Bridge tolls: For K-Stem, it hasn't been this good since that last lunch date with Mitch Daniels.

It's a load, all right -- of oligarchic bullshit. That's why it's a good thing we have River Lube ...

Stemler on road-pounding trucks: “A (truck) carrying 20 tons of asphalt or crushed stone – we're taxing (the Clark Memorial Bridge) an awful lot."

Yesterday: One Southern Indiana's hypocrisy is absolutely reprehensible.

To Kerry Stemler, hypocrisy is an art form.

He is a soul-crushing oligarchic corporate criminal suitable for tarring and feathering, or worse.

And these "road-pounding" trucks ... the many trucks belonging to Stemler's own businesses and those of his fellow regional wealth extractors?

Naturally, they need to be kept off the toll rolls, and also off the Clark Memorial Bridge, but are just fine and dandy when speedily rerouted through residential streets in New Albany ... which like the bridge, were not constructed for the use of such vehicles, which is why their presence preferably comes with the full cooperation of New Albany's OWN ELECTED GOVERNMENT, which is happy (or sufficiently clueless) to oblige with nary a peep.

Louisville chamber chair backs commercial truck ban on Clark Memorial Bridge, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

... Besides his GLI position, Stemler sits on the boards of the Finance Authority and a six-person panel in charge of the bridges project's toll policy. In an interview, he said he plans to use his influence to push for several other ideas included in Dant Chesser's letter.

Specifically, Stemler said he also favors reclassifying certain heavy vehicles to avoid the toll rates charged to tractor trailers and exempting Transit Authority of River City buses from tolls.

Notice the deft public transit touch. Fortunately, we have plenty of old masonry walls hereabouts ready to be pressed into service following the show trial.

Bluegill provides the coda, as posted yesterday:

Today is street sweeping day in front of our house-- you know, spend hour after hour writing tickets penalizing residents for minute, non-moving infractions while thousands of cars and large trucks whiz through their neighborhood at 45 mph day. As such, residents crammed all their cars onto the side street to avoid the harassment. With said cars parked on both sides, the folks profiting from the Main Street Bicycle Denial Project placed their barricade right in the middle of the street so no one could get out without backing up down half the street and turning into the glass strewn alley where the street sweeper might actually be useful but never goes. I moved the barricade. Will again tomorrow. It's come to that.

Yes, it has come to that -- with New Albany's streets, and on Kerry Stemler's pet bridges, and the best strategies for coping with both have narrowed to calculated, principled civil disobedience. It may be the best single mayoral campaign idea for 2015.

But wait ... what was that?

You can't see how it is possible for a government sworn to uphold law to instead express disobedience?

Come now.

It hasn't been that long since Doug England publicly announced that he wouldn't enforce his own parking regulations. England didn't strike them, but merely renounced their enforcement. The ordinances remain on the books, and the city continues to ignore its own laws.

As we speak, I suspect those same heavy trucks that inspire throbbing erections on the part of the likes of Kerry Stemler are being exempted from speeding enforcement in New Albany, and I'll continue to believe it until someone within our close-mouthed City Hall proves to me otherwise. If the local chain newspaper can't or won't ask the questions, I will.  

Isn't it an act of willful civil disobedience for a sitting mayor not to enforce the city's own ordinances? If not, then what exactly is it?

Consequently, to campaign for the office of mayor on an explicit platform of civic disobedience as it pertains to matters like one-way streets and Stemler's auto-erotic tolling project strikes me as the most ethical choice available to a candidate.

Apart from drinking beer, that is. I vow to achieve that, too.

Kerry Stemler's statement on the occasion of the Clark Memorial Bridge closing.

"Under Stemler’s watch, GLI’s demise accelerated, apparently without the board exercising any sort of oversight."

Here's a disclaimer: I probably care more for the health and well being of AB InBev's board of directors than the institutional disposition of Greater Louisville Inc, which to me is little more than another collection of clueless suits who should be wearing striped garb and breaking rocks somewhere for the public's fun and profit, rather than pillaging for their own.

Having divulged this shocking truth, Terry Boyd's assessment of GLI's leadership void makes for unintentionally hilarious reading.

Terry Boyd: Who will lead Greater Louisville Inc.?, by Terry Boyd (Insider Louisville)

Nature abhors a vacuum, and for the moment, Louisville has a stunning leadership vacuum.

Greater Louisville Inc. president and CEO Craig Richard has been on indefinite leave for more than two weeks.

Before there was a public confirmation of his absence, our sources tell us Richard had kept a peculiarly low profile for the leader of the city’s economic development effort. In the last three years, GLI’s finances and standing have declined precipitously to the point sources tell us his successor inherits a crisis situation ...

Boyd subsequently surveys the list of possible kingpins, and provides this rollicking, all-purpose punch line:

... Kerry Stemler, the current GLI chairman. We nominate him under the Colin Powell rule of “you broke it, you own it.” Under Stemler’s watch, GLI’s demise accelerated, apparently without the board exercising any sort of oversight.

Ah, yes. The bridge giver. Is Alcatraz still accepting new clients?

At last, photographic evidence of the existence of Kerry Stemler's erogenous zone.

Was it as good for you as it was for him?

(Photos pilfered from various heavy machinery and earth mover mags)

One fine evening at the 5 o'clock network.

Your Community Bank issues the invitation, and I'm happy to help them out when it's time for another 5 o'clock network. Attendees sampled Houndmouth, Solidarity and Tunnel Vision, and I had a great chat with Scott from Huber about wines and the impending ramp-up of distillation.

ON THE AVENUES: 1Si, Kerry, ROCK and the gays.

ON THE AVENUES: 1Si, Kerry, ROCK and the gays.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Remember back in 2007, when One Southern Indiana was tying itself in church/state/oligarchy enrichment knots by ineptly seeking to bind itself to the Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana cabal?

Boy, do WE remember it here at NA Confidential. Never, ever has it been any more fun ripping down statues of idols than when 1Si was thrashing in self-Stemler-inflicted Neanderthal agony over Theatair-X.

Great moments in silent film: Michael Dalby throws Kerry Stemler a lifeline.

Did anyone notice that in the end, when it came to clarifying the relationship of One Southern Indiana with Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana, Michael Dalby duly took responsibility for acknowledging the slippery slope that 1SI chairman of the board Kerry Stemler, not Dalby himself, originally commenced sliding down at the ROCK press conference?

Eminences seldom get grayer than Kerry Stemler, nor logic fuzzier than when refracted through the immaculately laundered linen of his privileged white Wonder Bread mind.

In 2007, Stemler was 1Si's Big Chief Tablet Chairman of the Board, and he had decided one morning over Pop-Tarts and Sanka that it would be a great idea to hop into bed with the meddling theocrats and scripture-quoters at ROCK, because doing so might end the vile threat to regional economic development posed by a solitary smut shop in Clarksville -- this being the same Stemler (and the same 1Si) who were conspiring at the very same time to toll those few precious Kentuckians choosing to cross bridges to come to Indiana and spend their money.

Go figure the economic development merits of THAT strategy ... but I digress. We asked:

What does ROCK's theocratic advocacy have to do with economic development, and why is Stemler giving 1SI's imprimatur to a very specific and exclusionary Christian advocacy group?

As soon became hilariously clear, Stemler's choice of churches had been made without the knowledge of 1Si's then-president, Michael Dalby, who in the end was compelled to take the responsibility hit and control the mayhem as Stemler retreated to the board room for another round of Champale and Chef Boyardee, a pairing of champions.

Now the topic is HJR-6, Indiana's lamentable attempt to fuse reactionary clergy with constitutional amendment, and thus stem the tide of rampant buggery and same sex marriage. The organization calling itself Freedom Indiana explains the basis of opposition to this sheer lunacy.

Freedom for all Hoosiers!

We are a statewide bipartisan coalition of businesses, faith leaders, civil rights and community organizations, and individuals united to defeat HJR-6.

This anti-freedom amendment duplicates existing law and would permanently ban all protections for same-sex couples and their families and remove existing protections for unmarried Hoosiers.

Stand with us, and sign the petition to defeat HJR-6!

As documented daily by reputable news organizations across the state, and others with metered paywalls, the momentum against HJR-6 is building quickly, and as the bookseller pointed out earlier in the week, the dominoes continue to fall against the amendment.

INDIANAPOLIS CHAMBER OF COMMERCE COMES OUT AGAINST ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE AMENDMENT

"Indiana's struggles to retain its college graduates are well documented and often acknowledged in the state legislature. Its necessity to ease this "brain drain" by attracting talent on a national scale would be inhibited by adopting an unnecessary, discriminatory amendment with fading support from younger generations.

"As the only potential marriage amendment up for consideration nationwide in 2014, it is important to be mindful of the conspicuous part HJR-6 would play in portraying Indiana as a state that welcomes some, but not all, talented workers."

Forever eager for clarification, I've gone to One Southern Indiana's Facebook page twice in recent weeks to ask whether the organization had yet lifted its quivering finger to the winds of modernity, and as yet, no reply has been forthcoming. It's no wonder, given that 1Si possesses the quaint view of social media wherein communications always are a top-down, one-way street. No doubt such an attitude was copped from the likes of Kerry Stemler himself.

It's an institutional thang, tantamount to a human stain. Nowadays Stemler seems to believe he is the chairman of the board of Southern Indiana as a geopolitical entity, and not just calling plays for 1Si. As such, will he be interfering in this great drama?

Indeed, what happens next?

Will 1Si do the right thing?

Will it do anything at all?

If 1Si actually decides to queue for once on history's correct side, will ROCK subsequently gather its members into a tight circle outside 1Si HQ, douse themselves with petrol -- and then both of them catch on fire?

Can we throw Stemler on that same fire and make it a threesome? Hasn't he done enough damage to the regional societal fabric (as opposed the profitability comforter) for one clueless lifetime?

Let's just say that while hopeful, I'm not holding my breath.

The multi-talented Kerry Stemler can screw up wet dreams on BOTH sides of the river.

Sifting through the weird breathlessness of Insider Louisville typically takes some doing. One of the site's latest fixations has been purges underway at Greater Louisvile Inc (GLI), which is Louisville's version of One Southern Indiana (1Si), which in turn suggests that a source for discounted Hazmat suits would be very much appreciated if I'm to keep reading about the wonders of besuited enrichment.

Wait ... what's the smell? It smells like a garden-variety Quisling to me.

CEO Craig Richard’s letter to GLI members reveals first details about staff cuts, budget issues and travel freezes

 ... These changes were not made lightly or in a vacuum. Communication with GLI’s Chairman of the Board, Kerry Stemler, and members of our Executive Committee on these decisions were ongoing. I appreciate their full support as we implement these changes and cost-saving initiatives.

Let me get this straight: Stemler gets to poison more than one well? On both sides of the river? Too bad we're not a tri-state area; he could pull a hat trick -- or a rat trick.

Just savor this prime bit of vintage oligarch-speak gibberish as he explores efficiencies and body cavities at GLI.

Sources: ‘Bloodbath’ at Greater Louisville Inc., with at least 25 percent of staff dismissed, by Terry Boyd

 ... “There were two catalysts for organizational change at this time – the post-recession business dynamics and the new leadership agenda of our president and CEO Craig Richard. We’ve been able to identify efficiencies within the organization and create a structure with an increased focus on economic development and member services.” Kerry Stemler, Chairman of the Board, Greater Louisville Inc.

Writing like that is so incredibly bad that it makes one pine for the halcyon days of Benny Breeze. In comparison with Stemler's nonsense, Tea Party screeds read like Thomas Jefferson. It makes Bob Cesar look visionary. More gin is demanded.

Posterity is going to be very unkind to these lemmings. GLI and 1Si will be consigned to the ash heaps they both richly deserve to inhabit. Meanwhile, future generations will be asking:

Why'd they let a second-rater like Stemler dictate anything beyond a mobile phone's voice mail message?

A certain resemblance, conceptually speaking.

For more on Vidkun Quisling

For more on Kerry Stemler

Any day now, we'll be seeing press releases crediting Stemler with doing his best to lessen the toll burden on his fellow Hoosiers, when of course, he was a major source of the bridges and tolling farce in the first place. As Quislings go, Stemler lacks a comprehensive written manifesto ... and no, flashing bank statements doesn't take the place of words and sentences.

Kerry Stemler: "Are we finished with the photo-op?Just throw those kids back under the boondoggle bus."

Don't forget to monitor the Say NO to Bridge Tolls page at Facebook.

Most recent news articles are gathered there, with Daniel Borsch's customarily trenchant commentary. Those children? They'll be paying through their noses for the rest of their lives to give ephemeral boosts to "the economy" and Kerry Stemler's flagging tumescence.

Kerry Stemler: Once an asshole, always an asshole.

Three years later, only two of the faces have changed

In Louisville Courant, Curtis Morrison reports from California.

Still no word from my attorney, meanwhile Kerry Stemler wants attention

 ... In the meantime, Joe Gerth with the Courier-Journal published what I would characterize as a pretty fair profile of me.

Laughable that Kerry Stemler thought he should have input, since we've technically never met.

A piece of oligarch-fluffing work, that Kerry Stemler. Presumably the carnage of the ORBP, which he has done so much to unleash on the region, is to be lauded because it emanates from self-effacing and rational motives.

Spare me, little man.

If memory serves, it wasn't just Curtis Morrison that Stemler wouldn't consider debating during the run-up to the bridges debacle. It was anyone and everyone expressing opposition to the concrete, steel and automotive sycophant's cadre of boondoggle fetishists -- you know, those wild and crazy suit wearers who drink a single watered-down margarita at a chain Tex-Mex place and then want to jump Ayn Rand's dusty bones while wearing a garter fashioned from toll chits.

Here's what Kerry Stemler has to say about Curtis Morrison, as reported by Joe Gerth. Stemler's fascistic big-business power trip is about to lay waste to the metro area. Remember this small factoid as you read.

“Do you think sometimes people want their 15 minutes of fame?” asked Kerry Stemler, former co-chairman of the Louisville and Southern Indiana Bridges Authority, a project about which (Curtis) Morrison has been outspoken.

Stemler doesn’t have much sympathy for Morrison ...

... While Stemler said he disagreed with (Tyler) Allen — who also worked against building the downtown bridge — he always felt that Allen was sincere. But he said Morrison seemed to be opposing the project just to oppose it.

“If I was ever asked to debate Curtis, I wouldn’t have done it,” Stemler said. “He was too irrational in his motives.”

Sickeningly, chief tolling advocate Kerry Stemler now placed on tolling junta.

Daniels and Dalby are gone; 1Si and Stemler live on.

In the context of bridge tolling, for which Kerry Stemler has been a prime S & M fetishist from day one, his presence on the tolling body constitutes a "local voice" in the same way Applebee's is a "neighborhood" grill ... rather in the fashion of Miller Lite being a "fine pilsner" beer ... and just like Gitmo waterboarding is the "American way."

And does Mike Moore really believe that Stemler's seat gives Clark County a "voice"?

Is he that bedazzled by the oligarch enrichment society?

What about the voice taken away from Clark County -- from all of Southern Indiana -- in the first place by the Stemler-driven Bridges (Tolling) Authority?

This one's little more than rubbing shit into our wounds. Then again, that's about all Kerry Stemler's ever been good for.

The board that will set tolls on new Ohio River bridges includes two local representatives, by Marcus Green (Courier-Journal)

The six-member board that will set toll rates for the new Ohio River bridges is finally set — and includes only two people from the counties directly affected by the project, along with one from nearby Shelby County, Ky.

Indiana and Kentucky agencies last month appointed Kerry Stemler, a Sellersburg, Ind., businessman, and former Kentucky Revenue Secretary Dana Mayton of Shelbyville, as the final members of the “tolling body” that will establish rates and recommend ways to ease the effects of tolls on low-income drivers.

The shocking report One Southern Indiana sought to suppress: "Nearness to Public Transportation Strengthens Home Values."

(Insert Ohio River Bridges Project joke here)

If Kerry "I Am 1Si" Stemler could hack through the cyber brush and delete this one, you bet your sweet ass he would. It rather contradicts his entire career of public disservice. Thanks to D for the link.

Study: Nearness to Public Transportation Strengthens Home Values, by Esther Cho (DS News ... "delivering stories, ideas, links, companies, people, events, and videos impacting the mortgage default servicing industry.")

“Transportation plays an important role in real estate and housing decisions, and the data suggests that residential real-estate near public transit will remain attractive to buyers going forward. A sound transportation system not only benefits individual property owners, but also creates the foundation for a community’s long-term economic well being,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.

Cabbages and kingpins, one year later.

Last year around this time, NAC was reaching out weekly to One Southern Indiana, selflessly offering to help our regional oligarch's benevolent society find a new kingpin. Among our candidates was the Angry Easter Bunny (April 8, 2012).

We got bored and suspended the search in May, and they ended up hiring a Queenpin instead:

1Si makes one small step to reduce CEO sexting, hires non-Wassmer female exec from Benton Harbor as kingpin.

At least when our routine reached its curdling of a sell-by date, we knew when to stop. Here is a reprise, as summarized in the final episode.

---

Kingpin of the week: There's only one, isn't there? (May 11, 2012)

JAY-sus, are these people EVER going to hire someone?

It sure would be nice to direct the cannonade toward a specific target rather than the scattershot practice adopted during the past eleven weeks, but as watchdogs, we have little choice in the matter.

Consequently, while not exactly running its course -- there's always time to casually eviscerate One Southern Indiana for its pandering imperiousness -- our "kingpin of the week" thread has reached its sell-by date.

It is striking, the extent to which 1Si as a marketing-driven design feature perfectly mirrors the mundane conformity of the exurb: Chain-centered, chock-a-block, whitewashed and identically-costumed Ken doll wannabe, seeking to "drain the hills and the sea of color." 1Si offers the safety of the herd, of business lingo buzz-speak, and the necessary assurance to peddle insurance. All around One Southern Indiana, there are potential grassroots movements aimed at the ways to come, and yet there persists our locally endowed (why?) chamber of (past) commerce, dedicated to foisting tolls on the populace merely to suit the prerequisites of River Ridge.

Can there ever be such things as glasnost and perestroika in such an organization? It is unlikely. But 1Si is adept at staging frequent and self-reverential Nurnberg rallies, as with one forthcoming on May 22, to which a friend refers in this Twitter post:

Yes, I'm proud to be a solid pain in Kerry "Oligarch" Stemler's ass, and not just because someone needs to do it.

It isn't what he does "for" the community, it's what he and his acolytes are doing "to" it: Shackling the community with policies, mind-sets, beer preferences and personal wardrobes that reflect an economic development mindset of corporatist, top-down exploitation and extraction, all of it having to do with the enrichment of the ownership and managerial elites forever enshrined in 1Si's country club ethos, and always at the expense of ancillaries (i.e., the rest of us) so eager to please these faux exemplars of propriety that we squeal like little kids playing grown-up games -- while the grown-ups ... while people like Kerry Stemler ... laugh at us for being so stupid.

If that's your idea of "economic development," feel free to bake some mud pies. Perhaps the idea can be franchised at a networking function. Meanwhile, One Southern Indiana is no more than a personal fiefdom, and the only tinhorn kingpin who ever really mattered is Kerry Stemler himself. He's the twelfth winner of the trophy, and I have a suggestion for where the trophy case should be located.

Previous weekly winners of Kingpin of the Week ...

Pinocchio
CDM (formerly Wilbur) Smith
Thunder Over Louisville
Margaret Thatcher
Angry Easter Bunny
Sancho Panza
Sean Payton
Jethro Bodine
Rush Limbaugh
Vaughan Scott
Benny Breeze

OTA Redux: My Three Step Therapy for the Tolling Blues (August, 2012).

Jeff begins our Tuesday morning with a look at the New York Times looking quizzically at us and our approaching bridges boondoggle.

Louisville metro and our place in it: The words are watching.

Has anyone else noticed that when local independent sorts are left to their own devices the metro area tends to get great national coverage and makes "best of" lists but when the regional power structure intervenes we always seem to get targeted with suspicious glances and generally confused disbelief?

To repeat: As long as there remains a fight to wage against the imposition of the ORBP, I'm there. 

At the same time, wishful thinking's never been a good civic strategy. New Albany is my top priority, and our city must begin planning for the future with the bridges variable in mind. I've made this case for pro-active readiness many times, as in this On the Avenues column from August 23, 2012. 

ON THE AVENUES: My Three Step Therapy for the Tolling Blues.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Southern Indiana’s resident economic oligarchs have diligently labored, backstage-leveraged, and eagerly licked exposed posteriors to provide the metropolitan Louisville region with a gift for the American post-industrial age so woefully inadequate that to this very day, it all seems like a Bill Maher satire piece.

But it’s the Ohio River Bridges Project, an auto-centric, Eisenhower-era, top-down “mobility” solution for the resource-gobbling individualist.

Think of the ORBP as a garishly wrapped box, which when opened, reveals a steaming pile of cattle dung and a slot to drop quarters for the privilege of continuing to smell it.

While other communities nationwide explore futuristic transit options, we get Kerry Stemler’s pre-pubescent idea of an erector set, with his leering tumescence enabled by naked steel girder eroticism, not unlike Dagny Taggart’s attraction to Reardon Metal in that crazy dead woman’s book that the wacko teabaggers still believe is literature.

I’ve never been more proud to have been labeled as an toxic obstructionist than through my adamant opposition to the ORBP. Indeed, the fight isn’t over. Show me where the Sunnyside version of the Alamo stands, and I’ll man the crumbling ramparts against One Southern Indiana’s zombie polo-shirted hordes until the first wildly inaccurate Wilbur Smith revenue estimate causes the river crossing fee to quadruple in mid-sensor-scan.

That said, the odds for us are worse than before. The Feds have laughed aloud and told us that if we’re so determined to be obstinately dunderheaded, please be their guests; the grants can go to mass transit elsewhere, and it tolls are inevitable, the Feds suspect that with educational standards hereabouts at such a low ebb, we’re sure to relax and enjoy it.

If bridge tolls eventually become reality, three things need to happen.

One.

First, we must consider the status of the Sherman Minton Bridge – New Albany’s bane as recently as 2011, when it was closed for repairs, but in the future, potential symbol of our civic free lunch.

As a disclaimer, label me skeptical. In spite of the oligarch cadre’s insistence, the mere existence of Horseshoe Casino, and the need for untrammeled (read: untolled) access to the all-night gaming we depend on to indirectly fund waning social programs probably will not permanently spare the Sherman Minton from taxation.

However, for so long as it remains safely off the tolling grid, the city of New Albany has a tailor-made, providential civic slogan, one we must repeat over and over:

“TOLL FREE NEW ALBANY”

Forget Trickle Back City, Open for Business, Riverview is Our Savior and all the other half-baked suggestions that make reasonable people wonder whether we’ve lost our minds. Compared with our brethren over in Jeffersonville, who are about to be relentlessly pulverized, first with unnecessary downtown bridge construction detritus, delays and clutter, and then, when all of it has been nicely carted off and paved, with the sheer villainy of tolls themselves, New Albany will be able to market itself as an island of sanity amid the turbulence of KStem’s self-serving tumescence.

Two.

Second, seeing as this potential New Albany advantage has one significant drawback, we must reverse decades of Real-time, Caesaresque inertia and get radical, aggressive and determined about our own streets, what they mean for the people who live here, and what we can do to facilitate them for use by people as well as automobiles.

It should suffice to say that maintaining our holy writ of a quasi-Stalinist 1960’s grid of one-way speed enhancers, with the novel magnet of an untolled Sherman Minton Bridge attracting drive-throughs and fly-overs through the city’s neighborhoods in unprecedented numbers, traveling as quickly as possible to save two bucks, and ignoring what we have to offer as they put the pedal to the metal, would be suicidal to our future prospects.

They will not stop here any more than casino clients already do (they don’t). Let’s “complete” New Albany’s streets now, and cure with a dose of intelligent design the illnesses we now try to “treat” with old-fashioned Georgia speed traps.

Three.

Third, let’s resolve to never forget that the ORBP is happening not because of genuine concerns for safety, or comprehensive thoughts for the future of transportation in the metro Louisville statistical area, or whatever other drivel we’ve been fed in a effort to solicit support for the project where precious little exists among just plain folks.

Rather, this is happening because the oligarchs and their ancillaries need to make their money the Mitt Romney way, in the exurbs, at places like River Ridge, where the jobs added by the likes of Amazon can only subtract independent small businesses from their homes down the street in the urban core.

In short, the ORBP is capitalism all right, but in a very restricted, profit-making sense of channeling the largess in directions so obvious that Nostradamus needn’t return to help us guess.

From the ORBP’s beginning until now, it has been representative of American robber baron capitalism of the old, heavy, monopolistic school, where Gohmann Asphalt’s soulless flunkies issue pious public intonations of “for your own safety” even as they ink the bids for the business constructing the project itself, “sealing” the deal with watery Bud Light Limes at a vapid chain restaurant somewhere on Veteran’s Parkway.

Thus, my third suggested bit of pre- and post-tolling therapy is simply this: Let’s never forget from whence this foolishness has emanated.

Granted, we cannot vote against the likes of Kerry Stemler, Steve Schultz and the rest of their merrily fluffing oligarch’s advancement society.

However, politicians are another matter, and when it comes to the ORBP and the likelihood of the regressive tax we’re all still euphemistically referring to as “tolls,” we have a clear idea of who is responsible.

Anyone seen Ed “Pro-Tolls” Clere or Steve “I Heart Tolls” Stemler lately? Remember them, will you?

One whole year after our bridge fell ill, tolls still suck.

On Sunday, September 9, 2012, it will have been one year since the Sherman Minton Bridge closed "indefinitely," a period that turned out to be six months long.  The resulting snafu was so devastating that New Albany very nearly was compelled to market itself as "Come To City," although saner heads eventually prevailed.

The photo above was taken early in the evening of Friday, September 9, 2011, at the Carnegie Center's annual fundraiser.

Bring on the acid: Kerry Stemler sips, picks and grins as the Sherman Minton Bridge closes.

Looking back on it a year later, I stand by what I wrote on the following day, when the fog of uncertainty as yet enveloped us. Perhaps KStem will be back tonight when the Carnegie event reconvenes. If so, perhaps I'll ask him about CART joining the River Fields lawsuit.

---

Sept.10, 2011: Sherman Minton bridge down, Kerry Stemler high like a kite.

What we know, apart from the inevitable sensationalism and multi-generational rumors, is that the Sherman Minton Bridge has been closed "indefinitely" owing to cracks, and that we'll now awake to helicopters each morning as though we were living in one of those places that we routinely bomb in order to ensure a reliable supply of petrol to feed Kerry Stemler's "mobility" solution.

Standing for a couple hours at last night's Carnegie Center fundraiser, serving beer samples and watching the inveterate bridge fetishist Stemler cradle insipid white wine while grinning like a screaming skull on acid, does nothing to inspire one's resistance to conspiracy theories, but being an adult, it is possible to compartmentalize: Nothing that Mitch Daniels says can be trusted, now or two days ago, and at the same time, nothing can be done about any of it right now.

The heavy governmental hitters now will reach a conclusion, and once they reveal it, we'll work through the resulting mess and survive, while at the same time knowing that there has been little money or effort allocated by the state of Indiana to maintain such infrastructure, even as the Tolling Authority devises methods to inflict daily incremental pain, which will be more severe in the coming weeks, and all the errant conclusions derived from the Sherman Minton's structural condition, as trumpeted by the folks at 1Si, can now be used to fluff the oligarchs -- as though they needed any more fluffing.

So it goes. Stay tuned.

ON THE AVENUES: My Three Step Therapy for the Tolling Blues.

ON THE AVENUES: My Three Step Therapy for the Tolling Blues.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Southern Indiana’s resident economic oligarchs have diligently labored, backstage-leveraged, and eagerly licked exposed posteriors to provide the metropolitan Louisville region with a gift for the American post-industrial age so woefully inadequate that to this very day, it all seems like a Bill Maher satire piece.

But it’s the Ohio River Bridges Project, an auto-centric, Eisenhower-era, top-down “mobility” solution for the resource-gobbling individualist.

Think of the ORBP as a garishly wrapped box, which when opened, reveals a steaming pile of cattle dung and a slot to drop quarters for the privilege of continuing to smell it.

While other communities nationwide explore futuristic transit options, we get Kerry Stemler’s pre-pubescent idea of an erector set, with his leering tumescence enabled by naked steel girder eroticism, not unlike Dagny Taggart’s attraction to Reardon Metal in that crazy dead woman’s book that the wacko teabaggers still believe is literature.

I’ve never been more proud to have been labeled as an toxic obstructionist than through my adamant opposition to the ORBP. Indeed, the fight isn’t over. Show me where the Sunnyside version of the Alamo stands, and I’ll man the crumbling ramparts against One Southern Indiana’s zombie polo-shirted hordes until the first wildly inaccurate Wilbur Smith revenue estimate causes the river crossing fee to quadruple in mid-sensor-scan.

That said, the odds for us are worse than before. The Feds have laughed aloud and told us that if we’re so determined to be obstinately dunderheaded, please be their guests; the grants can go to mass transit elsewhere, and it tolls are inevitable, the Feds suspect that with educational standards hereabouts at such a low ebb, we’re sure to relax and enjoy it.

If bridge tolls eventually become reality, three things need to happen.

One.

First, we must consider the status of the Sherman Minton Bridge – New Albany’s bane as recently as last year, when it was closed for repairs, but in the future, potential symbol of our civic free lunch.
As a disclaimer, label me skeptical. In spite of the oligarch cadre’s insistence, the mere existence of Horseshoe Casino, and the need for untrammeled (read: untolled) access to the all-night gaming we depend on to indirectly fund waning social programs probably will not permanently spare the Sherman Minton from taxation.

However, for so long as it remains safely off the tolling grid, the city of New Albany has a tailor-made, providential civic slogan, one we must repeat over and over:

“TOLL FREE NEW ALBANY”

Forget Trickle Back City, Open for Business, Riverview is Our Savior and all the other half-baked suggestions that make reasonable people wonder whether we’ve lost our minds. Compared with our brethren over in Jeffersonville, who are about to be relentlessly pulverized, first with unnecessary downtown bridge construction detritus, delays and clutter, and then, when all of it has been nicely carted off and paved, with the sheer villainy of tolls themselves, New Albany will be able to market itself as an island of sanity amid the turbulence of KStem’s self-serving tumescence.

Two.

Second, seeing as this potential New Albany advantage has one significant drawback, we must reverse decades of Real-time, Caesaresque inertia and get radical, aggressive and determined about our own streets, what they mean for the people who live here, and what we can do to facilitate them for use by people as well as automobiles.

It should suffice to say that maintaining our holy writ of a quasi-Stalinist 1960’s grid of one-way speed enhancers, with the novel magnet of an untolled Sherman Minton Bridge attracting drive-throughs and fly-overs through the city’s neighborhoods in unprecedented numbers, traveling as quickly as possible to save two bucks, and ignoring what we have to offer as they put the pedal to the metal, would be suicidal to our future prospects.

They will not stop here any more than casino clients already do (they don’t). Let’s “complete” New Albany’s streets now, and cure with a dose of intelligent design the illnesses we now try to “treat” with old-fashioned Georgia speed traps.

Three.

Third, let’s resolve to never forget that the ORBP is happening not because of genuine concerns for safety, or comprehensive thoughts for the future of transportation in the metro Louisville statistical area, or whatever other drivel we’ve been fed in a effort to solicit support for the project where precious little exists among just plain folks.

Rather, this is happening because the oligarchs and their ancillaries need to make their money the Mitt Romney way, in the exurbs, at places like River Ridge, where the jobs added by the likes of Amazon can only subtract independent small businesses from their homes down the street in the urban core.

In short, the ORBP is capitalism all right, but in a very restricted, profit-making sense of channeling the largess in directions so obvious that Nostradamus needn’t return to help us guess.

From the ORBP’s beginning until now, it has been representative of American robber baron capitalism of the old, heavy, monopolistic school, where Gohmann Asphalt’s soulless flunkies issue pious public intonations of “for your own safety” even as they ink the bids for the business constructing the project itself, “sealing” the deal with watery Bud Light Limes at a vapid chain restaurant somewhere on Veteran’s Parkway.

Thus, my third suggested bit of pre- and post-tolling therapy is simply this: Let’s never forget from whence this foolishness has emanated.

Granted, we cannot vote against the likes of Kerry Stemler, Steve Schultz and the rest of their merrily fluffing oligarch’s advancement society.

However, politicians are another matter, and when it comes to the ORBP and the likelihood of the regressive tax we’re all still euphemistically referring to as “tolls,” we have a clear idea of who is responsible.

Anyone seen Ed “Pro-Tolls” Clere or Steve “I Heart Tolls” Stemler lately? Remember them, will you?

With commencement of downtown Louisville demolition, Kerry Stemler's ORBP cadre transcends the village. Now they're the nation's idiots.

12-Lane Highway Gets Started with Ceremonial Wrecking of Downtown, at Broken Sidewalk

Actually, Kerry Stemler doesn't know what any of "it" is. Which doesn't stop him from transforming inadequacies into faux scripture.

Since the notion of congenitally empty suits like these planning for 1897 makes so much more sense than 2025 (dude, this "conversation is beyond bridges"), I was laughing too hard and for too long to do any more than publish the link and two of Bluegill's tweets.

High expectations for Hoosiers: Indiana planning for 2025, by Braden Lammers (N and T)

Indiana’s Chamber of Commerce has developed a long-term, comprehensive, economic development plan for the state and spent Tuesday presenting it to business and government leaders in Southeast Indiana.

Outlined in the chamber’s plan were four main goals: bring and retain talent to Indiana; create an attractive business climate for the state; create superior infrastructure in the state; and create a dynamic and creative culture in the state.

Kingpin of the week: There's only one, isn't there?

JAY-sus, are these people EVER going to hire someone?

It sure would be nice to direct the cannonade toward a specific target rather than the scattershot practice adopted during the past eleven weeks, but as watchdogs, we have little choice in the matter.

Consequently, while not exactly running its course -- there's always time to casually eviscerate One Southern Indiana for its pandering imperiousness -- our "kingpin of the week" thread has reached its sell-by date.

It is striking, the extent to which 1Si as a marketing-driven design feature perfectly mirrors the mundane conformity of the exurb: Chain-centered, chock-a-block, whitewashed and identically-costumed Ken doll wannabe, seeking to "drain the hills and the sea of color." 1Si offers the safety of the herd, of business lingo buzz-speak, and the necessary assurance to peddle insurance. All around One Southern Indiana, there are potential grassroots movements aimed at the ways to come, and yet there persists our locally endowed (why?) chamber of (past) commerce, dedicated to foisting tolls on the populace merely to suit the prerequisites of River Ridge.

Can there ever be such things as glasnost and perestroika in such an organization? It is unlikely. But 1Si is adept at staging frequent and self-reverential Nurnberg rallies, as with one forthcoming on May 22, to which a friend refers in this Twitter post:

Yes, I'm proud to be a solid pain in Kerry "Oligarch" Stemler's ass, and not just because someone needs to do it.

It isn't what he does "for" the community, it's what he and his acolytes are doing "to" it: Shackling the community with policies, mind-sets, beer preferences and personal wardrobes that reflect an economic development mindset of corporatist, top-down exploitation and extraction, all of it having to do with the enrichment of the ownership and managerial elites forever enshrined in 1Si's country club ethos, and always at the expense of ancillaries (i.e., the rest of us) so eager to please these faux exemplars of propriety that we squeal like little kids playing grown-up games -- while the grown-ups ... while people like Kerry Stemler ... laugh at us for being so stupid.

If that's your idea of "economic development," feel free to bake some mud pies. Perhaps the idea can be franchised at a networking function. Meanwhile, One Southern Indiana is no more than a personal fiefdom, and the only tinhorn kingpin who ever really mattered is Kerry Stemler himself. He's the twelfth winner of the trophy, and I have a suggestion for where the trophy case should be located.

Previous weekly winners of Kingpin of the Week ...

Pinocchio
CDM (formerly Wilbur) Smith
Thunder Over Louisville
Margaret Thatcher
Angry Easter Bunny
Sancho Panza
Sean Payton
Jethro Bodine
Rush Limbaugh
Vaughan Scott
Benny Breeze