GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Thursday) Slick Jeffie's car-centric street grid remains designed to maim and kill, and his clique doesn't give a damn.

Last week was so much fun, let's do it again.

As a run-up to Decision 2019, I'm headed back into the ON THE AVENUES archive for five straight days of devastatingly persuasive arguments against four more years of the anchor-imbedded Gahan Family Values™ Personality Cult.

I've already made the case for Mark Seabrook as mayor.

Now let's return to the voluminous case against Gahanism in five informative and entertaining installments -- at least until next week, when I may decide to do it all again. Heaven knows we have enough raw material. Following are last week's hammer blows.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Monday) The Reisz Mahal luxury city hall, perhaps the signature Gahan boondoggle.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Tuesday) Gahan the faux historic preservationist demolishes the historic structure -- with abundant malice.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Wednesday) The shopping cart mayor's cartoonish veneer of a personality cult. Where do we tithe, Leader Dearest?

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Thursday) That Jeff Gahan has elevated people like David Duggins to positions of authority is reason enough to vote against the Genius of the Floodplain.

GIVE GAHAN THE BOOT: (Friday) Slick Jeffie's hoarding of power and money is a very real threat to New Albany's future.

And this week's pink slip chronicles:

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Monday) No more fear, Jeff. This isn't East Germany, and you're not the Stasi.

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Tuesday) In 2015 roughly 14% of New Albany's eligible voters opted for the Anchor Deity, and they’re getting exactly what they deserve – good and hard.

GIVE GAHAN A PINK SLIP: (Wednesday) When he seized NAHA, Slick Jeffie depicted himself as a wise, caped, fatherly hero, when in fact he was more two-faced than Harvey Dent.

I'll never forget that when many of us in the 3rd council district were asking only that City Hall implement Jeff Speck's original two-way street grid network proposals, which transcended mere traffic direction changes by incorporating innovative and state-of-the-art improvements designed to enhance walkability and bicycle infrastructure, both Greg Phipps (councilman) and Greg Roberts (East Spring Street Neighborhood Association president) publicly dismissed Speck's ideas as outlandish and "going too far" for primeval New Gahanians.

Via the acquiescence and unwillingness of neighborhood "leaders" like Phipps and Roberts to do their homework and grasp what Speck was trying to say, Gahan was permitted to float yet another bait 'n' switch, gutting a wonderful walkability and bike-ability program, and transforming it into just another re-election paving project.

Yes, the two-way foundation was retained, but rendered far less transformational through the stupidity, timidity and the incomprehension of the C- minus students inhabiting our elite structure.

Two-way streets are better than one-way streets, and yet Gahan's various roadway boondoggles have bolstered automobile supremacy, not curbed it. Biking, walking and the simple act of crossing the street remain dangerous, and City Hall is inert -- all this, and quite a few self-identified "progressives" will cast a ballot for Gahan because ... why, exactly?

That's why this fetid swamp must be drained and the arrogant clique flushed.

---

August 9, 2018

ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

For more years than I care to remember, I’ve been attending weekly Board of Public Works and Safety (BOW) meetings, admittedly on an irregular basis, although still often and depressingly enough to justify frequent bottles of gin.

Just think of the books I’ve missed reading.

BOW's weekly grind largely consists of a procession of engineers, contractors and utility company representatives, who march to the podium and ask for permission to destroy existing infrastructure in order to improve it, by digging holes, felling trees, milling streets and maintaining essential backflow -- which in this instance means those many rivulets of convenience cash flowing into eager campaign finance ponds.

I’ve heard hundreds of these requests during the past 15 years, followed by the replies of BOW members and other city officials in attendance. Their words in response seldom vary.

“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting, which we’ll be numbly and ritualistically approving anyhow, even dare impact passing drivers in their cars?”

Once in a blue moon someone thinks to ask a different kind of question.

“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting impact sidewalk users -- walkers in the general sense, but especially disabled persons, who might have no other options to bypass closed sidewalks when BOW’s stated objective is to coddle drivers?”

On those rare occasions when a board member or functionary utters such heresy, he or she recoils immediately, as though smacked in the face by an evil spirit bearing a two-by-four.

“No, no, Mr. Nash -- I take it all back! Go ahead and pile dirt and debris on the sidewalk, even when it’d be easier to take up a parking space for them. By all means, leave your work trucks to block passage by those on foot or using a wheelchair. In fact, make those wheelchairs go out into the street so we can blame the disabled when speeding cars hit them broadside -- anything, just don’t rescind my invitation to the paving company’s annual costume ball.”

The preceding is an example of how car-centrism is reflective of institutional bias in places like New Albany.

A tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favored and others being disadvantaged or devalued. This need not be the result of any conscious prejudice or discrimination but rather of the majority simply following existing rules or norms. Institutional racism and institutional sexism are the most common examples.

Institutional bias helps to explain why Jeff Speck’s proposals to revolutionize our city’s street grid suffered a grim and meticulous death by a thousand belches and almost as many farts.

Speck’s plan was pruned again and again until the majority of design mechanisms intended to bring about the greatest positive change for the greatest number of overall users, whether behind the wheel of a car or navigating a skateboard, were left despoiled on the cutting room floor amid the laughter of Pinocchio Rosenbarger and David “Playboy of the Western World” Duggins.

Isolated in an otherwise untouched design vacuum, stripped of Speck’s ancillary buttresses, two-way traffic alone couldn’t have ever proven capable of transformation. It has been slightly helpful within its straitjacket, as tailored by the most intellectually deficient mayor in this city’s history, but it needs lots of help, beginning with one simply imperative.

Flush the fuckers, ASAP.

---

Institutional bias and institutional inbreeding aren’t exactly the same concept, although it might be argued that the first is an inevitable outcome of the second.

In the case of bureaucrats appointed to BOW, the redevelopment commission and other city agencies, we see the same “idea” people making the same decisions in conjunction with the same engineers, contractors and vendors -- and with the same underachieving results. At times these functionaries swap positions, but seldom is there any challenge to basic assumptions.

Hence the design conformity that comes to characterize closed systems. No new ideas can penetrate the circled wagons, and in political terms, the clique chooses to optimize whichever “outside” contributors (HWC Engineering and Jacobi, Toombs and Lanz being prominent local examples) who understand best how to prime the pump for maximum political patronage.

It's recurringly revolting, hence the generalized institutional bias, because dude: it’s always been this way. Cars come first. Multiple users of a street? Do they even vote? Why don't they have cars to begin with?

Planned paving obsolescence and proper pothole prioritization -- now there’s the ticket to many happy electoral returns.

After Chloe Allen was killed by a driver who went scot free, I wrote a fictional statement that we should have heard emanating from Jeff Gahan’s graft-smeared lips, and of course did not, because cynical and self-aggrandizing political calculations are why he’s here, or in the case of human emotion, they’re why he’s never, ever, here at all.

Kindly allow me to update it, but first, note that when the city of New Albany’s piecework feed supplier at Twitter deigned to mention Matt Brewer’s death, he or she already had been instructed that the paramount mission in any such mention was to declaim responsibility.

Yay! It wasn't our fault! Can't blame us!

Right. You know what this is?

It's just plain sick.

---

AN IMAGINED STATEMENT FROM OUR MAYOR

My fellow New Albanians, as your mayor – no, strike that.

I’m sorry. This isn’t the usual boilerplate.

As a human being, I’m saddened that a resident of New Albany lost his life skateboarding along Spring Street. Matt Brewer was only trying to return home after doing what he loved, and now he’s dead.

It’s unacceptable, it’s tragic, there are no excuses, and we’re going to do something about it. We cannot restore his life, but we can heed the words of Ms. Lori Kay Sympson, a friend of the late Chloe Allen, who in 2016 lost her life trying to cross Spring Street:

"If anything good can come of this, it'll be that this intersection is made safer."

In 2018, we’re referring to the intersection at 9th Street and East Spring, but actually the topic is enhanced safety for all street grid users on Spring (and Elm, and Market, and for that matter, all our streets). 

We’ll be taking a fine-tooth comb to our street grid, because for too long, we’ve ignored the dangers at this and other intersections in New Albany. This is going to change.

It’s critical for everyone who uses city streets that safety is not restricted to one or another crosswalk, or to this or that street. We have a problem.

We also have an opportunity.

Hazards are abetted on a daily basis by the way we’ve chosen to manage the city’s street grid. Indiana law plainly advises drivers that walkers have the right of way – and just as plainly, walkers in New Albany know that our streets are a coin flip at best. We may have sidewalks, but we don’t have walkability.

That’s because traffic safety has come to be viewed entirely as safety for drivers of cars, and not the city as a whole, including those who move about in other ways -- walking, biking, in wheelchairs or carts, or using skateboards. The problem at intersections like 9th and Spring, or Spring and Vincennes, extends for many blocks in all four directions. 

We cannot improve safety by merely treating symptoms. Only major surgery will be effective. We had the chance last year, and frankly, we blew it.

When I chose Jeff Speck to pioneer a walkability study for New Albany, it was done with the recognition that his factual, reality-based recommendations would preface a bold new chapter in the city’s history by restoring an environment suitable for all citizens and all users of our streets, whether on foot, riding a bicycle or driving a car.

Automotive traffic was never intended to move at highway speeds through built-up urban areas intended for the speed of your child at play, not for limited-access conditions like those on an interstate highway.

Unfortunately our city officials lost sight of the possibilities. So did I, so did HWC Engineering, and now we’re all going to return to Speck’s tool kit and do the things we failed to do with the two-way grid modernization program, and with the ultimate objective of slowing and calming traffic.

When it comes to humans driving cars, speed, inattentiveness and recklessness kill. It’s intolerable, and it has to stop.

Certainly law enforcement plays a part in any potential solution, but Speck’s proposals were based on empirical evidence. They were based on facts, and we simply didn’t implement them. We closed our minds to innovative thinking, and now it’s time to do the right thing and implement area-wide traffic calming as quickly as possible; not only must safety be our first imperative, but we also must apply principles of “quality of life” to this city as a whole, and to manage the city according to best practices for all grid users, not just some.

Call the street reform process as you will, so long as you grasp the necessity. Walkability, complete streets and street calming are good for neighborhoods, property values, quality of life and small business success. Cities all across the country provide examples, and we need only follow suit.

Some might point to statistics, and say that when it comes to deaths by walkers and bicyclists at the hands of people driving cars and trucks, New Albany is better than the national average.

That’s no consolation, and it is no reason to refrain from proven methods of doing better. Public safety is the very last place to be miserly, whether with money or scrutiny. An active, progressive, forward-thinking city is far more than the sum of its automobiles.

Rather, a city is about people like Matt Brewer and Chloe Allen, and the best -- the only -- way for us to honor their sacrifice is to get this damn thing right, once and for all.

I hope you’ll join us in the effort -- now, not later.

Mayor Jeff M. Gahan

---

Yes, I know. An unlikelihood of epic dimension, but a boy can dream about mayors who aren't built from silly putty and composite Disney caricatures.

Meanwhile, one after the other, Team Gahan's merry practitioners of institutional bias -- those arrogant products of institutional inbreeding -- step forward at the BOW meeting to insist our spanking new flashing yellow pedestrian crossing lights actually work (they don't), that speeds have appreciably slowed since two-way traffic was instituted (they haven't), and if deficient citizens in wheelchairs and carts, on foot or with skateboards, wish to avoid being killed or maimed, can’t they just stay on the sidewalk?

Of course, only in those cases when BOW hasn't already approved blocking the sidewalk so as to spare inconvenience to drivers, most of whom never notice they're being fellated because they're too busy staring at their phones while driving.

Team Gahan surveys the neighborhood carnage, and says: "Who are you going to believe, us or your own two eyes?"

Lasik isn't necessary to answer that one. In truth, Team Gahan is the problem, not the solution, and it’s them, not us, in immediate need of being institutionalized -- and yet we have a far better solution: #FlushTheClique and #FireGahan2019.

Flush Gahan’s toxic legacy, and it will travel through the sanitary sewer system, eventually re-entering the Ohio River at a point just downriver from the skate park by the amphitheater.

It's time for them to go. Then maybe we can get something accomplished in this town.

ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

For more years than I care to remember, I’ve been attending weekly Board of Public Works and Safety (BOW) meetings, admittedly on an irregular basis, although still often and depressingly enough to justify frequent bottles of gin.

Just think of the books I’ve missed reading.

BOW's weekly grind largely consists of a procession of engineers, contractors and utility company representatives, who march to the podium and ask for permission to destroy existing infrastructure in order to improve it, by digging holes, felling trees, milling streets and maintaining essential backflow -- which in this instance means those many rivulets of convenience cash flowing into eager campaign finance ponds.

I’ve heard hundreds of these requests during the past 15 years, followed by the replies of BOW members and other city officials in attendance. Their words in response seldom vary.

“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting, which we’ll be numbly and ritualistically approving anyhow, even dare impact passing drivers in their cars?”

Once in a blue moon someone thinks to ask a different kind of question.

“Will this digging/clearcutting/dynamiting impact sidewalk users -- walkers in the general sense, but especially disabled persons, who might have no other options to bypass closed sidewalks when BOW’s stated objective is to coddle drivers?”

On those rare occasions when a board member or functionary utters such heresy, he or she recoils immediately, as though smacked in the face by an evil spirit bearing a two-by-four.

“No, no, Mr. Nash -- I take it all back! Go ahead and pile dirt and debris on the sidewalk, even when it’d be easier to take up a parking space for them. By all means, leave your work trucks to block passage by those on foot or using a wheelchair. In fact, make those wheelchairs go out into the street so we can blame the disabled when speeding cars hit them broadside -- anything, just don’t rescind my invitation to the paving company’s annual costume ball.”

The preceding is an example of how car-centrism is reflective of institutional bias in places like New Albany.

A tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favored and others being disadvantaged or devalued. This need not be the result of any conscious prejudice or discrimination but rather of the majority simply following existing rules or norms. Institutional racism and institutional sexism are the most common examples.

Institutional bias helps to explain why Jeff Speck’s proposals to revolutionize our city’s street grid suffered a grim and meticulous death by a thousand belches and almost as many farts.

Speck’s plan was pruned again and again until the majority of design mechanisms intended to bring about the greatest positive change for the greatest number of overall users, whether behind the wheel of a car or navigating a skateboard, were left despoiled on the cutting room floor amid the laughter of Pinocchio Rosenbarger and David “Playboy of the Western World” Duggins.

Isolated in an otherwise untouched design vacuum, stripped of Speck’s ancillary buttresses, two-way traffic alone couldn’t have ever proven capable of transformation. It has been slightly helpful within its straitjacket, as tailored by the most intellectually deficient mayor in this city’s history, but it needs lots of help, beginning with one simply imperative.

Flush the fuckers, ASAP.

---

Institutional bias and institutional inbreeding aren’t exactly the same concept, although it might be argued that the first is an inevitable outcome of the second.

In the case of bureaucrats appointed to BOW, the redevelopment commission and other city agencies, we see the same “idea” people making the same decisions in conjunction with the same engineers, contractors and vendors -- and with the same underachieving results. At times these functionaries swap positions, but seldom is there any challenge to basic assumptions.

Hence the design conformity that comes to characterize closed systems. No new ideas can penetrate the circled wagons, and in political terms, the clique chooses to optimize whichever “outside” contributors (HWC Engineering and Jacobi, Toombs and Lanz being prominent local examples) who understand best how to prime the pump for maximum political patronage.

It's recurringly revolting, hence the generalized institutional bias, because dude: it’s always been this way. Cars come first. Multiple users of a street? Do they even vote? Why don't they have cars to begin with?

Planned paving obsolescence and proper pothole prioritization -- now there’s the ticket to many happy electoral returns.

After Chloe Allen was killed by a driver who went scot free, I wrote a fictional statement that we should have heard emanating from Jeff Gahan’s graft-smeared lips, and of course did not, because cynical and self-aggrandizing political calculations are why he’s here, or in the case of human emotion, they’re why he’s never, ever, here at all.

Kindly allow me to update it, but first, note that when the city of New Albany’s piecework feed supplier at Twitter deigned to mention Matt Brewer’s death, he or she already had been instructed that the paramount mission in any such mention was to declaim responsibility.

Yay! It wasn't our fault! Can't blame us!

Right. You know what this is?

It's just plain sick.

---

AN IMAGINED STATEMENT FROM OUR MAYOR

My fellow New Albanians, as your mayor – no, strike that.

I’m sorry. This isn’t the usual boilerplate.

As a human being, I’m saddened that a resident of New Albany lost his life skateboarding along Spring Street. Matt Brewer was only trying to return home after doing what he loved, and now he’s dead.

It’s unacceptable, it’s tragic, there are no excuses, and we’re going to do something about it. We cannot restore his life, but we can heed the words of Ms. Lori Kay Sympson, a friend of the late Chloe Allen, who in 2016 lost her life trying to cross Spring Street:

"If anything good can come of this, it'll be that this intersection is made safer."

In 2018, we’re referring to the intersection at 9th Street and East Spring, but actually the topic is enhanced safety for all street grid users on Spring (and Elm, and Market, and for that matter, all our streets). 

We’ll be taking a fine-tooth comb to our street grid, because for too long, we’ve ignored the dangers at this and other intersections in New Albany. This is going to change.

It’s critical for everyone who uses city streets that safety is not restricted to one or another crosswalk, or to this or that street. We have a problem.

We also have an opportunity.

Hazards are abetted on a daily basis by the way we’ve chosen to manage the city’s street grid. Indiana law plainly advises drivers that walkers have the right of way – and just as plainly, walkers in New Albany know that our streets are a coin flip at best. We may have sidewalks, but we don’t have walkability.

That’s because traffic safety has come to be viewed entirely as safety for drivers of cars, and not the city as a whole, including those who move about in other ways -- walking, biking, in wheelchairs or carts, or using skateboards. The problem at intersections like 9th and Spring, or Spring and Vincennes, extends for many blocks in all four directions. 

We cannot improve safety by merely treating symptoms. Only major surgery will be effective. We had the chance last year, and frankly, we blew it.

When I chose Jeff Speck to pioneer a walkability study for New Albany, it was done with the recognition that his factual, reality-based recommendations would preface a bold new chapter in the city’s history by restoring an environment suitable for all citizens and all users of our streets, whether on foot, riding a bicycle or driving a car.

Automotive traffic was never intended to move at highway speeds through built-up urban areas intended for the speed of your child at play, not for limited-access conditions like those on an interstate highway.

Unfortunately our city officials lost sight of the possibilities. So did I, so did HWC Engineering, and now we’re all going to return to Speck’s tool kit and do the things we failed to do with the two-way grid modernization program, and with the ultimate objective of slowing and calming traffic.

When it comes to humans driving cars, speed, inattentiveness and recklessness kill. It’s intolerable, and it has to stop.

Certainly law enforcement plays a part in any potential solution, but Speck’s proposals were based on empirical evidence. They were based on facts, and we simply didn’t implement them. We closed our minds to innovative thinking, and now it’s time to do the right thing and implement area-wide traffic calming as quickly as possible; not only must safety be our first imperative, but we also must apply principles of “quality of life” to this city as a whole, and to manage the city according to best practices for all grid users, not just some.

Call the street reform process as you will, so long as you grasp the necessity. Walkability, complete streets and street calming are good for neighborhoods, property values, quality of life and small business success. Cities all across the country provide examples, and we need only follow suit.

Some might point to statistics, and say that when it comes to deaths by walkers and bicyclists at the hands of people driving cars and trucks, New Albany is better than the national average.

That’s no consolation, and it is no reason to refrain from proven methods of doing better. Public safety is the very last place to be miserly, whether with money or scrutiny. An active, progressive, forward-thinking city is far more than the sum of its automobiles.

Rather, a city is about people like Matt Brewer and Chloe Allen, and the best -- the only -- way for us to honor their sacrifice is to get this damn thing right, once and for all.

I hope you’ll join us in the effort -- now, not later.

Mayor Jeff M. Gahan

---

Yes, I know. An unlikelihood of epic dimension, but a boy can dream about mayors who aren't built from silly putty and composite Disney caricatures.

Meanwhile, one after the other, Team Gahan's merry practitioners of institutional bias -- those arrogant products of institutional inbreeding -- step forward at the BOW meeting to insist our spanking new flashing yellow pedestrian crossing lights actually work (they don't), that speeds have appreciably slowed since two-way traffic was instituted (they haven't), and if deficient citizens in wheelchairs and carts, on foot or with skateboards, wish to avoid being killed or maimed, can’t they just stay on the sidewalk?

Of course, only in those cases when BOW hasn't already approved blocking the sidewalk so as to spare inconvenience to drivers, most of whom never notice they're being fellated because they're too busy staring at their phones while driving.

Team Gahan surveys the neighborhood carnage, and says: "Who are you going to believe, us or your own two eyes?"

Lasik isn't necessary to answer that one. In truth, Team Gahan is the problem, not the solution, and it’s them, not us, in immediate need of being institutionalized -- and yet we have a far better solution: #FlushTheClique and #FireGahan2019.

Flush Gahan’s toxic legacy, and it will travel through the sanitary sewer system, eventually re-entering the Ohio River at a point just downriver from the skate park by the amphitheater.

It's time for them to go. Then maybe we can get something accomplished in this town.

---

Recent columns:

August 2: ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

July 26: ON THE AVENUES: Maybe, just maybe, you really can go home again.

July 19: ON THE AVENUES: Confusion, exile, ignobility and resistance amid various other Chronicles of New Gahania.

July 12: ON THE AVENUES: Thanks to Joe Phillips, there'll be pints, union and good times downtown.

Remembering Chloe Allen -- and the unfinished task of making streets safe for all users, not just drivers.

As the late Chloe Allen's former neighbor pointed out yesterday, the second anniversary of her tragic death fell on squarely on Mother's Day.

It's also the second anniversary of Mayor Jeff Gahan's refusal to say her name aloud, or even to acknowledge her passing.

I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

I thought it prudent to wait a bit before mentioning it, and asking: Is the intersection in question safer now?

Perhaps marginally. It's still a terrifying place to watch the very worst that drivers can be. 

In the column reprinted here, I asked that Chloe Allen's death not be allowed to become yet another forgotten civic footnote. Unfortunately, the powers that be barely noticed when this murder-by-driver occurred, much less committed the sad fact to active memory.

The incessant roar of Team Gahan's campaign finance accumulation machine tends to drown out the sounds of compassion and human dignity. In 2019, we can do something about this. 

---

12/22/2016

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It’s time again for NA Confidential to select New Albany’s "Person of the Year." In 2016, we’ll be approaching the task a bit differently than before, although our basic definition remains intact.

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Admittedly, in past years the selection process has been conducted with a certain flippancy, and what I mean by this is that … we've done it with tongue planted in cheek, disrespectfully and facetiously.

(Just trying to help Shane out, in case he’s reading.)

• 2011 ... The Sherman Minton Bridge
• 2012 ... Bill "Slumlord" Allen
• 2013 ... (tie) Houndmouth and "Quality of Life"
• 2014 ... Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers
• 2015 ... New Albany property tax payers

Yes, we’ve been flippant in the past, but not this year. This year we're playing it perfectly straight.

That’s because in May, Chloe Allen was killed.

---

Chloe Allen was trying to walk across Spring Street where it intersects with Vincennes. It’s a chaotic intersection for pedestrians because it is designed expressly for cars, not people, with drive-through retail businesses trafficking their wares via numerous curb cuts on three of four corners.

To walk there regularly even while remaining entirely on the sidewalk is to know how unsafe it feels, but walking isn’t something Jeff Gahan’s team of Bud Light-swilling, frat-brother suburbanites understands, and so Chloe Allen was running errands in preparation for a family wedding, and she tried to cross Spring Street.

It should have been routine, but she never made it to the other side.

A distracted, negligent or otherwise rotten driver hit her, and she died. Of course the driver wasn’t charged, because the firebrand ideological appendage Keith Henderson evidently saw no potential for a book deal in the wake of her passing, and in the weeks following her death, New Albany City Hall contracted a severe and abiding case of laryngitis.

It remains a telling silence induced by pure, pitiful, bottomless cowardice.

Chloe Allen’s death was briefly discussed at city council, though not by those Disney-Democratic rubber stamp council persons who yawningly align themselves with City Hall’s every whim.

Her death was mentioned before the Board of Public Works and Safety during public comments, although these bored time servers were able to muster little more than tepid gurgling sounds for fear their phones might ring at 2:00 a.m., with Hizzoner himself breathing heavily and suggestively on the other end of the line.

Speaking for myself, I’ll never forgive any of them for their giggling remoteness, their nonchalant callousness and their cavalier gutlessness. I never will, and you shouldn’t, either.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn't be this way ever again, but what can we do?

For starters: Not forget.

---

In December, when I solicited nominations for Person of the Year, more than one blog reader suggested that Chloe Allen would be the best choice, precisely because the cosmic senselessness of an ordinary citizen’s murder while on foot, seeking nothing more than to continue her walk on the other side of a street designed to terrify any user not passing through at high speeds in an automobile, is a lamentable (and preventable) state of affairs perfectly illuminating the fundamental and enduring disconnect between New Albany's political hacks and their subjects.

And so it does, chillingly so.

It also holds an inconvenient mirror aloft, one that catches the reflection not only of Team “Image First” Gahan’s leering, abysmally-mannered, serial refusal to accept responsibility for anything at all that can’t be alibied in a poorly written press release, but serves also to expose these very same pusillanimous tendencies in the city’s populace as a whole.

However, when Chloe Allen’s name was mentioned as a possibility, I was hesitant, mindful of the local political caste’s knee-jerk reaction earlier this year when some citizens dared to speak truth to power.

Like the reaction of my councilman, who insists he supports safe streets for everyone, but spent the first five years of Gahan’s personality cult idly watching, with nary a peep, as Dear Leader sat on his hands, although at least my councilman will concede privately that he has felt constrained and unable to object openly, lest his imperial overlord respond by doing even less for public safety than before – if that’s possible.

Greg Phipps expressed annoyance with those who feel it is a public official's responsibility to speak to matters of the public's interest -- especially when these matters pertain to safety. Phipps referred to "malcontents" in this context.

Or City Hall’s anonymous house spokes-tweeter:

Hey everybody watch me crassly exploit a human being's death to score extremely cheap points for my pet agenda.

Which begs the question: Shouldn’t public safety be Gahan’s foremost “pet agenda” as mayor -- not dully repetitious ducking and covering?

In time, with our bureaucratic political caste busily lobbing flaccid missiles from their pea shooters, the sound of circling wagons brought Matthew Shepard to mind.

(The) backlash following Shepard’s murder was knowingly spurred and intentionally politicized by LGBT activists, civil rights advocates, world famous celebrities, but also ordinary folks inhabiting a table at Denny’s. It was crass, exploitative and fully justified. I supported it then, and I do now.

Perhaps then we’re all malcontents, each and every one of us, crassly exploiting tragedy for political purposes, whether it’s Marc Antony, the grieving Armenians pointing fingers at the Kremlin, Dr. King, human rights proponents memorializing Shepard – or a citizen like Lori Kay Sympson, who doesn’t want you to forget that her friend Chloe Allen was killed trying to cross a dangerous street in New Albany, where streets are kept dangerous due to crass exploitation – that’s right, for political purposes.

Politics is power. For a prevaricating politician like Greg Phipps to selectively deny the efficacy of this statement by tarring others as malcontents is a tragedy in itself, and a misreading of history eligible for crass exploitation by those of us, malcontented or otherwise, who apparently understand his elected position – and his past – far better than he does.

Alas, it seems we're no less malcontented now than in May, and so Chloe Allen is NA Confidential’s Person of the Year for 2016, but not without a respectful and sizable caveat.

---

Chloe Allen’s death cannot be allowed to become another forgotten civic footnote. 

Her passing must not have been in vain. In years to come principled citizens of this city – the ones for whom conscience isn’t a high school vocabulary term to be discarded once they’re elected to office – must forcibly insist that her memory be honored, nay, overtly exploited for the sake of a worthwhile agenda.

Specifically, an agenda of public safety in this city. Among other aspects, this public safety agenda reorders auto-centrism by reimagining our streets as community spaces, not mere transit routes. This agenda urges a genuine commitment to public safety by design, for all users, not drivers only. This public safety agenda empowers from the grassroots up, not the TIF bond down.

The late Chloe Allen is New Albany’s Person of the Year because we have no choice except to rededicate our efforts to honor her memory by lobbying for street grid improvements that matter for people, too, and not only their machines.

An excellent place to begin is the horrible intersection of Spring and Vincennes, though not to neglect Main and W. 1st, where City Hall gratuitously fumbled a nuts and bolts traffic taming opportunity in 2015 in favor of showy repaving prior to an election.

And then there's Spring and W. 1st. The only surprise here is that a lawyer hasn't yet been hit. Make it a Democratic donor attorney, and traffic calming might actually occur.

Not to mention State and Spring, where speed and recklessness are everyday occurrences for walkers.

But all these opportunities for correction simply must be accompanied by a civic mission statement of intent, as in Toronto, Canada:

Six Principles of Toronto Pedestrian Charter

Accessibility
Walking is a free and direct means of accessing local goods, services, community amenities and public transit.

Equity
Walking is the only mode of travel that is universally affordable, and allows children and youth, and people with specific medical conditions to travel independently.

Health and Well-being
Walking is a proven method of promoting personal health and well-being.

Environmental Sustainability
Walking relies on human power and has negligible environmental impact.

Personal and Community Safety
An environment in which people feel safe and comfortable walking increases community safety for all.

Community Cohesion and Vitality
A pedestrian-friendly environment encourages and facilitates social interaction and local economic vitality.

The Toronto Pedestrian Charter is an initiative that came from residents who serve their city on the Toronto Pedestrian Committee. The Charter reflects the principle that a city's walkability is one of the most important measures of the quality of its public realm, and of its health and vitality.

This is the first pedestrian charter in North America, and the first approved by a municipality anywhere. So this is an historic first that we hope will set an example for other municipalities across the country, the continent and around the world.

In approving the development of the Charter in 2000, The City intended:

• to outline what pedestrians have a right to expect from the City in terms of meeting their travel needs;
• to establish principles to guide the development of all policies and practices that affect pedestrians; and
• to identify the features of an urban environment and infrastructure that will encourage and support walking.

Most importantly, the Charter was intended to serve as a reminder to decision-makers, both in the City and in the community at large, that walking should be valued as the most sustainable of all forms of travel, and that it has enormous social, environmental and economic benefits for the city.

We can dedicate these to Chloe Allen, but unfortunately, we also can predict with near certainty that City Hall will remain indifferent.

Gahan’s grandiosely termed Downtown Street Grid Improvement Project might yield a bare minimum return on investment by restoring two-way streets, but otherwise it’s just another of his mock Potemkin façades, dedicated to garnering as much campaign finance lubrication as possible from the usual suspects in engineering and construction without making truly transformative changes to the grid.

It’s why the forever uncomprehending Gahan stripped Jeff Speck’s plan of its most potentially useful recommendations, and it’s why we’ll have to add them back as we’re able, with or without City Hall’s permission.

Rest in peace, Chloe Allen. I proceed and persist in the hope that we can make you and your family proud of us, and help this city become a safer place for people to live, work ... and walk.

Traffic calming and street safety: "The change needs to come from the highest levels of leadership all the way down the chain," though not in #OurNA.

It's been almost a year, and neither Jeff Gahan nor any of the posturing luminaries among his chortling pack of frat boy subalterns has bothered to publicly acknowledge the senseless death of a woman who was just trying to cross the street.

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Chloe Allen's passing must not be in vain. In years to come, principled citizens of this city – the ones for whom conscience isn’t a high school vocabulary term to be discarded once they’re elected to office – must forcibly insist that her memory be honored, nay, overtly exploited for the sake of a worthwhile agenda.

Specifically, an agenda of public safety in this city. Among other aspects, this public safety agenda reorders auto-centrism by reimagining our streets as community spaces, not mere transit routes. This agenda urges a genuine commitment to public safety by design, for all users, not drivers only. This public safety agenda empowers from the grassroots up, not the TIF bond down.

Apart from its crass inability to display genuine human decency -- they don't even pretend well -- Team Gahan is the very last organism to enlist in any project involving reimagination.

That's because there's no imagination in those craniums to begin with.

So, drivers: You're terribly inconvenienced by traffic calming, two-way streets and narrowed traffic lanes?

Here's an idea: Piss off.

Gahan's merry band of vandals won't say it, so other among us must do so, instead. When Dear Leader is finished with the cleansing of public housing dwellers, how about a Declaration of Pedestrian Rights?

Or was he planning on demolishing pedestrians, too?

Traffic Engineers' Epic Fail, by Jon Larsen (Strong Towns)

... What’s the solution? There are numerous other “traffic calming” treatments that could be added to this street, none of which really cost that much, especially when compared to the precious young lives that are at stake. If we can afford to add new streets and highways, we can afford to fix our existing streets first. You can start with a temporary implementation in your city to spark people's imagination.

That said, the best, most lasting solution is to narrow the street until it’s uncomfortable to drive fast. There have been some previous Strong Towns posts on the virtues of narrow streets. The benefits go well beyond safety, as articulated in “Narrow Streets do More with Less,” and “Some Thoughts on Narrow Streets.”

I’m calling out my entire profession. This is a systemic issue, a tragic case of groupthink gone wrong. The change needs to come from the highest levels of leadership all the way down the chain. Just as important, change needs to come from policy makers (i.e. elected officials) who make it crystal clear that safety is more important than speed. The change needs to come from an educated public that understands this tradeoff and is OK with it. Until that happens, the tragedies will continue.

"Car-centric policy dominates our legal system and the way police conduct business. And it's not holding people truly responsible."

Lest those of us who aren't employed by the city of New Albany forget:

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

I'd accuse City Hall of forgetting about Chloe Allen, although I'd hate to intrude on the image-burnishing and self-referential promotion that fills the languid days for Mayor Gahan's minions.

Yes, I'd accuse City Hall of forgetting about Chloe Allen, but let's be fair. The minions wouldn't even know who I was referring to.

That's how completely out of touch they are.

It's not just an accident, by Nathaniel M. Hood (Strong Towns)

Car-centric policy dominates our legal system and the way police conduct business. And it's not holding people truly responsible.

Hood tells of a horrible and inexcusable "accident" that took place on a shared use path where autos are not even supposed to be.

You guessed it. No charges.

It goes beyond not investigating something that so clearly should have been investigated. More often than not, reckless drivers do not lose their license and stay on the road. And, when a collision does occur and it’s not investigated, insurance laws can make it difficult to prove damage in a civil suit without charges and the dollar amount on damages can be capped.

This is the system we've created; one that favors drivers at nearly every level. It's unfortunate that car culture dominates our system and law enforcement so much that it doesn't hold people responsible. And until it truly does, we're not going to see as much progress as we need. Changes to laws and public mindset must happen in tandem with changes to the design of our streets. We need to reorient our understanding of transportation to value the safety and rights of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users just as much as drivers.

The top comment to this post reinforces a point we've made previously -- again and again.

With apologies to those who know that I harp on this here and elsewhere, I need to continue pointing out that part of this problem is linguistic. Law enforcement officers automaticaly assign agency to vehicles, which cannot be prosecuted, instead of drivers who can. A car did this, a truck did that. How glorious it must be to operate machines that offer such speed, power, and control, and know that your blunders, no matter how deadly, will always be attributed to the vehicle.

The media then dutifully follow suit. Reporters, who are trained to avoid passive voice, can get very huffy when you challenge them to change "A pedestrian was struck and killed by an SUV" to "A SUV driver struck and killed a pedestrian." They seem to think that active voice wording implies malicious intent or opens them up to a libel suit.

If this premature exoneration annoys you as much as it annoys me, I invite you to start calling it out with the hashtag #DriverNotCar.

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”


A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It’s time again for NA Confidential to select New Albany’s "Person of the Year." In 2016, we’ll be approaching the task a bit differently than before, although our basic definition remains intact.

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Admittedly, in past years the selection process has been conducted with a certain flippancy, and what I mean by this is that … we've done it with tongue planted in cheek, disrespectfully and facetiously.

(Just trying to help Shane out, in case he’s reading.)

• 2011 ... The Sherman Minton Bridge
• 2012 ... Bill "Slumlord" Allen
• 2013 ... (tie) Houndmouth and "Quality of Life"
• 2014 ... Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers
• 2015 ... New Albany property tax payers

Yes, we’ve been flippant in the past, but not this year. This year we're playing it perfectly straight.

That’s because in May, Chloe Allen was killed.

---

Chloe Allen was trying to walk across Spring Street where it intersects with Vincennes. It’s a chaotic intersection for pedestrians because it is designed expressly for cars, not people, with drive-through retail businesses trafficking their wares via numerous curb cuts on three of four corners.

To walk there regularly even while remaining entirely on the sidewalk is to know how unsafe it feels, but walking isn’t something Jeff Gahan’s team of Bud Light-swilling, frat-brother suburbanites understands, and so Chloe Allen was running errands in preparation for a family wedding, and she tried to cross Spring Street.

It should have been routine, but she never made it to the other side.

A distracted, negligent or otherwise rotten driver hit her, and she died. Of course the driver wasn’t charged, because the firebrand ideological appendage Keith Henderson evidently saw no potential for a book deal in the wake of her passing, and in the weeks following her death, New Albany City Hall contracted a severe and abiding case of laryngitis.

It remains a telling silence induced by pure, pitiful, bottomless cowardice.

Chloe Allen’s death was briefly discussed at city council, though not by those Disney-Democratic rubber stamp council persons who yawningly align themselves with City Hall’s every whim.

Her death was mentioned before the Board of Public Works and Safety during public comments, although these bored time servers were able to muster little more than tepid gurgling sounds for fear their phones might ring at 2:00 a.m., with Hizzoner himself breathing heavily and suggestively on the other end of the line.

Speaking for myself, I’ll never forgive any of them for their giggling remoteness, their nonchalant callousness and their cavalier gutlessness. I never will, and you shouldn’t, either.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn't be this way ever again, but what can we do?

For starters: Not forget.

---

In December, when I solicited nominations for Person of the Year, more than one blog reader suggested that Chloe Allen would be the best choice, precisely because the cosmic senselessness of an ordinary citizen’s murder while on foot, seeking nothing more than to continue her walk on the other side of a street designed to terrify any user not passing through at high speeds in an automobile, is a lamentable (and preventable) state of affairs perfectly illuminating the fundamental and enduring disconnect between New Albany's political hacks and their subjects.

And so it does, chillingly so.

It also holds an inconvenient mirror aloft, one that catches the reflection not only of Team “Image First” Gahan’s leering, abysmally-mannered, serial refusal to accept responsibility for anything at all that can’t be alibied in a poorly written press release, but serves also to expose these very same pusillanimous tendencies in the city’s populace as a whole.

However, when Chloe Allen’s name was mentioned as a possibility, I was hesitant, mindful of the local political caste’s knee-jerk reaction earlier this year when some citizens dared to speak truth to power.

Like the reaction of my councilman, who insists he supports safe streets for everyone, but spent the first five years of Gahan’s personality cult idly watching, with nary a peep, as the Dear Leader sat on his hands, though at least my councilman will concede privately that he has felt constrained and unable to object openly, lest his imperial overlord respond by doing even less for public safety than before – if that’s possible.

Greg Phipps expressed annoyance with those who feel it is a public official's responsibility to speak to matters of the public's interest -- especially when these matters pertain to safety. Phipps referred to "malcontents" in this context.

Or City Hall’s anonymous house spokes-tweeter:

Hey everybody watch me crassly exploit a human being's death to score extremely cheap points for my pet agenda.

Which begs the question: Shouldn’t public safety be Gahan’s foremost “pet agenda” as mayor -- not dully repetitious ducking and covering?

In time, with our bureaucratic political caste busily lobbing flaccid missiles from their pea shooters, the sound of circling wagons brought Matthew Shepard to mind.

(The) backlash following Shepard’s murder was knowingly spurred and intentionally politicized by LGBT activists, civil rights advocates, world famous celebrities, but also ordinary folks inhabiting a table at Denny’s. It was crass, exploitative and fully justified. I supported it then, and I do now.

Perhaps then we’re all malcontents, each and every one of us, crassly exploiting tragedy for political purposes, whether it’s Marc Antony, the grieving Armenians pointing fingers at the Kremlin, Dr. King, human rights proponents memorializing Shepard – or a citizen like Lori Kay Sympson, who doesn’t want you to forget that her friend Chloe Allen was killed trying to cross a dangerous street in New Albany, where streets are kept dangerous due to crass exploitation – that’s right, for political purposes.

Politics is power. For a prevaricating politician like Greg Phipps to selectively deny the efficacy of this statement by tarring others as malcontents is a tragedy in itself, and a misreading of history eligible for crass exploitation by those of us, malcontented or otherwise, who apparently understand his elected position – and his past – far better than he does.

Alas, it seems we're no less malcontented now than in May, and so Chloe Allen is NA Confidential’s Person of the Year for 2016, but not without a respectful and sizable caveat.

---

Chloe Allen’s death cannot be allowed to become another forgotten civic footnote. 

Her passing must not have been in vain. In years to come principled citizens of this city – the ones for whom conscience isn’t a high school vocabulary term to be discarded once they’re elected to office – must forcibly insist that her memory be honored, nay, overtly exploited for the sake of a worthwhile agenda.

Specifically, an agenda of public safety in this city. Among other aspects, this public safety agenda reorders auto-centrism by reimagining our streets as community spaces, not mere transit routes. This agenda urges a genuine commitment to public safety by design, for all users, not drivers only. This public safety agenda empowers from the grassroots up, not the TIF bond down.

The late Chloe Allen is New Albany’s Person of the Year because we have no choice except to rededicate our efforts to honor her memory by lobbying for street grid improvements that matter for people, too, and not only their machines.

An excellent place to begin is the horrible intersection of Spring and Vincennes, though not to neglect Main and W. 1st, where City Hall gratuitously fumbled a nuts and bolts traffic taming opportunity in 2015 in favor of showy repaving prior to an election.

And then there's Spring and W. 1st. The only surprise here is that a lawyer hasn't yet been hit. Make it a Democratic donor attorney, and traffic calming might actually occur.

Not to mention State and Spring, where speed and recklessness are everyday occurrences for walkers.

But all these opportunities for correction simply must be accompanied by a civic mission statement of intent, as in Toronto, Canada:

Six Principles of Toronto Pedestrian Charter

Accessibility
Walking is a free and direct means of accessing local goods, services, community amenities and public transit.

Equity
Walking is the only mode of travel that is universally affordable, and allows children and youth, and people with specific medical conditions to travel independently.

Health and Well-being
Walking is a proven method of promoting personal health and well-being.

Environmental Sustainability
Walking relies on human power and has negligible environmental impact.

Personal and Community Safety
An environment in which people feel safe and comfortable walking increases community safety for all.

Community Cohesion and Vitality
A pedestrian-friendly environment encourages and facilitates social interaction and local economic vitality.

The Toronto Pedestrian Charter is an initiative that came from residents who serve their city on the Toronto Pedestrian Committee. The Charter reflects the principle that a city's walkability is one of the most important measures of the quality of its public realm, and of its health and vitality.

This is the first pedestrian charter in North America, and the first approved by a municipality anywhere. So this is an historic first that we hope will set an example for other municipalities across the country, the continent and around the world.

In approving the development of the Charter in 2000, The City intended:

• to outline what pedestrians have a right to expect from the City in terms of meeting their travel needs;
• to establish principles to guide the development of all policies and practices that affect pedestrians; and
• to identify the features of an urban environment and infrastructure that will encourage and support walking.

Most importantly, the Charter was intended to serve as a reminder to decision-makers, both in the City and in the community at large, that walking should be valued as the most sustainable of all forms of travel, and that it has enormous social, environmental and economic benefits for the city.

We can dedicate these to Chloe Allen, but unfortunately, we also can predict with near certainty that City Hall will remain indifferent.

Gahan’s grandiosely termed Downtown Street Grid Improvement Project might yield a bare minimum return on investment by restoring two-way streets, but otherwise it’s just another of his mock Potemkin façades, dedicated to garnering as much campaign finance lubrication as possible from the usual suspects in engineering and construction without making truly transformative changes to the grid.

It’s why the forever uncomprehending Gahan stripped Jeff Speck’s plan of its most potentially useful recommendations, and it’s why we’ll have to add them back as we’re able, with or without City Hall’s permission.

Rest in peace, Chloe Allen. I proceed and persist in the hope that we can make you and your family proud of us, and help this city become a safer place for people to live, work ... and walk.

---

Recent columns:

December 15: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2016).

December 8: ON THE AVENUES: It’s never too late to beer all over again.

December 1: ON THE AVENUES: Once more with feeling, because as the notable American philosopher Moe Bandy once sang, “Here I am, drunk again.”

November 11: ON THE AVENUES: Kind-a full-a you know what, but now we're going to find out whether Jeff Gahan has any cattle under his hat.

ASK THE BORED: A 6-pack of BOW's top-scoring posts of the year at NA Confidential, as we try our best to forget them.

Of all posts this year tagged "Board of Public Works and Safety" or "Board of Public Works," these are the top six, according to Blogger's page view metric.

At its most basic, this board channels public financing of works. The chairman is Warren Nash, former Democratic Party tribal chieftain, who is there only because six decades of experience greasing wheels ensures that no campaign finance slush goes unslung. The abacus fairly sweats, and the rubber always meets the freshly paved road.

(The other two board members are Mickey Thompson, the street department commissioner, and Cheryl Cotner-Bailey, the mayor’s secretary and wife of the police chief.)

As for safety, yes, the word is mentioned every now and then, about as often as I concede to savoring the full, rich flavor of Bud Light.

---

590
No decision has been reached on new Street Piano Project, says Board of Works and Public Safety.

---

606
ASK THE BORED: Can we all have a banner atop the levee, or just the school corporation?

I've had several reader questions about the NAFC schools banner currently hanging on degraded remains of the structure atop the levee by the amphitheater. Because I'll be out of town, I cannot attend this week's BOW meeting and ask them. Perhaps someone else will.

---

613
I asked about bicycle racks, and have been directed to CM Barksdale and the Redevelopment Commission.

"Will the Bored of Works be placing bicycle racks on sidewalks, and if so, will it finalize the bike racks before or after the results come back from HWC Engineering's two-way street design and engineering study?"

---

617
ON THE AVENUES: Requiem for the bored.

It was another stellar day for auto-centrism in New Albany, and contrary to previous assurances, not a single egg was broken, Larry – just a random walker struck down, and never mentioned, not once, not by anyone in the room. She was probably too poor to afford a car -- right, Warren?

Tell me something.

Exactly how does any of this make any of you proud of your jobs?

---

650
Two Way Streets now? Finally? Gahan sets the bar as low as humanly possible and somehow clears it, as BOW opts for a rational street grid.

In the worst kept secret since the Electoral College sucks, the Board of Works voted today to adopt Option B, which restores two-way traffic to Elm, Spring, Market, Bank and Pearl, though at the considerable and heart-rending expense of gutting most of consultant Jeff Speck's worthiest proposals for bicycling lanes and parking innovations on these and other subsequently omitted streets (State and Vincennes most glaringly).

---

670
ON THE AVENUES: When the engineer uttered that scandalous word aloud, it was like Christmas in June.

There’ll be even more delays, snarls and slowdowns when toll evasion begins, even though INDOT predicts these disruptions will be brief (one month or less), and the overarching point everyone at BOW needs to grasp is this revamped section of Spring between Silver Creek and Vincennes is intended to be a check valve, to do exactly this – this process, this choking off … to willfully cause … CONGESTION.

No update, because the Chloe Allen case remains in non-transparent, bureaucratic limbo.

There are these ...

11/11/13
Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists? (and for that matter, pedestrians).

5/19/15
Wrist slap: Run a red light, kill three kids -- hey, I thought it was green.

... and there is this.

07/19/16
The July 19 BOW: All Chloe Allen's family has is Keith Henderson's word for it. No wonder they seek more information.

Sorry to say, I have no further updates on this case apart from a few back-channel rumors.

It's nice to imagine living in a functional community, where bureaucrats are efficient and prompt, and media performs the vital task of checking and balancing. Where we live, Keith Henderson is the prosecutor and Bill Hanson runs the newspaper.

My pitchfork is oiled and ready. Anyone care to join me?

I wish Chloe Allen's family the best, and if anything solid comes along, I'll try to get it out there. As a pro bono blogger and agitator, I simply don't have the time and resources to investigate this whole situation properly. There are too many vandals operating behind veils of non-transparency, and not enough us.

All we can do is try our best, and maybe now and then, we catch a break.