Let's go Twittering and observe how Jeff Gahan and Mike Moore differ in their seasonal greeting approaches.

Festivus is ongoing.

It's widely understood that the cities of New Albany and Jeffersonville outsource their social media feeds to an autonomous contractor, ProMedia.

The exact amounts of their expenditure remains hidden, but wouldn't you like to know how much daily propaganda actually costs these days?

This said, observe the appearance on Twitter of holiday glad-handing by the two cities. The posts appeared one minute apart. In New Albany, Jeff Gahan can't say "happy holidays" often enough.

Happy TIF Zones!

Meanwhile in Jeffersonville, Mike Moore apparently has zero diversity enhancement f*cks to give, and instead grows straight for the Christian jugular.

I thought it might be instructive to take a look at Charlestown's feed at Twitter.

That's right. The most recent post was October 18. Did Bob Hall take the password with him as he was clearing out his desk?

Charlestown residents to John Neace (and Bob Hall): "We ask you now: please abandon your plans to raze and replace our homes in Pleasant Ridge."

Are Deaf Gahan's ears burning yet?

Your desire to bulldoze our entire neighborhood is neither just nor transparent. It is unjust to tell us–after decades of pouring care and love into our homes and being responsible homeowners, who have every right to keep what we’ve worked so hard to own–that we have to give everything up so you can make money.

And when you work out a backdoor deal with Mayor Hall, designed to drive our property values down so that eminent domain will be cheap and easy–that’s just immoral.

We love our homes. Your properties may be rotting around us, but we’re not going anywhere.

The web site address is here: DearJohnNeace.com

Timing of anti-Pleasant Ridge development banner removal questioned, by Danielle Grady (Tom May the Hard Way)

CHARLESTOWN — For around two weeks, the truck with an illegal banner sat on Harold Goodlett’s property.

“John Neace: Stop destroying our neighborhood,” it read, underneath an even larger address for a website telling the story of the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood.

But it wasn’t until the truck and banner were moved to a prominent location along Charlestown’s Founder’s Day parade route that a property owner received a call from the city, requesting that the sign be removed lest a citation be issued.

The city is calling the timing a coincidence, a sudden realization by the building commissioner that the sign violated the city’s zoning ordinance, brought upon by research on a separate, but similar violation. The Pleasant Ridge Neighborhood Association doesn’t think that’s the real impetus.

NAHA and Pleasant Ridge? They're lookalikes, and it's only a matter of time until Jeff Gahan is exposed to the same scrutiny as Bob Hall.

So far, it seems that Adam Dickey is protecting his municipal meal ticket, but the party chairman's only hope for Democratic "progress" in the 9th district as a whole is Dan Canon. But our fair Boy Wonder can't defy gravity forever.

At some point soon, the damning case being wielded against Bob Hall, courtesy of Canon in this video, will be understood as applicable to Jeff Gahan's public housing putsch.

And then, finally, this thing gets interesting, because the seemingly invincible Gahan has a significant Achilles heel.

It's called David Duggins.

With potentially valuable redevelopment property at stake, Bob Hall and Jeff Gahan plot different paths to the same "go the hell away" outcome.

Remember the reader comment from a few weeks back, outlining Deaf Gahan's instructions for bag man David Duggins v.v. the latter's probable "stewardship" of the New Albany Housing Authority?

Duggins is getting a nearly 40% raise, not 30% which means that he is basically doubling his salary.

Oops. I meant this part:

Next thing to look for: Duggins will let maintenance slide and push the units into a state of total disrepair by neglect. Then they will have to be torn down. Some residents also expect that their now quiet and safe environment will suddenly be filled with problem tenants so that crime will increase, making the housing developments a broader negative public concern.

Different tactics in Charlestown, same overall aim. At least in Bob Hall's case, he's a Republican and doesn't pretend otherwise. Let's look first at the conclusion of Elizabeth's Beilman's report.

(Charlestown) officials have claimed the ordinance was designed to eliminate unsafe housing. Neace Ventures' redevelopment plan entails demolishing all homes in the neighborhood and building homes similar to those in Louisville's wealthy Norton Commons.

Whether it's New Albany or Charlestown -- Gahan or Hall -- there's potentially valuable property at stake, and absolutely zero ethical sensibility. Humans? Just do what you have to do to move them out, because luxury's on the way.

UPDATED: Charlestown officials, developers privately met on Pleasant Ridge redevelopment, documents show, by Elizabeth Beilman (Hanson's Cornucopia of Christianity)

Documents to be used as evidence in suit

CHARLESTOWN — Charlestown Mayor Bob Hall met in private and communicated via text message and email with developers to discuss redevelopment of Pleasant Ridge, documents supplied to media show.

An email between Neace Ventures developers as well as papers that appear to be notes taken from a meeting last summer suggest part of the plan entailed driving down property values in order to set lower prices for acquiring homes through eminent domain.

These notes, which are being attributed to Hampton taken during a meeting with Hall, state under a section labeled "plans" that "[boarded] up homes will lower values."

"If they talked to the mayor and got an impression that something might or might not happen, they're entitled to their impressions, their beliefs," city attorney Mike Gillenwater told the News and Tribune in a phone interview Wednesday. "You're talking about the note that [Neace Ventures agent] John Hampton took. Those are his impressions."

These documents — which include emails, text messages and meeting notes — were released by the Institute for Justice, which is party in a lawsuit against the city by residents of the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood. The documents were obtained during discovery portion of the lawsuit.

Pleasant Ridge in the NYT: All that nice outside money waiting to be invested, and all those low-income people refusing to get out of the way.

If you live in New Albany, you're advised to pay close attention to the ongoing saga of Pleasant Ridge, a neighborhood in Charlestown, which has been covered in some depth by both the News and Tribune (links below) and the Courier-Journal. On February 11, the story reached the New York Times.

Many of these same themes are playing out right here as Jeff Gahan seeks to remove affordable public housing -- and many of you are looking the other way, quietly pleased that someone finally is "cleaning up The Project" without stopping to consider the nature of the tactics, and without realizing that these tactics, once deemed acceptable, needn't stop with public housing residents who are in the way of big money.

Gahan considers himself a model Democrat (Clintonian sub-species), while Charlestown's mayor Bob Hall at least dispenses with Gahan's hypocrisy by embracing his inner Republican. Apart for disdain for the poor, apparently they have one other signal trait in common.

"Mr. Hall did not respond to requests for an interview."

Familiar, isn't it?

The NYT article is broken into three "teaser" sections.

Where a City Sees Decay, Neighbors Fight to Save a Community, by Monica Davey (New York Times)

 On Friday, residents who hope to save Pleasant Ridge filed a request for a preliminary injunction in state court, aided by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that sees what is happening here as a troubling new way for a city, in essence, to clear land.

“What’s very unusual about this is using code enforcement to circumvent eminent domain law,” said Jeff Rowes, a lawyer in the case, which asks a judge to stop the city. “And we’re worried about this becoming a model — the model for how to replace housing for people of modest means in states everywhere that have passed limits on the powers of eminent domain.”

SNIP

Michael Gillenwater, the city attorney, says what is happening in Pleasant Ridge, where a private developer has begun accumulating lots, is all about safety, not wealth ... “We’re not going to ever make a dime on this,” Mr. Gillenwater said. “It’s a matter of helping out the city and the people in the long run. All we’re doing is trying to have safe housing.”

“This is not about rich and poor,” Mr. Gillenwater continued. “When you’ve got the crime, the drugs, animals running about, this is about life and death.”

SNIP

“There’s no question that there are problems,” said Josh Craven, who lives here and is president of a homeowners association that has grown out of this fight. “But the city let this happen over all these years. They allowed the slumlords to come in, to not live up to the property maintenance code. They’ve let this go on so long that you can’t come in now and say, ‘Oh, you have to repair everything now or we’re going to fine you thousands of dollars every day so that you just have to sell to get out from under the debt.’”

February 9
Pleasant Ridge residents pursue court action to stop building code fines from the city of Charlestown, by Danielle Grady (News and Tribune)
Neighborhood Association filed lawsuit in January

January 11
Pleasant Ridge Neighborhood Association sues city of Charlestown over building fines, by Elizabeth Beilman (News and Tribune)
Lawsuit claims several Constitutional rights violated

Huzzahs all around as Mayor Gahan finally delivers jobs ... to Charlestown.

Was there a finder's fee?

I mean, the car salesmen pay it. Maybe lunch at Hooter's?

Earlier, I mentioned the "local economy solution."

I'm reading Michael Shuman's "The Local Economy Solution," primarily because David Duggins isn't.

"In his tenth book, Shuman, who was instrumental in designing the crowdfunding JOBS act as well as in the founding of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, introduces his concept of “pollinator” enterprises. These are “self-financing entities that stimulate and strengthen other local businesses,” and Shuman presents a range of these successful economic-development programs from around the world, laying out a strong alternative to the usual top-down economies dependent on taxpayer subsidies."

With this thought as backdrop, consider one of the more bizarre stories to come down the pike in a while, wherein the mayor of New Albany is thanked profusely by the mayor of Charlestown for providing providential assistance in the latter's successful use of top-down corporate welfare subsidies to attract a company even after the former's offer of the same incentives failed to entice it.

UPDATE: Auto supplier coming to Charlestown portion of River Ridge, by Elizabeth Beilman (N and T)

CHARLESTOWN — An automotive company that originally had eyes on New Albany announced Thursday it will locate in Charlestown at River Ridge Commerce Center.

Magnolia Automotive Services LLC, a minority-owned joint venture between Toyota Tsusho America Inc. and James Group International, plans to invest $4.4 million to establish a new facility and create 26 new jobs in the Southern Indiana community by 2017.

As David Duggins would say, it's all just "boilerplate" crony capitalism up to this point, but Charlestown's Mayor Hall provides ironic further context. Turns out he had an ace in the hole.

The Japanese company had tentative plans in December to locate in New Albany. The plan commission there approved preliminary plans for Toyota to locate two 62,000-square-foot distribution centers on a 20-acre site at Grant Line Industrial Park West before it pulled out.

Charlestown Mayor Bob Hall attributed some of the success in nabbing Magnolia to New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan.

“I also give a lot of credit to Mayor Gahan and the city of New Albany for keeping Southern Indiana in the hunt for this project when company leaders were on the verge of going in another direction," Hall said in a news release. "Had Mayor Gahan not kept the dialogue going with company leaders, this project would have landed in an entirely other region or state."

There is an opportunity cost to the city of New Albany's top-down approach to economic development, and it is amply illustrated in this instance. Toward which other outcomes might City Hall have used this time and money?

As it stands, we're left with no new industrial park tenants, but the adulation of One Southern Indiana and Mayor Bob Hall.

And this isn't even sufficient return to buy a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks -- all of it for only 26 jobs, anyway.

I agree with Michael Shuman, whose simplified overarching point is this: Use the same time and less money to target needs within the existing local economy and help it to grow, with the probablle results being the same number of jobs created, which in any event would emanate from existing local businesses tied more closely to the local economy, whose presence contributes more to ongoing local job creation than Magnolia Automotive Services ever could.

As Jeff Gahan expended time and money placing a tenant at River Ridge, Indatus got away. It's worth repeating this reader comment from yesterday.

I'll say it again - if Indatus had had access to real high-speed internet service and been encouraged to expand in New Albany, then the investment by out of town businesses, the spin-off businesses, and the growth heralded by the White House would have happened here, not in Louisville.

New Albany lost a great deal when they let that business go…

How many businesses have been sought out and encouraged to move here in the past twelve years?