ON THE AVENUES: The same tired "run government like a business" mantra.

ON THE AVENUES: The same tired "run government like a business" mantra.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It would be refreshing to hear a candidate for public office concede that the anticipated pay package for serving as an elected official would far exceed rates of remuneration at his or her current job, with this prospective increase constituting a prime reason for seeking office in the first place.

Some of those few bothering to vote these days undoubtedly would reply that public service is supposed to be about noble ideals and selfless sacrifice. I’d counter by waiting to see if the aspiring candidate puts forth the proposition that a lifetime of business experience has provided a unique opportunity to “run” government in precisely the same fashion as a taco stand, foundry or jewelry store -- at a considerable pay cut to the chief executive officer whose capitalist expertise in making money is his or her main recommendation.

Something about this equation doesn’t add up, but then again, I’ve never been very adept at mathematics.

While we were away, merrily partying in European locales where folks really can have nice things, David White made a pilgrimage to the Scribner House, and amid the swooning of resident DAR stalwarts, announced his campaign for mayor … as a Democrat.

For those just tuning in, this means that an incumbent mayor (Jeff Gahan) who garnered 64% of the vote in the 2011 general election is viewed as vulnerable within his very own party. Not unexpectedly, White revealed very little about his platform in terms of detail, although the rudiments were summarized in Daniel Suddeath's newspaper account of White's debut:

The four cornerstones of (White’s) Advance New Albany 2016 plan are: Unifying city-county government, job creation, generating a budget surplus and “exceptionalism.”

Judging from the scant content of White’s web site, we are to believe he is capable of executing this plan by virtue of his successful business background – or, as Suddeath reports:

White said he views government as a small business, and that the residents of New Albany are the customers.

The last time we heard this “government as business” argument from a mayoral candidate, the speaker was Irv Stumler, former mayor Doug England’s hand-picked successor, and Jeff Gahan’s first victim in route to a desk somewhere near Hauss Square.

At least White is younger than his predecessor.

All of which reminded me of something I wrote in March of 2011 during my city council at-large campaign. Let’s see how well it has survived the intervening three years.

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Last week, I was asked how it’s been possible for me to survive in business for 20 years with a lowly BA in philosophy, rather than a degree in business.

My response: Because serendipity rules our planet, and thinking trumps rote … and I doubt they teach any of this at business school.

In fact, I went into business because (a) I love beer, and (b), an opportunity was presented for me to love beer for pay while sharing my love with others. It was nothing more, it is nothing less, and it remains nothing to build a business school curriculum around. An autobiography is still possible, although if it ever comes to fruition, there’ll be precious little in it about spreadsheets.

Yesterday afternoon at Steinert’s, as I was listening for the second time this week to mayoral hopeful Irv Stumler read aloud his extensive and admittedly admirable Curriculum Vitae, it suddenly occurred to me how America’s weird indigenous cult of business achievement has almost never captured my fancy, but instead, over long decades, mostly repelled me.

Rather, my personal heroes have always been artists, baristas, musicians, chefs, writers, actors, dancers, sportsmen, brewers and other practitioners moving within the less easily quantifiable realm of creativity. How and why they’re paid is far less interesting to me than how they create, and what they produce in an aesthetic sense. How do their physical skills capture the output of their brains?

If the business of America truly is business, then it causes me to openly shudder, and if so, my personal “business” encompasses looking elsewhere – anywhere will do – for a higher order of inspiration, as opposed to worshipping techniques to amass and maintain wealth. While it’s true that Bruce Springsteen is handsomely rewarded for creating music, give me the Boss over Donald Trump, any day. I can whistle along with music, but only wince at avarice.

As a matter of convenience, I accept the term “businessman,” but prefer to think of myself as a beer entrepreneur.

The very word “entrepreneur” strikes me as more applicable. For one thing, it’s suitably French. There’s also an element of daring and risk contained in it, contrasting with “businessman”, which sounds far too numerically vocational and conservative for my blood. Entrepreneurs sweat to create; businessmen merely manage.

The prime reason for my violent, lifelong allergic reaction to the trappings of chambers of commerce and like-minded business idolatry societies is their vacuously obnoxious glorification of business for the sake of business, in the form of endless rounds of symbolic pom-pom waving, mysterious networking rites, totemic seminars and expense account driven re-education junkets, the sum total of which is the perpetuation of eager, grasping and typically greedy cadres of business “elites”, each dressed alike, refusing to travel in steerage, wholly ignorant of the universe beyond their sales strategies, but perfectly capable of exchanging indecipherable business lingo and colloquialisms that surely would have inspired Sinclair Lewis to update the saga ofBabbitt – or in the case of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), which uses the same sad tools in the context of God's inscrutable instructions – Elmer Gantry.

(How’s that for a paragraph, ma?)

That's why I generally refuse to wear a suit. I waited a long time to find a line of honest work that would permit me to dress like a normal human being on a daily basis. My uniform is different from yours, just as a football player’s is different from mine. Having found such a pursuit, and permitted to be both comfortable and unhesitant to dribble hot sauce down my chin, I’m hesitant to surrender the autonomy.

I’m a craft beer kind of guy, and there’s a saying in the craft beer business: We brew beer, we drink beer, and we sell what’s left. At the end of the day, if there still are a few farthings lying around, then we made a profit, and while I readily acknowledge the imperative of making a few bucks, it’s worth repeating that love of beer is what drew me to my business.

History, geography, lore and storytelling about beer are my fortes. The actual brewers can explain the enzymes. I’d rather let the finished liquid in the glass do the talking, and translate the testimony for our consumers.

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The preceding digression is brought to you by my perpetual annoyance whenever I hear a businessman-turned-politician proclaim that government should be run like a business.

That’s fine with me, in the sense that if I’m elected to city council, and if wisdom like this is accepted at face value, there’ll be quite a lot of craft beer served at meetings – and other times, too.

In an effort to explain, and at the risk of oversimplifying, usually when we’re told to run government like a business, the speaker is referring to expense reduction alone, first by means of greater efficiencies, and if necessary, by making all the cuts required to balance the budget. These infamous days, the state of Indiana looks at it the same way, and will mold its ideologically-derived budget directives to cities in such a manner as to focus attention on one side of the ledger to the exclusion, and at times impossibility, of the other.

The casual, pants-down "businessman" in me responds to all this with a simple question: Okay, but what about revenues?

Generally a pudgy tea partier's finger is wagged. I'm told not to ask, and this juncture, the “government as business” fallacy loses it wheels. If government cannot address revenues as well as expenses, it’s nothing whatsoever “like” a business and should not pretend to be one.

During the hard times in 2010, my company tried mightily to increase efficiencies and reduce expenses, while at the same time improving customer count and increasing volume. One without the other makes no sense to a business, does it? We never stopped trying to make the pie bigger even as we reduced expenditures to make it through the lean period. There was no choice except to address both.

If government is to be run like a business, doesn't it have an imperative to bring in money even as less is spent? It might charge higher prices to its consumers (taxes and fees), or if unable to charge higher prices, it might increase the number of consumers paying lower prices.

Businesses balance these considerations every single day: Will the consumer pay the same price for the lowered quality of good and services? Can the quality be maintained when expenses are cut? Are there intangibles that might justify higher prices in their minds? How do we get more of them to come in and sample what we have to offer?

But beyond that, considering what government does, how are goods and services even to be measured?

In America, we have a mission statement and business plan of sorts, known as the Constitution, from which emanates numerous other mission statements and business plans for governance from the grassroots up. To be specific, how do we calculate the price of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the playing field for which it is government’s job to keep level?

Or do we abandon the mission statement because we’ve decided that human rights are too expensive for consumer/citizens who’d rather opt out of the compact, and can be out-sourced, half-assed and winked at? Need a cop? Just phone the call center in Bangalore ... and take a number.

I’ll not belabor the point. Government is not the same thing as business, and even if it might be in some obscure way, any Democratic candidate urging us to run government like a business needs to come equipped with ideas for making the pie bigger, or introducing a whole new kind of pie (sustainability and the grassroots localization of the economy spring to mind), not just coping in servile fashion with the dubious physiological “benefits” of devouring civil society’s remaining muscle in the interest of certifying the diktats of theocratic Republican ideology.

By any standard of attainment, Irv Stumler has enjoyed a solid career in business. Is he ready to discuss the other side of the ledger?

Let’s hear those ideas, too.

2011 Highlights & Lowlights: My rejection at the polls.

In 2011, I declared for a city council at-large seat as a Democrat, and was defeated fair and square in the primary, finishing fifth in a six-person race, but garnering a respectable vote total while spending nary a penny.

My reward for this exercise in downward civic immobility was two-fold: First, it cannot be said that I didn't try (up yours, troglodytes), and second, the newspaper took away my weekly column sans coherent explanation, although we can surmise that somewhere in Alabama, someone became irate at the tone of my pants-down progressivism. But they do sports mighty fine, Verle.

Following are links to five somewhat randomly selected pieces published here during the campaign. These strike me as representative of my failed campaign's overall tone.

A Candidate's Progress (4): Platform planks and opening salvos.

A Candidate’s Progress (11): Suit yourself. Plaid?

Groomsian "freedoms" from a Republican Party intent on keeping women barefoot and pregnant.

REWIND: Starving for education (2010).

Tanned, rested, ready and appreciative.

Tanned, rested, ready and appreciative.

If you have not already heard, there was an election yesterday, and I lost it.

I’ll have more to say about my personal experience with the electoral process later today, or perhaps tomorrow. First, some much delayed business at work must be finished. In the interim, please be assured that even in defeat, I’m positively elated with the results.

My appreciation cannot be delayed, so please accept one huge, all-purpose, humble THANK YOU to all 1,341 of you who defied local convention, saw past the usual obstructionist blather, and made a compelling collective statement about the primacy of thinking versus the dull platitudes of party business as usual.

As you know, I violated each and every sacred rule of local campaigning, didn’t once fluff the hierarchy, refused to wear a suit, ran lean and green, stood in full view as a commie/atheist/liberal/gadfly, spent less than fifty bucks, bought no newspaper advertising and planted not a single offensive yard sign … and 1,341 of you approved because it's the thought that counts.

Yes, it wasn't quite enough ... this time around. But it’s one hell of a good start, and I cannot thank you enough for it. My only regret is being denied the chance to enjoy a campaign spent denouncing the malignant Republican platform.

Side note to Shea Van Hoy of the News and Tribune: When’s the column coming back? I can get you 900 words for tomorrow by 10:00 a.m. today; right now, in fact. Piece of cake. At least 1,341 people are eager to read all about it, and now more than ever, the newspaper needs it. Whaddya say?

As if you needed reminding.

An Elector Day pint special.

Because a troglodyte surely will complain, note the small print: In the state of Indiana, discounted alcoholic beverages are offered all day long during business hours, to all comers in a strictly non-discriminatory manner, provided (a) you're 21 years of age and can prove it, and (b) not already intoxicated. Enjoy Elector Day responsibly.

Baylor for Progress At-Large.

On Tuesday, the Confidentials will vote early at S. Ellen Jones, and then it's a normal workday for me until early afternoon. After that, it's Elector Day, primary-style.

If you are registered and have not yet voted absentee or early, please cast a ballot. There's no polite way to say this: It's simply ass-backwards that virtually every adult in town is ready to hold forth with an opinion about Osama Bin Laden, and yet perhaps only one or two out of 10 will bother voting. A majority of a minority is not.

Thanks to all of you for your support and good wishes. I just wish Lloyd could be here to be a part of the festivities. My friend, you are sorely missed.

A Candidate’s Progress (14): Jeff Gahan for Mayor, redux.

Throughout the primary campaign, which will conclude tomorrow on Elector Day, I’ve sought to further an ongoing dialogue about New Albany’s past and its future, much as we’ve been doing since 2004, right here at the NA Confidential blog.

Verily, there is much of importance to be found in past experience, primarily by thoughtfully adapting the time-tested urban experience to modern times, and extending it into the future. At the same time, New Albany’s long tradition of dysfunction remains a disfiguring carbuncle on the torso of the body politic, one to be removed and cast aside.

It comes down to this: If you agree that a council person should use his head, and not jerk his knee, then I’m your man, and I’d appreciate your vote tomorrow.

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Rightly or wrongly, the race for mayor is the one we’re all watching. For what it’s worth, I’ve already given my personal endorsement to Jeff Gahan. If I have any single regret during this election cycle, it’s not having arrived at this conclusion earlier than I did.

I’ve nothing whatever “against” Gahan’s opponent, businessman-turned-politician Irv Stumler. He has been gracious and pleasant, and overall, the experience reminds me of the way I felt throughout the Reagan years.

He’d probably be a great neighbor when it comes to grilling steaks, drinking a few beers and listening to the tales of old times. But affability is not the best reason for occupying office, and accordingly, after much deliberation, I find that Gahan is the better choice, for reasons both positive, pertaining to his own personal attributes, and negative, in the sense of the way that Stumler has come to be offered as a contestant in this race.

That's because for all his good qualities, we mustn’t ever lose sight of the secretive process whereby an erstwhile Republican, Irv Stumler, somehow came to be a Democratic nominee for mayor.

To be honest, it has repulsed me from the start.

Stumler dallied with the Republican Party chair, Dave Matthews, evidently convincing the GOP that he was their best hope, and then abruptly executed a stunning 180-degree pirouette, accepting “The Deal” offered by incumbent Doug England, who evidently feared Stumler as an opponent enough to co-opt him, while at the same time thinking nothing of how such a cynical move made further mockery of a local Democratic Party already in decline owing to a congenital absence of principle.

Thus, overnight, England gifted Stumler with the votes of department heads and various other patronage legacies, and they duly began campaigning for the new boss even while on the clock, while still beholden to the old one. The farce has proceeded without any discernable sense of shame (please don’t insist otherwise, as I’ve witnessed it), adding yet another layer of repugnance to an already offensive “fix-is-in” electoral scenario.

Barely pausing for breath, the three-time mayor then hastened to explain that while he cannot continue as "hizzoner" because he’s getting on in years, and he needs more time with his family – both seemingly plausible reasons – he’d rather, implausibly, serve on the city council, openly implying that council service requires far less time and effort than executive duties, which a first-time office seeker eight years older than England, who hails from the other major political party, would be far better placed to handle than the incumbent himself.

The Deal that brought Stumler across the aisle may have been conducted behind closed doors, but in terms of sheer chutzpah, it is utterly transparent, remarkably artless, and far more indicative of the New Albany Syndrome’s enduring contagion than representative of any sensible solution to the disease.

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Speaking personally, I always will like Mayor England. It has been a pleasure to work with him, even if so very much of his appealing platform from four years ago remains unfulfilled, like (to name just two) two-way street conversions and a genuine push to undo slumlord empowerment.

True, a litany of natural disasters, a debilitating inability to see eye to eye with an overwhelmingly “Democratic” council and the oppressive budgetary atmosphere emanating from the state GOP may have acted in concert to clothesline the mayoral agenda.

Still, taken overall, the past three years and four months often have seemed paralyzed by a curious listlessness and perpetually blurred focus – and the buck stops at the mayor’s desk. Maybe after all those years, he just ran out of gas, although the fact that England’s handpicked successor was immediately handed a sizeable check from Neace Enterprises suggests otherwise.

We must vote to undo The Deal, because there comes a time when the idiotically insulting political yard signs all point in the same direction, and now is precisely such a juncture.

To repeat: Jeff Gahan for Mayor.

Gahan is an underdog in an uphill battle against privilege, money and connections, and he’s responded to the challenge with tenacity and tireless campaigning.

Gahan is far younger than Irv Stumler, both chronologically and even more important, generationally, but by the time he’s sworn in as mayor, he’ll have had eight years of valuable council experience. Conversely, Stumler has no experience in elective office, and at 75, he's even older than the baby boomers. Reagan was two years into his second term before reaching the same age.

Although I’ve no idea how he’s managed it, Gahan goes into tomorrow’s election with support from the Gang of Four's coterie on one side, and most of the extended NA Confidential family on the other. How he plans on maintaining such bi-partisanship once in office is anybody’s guess, but significantly, he has gotten to this point as his own man, with his own qualifications and his own strengthened message – not merely as the catch-all alternative to Stumler.

I’m voting for Jeff Gahan tomorrow, and I encourage you to do so, too.

While you're at it, don't forget Baylor for Progress At-Large, okay?

Reminder: "Baylor for Progress At Large 2011."

As the unreconstructed troglodytes gather at the Luddite Bar & Grill for a round of Denhartian bacchanalia (damn, them big ol' thesaurus words), and as Flatulence Over Louisville (literally) rains in all directions, it's worth remembering that the primary draws near.

Roger Baylor for NA City Council At-Large

Click on photos, and read platform positions in the form of photo captions. Your support is appreciated.

A campaign tout, a petulant incumbent and the usual fluffers.

There was a very flattering letter in yesterday's Tribune advocating my candidacy for city council at-large ... and King Larry was too busy distributing his atheist's holiday broadsheets to have written it: NEWS AND TRIBUNE LETTERS: April 12, 2011

Meanwhile, Rep. Ed Clere coincidentally appeared on the very same page to explain his demotion to every-other-week status as columnist:

I disagree with the new policy. Its practical effect will be to preclude publication of my column for more than half of my two-year term. I’m sure the policy is aimed at promoting fairness, but it’s unfair to readers, who will receive less information about their state government.

Not unexpectedly, the fiercely partisan GOP operative still believes that his St. Daniels apologetics and ideologue's agitprop count somehow as "information," and that's plainly sad. By day's end, Kent, Amy and the Clere Channel Fluffers had descended, demanding that the torture continue. I may be a drunkist, but I'm not a masochist, and so I switched the channel.

Like me, please: Campaign page at Facebook is up.

The Facebook "fan" page is up: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Roger-Baylor-for-NA-City-Council-At-Large/112117005535055?sk=wall&filter=1.

When permitted to do so, I'll attach a shorter URL. Meanwhile, if you are inclined to support progress in New Albany, knidly reward my candidacy with a "like" at the candidate site above. I will try to be as active as possible there, but given the sum of my sites ... we'll see how it goes. Here is the roster:

The campaign web site at http://www.rogerbaylor.com/ will be more static in nature, with the bare bones, but not as participatory in a social media sense.

Longer form essays and blogging will continue here at NAC: http://www.cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com/

And then, there's my personal Facebook site for rabble rousing and amusement: http://www.facebook.com/roger.a.baylor

REWIND: It shan’t happen here (2009).

New Albany's civic inferiority complex is the subject of this, another of my Tribune columns. It was originally published on March 12, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: It shan’t happen here.

By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

To live in New Albany is to be compelled forever and always to look at positive developments with a shrug, knowing that local Limbaughs are praying for failure, and to listen to their self-flagellating admonitions of futility, powerlessness and begrudgery:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even try.

Which ideas and activities do the naysayers advise us to shun? Virtually all of them, especially any that suggest a departure from established thought and practice, even if it can be demonstrated that the “way we’ve always done it” never worked.

You name it, and it has been rejected as impossible in New Albany. From electrification and internal combustion engines in days past, to ordinance enforcement and restoring two-way streets in the present age, reality-based forward thinking always has been derided as completely unattainable.

Usually the excuse for inaction is the city’s lack of cash, but the malaise extends far deeper into the tortured psyche of the citizenry. Ours is an inferiority complex of epic dimensions, and outlanders discern it immediately upon entering the city limits, yet because these widespread feelings of inadequacy constitute a known devil, ruinous conservatism compels people to hug the ground and wait for impending change to cease before rising to scurry to previous dysfunctional patterns.

But the world continues to rotate and calendar pages inexorably turn, with or without New Albany’s assent, leaving the city’s enlightened elements to struggle against the dreary shackles of habitual humbuggery as they seek freedom from the fear-crazed nooses of the little people, whose contradictions are legion.

Is it rational to insist that we are citizens of the greatest country on the face of the earth, purportedly a place where opportunity is unlimited, but at the very same time, to assert entirely different rules for New Albany, thus dooming us to suffer through ignorance, squalor and underachievement as though we’re being gleefully punished by one of those celestial deities that folks hereabouts so eagerly accept?

I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

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Given my outspokenness on this topic, dissent is inevitable, and I’ve heard the vague rumblings. These might be enough to induce paranoia into the bloodstream of this opinionated barfly, but since the market on New Albanian paranoia is fully sated in the 1st council district alone, I shall continue to walk through the valley of the shadow of the alley between my Bank Street Brewhouse and Connor’s Place without fearing evil – or anonymous e-mails, or even spilled, bitter Coffey.

Ten weeks into this experiment in constructive agitation, the objections can be distilled to this essence:

“Roger, why do you hate New Albany so much?”

Let me try to count the ways that this accusation makes even less sense than the usual opinions seeking to pass muster as facts in a place that seldom values the distinctions between the two.

I hate New Albany so much that it has been my conscious choice to live here since descending the Knobs in 1994, later moving into a century-old house downtown with my wife in 2003, and all along resisting the common local impulse to transform the house into a quadplex rental unit while disingenuously denying that rental property is a business activity.

I hate New Albany so much that I’ve been working here in one or another capacity since 1983, becoming a business owner myself, and spending the past four years studying urban revitalization, networking with the like minded, and devising a business plan for an expansion of our brewing business into downtown – even though there were opportunities as good elsewhere.

I hate New Albany so much that I remain sanguine about the prospects of forging pacts of unity with fellow progressives, and doing my little bit to transform this city into a viable, marketable, modern component of the Louisville metro area.

Sorry to dash those preconceived notions, but I don’t hate New Albany.

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However, with our longstanding civic inferiority complex looming over us like an 800-pound pigeon perched on the Elsby Building, New Albany’s populace certainly seems to hate itself. Why does it conduct itself in such a self-loathing way?

Perhaps because so many of the ward heelers we elect to local office provide living, daily proof of the old axiom, “Insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Too many New Albanian politicians persist in greeting the wide world around them with fear and incomprehension, trumpeting their confusion as bequeathed to them by birthright, citing their own shortcomings as proof that the world cannot be changed or even modified, and spending their political careers excusing futility and failure.

Not to single out my 3rd district councilman, but where else do you hear campaign slogans like this:

It just can’t be done here – and you’re a fool to even trying.

And yet the citizens of New Albany vote for those proud of being incapable. The same people vote for the similarly incapable further up the Indiana governmental food chain, those who insist that local government must do more with less than ever before?

I won’t point a finger at government, because we get exactly the quality of government we deserve. If we hate ourselves and vote for others who do, too, then there’s only one place to look for the real answer: Pogo, who knew the truth.

The enemy (still) is us.

REWIND: Human rights in New Albany? (2009).

As you already know, I am running for city council at-large, and my newspaper column is on hiatus pending the outcome of the primary election in May. During my first incarnation as columnist, from January 2009 through February 2011, a total of 111 essays were published, and because many of them pertain directly to campaign issues, it seems appropriate to reprint some of them. The following appeared in the Tribune on April 16, 2009.

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BEER MONEY: Human rights in New Albany?

By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

To my delight, last week the Iowa Supreme Court defied the American theocratic establishment by affirming a non-discriminatory definition of marriage as a secular institution, existing concurrent with organized religion, but not dependent on its supernatural sanction for validity.

By doing so, the court did its own little bit to reclaim genuinely salvageable culture, correctly espousing the rule of law and exposing the fraudulence of those whose vision of America as a “Christian nation” forever requires depriving fellow Americans of basic human rights clearly enunciated during the founding. Moreover, I’m reminded of this passage written by H. L. Mencken more than 75 years ago:

“The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking … Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.”

Coincidentally, my wife and I, who were married in 2004 by the city clerk, recently had the chance to watch “Milk,” the acclaimed biopic of gay activist, politician and martyr Harvey Milk. Sean Penn, the finest actor of his generation, stars in a riveting, Oscar-winning performance as the title character. Drop what you’re doing, rent the DVD of “Milk,” and prepare to be challenged, rewarded and enriched.

While the real Harvey Milk’s principled political activism in the diverse milieu of 1970’s San Francisco specifically espoused gay rights, his focal point is inseparable from the broader context of human rights and freedoms, providing the basis for a question I won’t stop asking until some semblance of a coherent answer is provided:

Precisely which aspects of the past are organizations like Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK) seeking to reclaim?

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Buried deep within New Albany’s terminally neglected Code of Ordinances is a 1974 law mandating a Human Rights Commission. It existed for a time, and then was unceremoniously discarded, so today I’m embracing a custodial public service duty by reminding the community that there is statutory authority to re-energize and staff a new Human Right Commission. We should do so immediately.

The administration of Mayor James Garner displayed a keen private grasp of the moribund commission’s potential importance, but nothing happened, and if you’re looking for a nutshell summary of the Garner era, this is as good a place as any to begin. Excellent intentions were accompanied by a supreme mastery of detail, but an inexplicable absence of political acumen and simple stick-to-it-ive-ness resulted in stasis.

No matter. That was then, and this is now. I support a rehabilitated Human Rights Commission simply because I always try to put myself in others’ shoes, imagining how it must feel to do as I’ve done by publicly promoting civic improvements and espousing reforms in an effort to make the city itself a more livable and civilized place, while recognizing that even these hard-fought gains may not provide protection from discrimination and harassment owing to race, gender or sexual orientation.

For instance, consider the fundamental human act of walking.

I walk New Albany’s streets on a daily basis, and do so at all hours, seldom giving the notion a second thought. Then again, I’m a white male standing well over six feet, and weighing 270 lbs. at last reading. Naturally, in a world filled to the brim with firearms, physical stature alone neither precludes violent acts nor negates harassment … but it does have a way of reducing problems.

Even so, occasionally a passing dullard finds it amusing to bait a man my size. Imagine going out for a walk as a more vulnerable potential target: Female, or gay, or an ethnic minority, or handicapped, or all four together, perhaps leading one to forsake activities and pursuits taken for granted by others, thanks to social and cultural primitivism that extends well beyond familiar urban woes like drugs and impoverishment, into public racism, overt homophobia and violence.

Just as speeding is not an enforcement issue, but a design issue, so goes an active daily consideration of human rights. A tweaked and reconstituted Human Rights Commission, even if chronically underfunded in the sad New Albanian tradition of penny wise, pound foolish, might provide an effective bully pulpit for making this city a place that welcomes diversity and its accompanying benefits, and not views “different” as opportunities for abuse and exploitation.

Now is the time. Is there the will?

A Human Rights Commission is sorely needed in a place where topics like basic rights, diversity, and fundamental human dignity are regularly the targets of gleeful disparagement and outright malice on the part of those of dominant white, male culture, who've obviously never suffered institutionalized deprivation.

Furthermore, thinking back to its conceptual origins in housing discrimination, a functional Human Rights Commission might be a component of solutions to the city’s rental housing problems. Tenant rights and human rights are cut from the same bolt, aren’t they?

Are any members of our local political establishment willing to go on record as supporting the revival of New Albany’s Human Rights Commission?

Or: Are any of them willing to go on record as supporting anything?

Two more readers questions answered: Infrastructure and human rights.

Dear Larry,

Your opening question was answered here. Following are the answers to your next two questions.

Q. What is your position on infrastructure projects and the funding thereof? What projects take priority?

A. In terms of city council service, my primary interest in policy matters is the principle of localization, whether this is taken to imply economic matters (local investment; buying locally; keeping money at home; using economic development funds to empower local businesses), moving to fight the good fight necessary to implement a high degree of local autonomy to retain and enhance grassroots decision-making, or restoring neighborhoods as the most vital building blocks of localized living and a genuinely civil society.

Two factors will preface all of my considerations of infrastructure long before the first dollar is spent: Inter-connected imperatives of sustainable green development and redevelopment, and quantifiable elevation of quality of life for the people inhabiting this city.

The city’s infrastructure begins with a blade of grass. As extreme weather events surely have indicated, mankind’s superstructure originates in the natural environment, previously trumpeted in the heroic American ethos as something obstructive, to be tamed and molded to our often temporary infrastructure needs, while ignoring the long-term effects on the quality of human life.

Here in New Albany, we have paved the earth, neglected the forest canopy and designed haphazardly, and then shaken our fists at predictable results such as storm water drainage problems and ensuing flooding, demanding Soviet-bloc sized engineering solutions even as we refuse to pay their cost. This cannot continue, because the result is an ineffective Band-Aid.

It is far better to begin implementing long-term, holistic and sustainable remedies for storm water drainage, including house by house and block-by-block remediation. Can we do more to encourage and reward permeable surfaces? Can we pull up unneeded pavement and asphalt? Can we plant trees to replace the ones lost? Obviously, we can’t do everything at once, but nothing can be accomplished unless we first begin the effort.

Thanks to the EPA’s monitoring of the results of decades of shortsightedness, we still lack complete autonomy over the sanitary sewer system, and what control we have constantly is deployed to perpetuate politically dysfunctional tribal conflict. I’m guardedly optimistic that this era of EPA control is about to come to a close. I believe we must bear the costs of the sewer utility’s conforming to high environmental standards, and do so without political subsidies from EDIT funds. This is better accomplished by a council willing to consider expert testimony and able to understand it, rather than contriving sewer system calculations based on the previous election’s vote totals.

As infrastructure pertains to roadway and traffic projects great and small, the Ohio River Bridges debacle clearly illustrates what can happen when everyday human needs and quality of life considerations are tossed aside in favor of compounding historic auto-envy with an oligarch’s largesse-and-reward system that perpetuates design flaws to maintain Holy Profit Writ.

I intend to subject all roadway infrastructure plans to a simple means test: Do humans, as opposed to their cars, fit into the plan, and to what extent? The greater the extent of consideration for human needs, the better to go forward with the project. The better the roadway design, the less need for subsequent enhanced enforcement regimes, and also, the roadway design/redesign can help achieve other goals.

Especially downtown, city streets should be two-way, traffic calmed, more allowance for walking and bicycling made, and all traffic projects implemented with surrounding neighborhoods in mind, not merely the traffic engineer’s need to move autos more quickly to the other side of the city.

More specific infrastructure questions? Please ask.

Q. What is your position on a Human Rights Commission? What is your position on extending Equal Opportunity Employment protections for sexual orientation and gender identity? What is your position on extending protections against discriminatory housing practices for sexual orientation and gender identity? What is your position on extending protections against hate crimes for sexual orientation and gender identity?

A. Human rights are incapable of quantification through market pricing. If memory serves, I began advocating for a reconstituted Human Rights Commission in 2005. It is statutorily enabled, and yet moribund. A revived Human Rights Commission is the obvious first step toward consideration of your three specific questions. I am in openly and unapologetically in favor of each, although still unsure as to how the city council can help implement them. The often neglected bully pulpit is always available, and I will use it.

Response to a reader's question.

Q. What is your primary goal in seeking a position on the New Albany City Council? What changes will you facilitate?

A. Seven years ago, I began attending city council meetings as a way to learn more about how local government operates, because I had numerous questions. These questions can be rolled into one overarching query:

Why did the city of New Albany come to symbolize regression, and how can we reverse this decline, and instead pursue progress toward a stronger, more just and economically equitable civil society?

I harbor no "Jimmy Stewart Goes to Hauss Square" illusions about the extent to which an individual at-large council member can “change” anything. However, council members overall can be far better informed and aware of a vast planet that exists outside the city limits.

Now more than ever before, New Albany needs elected officials who are capable of creative thought somewhat beyond conditioned dysfunctional responses intended to preserve their own tiny fiefdoms (and worldviews). “No” votes are not to be confused with leadership or ability. Politics is the art of the possible, and too many council members fail to grasp this truth.

Here’s a brief summary of my platform.

Human dignity has no price tag. Justice, diversity, equality and basic human rights begin at the grassroots. I will never lose sight of this.

Aggressive pursuit of a localized economy is essential. The beginnings of a stronger, smarter, more sustainable economic foundation are possible right here, with more money staying in this community and a greater degree of economic self-sufficiency.

Existing economic development funds are for economic development, and should be used to assist in localization. They are not sewer rate subsidies, bribes for wealthy multi-national corporations, or available for the use of bloated oligarchs under the wing of One Southern Indiana.

Zero tolerance for failure to cooperate, as it pertains to existing economic development entities: New Albany First, Develop New Albany, Urban Enterprise Association and applicable government agencies. We all row in the same direction, or else.

Environmental restoration and sustainability are fundamental to resolving longstanding problems with storm water and the sewer system.

Sustainable initiatives, green and urban, can take New Albany back to the future and return it to functioning as cities are intended to function. We have to adapt what we have, understand the lessons of historic preservation, build new buildings the right way, and maximize the advantages of urban living.

A progressive, family- and human-friendly neighborhood policy must emanate from the bottom up, not the top down. Many current problems result from generations of bad remedies and design flaws. We must rethink, plan, explore cause and effect, recognize inter-relatedness and repair these.

It’s time to fairly enforce our own laws. This is a political deficiency, not a police issue. All proceeds from enforcement should be kept right here to help fund further improvements. Mandatory rental property inspections need to begin as soon as possible.

No tolls! The Ohio River Bridges Project is a multi-billion dollar transportation boondoggle. I’m proud to say I was an early opponent of tolls, and I remain opposed in spite of recent cosmetic changes in the plan, Tolling will disproportionately burden Hoosier small businesses, Hoosier workers and Hoosier families. Build the East End Bridge now, and then reassess other vehicular transportation needs later.

The biggest “bully pulpit” issue is our obligation to fight the good fight for greater local determination. The Indy-centric budgeting system we have now is inefficient and infected with malicious Republican ideology. Cutting essentials in education, public safety and social services is penny-wise, pound-foolish madness. Yes, spend less when possible, but think more, and work smarter. The obsequious obstructionism of past councils is inexcusable.

A Candidate’s Progress (6): It might be some of your business.

Last week, I was asked how it’s been possible for me to survive in business for 20 years with a lowly BA in philosophy, rather than a degree in business.

My response: Because serendipity rules our planet, and thinking trumps rote … and I doubt they teach any of this at business school.

In fact, I went into business because (a) I love beer, and (b), an opportunity was presented for me to love beer for pay while sharing my love with others. It was nothing more, it is nothing less, and it remains nothing to build a business school curriculum around. An autobiography is still possible, although if it ever comes to fruition, there’ll be precious little in it about spreadsheets.

Yesterday afternoon at Steinert’s, as I was listening for the second time this week to mayoral hopeful Irv Stumler read aloud his extensive and admittedly admirable Curriculum Vitae, it suddenly occurred to me how America’s weird indigenous cult of business achievement has almost never captured my fancy, but instead, over long decades, mostly repelled me.

Rather, my personal heroes have always been artists, baristas, musicians, chefs, writers, actors, dancers, sportsmen, brewers and other practitioners moving within the less easily quantifiable realm of creativity. How and why they’re paid is far less interesting to me than how they create, and what they produce in an aesthetic sense. How do their physical skills capture the output of their brains?

If the business of America truly is business, then it causes me to openly shudder, and if so, my personal “business” encompasses looking elsewhere – anywhere will do – for a higher order of inspiration, as opposed to worshipping techniques to amass and maintain wealth. While it’s true that Bruce Springsteen is handsomely rewarded for creating music, give me the Boss over Donald Trump, any day. I can whistle along with music, but only wince at avarice.

As a matter of convenience, I accept the term “businessman,” but prefer to think of myself as a beer entrepreneur.

The very word “entrepreneur” strikes me as more applicable. For one thing, it’s suitably French. There’s also an element of daring and risk contained in it, contrasting with “businessman”, which sounds far too numerically vocational and conservative for my blood. Entrepreneurs sweat to create; businessmen merely manage.

The prime reason for my violent, lifelong allergic reaction to the trappings of chambers of commerce and like-minded business idolatry societies is their vacuously obnoxious glorification of business for the sake of business, in the form of endless rounds of symbolic pom-pom waving, mysterious networking rites, totemic seminars and expense account driven re-education junkets, the sum total of which is the perpetuation of eager, grasping and typically greedy cadres of business “elites”, each dressed alike, refusing to travel in steerage, wholly ignorant of the universe beyond their sales strategies, but perfectly capable of exchanging indecipherable business lingo and colloquialisms that surely would have inspired Sinclair Lewis to update the saga of Babbitt – or in the case of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), which uses the same sad tools in the context of God's inscrutable instructions – Elmer Gantry.

(How’s that for a paragraph, ma?)

That's why I generally refuse to wear a suit. I waited a long time to find a line of honest work that would permit me to dress like a normal human being on a daily basis. My uniform is different from yours, just as a football player’s is different from mine. Having found such a pursuit, and permitted to be both comfortable and unhesitant to dribble hot sauce down my chin, I’m hesitant to surrender the autonomy.

I’m a craft beer kind of guy, and there’s a saying in the craft beer business: We brew beer, we drink beer, and we sell what’s left. At the end of the day, if there still are a few farthings lying around, then we made a profit, and while I readily acknowledge the imperative of making a few bucks, it’s worth repeating that love of beer is what drew me to my business.

History, geography, lore and storytelling about beer are my fortes. The actual brewers can explain the enzymes. I’d rather let the finished liquid in the glass do the talking, and translate the testimony for our consumers.

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The preceding digression is brought to you by my perpetual annoyance whenever I hear a businessman-turned-politician proclaim that government should be run like a business.

That’s fine with me, in the sense that if I’m elected to city council, and if wisdom like this is accepted at face value, there’ll be quite a lot of craft beer served at meetings – and other times, too.

In an effort to explain, and at the risk of oversimplifying, usually when we’re told to run government like a business, the speaker is referring to expense reduction alone, first by means of greater efficiencies, and if necessary, by making all the cuts required to balance the budget. These infamous days, the state of Indiana looks at it the same way, and will mold its ideologically-derived budget directives to cities in such a manner as to focus attention on one side of the ledger to the exclusion, and some times impossibility, of the other.

The casual, pants-down "businessman" in me responds to all this with a simple question: Okay, but what about revenues?

Generally a pudgy tea partier's finger is wagged. I'm told not to ask, and this juncture, the “government as business” fallacy loses it wheels. If government cannot address revenues as well as expenses, it’s nothing whatsoever “like” a business and should not pretend to be one.

During the hard times in 2010, my company tried mightily to increase efficiencies and reduce expenses, while at the same time improving customer count and increasing volume. One without the other makes no sense to a business, does it? We never stopped trying to make the pie bigger even as we reduced expenditures to make it through the lean period. There was no choice except to address both.

If government is to be run like a business, doesn't it have an imperative to bring in money even as less is spent? It might charge higher prices to its consumers (taxes and fees), or if unable to charge higher prices, it might increase the number of consumers paying lower prices.

Businesses balance these considerations every single day: Will the consumer pay the same price for the lowered quality of good and services? Can the quality be maintained when expenses are cut? Are there intangibles that might justify higher prices in their minds? How do we get more of them to come in and sample what we have to offer?

But beyond that, considering what government does, how are goods and services even to be measured?

In America, we have a mission statement and business plan of sorts, known as the Constitution, from which emanates numerous other mission statements and business plans for governance from the grassroots up. To be specific, how do we calculate the price of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the playing field for which it is government’s job to keep level?

Or do we abandon the mission statement because we’ve decided that human rights are too expensive for consumer/citizens who’d rather opt out of the compact, and can be out-sourced, half-assed and winked at? Need a cop? Just phone the call center in Bangalore ... and take a number.

I’ll not belabor the point. Government is not the same thing as business, and even if it might be in some obscure way, any Democratic candidate urging us to run government like a business needs to come equipped with ideas for making the pie bigger, or introducing a whole new kind of pie (sustainability and the grassroots localization of the economy spring to mind), not just coping in servile fashion with the dubious physiological “benefits” of devouring civil society’s remaining muscle in the interest of certifying the diktats of theocratic Republican ideology.

By any standard of attainment, Irv Stumler has enjoyed a solid career in business. Is he ready to discuss the other side of the ledger? Let’s hear those ideas, too.

A Candidate's Progress (4): Platform planks and opening salvos.

Previously in this series:

A Candidate's Progress (1): Wet feet and strategy.
A Candidate's Progress (2): “Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.”
A Candidate's Progress (3): The paint's almost dry.

I am a candidate for city council at-large, running for office under the banner of the Democratic Party, and it is my intention to embrace the relevant principles and values of the Democratic Party as they apply to our particular local situation in New Albany, but in addition, to offer expanded visions of the possibilities.

Following are my interpretations of these principles and values. I welcome questions

Human dignity has no price tag.
As these value and principles pertain to liberty, justice, diversity, equality and human rights, I steadfastly refuse to cite dollars as an excuse to refrain from sense. A civil society is our goal, and its success will be measured by how it treats its weakest members. A fine place to begin locally is by re-animating the dormant Human Rights Commission.

Promises, promises.
In political terms, unattainable promises are empty promises, so it’s better to focus on the attainable. What can a city council member do about jobs, neighborhoods, the economy, education and urban function? First and foremost, he or she can be open to ideas, willing to learn, and able to adapt to changing realities. Openness may sound simple, but it’s too often ignored, and with disastrous consequences.

Back to the Future
Forward progress for a city like New Albany can best be understood as willingness to look back to the future – comprehending and harnessing solutions already evidenced by the city’s unique history, physical location, urban composition and previous experiences, and applying them to contemporary problems. Among these:

· Localization of the economy for a stronger economic foundation, with a higher percentage of money staying in the community, and a greater degree of economic self-sufficiency as a result. Sustainable, smart, localized growth is the goal.

· Use of economic development funds to achieve localization, not as political subsidies, as in the case of artificially maintaining lowered sewer rates. These economic development funds should be used to empower and assist local business and job creation, not as veritable bribes for engorged multi-national corporations – and One Southern Indiana should never be the final arbiter.

· Enhanced and improved cooperation between existing economic development entities like NA First, Develop New Albany and the Urban Enterprise Association to avoid overlapping programs and use available monies more responsibly.

Green. Green. Green.
Environmental restoration and sustainability are the fundamental keys to resolving longstanding problems. For instance, why is there a storm water drainage problem to begin with? The natural hydrological process has been subverted by ill-considered development patterns, burdening the sanitary sewers and leading to lawsuits, edicts, expensive engineering solutions and of course, flooding. Wouldn’t it help to address the problem by treating the cause, and also implementing any number of low-tech, low-cost neighborhood solutions – rain barrels, green spaces, trees, street cut-outs, and the demolition of unnecessary pavement?

Urban living as originally intended.
Thinking green and acting green are not at odds with the city; rather, they harmonize fully with our stated goal of using the pre-1960 urban footprint as it was intended to be used – for humans, in concert with nature, and not as a massive, city-wide parking space. It costs far less to use and adapt what we have, to understand the lessons of historic preservation, to maximize the advantages of urban living, and to enlist nature as an ally rather than to build anew and thwart nature. When there is a case for new construction, a high bar of compliance in terms of the building and zoning codes must be maintained.

Neighborhood restoration
A progressive neighborhood policy is at the core of meaningful change, and reform starts from the bottom up: Gathering data, studying best practices, focusing on design, and exploring cause and effect concerning myriad factors including walking and bicycling opportunities, storm water drainage, public transportation options, retail availability, crime and safety, and improved enforcement of building codes to improve the quality of housing. We must beautify, fill in the gaps, absorb the water, and most of all, undo the “improvements” that remade the city into a place for cars, when it was initially designed for people and families.

Recognize inter-relatedness
Something as seemingly minor as the design of a city street has broad implications. Is it designed to efficiently move people, or facilitate high-speed driving? To be friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists, or to endanger them? Safely designed for children and the elderly? Efficient for drainage? Many of the problems we face are the result of design flaws. Repair the flaws, and watch as a ripple effect of good results improves the quality of life for everyone.

Tolls and the Ohio River Bridges Project
As currently projected, even after minor and strictly cosmetic changes to the overall plan, the ORBP is a multi-billion dollar transportation boondoggle meant to solve problems that barely exist now, and may no longer be of significance long before the bridges are finished. I was an early opponent of tolls, remain inalterably opposed to tolling existing transportation infrastructure, and believe that an East End Bridge (the one we actually need) can be built without recourse to tolls, which will place an intolerable burden on Hoosier workers and families.

Local self-determination
It will be a tough and a long fight, but we must initiate political action for greater local determination in budgeting and revenue. If we make the pie bigger, the bigger slices stay here. When it comes to budgets and expenditures in the context of “fiscal conservatism,” taking this as a knee-jerk call to “spend less” until we’re devouring muscle, not fat, is futile without a concurrent commitment to “think more.” In fact, thinking by itself costs nothing, and working smarter by more wisely deploying the financial resources we already possess moves us beyond penny-wise and pound-foolish obstructionism, which must come to an end if we’re to survive.

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It strikes me that just like a business plan, a campaign platform is a living document and a point of departure. It will evolve as the campaign progresses. Questions, observation and critiques are appreciated, and as soon as humanly possible, we’ll get a web site up and running. In the interim, this blog will continue to serve as a sounding board. Thanks for your help.

A Candidate's Progress (3): The paint's almost dry.

Verily, platform planks are easier dreamt than nailed, and not every candidate is willing to play the platform game.

Some hopefuls write meticulous and lengthy manifestos, while others spout a familiar platitude or three, and call it a day. Virtually all prospective office holders display chintzy airbrushed views of their families, smile too often, and avoid the slightest hint of a viewpoint. Presumably, they aim to convince us that their lives are as miserable as ours – and far too often, they succeed.

My problem is different: Eight years and 4,000+ blog posts, 111 newspaper columns and countless discussions. If the trick in constructing a platform is to provide an overall view of what one believes, espouses and advocates without squandering precious voter attention spans on “boring” wonky details, I have a bit of editing to do.

At any rate, voters are busy staring at yard signs, remember?

At least this is what I’m now perpetually reminded by people who apparently spend long hours comparing the design elements of yard signs, and apparently believe that my unprecedented eagerness to avoid polluting the landscape with disposable detritus somehow translates into penury, or worse yet, an unwillingness to be “serious” about my political campaign.

Sorry, but I’m very serious.

I’ve spent the morning trying to bring order to these hundreds of ideas and discussions entertained at this blog since 2004, and the first draft has been sent to my committee of helpers for consideration. It is my aim to publish this platform on Tuesday. In the meantime, permit me to explain to the uninitiated exactly why I’m serious about running, even if I opt out of the methodology of the “campaigning as usual” crowd.

What have they achieved, anyway? The city as it is, today. Don't believe them. Rather, believe your own eyes.

It starts in 2004. Since then, voluntarily and of my own volition, neither as an obligatory class assignment nor lasting punishment for a heinous misdeed in a previous life, I’ve attended somewhere on the order of half, perhaps as many as two-thirds, of the twice-monthly New Albany city council meetings held. I’ve criticized them, analyzed them, blogged about them, written newspaper columns about them, and constructed work and social schedules around them.

Why?

Why have I chosen council watching as pastime, as opposed to bird watching, or perhaps a more “uplifting” voyeurism addressing erotic attainment that lies somewhat beyond the drudgery of mere ordinances and resolutions?

It’s because learning about the council’s business seemed a logical first step to making a difference. After many years submerged in the beer and food business, making life better for lovers of real beer and great pizza at NABC and our locally based spin-offs, I was ready (and able) to get involved with the community.

Following George W. Bush’s unfortunate re-election, I concluded that instead of incessantly complaining about national and international matters over which I had no hope of input or control, I’d finally open the envelope, read the memo, and apply myself to the grassroots, in the neighborhoods, where I’ve lived, worked and played my entire life.

In short: The city of New Albany.

Indeed, it finally dawned on me that one can continue to think globally while acting locally. Somehow, I’d passed the point of wanting to run away, something I’d pretended to do many times before, but couldn’t quite succeed in achieving. In fact, I always returned to this area, and somewhere during the process of maturing, the depth of my roots became too obvious to ignore. Perhaps bizarrely, or not, I became hooked on this weird, unique and distinctive place, and began grasping the vast potential therein.

Now, at the age of 50, everything my family has, which isn’t much compared with the average regional oligarch, is invested right here in New Albany – not Louisville, not Indianapolis, not Munich or Copenhagen or Paris. We will sink, or we will swim, with the city’s fortunes. New Albany is where we’ve chosen to invest our money, our time and our lives, and running away simply is not an option. It never was.

Eight years ago, I knew a lot about my own business, and not very much about urbanism, storm water or EDIT funds. I know more now, and hope to keep absorbing all such information, which might be useful in helping fix what’s broken – and by extension, understanding when to leave alone what isn't.

Taken separately, none of these random biographical facts guarantee that I’d be a great council member. Howevr, viewed together, they testify to commitment and a willingness to learn. My life experiences are varied, and through trial, error and teamwork, the New Albanian Brewing Company has earned a modicum of success in our chosen field. All I’ve ever sought to do is to take what I’ve learned, whether in business, in school or on the road, apply it this community, and see if and how it might work.

For the last eight years, after we chose to live (and more recently, work) in the historic heart of the urban core, I’ve tried to catch up with trends and experiences I’ve missed, to learn what it means to revitalize a city, to push, to shove, to listen and to serve the community’s best interests, hence the aforementioned attendance at council meetings, as well as periods of service on the boards of Develop New Albany and the Urban Enterprise Association.

Here’s a preview of tomorrow's platform items.

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Publican, not Re-Publican. I’m a Democrat, and intend to articulate coherent opposition to the Republican ascendency.

Human dignity has no price tag.

The very least a member of council can do is think, and be open to the transformative power of ideas.

Forward progress for a city like New Albany can best be understood as willingness to look back to the future.

As examples: Localization of the economy; keeping money in the community; economic development to empower local business and local job creation; and enhanced and improved cooperation between existing economic development entities.

Environmental restoration and sustainability are non-negotiable priorities.

Initiatives to encourage urban living as it originally was intended will be sought.

Neighborhood restoration: Cities are for people, not cars. We must design neighborhoods to facilitate lawfulness, not encourage lawlessness.

Recognition of inter-relatedness, because proper design leads both to proper use and positive ripples.

I oppose all bridge tolls and advocate a vastly rescaled Ohio River Bridges Project.

Local determination: If we make the pie bigger, the bigger pie stays here.

The essence of fiscal rectitude is to think more, not just spend less.

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There'll be more flesh to these bones tomorrow. In the meantime, please let me know what you're thinking.

A Candidate's Progress (2): “Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.”

The first great internal debate of my campaign for New Albany city council at-large has unexpectedly come in the realm of propaganda, or to be more precise, a Shakespearean question: “To yard sign, or not to yard sign.”

One might spend hours, preferably over Progressive Pints, debating the relative merits and demerits of politics, the American political system, and the political impulse in a context of perplexing, deviant human behavior, but the single most enduringly annoying aspect of local politics to me is the unquestioned assumption that there exists one way, and one way alone, to go about campaigning for public office.

Granted, politics and prostitution remain among the world’s oldest professions, but at least brothels generally are located indoors, safely out of sight. Conversely, candidates seemingly must hawk their wares outdoors, and it’s a messy process.

First, when the filing’s done, vast stocks of yard signs must be assembled and distributed sans proper instruction, meaning that inevitably, they begin sprouting in places not capable of being defined as “yards.” Such placements, as when clusters of yard signs appear at intersections and block the view of motorists, are plainly illegal although perpetually unenforced – itself a platform plank for future discussion.

Second, immediate squabbling commences over who is vandalizing the other’s yard signage, which conveniently detracts from the opportunity of discussing issues, as opposed to perpetuating agitated theological considerations of whether heaven awaits those who uproot signs that were erected illegally in the first place.

Third, the city is blanketed with fliers, pamphlets and screeds, jammed into door handles or dropped in the vicinity of porches. Roughly three-quarters of these fall of their own weight onto the ground or are summarily cast aside by disgruntled occupants, destined to take blow away and take their place alongside the rest of the Watchtowers, Big Gulp cups and other garbage blithely tossed away by resident derelicts in route to the neighborhood meth lab.

(If you persist in believing that the city’s street sweeping program snags more than a small percentage of this waste while shifting debris from the curb into the bike lane, I have a Ohio River Bridges Project tolling futures share to sell you.)

Of course, candidates for higher office (really?) have the advantage of corporate funds from far, far away, which can be used to directly snail-mail the offensive detritus into unsuspecting mailboxes to be quickly deposited into the nearest available receptacle. This method has the clear advantage of keeping the streets marginally cleaner. But what of our burgeoning landfills? Alas, that’s another story.

Personally, I am repelled by the prospect of contributing to littering and visual pollution problems that already exist, and further unwilling to be hypocritical in this fashion when there is little or no available evidence suggesting that to do so offers a measurable advantage in terms of the subsequent campaign.

I’ll be running for office, and against the accepted way of running for office. My theory is that if a voter likes what I have to say, he or she need only pass the information along to friends, because word of mouth advertising is the most efficient and least environmentally intrusive way. Moreover, responsible supporters will be able to visit my web site, which will be up soon, choose from a variety of .pdf files, and print their own position sheets and signs. Many more of these will be recycled than would otherwise be the case, and none will cause roadway accidents.

I’m considering other ways of presenting my name to the world, funds permitting: Buttons, t-shirts and the like. Items like these are far less likely to be abused, although the people wearing them might consider carrying pepper spray to ward off hooded troglodytes.

A Facebook friend offered this observation: “Always speak to truth, Rog (I know that you will); remember truth won’t get you elected, but it will set you free.”

While contesting the proposition that truth always precludes electoral success, my own truth is this: I detest the supposedly necessary yet trashy trappings of a local campaign, and I didn’t sign up to indulge in behavior I detest. We’ll do it differently and go our own way, and see what happens. That’s the way I’ve tried to approach life, and there’s no reason to change now.

A Candidate's Progress (1): Wet feet and strategy.

Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
-- Elbert Hubbard

It’s always a good idea to test new material before a live barroom audience, and so in the ten days since I filed to run for city council at-large, there have been numerous rehearsals undertaken with cool, challenging Progressive Pints firmly in hand.

And why not? Habitats and goals occasionally intertwine. There was a period in American history when the pub was the most ideal place for a stirring stump speech, and you must admit there is a certain economy to scheduling campaign stops not only where voters congregate, but where I spend much of my free time, anyway. If I began materializing at church functions, you can easily imagine the incredulous reaction, which would be justified.

Or, to be more succinct: I’m 50 years old, lived and written a largely public life, and there’s no use trying to kid anyone. As for all the wonderful things that political aspirants cite by rote as justification for electing them to office, some of them probably apply to me, too, and overall, I’ve had my moments, but somewhere hidden within several hundred thousands words belched into the record over a quarter century awaits the perfect phrase for hoisting me on my own petard.

I’ve been remarkably distant from the concept of kissing babies, and dating back to my younger, hormonal years, numerous locals have witnessed episodes of boorishness and misbehavior, often fueled by alcohol. More recently, I publicly referred to another current candidate as a lying bitch and was quoted (though not refuted, natch) in the newspaper. Nope, can’t say I didn’t know what I was doing, refrained from inhaling, or was victimized by Satanic possession.

Consequently, there’s little use either denying or worrying about any of it. The best way to proceed is to be myself, because it’s both the easiest and least stressful way, although strangely, what is proving to be fractionally harder is briefly summarizing a platform, one built to withstand the sort of criticism the likes of which I’d be the very first to level against it were the shoes on other feet.

As this series of ruminations unfolds in the coming weeks, I’ll make it to the goal of defining specific platform planks. However, first there is the task of answering the basic,, beginning question of why on earth I want to occupy a seat at the council table.

To answer it, let’s begin with negations. I’m not doing it because of political ambition, or out of boredom. I’m not doing it for the money, or because “government should be run like a business” and the accompanying truism that all businessmen automatically qualify to prove the axiom; the cult of adoration for business people is what One Southern Indiana worships, not me, even though I am one.

Finally, I’m not doing it because attending those many council meetings for almost eight years as a blogging spectator has convinced me of how easy it is, and how much better I am than previous (and current) contestants.

Rather, I’m running for council out of the simple conviction, one shaped from all these experiences, both good and bad, that New Albany has considerable potential and can do far better as a city if it possesses a legislative body itself capable of performing at a higher level.

Precisely because life in the 21st century is complex, it isn’t enough to abuse and hector the skilled and knowledgeable, as has so often been the reaction of past councils to unfamiliar ideas and new ways of thinking. These must be embraced, sorted through, and applied to solving problems.

All of it applies to me as much as it does the city and the actions (or non-actions) of others. I’ve denounced the dysfunction, but too often participated in it. That’ll have to change, too, and I know it. It is my belief that when humans stop thinking, they might as well die. There’ll be much inner renovation to accompany the rest, and I look forward to the challenge.

There’ll be much more to say about this. For now, know that while I wouldn’t undertake to run a less than “serious” campaign, at the same time, I’m the judge of what is and is not serious as these considerations apply to my chosen mode of campaigning. To know me is to know that I thoroughly enjoy teaching, laughing, experiencing and learning. This is going to be fun, or it isn’t going to “be” at all.

Time is scarce, and tactics will have to be improvisational and “guerrilla”, which works for me, since word of mouth has been just about the only form of advertising that my company’s ever been able to afford since 1992, when we began doing the supposedly “impossible” and luring spending Kentuckians to Indiana via as-yet non-tolled Ohio River bridges.

Wait … there might be a platform plank there … what’s good for small business, what’s bad, buying local and attracting visitors … let me get to work on these, okay?

I can just use the back side of Erika's signs.