One looks at least 40 - 50 years old.
It doesn't stop with yet another clear cut.
Did you read the horrible paragraph on the back of the “Stormwater News”? The “Message from Mayor Jeff Gahan” is a piece of steaming dog shit.
You mean this?
Deforestation hinders the stormwater control effort, but let's not ignore how stupefyingly banal this message reads, although the mayor has a reasonable retort: "Do you really think I write the words my name is attached to"?
Welcome to the increasingly rocky reign of Crooked Jeffrey.
Even Donald Trump had a better week than our increasingly out of touch, cash-obsessed and graft-ridden Ceausescu fetishist. I hear Joseph Kabila is a free agent; maybe with a bit of added TIF funding, Gahan can outbid LeBron's resurgent Lakers and put the idle Congolese strongman in charge of Fairview Cemetery.
Take it away, Mr. Gillenwater.
More tales from Corruption Junction. As Roger previously noted about NA’s blatant nepotism as normalcy, “If you believe that Warren Nash on the Human Rights Commission somehow differs from Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA, please drop me a line. You'll be entered into a drawing, and the lucky winner gets to serve with Gahan's brother-in-law on the City-County Building Authority, or with the mayor's son-in-law on Flood Control, or with his daughters at their summer jobs at the Aquatic Center -- or maybe I'm thinking about former redevelopment director Duggins' sister married to consultant Wheatley who gets all the posh the redevelopment gigs, or the HWC Engineering connection with Dugout ...” Occasionally, you might be tempted to think they’ve bottomed out, that it can’t get any worse. You’d be wrong, not least because you’re likely forgetting the pride expressed by the Gahan administration in finding novel ways of circumventing public bidding laws so that donors are rewarded with lucrative city contracts much more directly. If you support or profit from this ongoing Democratic boondoggle here at home, you’re cordially invited to STFU about Trump and corruption elsewhere.
Yes, Dear Leader is your cross to bear, local Democrats. Even by Jeff Gahan's subterranean standards of casual fraudulence and wagon-circling paranoia, it was a memorable week, one filled to the brim with reasons to #FireGahan2019.
On Monday, a skateboarder was killed by a driver on Spring Street. Predictably the driver won't be charged, and City Hall's first and only reaction has been to loudly deny responsibility for its own high-speed, pass-through street grid, followed immediately by the pitter-patter of tiny bureaucratic feet scampering into the safety of the down-low bunker.
After dragging his feet for years, and lately feeling the heat from local activists who look to Jeffersonville's Republican mayor Mike Moore as an area leader in fairness, a petulant Gahan finally got around to making his appointments to New Albany's moribund Human Rights Commission, which Gahan's crack team of bootlickers previously had engineered to be impotent-by-design.
Surveying a diverse rainbow-accented landscape, Gahan predictably opted for two old, straight, white males with the requisite ironclad DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party credentials: Warren Nash and Cliff Staten. They'll be expected to maintain control, because a truly autonomous Human Rights Commission would be working overtime just investigating Team Gahan.
Gahan's hostile takeover of the New Albany Housing Authority came back to bite the colonial overlord, as the mayor's handpicked team of clueless but servile lackeys heaved, flailed and looked like a motley crew of rejects at the Keystone Kops audition in reaction to the failure of the electrical system at Riverview Towers. The community's eyebrows arched as Gahan's dimmer-than-ever bulbs, previously billed as managerial geniuses, frantically blamed others for their own failure to be pro-active.
Speaking of the housing authority, sitting councilman Matt Nash, son of Warren the Party Fixer, whose sworn duty as an elected official is to scrutinize matters precisely like the mayor's NAHA annexation, has accepted a paying job there, and now answers to grape-stuffed satrap David Duggins, whom the councilman should be pursuing for gross incompetence. Failed Tom Hagen wannabe Shane Gibson has merely waved his arms and dismissed the obvious conflict of interest.
And, the grandiosely titled Mt. Tabor Road Restoration and Pedestrian Safety Project -- known colloquially as Gahan's Folly -- hit the rocks yet again as residents began firing back in court over the issue of eminent domain. Pliable lickspittles were trotted out to speak indecipherable platitudes, and Gahan remained shielded from view, suckling a Bud Light Lime and calculating campaign finance proceeds.
ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique. A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
For more years than I care to remember, I’ve been attending weekly Board of Public Works and Safety (BOW) meetings, admittedly on an irregular basis, although still often and depressingly enough to justify frequent bottles of gin.
Just think of the books I’ve missed reading.
BOW's weekly grind largely consists of a procession of engineers, contractors and utility company representatives, who march to the podium and ask for permission to destroy existing infrastructure in order to improve it, by digging holes, felling trees, milling streets and maintaining essential backflow -- which in this instance means those many rivulets of convenience cash flowing into eager campaign finance ponds.
I’ve heard hundreds of these requests during the past 15 years, followed by the replies of BOW members and other city officials in attendance. Their words in response seldom vary.
“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting, which we’ll be numbly and ritualistically approving anyhow, even dare impact passing drivers in their cars?”
Once in a blue moon someone thinks to ask a different kind of question.
“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting impact sidewalk users -- walkers in the general sense, but especially disabled persons, who might have no other options to bypass closed sidewalks when BOW’s stated objective is to coddle drivers?”
On those rare occasions when a board member or functionary utters such heresy, he or she recoils immediately, as though smacked in the face by an evil spirit bearing a two-by-four.
“No, no, Mr. Nash -- I take it all back! Go ahead and pile dirt and debris on the sidewalk, even when it’d be easier to take up a parking space for them. By all means, leave your work trucks to block passage by those on foot or using a wheelchair. In fact, make those wheelchairs go out into the street so we can blame the disabled when speeding cars hit them broadside -- anything, just don’t rescind my invitation to the paving company’s annual costume ball.”
The preceding is an example of how car-centrism is reflective of institutional bias in places like New Albany.
A tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favored and others being disadvantaged or devalued. This need not be the result of any conscious prejudice or discrimination but rather of the majority simply following existing rules or norms. Institutional racism and institutional sexism are the most common examples.
Institutional bias helps to explain why Jeff Speck’s proposals to revolutionize our city’s street grid suffered a grim and meticulous death by a thousand belches and almost as many farts.
Speck’s plan was pruned again and again until the majority of design mechanisms intended to bring about the greatest positive change for the greatest number of overall users, whether behind the wheel of a car or navigating a skateboard, were left despoiled on the cutting room floor amid the laughter of Pinocchio Rosenbarger and David “Playboy of the Western World” Duggins.
Isolated in an otherwise untouched design vacuum, stripped of Speck’s ancillary buttresses, two-way traffic alone couldn’t have ever proven capable of transformation. It has been slightly helpful within its straitjacket, as tailored by the most intellectually deficient mayor in this city’s history, but it needs lots of help, beginning with one simply imperative.
Flush the fuckers, ASAP.
---
Institutional bias and institutional inbreeding aren’t exactly the same concept, although it might be argued that the first is an inevitable outcome of the second.
In the case of bureaucrats appointed to BOW, the redevelopment commission and other city agencies, we see the same “idea” people making the same decisions in conjunction with the same engineers, contractors and vendors -- and with the same underachieving results. At times these functionaries swap positions, but seldom is there any challenge to basic assumptions.
Hence the design conformity that comes to characterize closed systems. No new ideas can penetrate the circled wagons, and in political terms, the clique chooses to optimize whichever “outside” contributors (HWC Engineering and Jacobi, Toombs and Lanz being prominent local examples) who understand best how to prime the pump for maximum political patronage.
It's recurringly revolting, hence the generalized institutional bias, because dude: it’s always been this way. Cars come first. Multiple users of a street? Do they even vote? Why don't they have cars to begin with?
Planned paving obsolescence and proper pothole prioritization -- now there’s the ticket to many happy electoral returns.
After Chloe Allen was killed by a driver who went scot free, I wrote a fictional statement that we should have heard emanating from Jeff Gahan’s graft-smeared lips, and of course did not, because cynical and self-aggrandizing political calculations are why he’s here, or in the case of human emotion, they’re why he’s never, ever, here at all.
Kindly allow me to update it, but first, note that when the city of New Albany’s piecework feed supplier at Twitter deigned to mention Matt Brewer’s death, he or she already had been instructed that the paramount mission in any such mention was to declaim responsibility.
Yay! It wasn't our fault! Can't blame us!
Right. You know what this is?
It's just plain sick.
---
AN IMAGINED STATEMENT FROM OUR MAYOR My fellow New Albanians, as your mayor – no, strike that. I’m sorry. This isn’t the usual boilerplate. As a human being, I’m saddened that a resident of New Albany lost his life skateboarding along Spring Street. Matt Brewer was only trying to return home after doing what he loved, and now he’s dead. It’s unacceptable, it’s tragic, there are no excuses, and we’re going to do something about it. We cannot restore his life, but we can heed the words of Ms. Lori Kay Sympson, a friend of the late Chloe Allen, who in 2016 lost her life trying to cross Spring Street: "If anything good can come of this, it'll be that this intersection is made safer." In 2018, we’re referring to the intersection at 9th Street and East Spring, but actually the topic is enhanced safety for all street grid users on Spring (and Elm, and Market, and for that matter, all our streets). We’ll be taking a fine-tooth comb to our street grid, because for too long, we’ve ignored the dangers at this and other intersections in New Albany. This is going to change. It’s critical for everyone who uses city streets that safety is not restricted to one or another crosswalk, or to this or that street. We have a problem. We also have an opportunity. Hazards are abetted on a daily basis by the way we’ve chosen to manage the city’s street grid. Indiana law plainly advises drivers that walkers have the right of way – and just as plainly, walkers in New Albany know that our streets are a coin flip at best. We may have sidewalks, but we don’t have walkability. That’s because traffic safety has come to be viewed entirely as safety for drivers of cars, and not the city as a whole, including those who move about in other ways -- walking, biking, in wheelchairs or carts, or using skateboards. The problem at intersections like 9th and Spring, or Spring and Vincennes, extends for many blocks in all four directions. We cannot improve safety by merely treating symptoms. Only major surgery will be effective. We had the chance last year, and frankly, we blew it. When I chose Jeff Speck to pioneer a walkability study for New Albany, it was done with the recognition that his factual, reality-based recommendations would preface a bold new chapter in the city’s history by restoring an environment suitable for all citizens and all users of our streets, whether on foot, riding a bicycle or driving a car. Automotive traffic was never intended to move at highway speeds through built-up urban areas intended for the speed of your child at play, not for limited-access conditions like those on an interstate highway. Unfortunately our city officials lost sight of the possibilities. So did I, so did HWC Engineering, and now we’re all going to return to Speck’s tool kit and do the things we failed to do with the two-way grid modernization program, and with the ultimate objective of slowing and calming traffic. When it comes to humans driving cars, speed, inattentiveness and recklessness kill. It’s intolerable, and it has to stop. Certainly law enforcement plays a part in any potential solution, but Speck’s proposals were based on empirical evidence. They were based on facts, and we simply didn’t implement them. We closed our minds to innovative thinking, and now it’s time to do the right thing and implement area-wide traffic calming as quickly as possible; not only must safety be our first imperative, but we also must apply principles of “quality of life” to this city as a whole, and to manage the city according to best practices for all grid users, not just some. Call the street reform process as you will, so long as you grasp the necessity. Walkability, complete streets and street calming are good for neighborhoods, property values, quality of life and small business success. Cities all across the country provide examples, and we need only follow suit. Some might point to statistics, and say that when it comes to deaths by walkers and bicyclists at the hands of people driving cars and trucks, New Albany is better than the national average. That’s no consolation, and it is no reason to refrain from proven methods of doing better. Public safety is the very last place to be miserly, whether with money or scrutiny. An active, progressive, forward-thinking city is far more than the sum of its automobiles. Rather, a city is about people like Matt Brewer and Chloe Allen, and the best -- the only -- way for us to honor their sacrifice is to get this damn thing right, once and for all. I hope you’ll join us in the effort -- now, not later. Mayor Jeff M. Gahan
---
Yes, I know. An unlikelihood of epic dimension, but a boy can dream about mayors who aren't built from silly putty and composite Disney caricatures.
Meanwhile, one after the other, Team Gahan's merry practitioners of institutional bias -- those arrogant products of institutional inbreeding -- step forward at the BOW meeting to insist our spanking new flashing yellow pedestrian crossing lights actually work (they don't), that speeds have appreciably slowed since two-way traffic was instituted (they haven't), and if deficient citizens in wheelchairs and carts, on foot or with skateboards, wish to avoid being killed or maimed, can’t they just stay on the sidewalk?
Of course, only in those cases when BOW hasn't already approved blocking the sidewalk so as to spare inconvenience to drivers, most of whom never notice they're being fellated because they're too busy staring at their phones while driving.
Team Gahan surveys the neighborhood carnage, and says: "Who are you going to believe, us or your own two eyes?"
Lasik isn't necessary to answer that one. In truth, Team Gahan is the problem, not the solution, and it’s them, not us, in immediate need of being institutionalized -- and yet we have a far better solution: #FlushTheClique and #FireGahan2019.
Flush Gahan’s toxic legacy, and it will travel through the sanitary sewer system, eventually re-entering the Ohio River at a point just downriver from the skate park by the amphitheater.
It's time for them to go. Then maybe we can get something accomplished in this town.
NA Confidential's mask-free policy on reader comments.
NA Confidential believes in a higher bar than is customary in the blogosphere, and follows a disclosure policy with respect to reader comments.
First, you must be registered with blogger.com according to the procedures specified. This is required not as a means of directing traffic to blogger.com, but to reduce the lamentable instances of flaming and personal attacks on the part of the anonymous.
Second, although pen names are perfectly acceptable, senior editor Roger A. Baylor must be informed of your identity, and according to your preference, it will be kept confidential.
To reiterate, I insist upon this solely to lessen the frequency of malicious anonymity, which unfortunately plagues certain other blogs hereabouts.
You may e-mail Roger at the address given within his profile and explain who you are. Failure to comply means that your comments probably will be deleted -- although the final decision remains ours.
Thanks for reading, and please consider becoming a part of the community here, one that is respectful of the prerequisites of civilized discourse, and that seeks to engage visitors in substantive dialogue.
