Five years ago: "For heaven's sake, give 'em some candy ... and maybe they'll leave us alone."

It's pre-council meeting artwork from Oct. 24, 2007. The era of the Gang of Four mercifully was coming to an end. Kochert (left) retired to his polling place, and Schmidt (right) had already been ousted in the primary. The ventriloquist's Price survived to lose in the primary in 2011, while Coffey remains in office to this day; he's made a great deal more sense lately.

I'd prefer more wholesome entertainment, say, "Mr. Smith Goes to the Rustic Frog."

Just my luck.

A previously scheduled obligation precludes my attendance at tonight's city council, and wouldn't you know it: ROCK's planning a floor show, although the master of ceremonies is wary of grandstanding in the center ring.

ROCK to protest II Horseshoes at New Albany City Council meeting; Agenda lacking any measure concerning strip club, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune).

A group opposing a new strip club in New Albany promises to plead its case before the City Council Thursday.

Reclaim our Culture Kentuckiana, the Louisville-based organization known as ROCK, sent out an e-mail last week encouraging its members to pack the assembly room of the City/County Building in opposition to II Horseshoes, an adult entertainment business located at 1720 Old River Rd.

While the e-mail states the council will address the club during the meeting, Council President Jeff Gahan said that’s not the case.

“That item is not on our agenda for Thursday,” he said. “I don’t anticipate any presentation or any discussion at this point.”

It looks as if the members of ROCK will be forced to wait until non-agenda public speaking time at meeting's end. After sitting through the usual antics of the conjoined councilmen, they may decide to broaden their definition of "a total disregard for our common goal of decent and wholesome communities where we can live, work and raise a family."

Meanwhile, also on the council's plate:

Former councilman Bill Schmidt has been recommended for appointment to the Building Authority Commission, which requires a vote of approval from the council.

The recommendation probably came from Professor Erika, who has selected Schmidt to father her love child ... wait; got that one wrong. Sorry. Rather, she has chosen him as one of her "outstanding men" of 2008 in New Albany, based on a list of vaguely defined criteria that includes this:

They work hard and play by the rules. And most of all they look out for their neighbors, co-workers, and the many needs of the "little people" of New Albany.

As a humorous side note, Prof. Erika cautions that "names are listed in alphabetical order only," and accordingly, she has Larry Kochert coming before Maurice King.

Kochert?

See what a Bazooka Joe university degree can do?

Here is tonight's meeting agenda.

Let’s take a look at the Gang of Four’s scorecard from last evening’s opening reception at the YMCA.

(If you’re a friend of The King, you may wish to turn to the funny pages.)

Wait a minute … on second thought, the former councilman is the funny pages, though only if unintentional bathos counts as humor. It certainly worked for George W. Bush.

The YMCA's coming, and the Gang of Four should be denied invitations to the party.

The senior editor of NAC says: "It took almost three years before that to convince the Gang of Four to endorse the check handed to the city by Caesar's (now Horseshoe) Foundation!"

I wonder if the Schmidts, arch-opponents of Scribner Place, will be there Thursday for the donor reception? King Larry? The Conjoined Councilmen (Coffey and Price)?

The Tribune should commission McGloshen to take their pictures if any of them dare to attend. Wretched councilmen are a New Albanian birthwrong, but bad actors?

Councilmen Dan Coffey and Steve Price didn’t crash the gate. Give Coffey full credit for avoiding flagrant hypocrisy, but Price is penalized for insisting in a Tribune story yesterday that he was never opposed to the YMCA:

“A lot of people said I was anti-YMCA, which was never the case.”

Price may not know the meaning of “revisionism” and “semantics,” but he knows how to indulge in verbal games featuring them. Deeds, not words, are the determining factor. Price wasn’t "anti-YMCA", mind you. He just objected to every conceivable funding mechanism to make the Y a reality, all in the name of a benumbed cultural purity that might be summarized as, “New Albany for the dunderheaded, now and always.”

Meanwhile, former council ward heeler Slippery Larry Kochert breezed into the reception just after the doors opened and immediately thanked NA Confidential’s senior editor for the impetus to attend. It turns out that The King reads, after all, even if it always seemed like his primal reaction to books would be to search frantically for a blazing fireplace.

Predictably, not unlike a knee-panted, snot-clogged child on the playground, Larry Kochert simply couldn’t resist stepping across the chalk line after being told that by doing so, he would emerge as a buffoon, and so there he was, giggling at his perceived rambunctiousness, approaching me not once, not twice, but three times to toss adolescent jibes – and in the process, well, emerging as a buffoon, and in the process proving the veracity of everything written about him in this space since we had the temerity to begin chronicling Kochert’s abject political futility at the dawn of his mercifully final term in orifice.

All this from a fellow who’s pushing seventy, and yet as undignified and hypocritical as Kochert can be on occasions like the Y’s party, one is obliged to concede his remarkable consistency in maintaining a certain impotence of accomplishment at all times and all places. Whether formerly seated in the council’s president chair unlashing venom against imagined county enemies or supporting the Republican candidate for his seat against a fellow Democrat, Kochert surely never relinquishes his persona as living, breathing personification of everything wrong with local politics.

In fact, coming to the Y to absorb even a slight measure of credit for something he played absolutely no part in achieving comes perilously close to summarizing Kochert’s ineffectual, self-aggrandizing “career” in local affairs. The senior editor is open to correction, but other than graciously offering to hold elections in his own garage, thus giving an appropriate banana republic sheen to the process, did Kochert ever accomplish anything of lasting merit during his multiple terms in office beyond articulating the unprincipled pique of same-aged know-nothings who got just enough of theirs to cease giving a damn whether anyone else might ever have the chance to get some of theirs?

Former councilman Bill Schmidt was there last night, too, and on the second of Kochert’s stroll-by tauntings, The King brought Schmidt along for the ride, perhaps in observance of the timeless dictum of, “Double your hypocrisy, double your fun.”

The latter smiled weakly and seemed confused by the charade. You’d think that would be enough to embarrass Kochert, but it wasn’t.

That’s the final nail in the Gang of Four’s pettiness-riddled coffin, don’t you think?

From jaw-dropping YMCA sightings to belated C-J findings, it's been that kind of week.

Last evening the Confidentials dropped in on One Southern Indiana’s “5 o Clock Network” monthly kibbitzorama, which took place at the gleaming new YMCA on Main Street. It was my first chance to glimpse the interior, and not only is the facility a bona fide knockout, it’s enough to make a person wonder how it could have taken so long for the city to spend $20 million of someone else’s money to assist in bringing the YMCA’s own fundraising effort to fruition.

(Like Radar O‘Reilly once said, “Wait for it.”)

In a week already filled to the brim with strange incongruities, not the least of which has been the trognonymous testimony of every Internet-emboldened coward in the city's existence in support of a nationally quoted local racist, you can imagine how strange it was to enter the sparkling YMCA lobby and find none other than former co-councilpersons Bill and Anna Schmidt in attendance.

Did I mention my intention to attend a church service this weekend?

I’ve picked an excerpt from one blog entry to briefly illustrate why this sighting is enough to raise eyebrows, crack unprotected mirrors and send area pots and kettles on the trail of tears to Birdseye. Dude, pass the garlic.

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From July 4, 2006: Passing notes during class, and other Monday post-mortems.

As many readers already know, the latest challenge to the Scribner Place project on the part of New Albany’s rogue council faction went down in fully deserved flames on Monday evening.

Our own All4Word provided sterling NAC coverage of the meeting: He wears a “K” on his chest, but it doesn’t mean “strikeout.”

Randy reported here:

For the record: Voting to kill Scribner Place were CM’s Coffey (District 1), Schmidt (District 2), and Price (District 3). All other members in attendance voted against any notion of killing the project and creating a lasting stain on the name of New Albany.

Note yet again – perhaps for the final time – that three of the four council members representing the city’s historic core of business and residential areas joined together to support CM Bill Schmidt’s cowardly resolution to renege on the city’s commitment to Scribner Place, in effect openly opposing a downtown revitalization effort that would greatly benefit their own districts, and by extension, the entire city.

No matter how many times it happens, such self-defeating behavior persists in defying rational explanation, but in the end, these are the patently unrepresentative and simply tragic depths to which these three overmatched politicians have plummeted in response to inner demons characterized by consistent, spasmodic, and knee-jerk opposition to change, revitalization and reform.

Don’t we deserve better?

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Well, we’ve gotten better in the limited sense of the YMCA project finally being completed, and as a bonus Schmidt, who worked tirelessly against it, was summarily displaced in last year’s election. My mentioning all this no doubt will inspire the foam-flecked anonymites to rail anew on whichever blog that still accepts submissions in cyber-crayon, but seeing as their time is passing so quickly, it no longer really matters.

Life’s too short to suffer hypocrites, don’t you think?

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With reference to our recently well documented antebellum attitudinal deficiencies, the Louisville Courier-Journal finally located the David Ward story. The question is, where did they get it?

Sparks fly after Floyd man's racial comment on election; New Albany man opposes Obama, by Dick Kaukas.

A comment by a New Albany antiques dealer, who was quoted in a Chicago Tribune story as saying he would vote for Republican presidential candidate John McCain "mainly because he's not black," has set off a flurry of local criticism.

Kaukas duly noted commendable statements issued by Democratic Party Chairwoman Marcey Wisman and New Albany’s Mayor Doug England.

England, a Democrat, added, "Through our actions as well as our words, the entire local community should repudiate this type of ignorance and intolerance."

Later yesterday, England said in an interview that he was acting on his own, responding to a remark that he considered "racist," and was not simply reacting to requests from a blogger.

A blogger? Here in New Albany?

While I find it odd that the reporter Kaukas felt obliged to make references to blogs and bloggers without identifying them, I’ve only been an official journalist since Wednesday evening. Can't we just publicly give credit where credit’s due?

Freedom of Speech?

Trogs ‘n’ blogs: Speaking of committee reports, there is one we'd like to see.

For the past few days a desultory discussion has taken place elsewhere in the local blogosphere. To distill it down to the base weirdness, an anonymous troglodyte masquerading as multiple anonymous troglodytes (well, you can’t really know, can you?) wants to know the location of the minutes kept by the recently disbanded redistricting committee.

I wasn’t part of the committee, but I’m tempted to answer that the soggy minutes had to be carted off to the landfill after five council persons took advantage of the most recent meeting to publicly urinate on the proffered results of the committee’s work, and by extension, to soil the very concept of equal representation.

The thing that continues to strike me as telling amid the accusations and recriminations of Luddite Nation is its refusal to apply the same standards of accountability to the abortive redistricting plan that was hurriedly rushed through the council’s docket in 2007, only to be swatted down like a blood-engorged horse fly in high summer heat by a Federal judge.

I’ve always called the council’s flaccidly abortive compliance effort the Schmidt Plan, primarily because it had the fingerprints of the Coup d’Geriatrique all over it, not to mention worn Formica fragments that even a forensics novice could readily link to the ex-councilman’s/woman’s kitchen table.

A handful of the council’s lesser lights duly conspired to submit the Schmidt Plan as a solution, and you can bet your sweet bippy that it was incalculably more “gerrymandered” than the plan offered by the redistricting committee, and yet our anonymous friends aren’t scandalized at all by such wholesale chicanery, preferring instead to slime the committee and to wholeheartedly endorse the work of oblivious officials whose very presence on the council may have stemmed from earlier refusals to redistrict and the electoral inequalities stemming from them.

It’s a highly selective interpretation, indeed, but then again, they’re anonymous, aren't they?

Can I see the minutes from the Schmidt kitchen cabal, please?

What Blevins, Coffey, Price, Kochert, and Schmidt rejected in choosing to go to trial

In order to avoid any public confusion, the actual and final consent decree proposed in conjunction by the plaintiffs and a Council committee as a means to settle the current redistricting lawsuit is presented below, as offered to the Common Council of New Albany.

As you can see, the first page begins with the Council being asked to take responsibility for violating the right of citizens to equal representation as mandated by law.



The second page continues with language noting involvement in the lawsuit, specifying that the parties wish to settle it prior to trial, and expressing the desire to establish new districts to ensure that future elections are fair.

The next three numbered points are the conditions which, if agreed to by Council, would have settled the case and avoided having taxpayers foot the bill for the Council to defend a lawsuit, the facts of which Council President Larry Kochert doesn't even dispute.

Condition number one states that the Council will, sometime after January 1, 2008, establish an Advisory Committee on Redistricting made up of three at-large council members and three people chosen by the Council from a list provided by the plaintiffs. The committee's purpose would be to help explore options for lawful redistricting. Readers will note that the language in the agreement neither requires payment for committee members nor otherwise obligates this or future councils in any way. It's simply a mechanism to begin discussions and keep the process moving in a public manner.

Condition number two states that the Council will pay the plaintiffs' attorney's fees and expenses incurred thus far, as the Council had to be legally prodded to take seriously its public obligation after failing to do so since at least 2002. The proper amount would be determined by the court rather than the plaintiffs or defendants, again to ensure fairness.

Condition three states that, although the lawsuit would be settled, the court would maintain the authority to monitor the process, making certain that both plaintiffs and defendants follow through on the agreement in a legal manner.

The signature section begins after that and continues on the third page.





The gist of it is this: In the interest of reaching settlement and avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of additional public funds, the plaintiffs worked in good faith with a council committee to remove language from prior settlement drafts reported as objectionable to a majority of council members.

We produced a bare bones document that as simply as possible required three essential items:

That the Council be accountable for its wrongdoing; that the Council pay for the expenses incurred in addressing its ongoing refusal to correct that wrongdoing; and that the Council agree to start a legitimate discussion about creating fair voting districts.

Plaintiff Lloyd Wimp made it very clear during the meeting that the above was the final of several settlement offers. But, rather than agreeing with the plaintiffs to honor one of the most basic of civic principles-- a belief in fair and equal representation-- Council Members Donnie Blevins, Dan Coffey, Larry Kochert, Steve Price, and Bill Schmidt chose to defend a lawsuit at taxpayer expense. What they're defending remains to be determined.

NAC’s Primary Primer: 2nd and 4th council district (D) endorsements.

The year 2007 is shaping up as pivotal for the city of New Albany, and not coincidentally, a primary election comes to us on Tuesday, May 8, 2007. NAC is considering the five contested city council races in the Democratic Party primary and the wild three-way Democratic mayor’s race.

The format will be consistent throughout, continuing here with the 2nd and 4th council districts.

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Council - (D) 2nd District

The New Albanian (NA):
Tired of the same old Schmidt? The incumbent’s campaign literature predictably touts him as the man “who listens to the citizens,” but something about that phrase always reminds me of the Twilight Zone story about the visiting aliens and their book, the tome with the “seemingly innocuous title of ‘To Serve Man.’”

While listening is important, leading sometimes requires independent thought – and this has not been in evidence, at least lately.

(NA) - Endorsement:
Challenger Bob Caesar’s relative youth, retail experience, longtime involvement with New Albany’s downtown business district and impeccable service credentials add up to ample qualifications to serve on the city council. I suspect that Caesar will rely far less on the esoteric numerology practiced by the incumbent, and seek a slightly more comprehensive development strategy than “Not In My Back Yard.” As David Brain once wrote, "NIMBY reactionaries don't stop change in the long run. They simply help to insure that it happens in the worst possible way." That's the Schmidt legacy.

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Bluegill (BG):

Bob Caesar has built and maintained a downtown business for over thirty years during the proverbial worst of times. When most everyone else left, he stayed and thrived. As an entrepreneur and survivor, he's a seminal root of the tree that's now branching. Simply put, he's earned my respect.

While Schmidt has spent the past few years in a fog of imaginary lists and figures, Caesar has produced, with hard numbers in real time. As a young, at least semi-ambitious person in the city, I'd readily seek Caesar's counsel concerning business in New Albany. If I wanted to know what Schmidt's wife thought, I'd just ask her and spare myself the probably confused translation of the incumbent.

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Council - (D) 4th District

The New Albanian (NA):
Although he competently played the title role in a revival of "Hamlet" with his anguished decision not to seek re-election as a Democrat, the infamously ward-heeling incumbent Larry Kochert continues to cast a spectral, malign influence over the 4th district, which he obviously regards as something of a personal fiefdom. Kochert has emitted shifting signals of support for Roger Hefler (apparently the King’s preferred successor), boastful threats to run himself as an independent, and pious vows to support the unopposed Republican, David Aebersold – just about anything to keep up in lights a political name brand that increasingly has come to symbolize futility and impotence of an unprecedented magnitude, even by the benighted and reactionary standards of New Mayberry.

(NA) - Endorsement:
In 2003, challenger Pat McLaughlin came within 30 votes of unseating Kochert. McLaughlin is intelligent, earnest and capable of independent thought. He deserves the nomination in 2007. Apologies to Pat for forgetting to snap a photo of one of his signs.

Bluegill (BG):

4th Aside from the acumen highlighted by the New Albanian, Pat McLaughlin is funny on purpose.