Three hats withering to one?

Amid the five-days-of-Christmas religious advertisements being featured in the newspaper this week, there was space for another wave of incoming mayor Jeff Gahan's appointments.

Gahan names Knight police chief, among appointments ... Juliot will stay fire chief; more announcements coming next week, by Daniel Suddeath

Sherri Knight will be the next New Albany Police Chief, as her promotion was one of three appointments announced by Mayor-elect Jeff Gahan on Thursday.

Gahan confirmed Matt Juliot will retain his position as New Albany Fire Chief. He also announced that Scott Wood will be promoted to New Albany City Plan Commission Director from his current slot as Assistant Director and Zoning Officer.

Knight will replace Todd Bailey — who was appointed by Mayor Doug England in 2010 — as NAPD chief effective Jan. 1.

Speaking for myself, it's too bad to see Todd Bailey depart; as terms go, "modern" and "police" need not be contradictory. Meanwhile, Harold J. Adams of the C-J takes the story a wee bit further.

Among other appointments announced by Gahan, Scott Wood has been promoted to director for the New Albany City Plan Commission where he has served as assistant director over the past four years. That’s a position that had been held by current deputy mayor Carl Malysz under outgoing mayor Doug England. It was not clear Thursday whether Malysz would have a role in the Gahan administration.

In the city clerk's on-line directory these past four years, Malysz has been listed three times: Once as Deputy Mayor, and twice as Director of Community Development, the latter under both Redevelopment and the Plan Commission. City Hall consistently has pointed out that the deputy mayor/body double position was intended as  "ceremonial," without power and sans pay. The reporter Suddeath explained it in this city council preview from November 18, 2010: England: New Albany City Council should not cut salaries; Mayor says Malysz saves city $20k a year

The deputy mayor’s salary is comprised of about $40,000 in plan commission money, about $40,000 from Economic Development Income Tax proceeds and about $5,000 from redevelopment commission funds.

 ... Earlier this week, Coffey said a deputy mayor should not make more than the mayor. The 2008 ordinance that set the deputy mayor’s salary also raised the mayor’s annual pay by $11,000 to $75,000.

It also established a $43,000 a year salary for the director of city operations, a position that has not been held since John Wilcox stepped down shortly after England took office. The position has not been funded by the council the past two years.

Matt Denison is paid $35,000 a year for his role as Assistant Director of Operations ...

At the city council meeting of November 18, 2010, CM Dan Coffey introduced a largely symbolic resolution to gut both Malysz's and city attorney Shane Gibson's pay packets.

R-10-41 A Resolution To Cap Certain Salaries of Appointed City Officials Coffey and Hiring Freeze ... Mr. Coffey moved for the reading R-10-41, Mr. Price second, the vote did not pass with six no votes and 3 aye votes.

Although NAC covered the meeting, which will be remembered primarily as the culmination of Steve Price's fit of pique against historic preservation (Briscoe Declares for Aunt Bee), I cannot recall who cast the third vote in favor of Coffey's resolution.

All of which points to these questions: With Gahan having stated that there'll be no deputy mayor in his administration, will Wood's elevation have the effect of depriving the soon-to-be-former deputy mayor of a revenue stream? Will the director of city operations be funded, and if so, who will serve? What happens to Denison?

And: Can't Gahan just grab some some more unguarded federal money from neighborhood stabilization and give all of us a few hundred bucks for a Christmas shopping spree at Big Lots?

Fire insurance marks, privatization and being careful which savior you wish for.

Welcome to the jungle, Matt.

New Albany fire chief wonders what no overtime in 2009 will bring, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune).

The City Council passed it, now New Albany Fire Department Chief Matt Juliot has to live with it.

No money is appropriated for overtime pay in the department beginning Jan. 1, the result of budget cuts approved by the council …

… Juliot said losing the option of overtime may mean cutting service.

“At this point in time, I don’t know what else to do,” he said.

I don’t, either, but perhaps it’s time to humor the Kool-Aid drinkers in the Norquist camp and privatize the lot -- a complete and all-encompassing imposition of user fees on all the services people expect from government but wish not to pay for ... if by "paying" we mean taxes, and running the insulting risk that my money might be used by someone I don't like very much.

Never mind that the reverse might be true. Hypocrisy needn't make sense.

It’s even worse now owing to the economic malaise, but even in better times, we've seen voters pleading poverty, both in terms of cash and in the larger sense of communal insensibility, and opting for devotion to candidates like 3rd district councilman Steve Price, who vows to drown all government in the bathtub, and whose legislative agenda achieves the desired end of starving local authority of the resources to function – all in the name of the downtrodden, who simply can't deal with reality without assistance.

The question remains whether Price and his ilk really are helping this segment of the population.

At any rate, because local government continues to be populated largely by elected officials whose ambitions are indiscernible from the ward heeler’s bare minimum, and who won’t or can’t comprehend the notion of supporting reasonable efforts to make the pie bigger for everyone through paying periodic attention to good ideas about economic development proposed by trained and educated pointy-heads who can't be trusted by people who don't customarily read past the funny pages, budget cuts are duly made amid a heroic cacophony of nickel-and-dime political grandstanding.

As correctly identified by Chief Juliot, the inevitable result of this endlessly corrosive cycle of mandated legislative impotence is the slashing of services, which leads us to that most delicious of junctures, as the people so loudly demanding ever smaller government now must explain the prioritizing of resources made necessary by their refusal to pay a few dollars more – and bitching until the cows come home when the ambulance doesn’t show up all time.

Have they considered the re-privatization of fire services, and the re-establishment of fire insurance marking? Wikipedia helpfully explains the way it used to be.

Fire Insurance Marks
Fire insurance marks were lead or copper plaques embossed with the sign of the insurance company, and placed on the front of the insured building as a guide to the insurance company's fire brigade. They are common in the older areas of Britain's and America's cities and larger towns. They were used on the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the days before municipal fire services were formed. The UK marks are called 'Fire insurance plaques' the first to use the mark was the Sun Fire Office before 1700.

American Fire Marks
Fire Insurance has over 200 years of history in America. Famous fires include the Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco of 1906. The early fire marks of Benjamin Franklin's time can still be seen on some Philadelphia buildings as well as in other older American cities. Subscribers paid fire fighting companies in advance for fire protection and in exchange would receive a fire mark to attach to their building. The payments for the fire marks supported the fire fighting companies. If the protected building were to suffer a fire only their fire fighting company would attend the call to extinguish the fire. Even if competitor fire companies were closer to the fire they would not do anything to prevent further damage or extinguish the fire. This caused bad public relations for the fire mark system. Municipal and rural fire departments support by local taxation became a more logical solution.

Here and now, in the contemporary Norquistian era of rampant selfishness disguised as reasoned doctrine, and where no one wants to pay for anything except their half-dozen weekly trips to Wally World, it looks like we’re back to old way of doing things, Mafioso-cum-protection style, to wit:

Need a fire put out, or a cop to come take the gun away from your meth-crazed stepson? Well, we sure hope you're taken the necessary advance steps to procure service contracts and insurance. Otherwise, we can't help you ... and anyone who can remember what a civilized society resembled, you may wish to pack enough heat to keep the wolves at bay until the monthly check clears.

And guess who will be hurt the most by such a system of non-governance?

The very same downtrodden people who Steve Price says he’s trying to protect from the 21st century. In an irony-free zone, neither he nor they are likely ever to awaken and figure that part out.