From Abbott and Costello to Gahan and Phipps -- that's the Great Rails to Trails Bait 'n' Switch of 2019.

I'm turning over a new leaf ... on January 1. Festivus lasts until all my grievances are aired.

In 2018, Mayor Jeff Gahan unveiled a wondrous plan for rails-to-trails to extend from just north of the former Pillsbury plant to Bedford, reminding us that when anything seems too good to be true, check your wallet.

ON THE AVENUES: "That's why I voted no," explains Scott Stewart, pausing to duck rocks feebly lobbed by Team Gahan's propaganda pygmies.

The hosannas rained down, the boot-polishers got giddy, and yet no observers in local mainstream media bothered asking the only pertinent question: Wouldn't an idea like this be far better linking the Greenway to IU Southeast? -- and besides, the city of New Albany wouldn't even be responsible for 95% of any such project perched on the outer edge of the city limits, right?

Dear Leader took credit, the sycophants became orgasmic, and apart from this blog, conventional media outlets repeated the press release talking points with nary a moment of doubt.

However, there was ample annoyance from property owners along the rights-of-way outside city limits, as well two or three oblique voices located far away from the Gahan inner circle, who kept pointing out an important fact: A component of the city's deal with Sazerac to move into Pillsbury included the provision that CSX would be re-opening the rail line running through the densely populated center of the city, which only a few years ago was a controversial facet of life downtown.

Or, precluding the only rational use of the railroad's right of way for a rails to trails scheme owing to the elegantly simple reason that it was about to be put back into use, thus averting gazes elsewhere. Neither the mayor nor a single candidate for city council thought this entire situation important enough to clarify or so much as mention during the municipal campaign, prime among them Greg Phipps, who once upon a time was outspokenly opposed to trains disrupting the serenity of his hermetic third district.

Gahan's rails-to-trails public relations stunt -- and that's all it ever was -- will be tied down amid lawsuits from property owners ... and it never had anything to do with New Albany, anyway.

Meanwhile Phipps has become a born-again defender of corporate interests at the expense of -- shall we say it aloud? -- QUALITY OF LIFE in his district.

And, notice yet again that Gahan's automobile supremacist default floats inevitably to the surface; in an ideal instance where non-automotive mobility might have been served by a downtown rails-to-trails, Gahan ends by assuring you that the roadway for your car will be smoother.

Bait and switch, thy name is Gahan, but don't look at me. I didn't re-elect the evasive connivers -- you did.

CSX has begun the process of replacing railroad components throughout New Albany, by John Boyle (No Newspaper Never Mind)

 ... Work to update the tracks and roadway intersections started in recent weeks, with crews popping up in areas throughout the city.

No exact timeline for the repairs has been set, but Mayor Jeff Gahan said the work is in full swing.

“It’s fully under construction," he said. "They want it done as soon as possible. They have removed some ties and done some road repairs."

Early phases of the work have seen crews working to tear up and replace older components of the railroads to ready them for renewed traffic. Such construction has seen the closure of sections of roadways along the East 15th Street tracks, including some that have lasted throughout this week.

Another feature of the final product will be improved intersections with the city's streets. Gahan said the city is looking to make these crossings smoother for vehicles ...

The curious question of 3rd district candidate Alex Bilbrey's yard signs.

No joke: Alex Bilbrey will need to be Superman to beat Greg Phipps.

It's hard to imagine Bilbrey (R) breaking 40% of the vote in the 3rd council district against two-term incumbent Phipps (D); after all, the 3rd district is to pretend-progressive Kool Aid as Porto is to vintage port wine, and Bilbrey -- who registered to run at the last possible minute without the knowledge of his party's chairman -- has been all but invisible for the entirety of 2019.

Except for yard signs.

I've seen several, including one of the big honking signs behind my house at the auto repair shop, and this makes Bilbrey's CFA-4 campaign finance disclosures very curious.

Bilbrey reports that he has neither raised nor spent a dime.

How then did he pay for the signs?

No matter; never mind -- you know, like Gahan's platform.

Yes, conscience precludes a vote for either Bilbrey or Phipps, and this is why I'm supporting Thunder Over the 3rd.

Vote for Thunder the Wonder Ferret as a write-in for New Albany City Council District 3.

 ... Phipps does a fair to middling job of performing the duties of a purely average council representative. However, in political terms Phipps is profoundly weak, and he has done so very little on his own initiative that it comes down to a single consideration.

Phipps has supported Mayor Jeff Gahan roughly 95% of the time, and I've opposed Gahan by an equal percentage. The taint is real.

Consequently, I cannot vote for Phipps, who has been utterly non-intellectual in his persistent sycophancy. That's a shame. He could have been so much more.

But no.

He wasn't ... and isn't likely to be.

---

Roger's Endorsement Compendium:

• Vote Stefanie Griffith for New Albany City Council District 1.
• Vote Scott Stewart for New Albany City Council District 2.
• Vote for Thunder the Wonder Ferret as a write-in for New Albany City Council District 3.
• Vote Cisa Kubley for New Albany City Council District 4.
• Vote Josh "JT" Turner for New Albany City Council District 5.
• Vote Scott Blair for New Albany City Council District 6.
• Vote Al Knable and Christina Estill for New Albany City Council At-Large.
• Vote your conscience for New Albany City Clerk, as both candidates are excellent.
• ON THE AVENUES: Socialists for Seabrook, because we desperately need a new beginning in New Albany.

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.

Vote for Thunder the Wonder Ferret as a write-in for New Albany City Council District 3.

Thunder's campaign web site.

Call it an endorsement if you will, or think of it as my personal support, backing, seal of approval, recommendation or advocacy.

In making these 2019 election endorsements, I'm trying my best to focus on the positives, but the 3rd council district is my own, and positives are few and far between.

The incumbent is Greg Phipps (D), and the challenger is Alex Bilbrey (R). Phipps does a fair to middling job of performing the duties of a purely average council representative. However, in political terms Phipps is profoundly weak, and he has done so very little on his own initiative that it comes down to a single consideration.

Phipps has supported Mayor Jeff Gahan roughly 95% of the time, and I've opposed Gahan by an equal percentage. The taint is real. 

Consequently, I cannot vote for Phipps, who has been utterly non-intellectual in his persistent sycophancy. That's a shame. He could have been so much more.

Conversely Bilbrey's bizarre vanity/stealth candidacy is so problematic that it's hard to know where to begin dissecting it.

He's been almost completely invisible, and he has made no public indication whatever of core positions or policy preferences apart from platitudes about "service." Bilbrey has not attended events like the League of Women Voters' chat at the Silver Street Pleasure Dome. He doesn't seem to be taking his own candidacy seriously, so why should anyone else?

However, my biggest problem with Bilbrey is that he works for the sheriff's department, as does Scott Evans, the Republican candidate in 6th district -- who by contrast is a quality candidate and a campaigning dynamo worthy of consideration in that district.

True, it is not illegal for men and women with badges to occupy elected office; Jack Messer (city councilman) and Steve Bush (county commissioner) both did, and they are good people.

It's just a personal thing with me, and it's not about being anti-police. Rather, it has to do with worrisome accumulations of power. I believe being a cop and a councilman simultaneously is a concentration of too much power in one individual.

You're free to disagree, and my ears are open to your arguments against my position. I'd love to find a loophole in my conscience to include Evans, but so far it's elusive.

Conscience dictates that my only option in the 3rd district is to cast a write-in ballot. I'm open to suggestions in this regard.

John Smith, are you ready?

Steve Price?

Thunder the Wonder Ferret?

---

Compendium:

• Vote Stefanie Griffith for New Albany City Council District 1.
• Vote Scott Stewart for New Albany City Council District 2.
• Vote for Thunder the Wonder Ferret as a write-in for New Albany City Council District 3.
• Vote Cisa Kubley for New Albany City Council District 4.
• Vote Josh "JT" Turner for New Albany City Council District 5.

The four-way stop at Elm & 13th, and why openness and transparency matter.

At last evening's city council meeting, 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps used his speaking time to congratulate himself and the Board of Works for the two recently installed stop signs (complete with helpful flashing red lights) on Elm at 13th Street.

Their addition has created a four-way stop, and it only took the amount of time required for a kindergarten student to take his or her first university class.

It's hard to begrudge Phipps his small victory, given how little he's achieved overall during eight years as a council representative apart from rubber-stamping expenditures.

However, the problem with his victory is the way he first explained it (paraphrased):

I've been working behind the scenes with the powers that be to facilitate this four-way stop, which the neighborhood has been asking for since the inception of NA Confidential. Yay!

Consider that (a) HWC Engineering's voluminous campaign donations to Jeff Gahan have had the effect of establishing the company as a de facto arm of city governance, and (b) every public utterance on the topic of four-way stops by an HWC official during the time of the two-way street reversion and since has been accompanied by a disdainful disclaimer: hardly ever can this be done and when it is, that's because a traffic count was made and the INDOT Pass Through Oracle consulted for clarification and approval.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 1: Mysterious CRS Marketing and the inevitable HWC Engineering tie-in.

This from a street engineering company that openly laughed at Jeff Speck's street grid recommendations (I was there and witnessed it) and operates from a strictly Talmudic old school perspective when it comes to traffic engineering, professing the necessity of keeping cars moving through town as quickly as they can on collector streets with as few impediments as possible -- and other considerations (quality of life for residents, perhaps?) be damned.

I'm not exaggerating. I attended the meetings and took note of what was happening. Having HWC implement Speck was like asking your goldfish to perform ballet.

So, we return to Phipps and his four-way triumph. It's good that we have a four-way stop at Elm and 13th, but the problem with "behind the scenes" is that we have no idea why something that kept being referred to as unlikely, if not outright impossible, suddenly occurred -- apart from an impending primary election and the obvious need to fluff the resumes of candidates.

What happened to change BOW's, Larry Summers' and HWC's minds?

What's the principle involved?

Is the principle involved useful as a precedent?

Will it take another 15 years to apply the precedent elsewhere?

Or is this four-way just an imperial decree and alms from Dear Leader, absent any coherent justification or explanation?

Rather than take to Facebook to announce his win, shouldn't Phipps explain the hows, whys and wherefores to residents?

Situations like this are why one is compelled to dismiss the boilerplate and look behind the curtain. A four-way stop at Elm and 13th was needed, but if the four-way is a one-off with no future applicability, what's the point?

We need to know, and Phipps needs to explain. He'll be hearing many more questions like this during the months to come.

HWC Engineering, municipal cowardice, Jeff Speck and reading the tea leaves through dry heaves.

Miss Emery's ice cream parlor, economic development and the politics of awarding credit.

In an email, regular reader B refers to a post here at NAC on Saturday evening.

Greenville, Georgetown and Duncan capitulate as giddy Gahan boasts that New Albany is "the economic engine of Floyd County." No shit, Sherlock. But not so much regionally, eh?

When you ask ...

"Can anyone capable of reading and comprehending these words cite a single instance of (3rd district councilman Greg) Phipps being involved with economic development during the past eight years, apart from attending the stray ribbon-cutting, and issuing rote rubber-stamp approval of every expenditure ever handed him by Team Gahan?”

You forget how Mr. Phipps arm-wrestled everyone on the council and won the rights to Miss Emery’s ice cream parlor, locating the historic structure in his district.

A big WIN, sadly forgotten!

Our reader is referring to the long-forgotten saga of the little building pictured above, which for decades was situated in the front yard of a house on Beharrell Avenue and housed an ice cream dispensary. The business petered out at some point during the early 1990s, and eventually resurfaced in Corydon with the old equipment and new owners.

Meanwhile in 2009 the humble little building became an unlikely cause célèbre when the property changed hands and the new owner began to demolish it. Evidently older members of the community's historic preservation contingent were overwhelmed by pleasant memories of youth and pervasive nostalgia about bygone times, and they threatened to chain themselves to the structure until it was "saved."

The owner said fine, take it -- and get out of my yard. For three years the former parlor reposed atop blocks behind a house on Main Street as downtowners scratched their heads in puzzlement as to why preservationists were expending their political capital in this fashion.

Concurrent with this four-alarm outbuilding rescue a far larger and much more expensive kerfuffle centered on the decaying Weinmann-Hess building on the northwest corner of 8th & Culbertson, or as many of us knew it, the Alligator Tavern.

To make an exceedingly long story somewhat shorter, then-mayor Doug England took a peculiar interest in the Weinmann-Hess building and pledged a pot of money toward preserving it.

Unfortunately the money actually belonged to the Urban Enterprise Association, which had not been asked if it approved of shifting these dollars from UEA programs already in progress to variable political whims in suspension.

The Fix to enable the fix duly was executed, the UEA-ATM was emptied, and three years of fits and starts followed in an effort to stabilize and prep the building to be sold.

You saw it here first: The Emery/Culbertson Connection, Phase 453 ...

If these gyrations seem muddled, that's only because they were, and by early 2012 it had been decided that the perfect place for the Emery's Ice Cream shack was the backyard of the Weinmann-Hess building, where it stands to this very day, apropos of nothing.

Now, back to Reader B's observation about Phipps' role in the Great Emery's Ice Cream Hovel Economic Redevelopment Plan of 2012, as Tricky Dickey surely would refer to it in one of his robotic boilerplate press releases.

Phipps defeated incumbent 3rd district councilman Steve Price in the 2011 primary, and won his current seat that fall. By the time he'd been sworn in, the Emery's tale was three years in the making.

Granted, I seem to recall that during this period, when Phipps did not serve on the council, he nonetheless was a strong advocate of the various cash-laden remedies for the former ice cream parlor as well as the Weinmann-Hess building.

But as an aside, Phipps famously refused to apply precisely the same logic in 2015 in very similar circumstances involving the old Haughey's Tavern building: "Tear It Down," Sayeth the Councilman, Part 2: "Just how has this been a corrupt process?" Hint: Secretive nonsense.

The central question, then: According to the usual rules of the game in New Albany, as formulated by the same tired suspects, can Phipps take full and unalloyed credit for the economic development windfall provided by the relocation of the Emery's Ice Cream building, even though he was on the public payroll for only the last few months of a three-year-long farce?

Let's go to Jeff Gahan's wheel of fortune and give it a spin.

YES he can.

NA Confidential appreciates reader input. Thanks to B for helping to put the credit where the credit is due.

---

Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

Lords of the Sharrow? This blog's editors discuss cycling opportunities in Jeffersonville as compared with New Albany.

Bluegill posted a characteristically insightful thought about cycling.

Jeff: I listen to Jeffersonville’s mayor touting increased cycling opportunities there. Then I look out the window here in New Albany where preexisting infrastructure is actually better suited to cycling opportunities but our mayor and planners have worked to specifically remove bicycles from nearly every plan and space. That’s a big difference, one for which New Albany will pay for a long time if not corrected.

I replied.

Roger: And of course we both recall our purportedly (is puppet-edly a word?) council rep Greg Phipps stating aloud that Jeff Speck’s views on the matter of bicycling were just crazily out of sync with mainstream New Albany (read: alien to Gahanism) and merited adjustment (read: outright removal). But there they are, all the Phipps signs in the yards of “progressives,” who’ll praise Jeffersonville’s Republican Mayor for bicycling initiatives even as they vote for Phipps and Gahan, otherwise known as Lords of the Sharrow. #IronyFreeNawbany

Jeff: Yes, on all accounts.

Roger: That's what I thought, although occasionally we all need a bit of verification to make sure we haven't gone insane ...

Jeff: “Well, sure, I prefer the policies of so-and-so, but this time I’m voting for the one in the blue shirt, because I really like blue shirts, too.”

Roger:

Jeff: LOL. Three Republicans and a dentist’s office.

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Democratic mayoral candidate David White understands that change begins with a whole lotta scrubbing, and NA Confidential advocates just such a deep civic cleansing. 

After eight years on the job, Mayor Jeff Gahan's list of stunning "achievements" is long, indeed: tax increases, budgetary hide 'n' seek, self-deification, daily hypocrisy, public housing takeover, non-transparency, pay-to-play for no-bid contracts, bullying city residents and bullying city employees. Eight years is enough. It's time to drain Gahan's swamp, flush his ruling clique and take this city back from Gahan's Indy-based special interest donors. 

NA Confidential supports David White for Mayor in the Democratic Party primary, with voting now through May 7. 

There's a 4-way stop at Elm and 13th. The only question is whether it came with a ribbon.

Does this mean the forever variably apolitical Develop New Albany is endorsing candidate Phipps? Let's follow the Facebook sharing protocol of the presumed non-profits. First, from DNA back to ESNA.

Then ESNA to the source.

It's an election year, and candidate Phipps says he has been "working with the city for several months," as back-room and non-transparently as always, to get a 4-way stop at Elm and 13th.

Fair enough; it's been needed not for months, but for YEARS. After almost eight years of rubber-stamping City Hall expenditures, it's always good to achieve something.

So, ignoring the pertinent question of why Phipps took so long to work behind the scenes, and why his cherished overlord the mayor took so long to give his "superstar" BOW mentor Warren the okay to release this intersection just in time to become a nice pre-primary poll-boost, there’s an absolutely positive aspect to all this electioneering.

That's because the same Democrats who dragged their feet for months before making this needed change so a Democrat could take re-election campaign credit for it can no longer be the same Democrats resisting similar proposals (hint: 4-ways for Spring and 10th; for Main and Bank; rinse, repeat) because the statute of limitations has expired for the same Democrats who oft times before used the completely spurious excuse of a need for traffic studies and INDOT indulgences to avoid mustering the simple one-two cojones to do what's right.

All of which Phipps never questioned until his passive acquiescence to Gahan's hack job on Speck's plan produced tepid two-way street grid results.

But hear me out; this 4-way at Elm and 13th is genuinely important.

Finally a 4-way precedent has been set, so let’s hope future action to #slowthecars might someday occur when it ISN’T an election year.

Dude; that'd almost be PROGRESSIVE, wouldn't it?

ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It's coming around again, isn't it?

Since the column reprinted today first was published on April 27, 2015 councilman Greg Phipps (D-3rd) has blithely cast Jeff Speck to the dire pleasantries of HWC Engineering, in the process supporting and defending a long delayed and thoroughly botched Gahanian two-way street reversion so hideously disfigured that random speedway band-aids still are being applied ... by HWC Engineering.

That's no plus. More importantly, given Phipps' previous stated interest in transparency, analytical analysis and political integrity, these theoretical priorities have long since been subordinated to the fix-is-in needs of Jeff Gahan's pay-to-play political patronage machine.

Has Phipps held a single public forum during the past seven years?

Then there's this, from 2011: “I have no desire to become a career politician.” Except now Phipps wants four more years, which would total 12. Matt Nash, Bob Caesar and Pat McLaughlin also want extra time: respectively, 2nd, 4th and 4th terms.

Extra time? I can't agree. All their terms combined have totaled previous little in terms of genuine achievement, although Mayor Gahan surely appreciates their assistance in feathering his own nest.

It's time for a change, isn't it? 

#FreeDistrict3

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ON THE AVENUES MONDAY SPECIAL: Et tu, Greg Phipps? Or: Anger and the electoral variability of transparency.

I’ve been thinking about 2011, when Greg Phipps defeated Steve Price in the primary, and then won the 3rd district city council seat against Jameson Bledsoe in November. For one shining moment, there was dancing in the streets; then we met the new boss, but I won't look back in anger.

On October 26, 2011, Daniel Suddeath previewed the contest in the News and Tribune.

Phipps was unable to be reached for additional comment, but stated in his election questionnaire submitted to the News and Tribune that some council members have been more interested in “playing politics than finding solutions to our city’s problems.”

“Integrity needs to be restored to the city council,” said Phipps, who is a 50-year-old senior lecturer and coordinator of sociology in the Indiana University Southeast School of Social Sciences.

It is Phipps’ first campaign for elected office, but he’s the president of the New Albany Board of Zoning Appeals and was president of the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association in 2007.

He said better transparency is needed in local government, and said he would hold semi-annual public forums, if elected.

“I honestly believe I can provide new and progressive leadership for the residents of the third district and the city as a whole,” he said.

The calendar reads 2015, and Phipps is running for re-election. He is unopposed in the May 5 primary, and has little reason to be substantive, but last week, on April 21, he offered a genuine bolt-from-the-sky, out-of-the-blue revelation, posting a Facebook assessment of Mayor Jeff Gahan's position on street grid reform in New Albany, which centers on Jeff Speck’s downtown street network proposals, whether they’ll ever come to fruition, and if so, when.

Note that like Phipps, Gahan seeks re-election.

Mayor Gahan is committed to making our downtown streets more friendly to drivers and walkers. Three concepts are being developed to address this issue. What makes it great is that the federal government is going to cover 80% of the cost. Soon we will have options to improve the way we move, which will include more 2-way streets, better signage, and safer crossings. I’m sure downtown residents and businesses will be pleased with the results. Two additional items must be considered before moving forward: 1) the cost of the project. 2) There must be a plan to allow trucks in and out of downtown.

Why is this noteworthy?

To date, Gahan has made no verifiable or attributable public statement suggesting a positive position on the topic, openly and for the record. The mayor has made numerous private comments, most of which have come with “not to be repeated” warnings appended.

Love or hate Jeff Gahan, this much is beyond dispute: He has maintained a rigorous, non-committal public neutrality on street grid reform. At least on this one topic, he has been transparently non-transparent.

Consequently, for Phipps to suggest mere days prior to the primary that Gahan now advocates street grid reform, albeit as a bizarre milquetoast on the down-low, whimpering in a watered-down variety of bureaucratically-worded pablum, constitutes real news.

As such, given months of mayoral silence, we must ask for proof.

Exactly when did Gahan say this, and to whom?

Where can I read it in his words?

Can you show me?

How do we know it’s really true?

More than once since last Tuesday, I've asked the Phipps camp to verify the source of this statement with something (anything) attributable to Gahan himself.

I've received no answer, and yet as a university instructor and sociologist, surely Phipps understands that the validity of any affirmative claim is suspect if it cannot be verified and attributed in precisely the same fashion as my requests for proof of mayoral street grid intent, on the record, in the open, for all to see.

Without such standards of evidence, academic research would be rendered moot. They’re also questions any reputable journalist would ask, aren’t they?

Obviously, politics constitutes a different set of rules, most of them dubious, and yet during his first run for office, it was Phipps himself who raised the bar and said he'd approach such issues “analytically,” adding that “I have no desire to become a career politician.”

And yet four years later, certain shoes seem to have shifted feet -- and it's getting ugly.

Some might say that by asking reasonable questions, I’m unfairly stalking or bullying Phipps. It isn't true. My satiric references to yard sign sizes aside, what I’m doing is requesting intellectual accountability from a university professor who has chosen to be a public official, and who has previously indicated with explicitness that he accepts precisely such scrutiny.

Except when they're my questions,

Moreover, I’m asking for accountability from Phipps as it pertains to his specific role as public official. After all, I remain a constituent. If Phipps wishes to explain which questions from constituents are deemed proper for his response and which are not, it’s an explanation of potential interest to all voters in his district, and not just me.

He should offer this parsing of  constituent service now … verifiably, openly, and for attribution. That’s what greater transparency in local government is all about, right?

In my insistence on making these points, is there negativity, cynicism or anger?

Not much, if any. It may resemble the act of trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in a pea soup fog while wearing mittens, but I’m not angry about it. Providentially, my colleague Jeff G. has helped me understand this “oversimplification” of anger with an excerpt from an interview with the late comedian, George Carlin.

April 3, 2004: Dirty old man: George Carlin on obscenity in the age of Ashcroft, by Charles Taylor (Salon)

... When people say, “What are you so angry about?” Well, that’s a terrible oversimplification because I don’t live an angry life as people who know me for five minutes or five years will say. They rarely see me in an angry mood. I get irritated like anyone else, in traffic or in a long line that’s not moving. But I don’t carry anger around. What I feel is a sense of betrayal by my species and by my culture — that they lost their way and misled me, too, to a degree.

I’m a disappointed idealist. I think of myself as a skeptic, a realist. I think the cynics are the people who left the gas tank on the Ford Pinto, companies that kill people and just cross them out because they can’t afford to retool. That’s a cynical position. But the saying goes, if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist, and that’s what’s going on with me. Down deep and underneath, the flame still flickers. I wish for an idealist, utopic world but the realist in me says it’s never gonna happen because of the way they’ve structured power and money and control and the hierarchies they’ve established.

I'm not angry.

But I'm quite capable of voting my disappointment.*

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* If I were to rewrite this sentence in 2019, it would go like this: "But I'm quite capable of filing my disappointment."

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Recent columns:

January 22: ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

January 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

January 8: ON THE AVENUES: In the 3rd district, that "stepping aside" time finally has arrived.

January 1: ON THE AVENUES: As a new year dawns, I’m existentially yours.

ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Ever since Dan Coffey’s how-did-it-take-so-damned-long-anyway defection from the Democratic Party in January of 2016, New Albany’s nine-member city council has been populated by just four presumed Democrats.

• District 2: Bob Caesar (now in his twelfth year)
• District 3: Greg Phipps (eighth year)
• District 4: Pat McLaughlin (twelfth year)
• District 5: Matt Nash (fourth year)

The scuffed fingernails of this motley 44th percentile have managed to cling to an ever-shrinking semblance of significance for a variety of reasons, absolutely none of which attest to any specific distinction or merit as public servants.

Both literally and figuratively, it hasn’t been about them at all. The gradual evolution of mayoral authority, as capable of governing New Albany by authoritarian decree apart from direct council oversight, has allowed the city’s diminished Democrats to hang on to what’s left of their power.

With the municipal populace forever determined to ignore local matters in favor of arguing endlessly over national issues, apathy and inertia play their roles, too.

It also took a while for the three council Republicans and two Independents to come together (occasionally) for a semblance of common cause against the imperial excesses of Jeff Gahan’s reign.

One example: In hindsight, Al Knable probably regrets being conciliatory at the beginning of his council career in 2016, seeing as conniving and opportunistic Democrats lost no time in paying back Knable for his equanimity by savagely attacking his character over the contrived and nonsensical 9-1-1 phone call episode.

Unfortunately the Republican at-large troika hasn’t always been able to maintain a unified front. Their biggest head-slapping disgrace in recent memory remains David “I'm Passionate for Masonry” Barksdale, who resembled a slobbering puppy angling for tasty kibbles and bits during the course of gulping Dear Leader’s cynical pleasantries, as necessary to procure approval for the cherished Democratic Party goal of an election-ready Reisz Mahal luxury city hall boondoggle.

Then earlier this month, a befuddled David AeberSOLD out his compatriot Knable by bizarrely rolling over on behalf of an unctuous Caesar in the election for 2019 council vice-president.

With friends like those, who even needs Adam “Tricky” Dickey as an enemy?

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The enduringly fascinating aspect of our bedraggled Democratic council quartet is the beige patina of its blandness. The best historic parallel is those jowly Politburo geriatrics propped atop Lenin’s Mausoleum during Soviet May Day parades of old; colorless and featureless functionaries without the first original thought of their own, committed only to agreeing in lock step with the First Secretary.

By the end of 2019, New Albany’s four remaining Democratic council critters will have 36 years of combined service – and for what ultimate purpose? They’re faded pawns waiting to be pushed around the chess board, and veritable rubber stamps in desperate need of re-inking. They seem far older than they really are, with a collective demeanor suggesting mute charred hulk burnout.

That’s no surprise, given that their chief duty these past eight years has been to purge their souls of any damning stain of cogitation and meekly obey whatever orders Gahan and Dickey have given them as obsequious toady foot soldiers digging trenches to maintain Gahan’s sole achievement as mayor: a cash-laden political patronage machine constructed to enable VIP treatment for donors and vested interests, boasting pay-to-play as the order of the day, and with the lion’s share of the proceeds going to the mayor himself.

Witnessing these four remaining council Democrats in (re)action at last Thursday’s meeting, and knowing that all of them will trudge forward to re-enlist for four more senseless, torpid years of tuck-pointing Gahan’s prophylactic wall against fresh thinking and new ideas, I couldn’t help noticing their utter political exhaustion.

They’re bored, lethargic and absent anything resembling excitement, save for the sporadic flaring of pet fetishes. As such, Caesar briefly showed a heightened pulse when allowed to gush like a hormonal crush-afflicted schoolboy over One Southern Indiana’s yearly panhandling appointment to tout its oligarch masturbation outreach.

Similarly, Phipps became momentarily lucid on the topic of resuscitating (yet again) his otherwise toothless Human Rights Commission; those of us with long memories winced while recalling the time just a year ago when he dramatically “washed” his hands of the HRC. This exceedingly rare moment of Phippsian candor evidently has been delightfully airbrushed from the narrative, Dickey having issued contradictory marching orders numerous times since then.

In customary fashion McLaughlin said almost nothing the entire evening, leaving the accidental Democratic council yes-man Nash to shock the peanut gallery by erupting at freshly installed council president Scott Blair’s appointment of civilian Scott Whalen to the Board of Zoning Appeals in place of Stephen Pacciano, whose term had expired.

It is the prerogative of the council president to reappoint or replace board members, which the remaining eight councilmen subsequently affirmed. It later emerged that Pacciano had wanted another term, with Blair preferring his own man, although characteristically secretive Nash didn’t clearly explain any of this during the course of his weirdly emotional and garbled complaint.

Nash’s outburst came as a surprise to veteran council watchers, who’ve grown accustomed to the passing of entire seasons between instances of Nash saying anything at all. Last summer when it came time for the final Reisz Mahal vote, Nash remained impassive and unquestioning through a lengthy and detailed discussion without uttering a peep apart from the single syllable “aye” when called upon by Gahan and Dickey to vote in favor of the most misguided expenditure of public funds I’ve witnessed since my council viewing began in 2004.

The 5th council district plainly deserves better than this.

As much as I like Nash personally, the sad fact is that politically, he is a pliable tool of the Democratic Party’s fix-is-in machine, a jalopy lubricated for decades on end by Warren Nash, the councilman’s father.

In 2015 Matt Nash became the nominee for 5th district councilman by predetermined precinct committee decision when Dustin Collins became ill, and later when down on his luck in 2018 after the failure of his business venture, he abruptly and miraculously landed a job with the housing authority, itself the victim of a hostile annexation by Gahan the year before – something Nash has yet to publicly reference even once as a councilman.

If that’s not nepotism and political bondage according to the gnarly Tammany Hall model, American history books might have to be rewritten.

For Nash to be angry about Pacciano’s treatment might well have been exemplary and praiseworthy – but exactly where has Nash’s outrage been hibernating during his council term as Gahan and Dickey have run roughshod over basic human decency, bullying, bribing and bartering without any semblance of empathy or conscience?

Had Nash murmured even once about the immoral morass and selective ethics of his Democratic Party overlords, it might be different for me – but wait, I forget; he has the same tired excuse as every other Democrat in town, namely that Republicans are always worse.

Spare me.

---

Meanwhile here in the 3rd, the PhippsBot becomes even further estranged from his self-described powers of cool, analytical detachment, with these skills inevitably being spotted solely as knee-jerk responses to Republican initiatives, and never in gauging the various special interest power plays advanced by his own party.

Last Thursday Phipps haltingly described the inadequacy of the digital speed control installations on Spring Street, and he’s right, but apparently it has not occurred to Phipps that his own cowering and complicit complacency during the run-up to two-way street reversion crucially enabled Gahan to assign HWC Engineering the task of unceremoniously junking the vast majority of Speck-recommended precepts as intended to REDESIGN these same streets to lessen vehicular speeds.

And this is the ultimate truth: unalloyed enablement.

Each of these four Democrats – Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash – are pleasant enough company for a beer (well, maybe three of them, excepting the former jeweler, who still has those Bicentennial Commission finances safely hidden), but the political roles they’ve agreed to play are exuberantly passive.

They’re to emit gurgling sounds of rote acceptance on cue to whatever degraded and dictatorial whims Gahan and Dickey decree – just as Shane Gibson’s daily insider job is to find legal precepts capable of being artfully molded to accommodate a mayor and party chairman so crooked that it takes two valets each morning to help them screw on their pants.

Enablement and passivity, silence and culpability.

These are the de facto re-election “platforms” of New Albany’s four incumbent Democratic council representatives Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash. That’s 36 years of … what, exactly?

As you might expect, Gahan and Dickey are working hard to assure there’ll be no primary opposition to incumbent council candidacies in 2019. That’s highly ironic, given that during mid-term elections last November numerous residents of the council districts represented by Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash loudly declared themselves to be progressive, and publicly supported folks like Liz Watson, Dan Canon and Anna Murray.

If we are to assess the situation today, referencing the record of 36 combined years of actual city council seat-warming rather than their imagined stances pertaining to substantive policy, the incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are nowhere near as “progressive” as their 2019 Republican challengers – and Phipps’ underachieving sinecure is as yet uncontested, at least until I get my Independent petition started.

It’s very sad for the Democratic Party, though not for residents of those districts, who have high-quality Republicans ready and waiting for November. Personally, I find it hard to fathom that seemingly none of Watson’s, Canon’s and Murray’s purportedly progressive enthusiasts living in these precincts have grasped that when it comes to deeds and not words, their own Democratic council representatives are the ones who are completely out of sync.

There’s still time. Shouldn’t the local Democratic Party be walking the walk and not just talking the talk?

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Recent columns:

January 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey are Trumping the Donald when it comes to breathtaking moral turpitude. Have they no shame?

January 8: ON THE AVENUES: In the 3rd district, that "stepping aside" time finally has arrived.

January 1: ON THE AVENUES: As a new year dawns, I’m existentially yours.

December 29: ON THE AVENUES: Another year older and deeper in debt, so let's doo-doo it all over again.

ON THE AVENUES: In the 3rd district, that "stepping aside" time finally has arrived.

ON THE AVENUES: In the 3rd district, that "stepping aside" time finally has arrived. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In 2019, ON THE AVENUES moves to Tuesday -- unless I change my mind again.

The Confidentials reside in New Albany’s 3rd city council district, made up of precincts 3, 5, 7 and 10. In the city as a whole, there are five other enumerated council districts and also three “at-large” council seats. In municipal elections, we vote for the mayor, the city clerk, and the council person in our own district, as well as three candidates from a slate to fill the at-large seats.

The 3rd district’s boundaries are the Ohio River on the south, and Silver Creek to the east. To the northeast, there’s a brief jagged frontier with the 5th district, but a clean division westward along Ekin. A weird salient juts to the north along 8th Street near where Grant Line Road begins, then Falling Run Creek forms the line in a southwesterly direction to where it crosses State Street, which forms the western extent of the 3rd, most of the way back to the riverbank. The 3rd district contains much of the city's revitalizing downtown business district as well as the usable portion of its waterfront.

Greg Phipps, our current council representative, took to Facebook on November 13, 2018 to announce that he’d be seeking a third term.

Now that the 2018 election cycle is over, and after much deliberation, I have decided to publicly announce my candidacy for the 2019 election. I will be seeking a 3rd term as the 3rd district councilman for the City of New Albany. If elected, I will continue my support for efforts to revitalize our historic downtown and mid-town neighborhood.

Some of us are so old that we can remember his oft-repeated disclaimer about personal suitability, as in 2014.

But I digress. We have eleven months to discuss this and other pressing matters. Before doing so, I’ve assembled a few statistics from the past two election cycles.

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3rd district city council (precincts 3, 5, 7 and 10)

2015: municipal election (mayor, city council, city clerk; no state or federal offices)

4,130 registered voters
779 votes cast (19% turnout)
266 straight ticket (33% of all votes cast)

2018 mid-term election (county, state and federal offices)

4,209 registered voters
1,702 votes cast (40% turnout)
971 straight ticket (57% of all votes cast)

Straight ticket votes 2015 vs 2018

2015: 266
172 Democratic
94 Republican
0 Libertarian (none ran)

2018: 971
650 Democratic
303 Republican
18 Libertarian

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I'll leave you to make of these numbers as you will, with only a few disjointed observations. Unsurprisingly, straight tickets in the 3rd district more than tripled for each party in 2018. This has the appearance of an anomaly. Historically Democrats have far outnumbered Republicans in the 3rd, and in 2016 Hillary Clinton carried the day (except for the 10th precinct). Sadly, voters typically turn out in very low numbers for municipal election cycles.

All of this bodes well for Phipps' dynastic ambitions, or so we're led to believe.

During his career in politics, Phipps has experienced two primaries and two general elections. Not one has been a close contest. His debut race came in the 2011 Democratic primary, when he ran against two-term incumbent Steve Price.

COUNCIL DISTRICT 3
GREG PHIPPS. . . . . . . . . . 303 - 57.93%
STEVE PRICE. . . . . . . . . . . 220 - 42.07%

Phipps handily defeated Jameson Bledsoe in the 2011 general election. Running for re-election in the fall of 2015, he recorded 502 votes (63%) against 277 for his Republican opponent, Dale Bagshaw (37%).

Will Phipps even have a challenger in the 2019 Democratic primary? It seems unlikely. Party chairman Adam Dickey surely would discourage any such dissent given Phipps’ nearly perfect record of voting in accordance with Mayor Jeff Gahan.

However, if reliably blue-tinged voters in the 3rd district paid slightly closer attention to what Phipps, Dickey, Gahan and other local Democratic office holders actually do, as opposed to what they constantly say they’re doing, there might well be a progressive revolt against the status quo.

It’s revolt that should be occurring every single day.

At this juncture, allow me to insert a big caveat: for reasons I'll explain shortly, I'm not limiting this discussion to those who identity as "progressive." However, because the 3rd is blue, I'm opening the proceedings with blue terminology, and aiming my comments at blue voters. In fact, the solution to our present difficulties is far more ecumenical.

Imagine for a moment a younger progressive voter, one inspired in 2018 by the candidacies of Anna Murray, Liz Watson and Dan Canon – and disappointed by Republican wins in those races.

Now imagine Dickey’s forthcoming boilerplate: “Carry forward the progressive movement-building work of Anna, Liz and Dan by re-electing Jeff Gahan and Greg Phipps (and Bob Caesar, and Pat McLaughlin, ad nauseam).

Think about this sentiment for a moment. Have a nice, strong drink – if you can keep it down.

Granted, Phipps is an intelligent and pleasant fellow, and he plausibly can lay claim to suitably progressive public positions on social justice and human rights issues; he’s fought for one or the other of them on scattered occasions, though generally only when given explicit permission by the likes of spider-webmaster Dickey.

It’s just that Phipps has yet to utter the first peep of principled protest when these matters of basic human decency are blithely violated by Gahan, as in the obvious examples of the chaotic public housing takeover, City Hall's abysmal record of threatening and bullying both city employees and civilians, the mayor’s steadfast refusal to concede the existence of issues like homelessness and opioid addiction -- not to mention Gahan's personal addiction to campaign finance receipts.

Moreover, Phipps has yawningly rubber-stamped virtually every extravagant spending proposal ever minted by the mayor’s crack team of TIF juicers, the vast majority of which have been explicitly intended to encourage gentrification by benefiting higher-income segments of the city’s population, as well as fluffing a gigantic pool of pay-to-play special interests who donate profusely to Gahan for the privilege of profitable participation in these projects.

It’s enough to make a progressive’s blood boil – so why aren’t progressives in locales like the 3rd district mad as hell at the Floyd County Democratic party’s perennial bait and switch?

Well, it’s because no matter how low Gahan and his cronies go, the Democrats have the same answer:

Paraphrased: We might be shameless, bullying and conniving ward heelers, forever packing the political patronage machine full of cash drained from fat cat contract-seekers, rarely if ever keeping our word when it comes to disposable platform promises about fairness, dignity and equality of opportunity for those among us who are in the greatest need, and squelching free speech at every turn, but … but …

But what?

"BUT THE REPUBLICANS ARE EVEN WORSE."

Forever and always in Nawbany, this is the alleged “choice” given to us by local Democrats, and I have news for you: it isn’t.

It isn't a choice, and it isn't reason enough to justify excusing their transgressions.

If you’re a 3rd district left-leaning voter prone to taking Phipps’ word for being a spotless progressive just like you, I have two bits of advice. The first is to avoid misunderstandings by being sure both of you are using the word “progressive” in the same way. The second is to stop giving Phipps a free pass to be progressive when it suits him for one set of issues, and Gahanishly regressive as it pertains to another.

It’s early, and so far we don’t know what sort of candidate the GOP will field in the 3rd in 2019. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans simply can’t go higher than 35%-40% of the vote in the 3rd, and may not field a candidate. I simply shudder to think of Phipps grabbing a third term without an opponent in either the primary or the general election.

But what if I told you it isn’t impossible for a council candidate in the 3rd district to possess impeccable social justice and human rights credentials, while simultaneously embracing the Strong Towns approach of fiscal sanity, which emphasizes cumulative and sustainable grassroots strategies for economic development and quality-of-life enhancement, thereby avoiding those overloaded TIF One credit card debts?

After all, it's your children and grandchildren who’ll be paying those. I'm speaking of consistent, community-friendly precepts and policies across the board, and not just when Dear Leader graciously allows lip service to the principle.

As an added bonus, these precepts and policies also are in keeping with the instincts of many 3rd district residents who’d never in a million years think of themselves as progressive. 

Rather, they’re libertarian when it comes to social issues, and fiscally conservative on expenditures; they know a boondoggle when they see it, and have noticed that Gahan takes full credit for an inordinate amount of them.

In the end, the terminology and tags are junk. It's a local grassroots election, and it's about the place where we live.

The ideal candidate to match up in the 3rd district against Phipps is one who keeps government out of the private sphere, upholds the marketplace of free speech and expression, and regards human rights as non-negotiable; is serious about multi-modal transportation options and grasps the value of a walkable city; understands what small business ownership means and never once had "tenure" as a safety net for a household budget; busted ass in the trenches during the first generation of downtown revival and knows how much more remains to be done; views Gahan's personality cult and his fetish for branding a whole city in his own sad image as the height of absurdity; will put the district's people first and not fold like a house of cards when the party's hierarchy demands it -- because the ideal candidate is an independent, not a cog in the wheel-greasing of money machines.

Is it possible?

I think it is, so let's keep talking. Let me know where you stand.

---

Recent columns:

January 1: ON THE AVENUES: As a new year dawns, I’m existentially yours.

December 29: ON THE AVENUES: Another year older and deeper in debt, so let's doo-doo it all over again.

December 20: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2018 Remix).

December 14: A joyful noise? The six most-read ON THE AVENUES columns of 2018.