Watch this: How to build a toll-free bridge in one week, at Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park.

Thanks, S.

"The Floyd County Parks & Recreation Department and The Floyd County Commissioners are building the Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park. A Contech CON/SPAN O-Series precast concrete bridge was selected for the main entrance. This video details the installation of the precast EXPRESS Foundations footings, the precast CON/SPAN bridge units, and the precast CON/SPAN headwalls and wingwalls. This installation was completed in April 2016."

The link: Floyd County - Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park CON/SPAN Bridge Installation Video.

See also:

Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park groundbreaking ceremony.

Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park groundbreaking ceremony.

The News and Tribune's Chris Morris gives good preview here. Today's ceremony was well attended, and there couldn't have been a better November day for it. The site is behind Northside Christian, on what must be one of the last perfectly flat undeveloped bits of acreage below the Knobs.

The park is an appropriate honor for Kevin, who was a longtime (combined) parks board member and a great supporter of the parks and recreation ideal.

Zirin: "Gentrification Is the Real Scandal Surrounding Jackie Robinson West."

In wintertime, daily life in the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness often revolves around sports. Last week, it was a debate about the politics of Little League.

... Little League Baseball confirmed the news on Wednesday, forcing Illinois' All-Stars (Jackie Robinson West) to vacate its U.S. Championship over Nevada and Great Lakes Valley Regional victory over Indiana. The announcement also declared New Albany a Great Lakes Valley champion, the town's first such honor.

Fulfilling my duty as resident civic contrarian, let's pole-vault past the cacophonous blather about scandalous adult cheating, childhood heartache, overdue victory parades and selective exurban zoning. Rather, let's look at a different side of the story.

Gentrification Is the Real Scandal Surrounding Jackie Robinson West, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

 ... As for the decision itself, ironies abound. Jackie Robinson West was the first entirely black team to represent the United States in the Little League World Series. And yes, waiting until Black History Month to strip JRW of their title is at best tin-eared. But that insult shouldn’t blind us to the greater injury. Recall their damnable offense: Jackie Robinson West didn’t use 16-year-old ringers or cork their bats. They had players suit up who lived “beyond their geographical boundary.” The fact that the adults in charge of JRW felt the need to breach this rule perhaps has something to do with the fact that today’s urban landscape supports baseball about as well as concrete makes proper soil for orchids. A plurality of Major Leaguers is made up of people from either the US suburbs or the baseball factories of the Dominican Republic. Many of the few African-American players on Major League rosters actually come from the suburbs. This is because twenty-first-century neoliberal cities have gentrified urban black baseball to death. Boys and Girls Clubs have become bistros. Baseball fields are condos and in many cities, Little League is non-existent. The public funds for the infrastructure that baseball demands simply do not exist, but the land required for diamonds are the crown jewels of urban real estate. That’s what made JRW such a profound anomaly. In Chicago particularly, which under Mayor Rahm Emanuel has seen school closures and brutal cuts to physical education programs, their success made people believe that—with apologies to Tupac—flowers could in fact grow in concrete.

Little League snorer: Gahan's tiny tot baseball analogies argue against his own swimming pool fixation.

Mayor Jeff Gahan's argument that underprivileged inner city children stand to be disenfranchised by a county-dominated Little League park on the outskirts appears almost reasonable at first glance. There are grains of truth to it. And yet selectivity always applies, doesn't it?

Baseball for a  relative handful, vs. recreation for the many children who won't ever play organized sports?

An ongoing obsession with parks, vs. everyday infrastructure improvements that would benefit the quality of life for more children than just those playing sports?

Can we do things to help improve their minds, too? Might this lift the community in ways that extend slightly beyond civic pride when a team miraculously advances in the tournament?

Embarrassingly (and predictably), Gahan's pro-inner city baseball argument eloquently weighs AGAINST the stated justifications for his own aquatics center, which is intended as the crowning glory of a parks-first "quality of life" program that no one can remember ever being part and parcel of Gahan's mayoral run.

Clearly, a city parks empire has been the main thrust of Gahan's term to date. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, apart from its gaping absence during the campaign, and of course the multitudinous contradictions inherent in declaring certain areas deserving of special park-related QOL TLC, while the possibilities of deploying the city's entire street and road system toward precisely the same purpose are pushed to a seemingly perpetual back burner.

Frankly, it's also disappointing that Jeff Speck would choose this of all situations to lend his prestigious voice. Perhaps he doesn't yet understand the timidity with which this administration is likely to "implement" his recommendations, and the cowardly politics of heavy pass-through trucking fellatio currently driving City Hall's non-street passivity. It would be interesting to know Speck's view on the aquatics center.

Yet again, plans and expenditures are calibrated on "bread and circus" assumptions: You'll forget all about the annoyances of daily life in New Albany if you're given a few part-time bells and whistles: A park here, a concert there, Harvest Homecoming's annual pillage of downtown, a "dilapidated" building's removal in favor of cheaply built houses that City Hall couldn't bother telling us about until after the fact.

There are opportunity costs associated with these backroom decisions, and because they're kept as non-transparent as possible, too little public input is received. What might have been done differently for greater gain? It's never about the daily undertow, and always about "special" achievements of the sort upon which plaques can be affixed and Democratic Party fundraising prefigured.

Plastic whiffleball bat, meet Felix Hernandez.

Gahan: Little League struck out looking with new park; City offered essentially same plan at no cost to Little League, by Daniel Suddeath (Jeffersonville Examiner)

NEW ALBANY — If the goal of New Albany Little League is to better serve the entire city by constructing a new complex outside the municipal limits, the organization has struck out, Mayor Jeff Gahan said.

In fact, it was essentially “rung up looking,” to use a baseball analogy, by moving forward with a plan that will isolate disadvantaged kids from Little League’s main facility, he said Friday in response to recent approvals by municipal boards of the organization’s proposal.

New Albany kiddie athletics: More money than balls.

It's only a matter of time until the News and 'Bune's Chris Morris gratefully defers to his county elder political heroes on this issue, so let's instead look at the story as reported by Grace Schneider of the Courier-Journal.

New Albany mayor, Little League at odds over location of new ballpark complex

New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan and the leaders of the New Albany Little League are locked in a battle over competing plans to build a new youth baseball and softball complex.

Both the city and New Albany Little League officials have released statements saying they intend to build ballfield complexes — and each is criticizing the other’s plans.

NAC co-editor Jeff Gillenwater's thoughts at Facebook mirror my own.

All the backdoor scheming to move New Albany Little League out of New Albany reflects very poorly on county government, the Little League, the new Floyd County Parks Board, and the Horseshoe Foundation. It represents some of the ugliest politics I've seen in Floyd County, every Little League parent stereotype proven true ... people who use the terms "Little League" and "economic driver" interchangeably should be banned from activities involving children.

But the issues go deeper. In a city noted for its chaotic, poorly plotted and frankly archaic street grid, one that reduces humans choosing not to travel by automobile to a degraded status as second-class citizens, the Redevelopment Commission has indicated that up to $19 million might be bonded for aquatics, soccer and Little League ball fields.

Owing to the comprehensive absence of transportation infrastructure not exclusively dependent on private cars, all of these recreation facilities, if built, will require even more auto-centric infrastructure to use than we have now ... and what we have now needs to be drastically altered.

All this money for sports, and just two years ago, didn't the departing England administration insists that the million bucks or so needed to facilitate downtown street conversions simply couldn't be found?

It becomes increasingly evident that prioritization has been removed from the gene pool of the city's political culture.

What's missing isn't money. It's balls ... and I'm not talking about the kind you fungo, either.

Before the meeting, let's think about differing qualities of life.

In today’s ‘Bama Ad Coagulator, Chris Morris considers the millions of dollars transferred from Horseshoe Casino (formerly Caesar’s) to Floyd County over a 13-year period.

Echoing recent words in the same forum by career politician and chronic board sitter Mark Seabrook, Chris placed the Horseshoe Foundation, dispensing agent of the gaming largesse, at the very pinnacle of local indispensability.

Honestly, I don’t know where we would be as a community without the grants handed out by the Horseshoe Foundation. Obviously, there would be no YMCA, no college scholarships and many organizations would have had to learn to do without a new furnace, a church steeple or funding for a baseball league for disabled children. The organization has made such a positive impact on this community, a community that not once, but twice said no, we don’t want you.

In a way it screams hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy?

Is that what it’s called when pundits like Chris remain aloof from politics until it’s time to “scream” their blanket refusal to pay a penny more in higher taxes, and then, spinning on a thin dime, commend the casino for filling their own funding voids?

But I digress.

Chris’s purpose in writing is to note that Mayor Jeff Gahan has asked the Foundation for “major moves” monetary assistance in financing an aquatics center and/or a little league baseball complex.

I have no idea whether Mayor Gahan will have his wish granted. If he does, it would help New Albany move forward with building a new aquatic center or Little League park. That would be nice since Jeffersonville and Clarksville have state-of-the-art swimming facilities and Little League complexes. New Albany always seems to be a step behind when it comes to quality-of-life projects, with the YMCA a notable exception.

It took me a second reading before I realized why this paragraph is so annoying – and it isn’t restricted to Chris Morris's phrasing.

Rather, it’s this persistent, unquestioned notion on the part of self-assigned movers and shakers that the highest civic priority when it comes to “quality-of-life” issues is the same old kneejerk-as-usual pablum: The benign “niceness” of swimming and baseball, and the accompanying tendency of the powers that be to lapse into dazed stupor at the very suggestion that prioritizing basic everyday infrastructures of living, from transport to design to neighborhoods, addresses “quality-of-life” issues far more comprehensively than parks and recreation force-fed into a vacuum.

Me? My quality of life is reflected by whether I can bike or walk city streets that are just as much mine as yours, and do so without being struck by chaotic cars. Complete these streets, and my quality of life skyrockets, and at a fraction of the cost required to build and maintain aquatics centers and ball fields.

In this scenario, the quality of life improves for everyone who lives in our urban neighborhoods, not just those who do the backstroke or swat horsehide. Make the whole city a recreational area, and we’re getting somewhere, as well as attracting the like-minded to move here and be a part of it.

I’m constantly reminded of my irrelevance by people with the surname Anonymous, and so it may or may not matter to anyone that I’m opposed to these grandiose ideas of aquatics and baseball until the current administration takes the time to explain its plan (there is one, right?) for finishing the work we’ve begun downtown; for completing the streets and preparing for the toll evasion dullard onslaught to come; and for improving our neighborhoods.

Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.

And Horseshoe Foundation board members who may be reading: Some tough love, please.

Look to the county, not Community Park, for Little League needs.

I'm a fervent baseball fan, as diehard as they come, and I played Little League myself, but notions of draining the lake at Community Park to build ball fields smack of sheer desperation at this point.

Yes, I feel the pain of the Little League proponents, but the economic climate is not favorable, and the money -- if it existed at all -- surely would be better spent on outdoor recreational opportunities suitable for all residents, not just the ones playing and watching baseball. Community Park is a commons, and should remain one.

New Albany Little League eyes new home; Idea has been discussed, but move to Community Park is unlikely, by Chris Morris.

... “We don’t have a master plan yet. We are just trying to see what will work,” (Troy) Striegel said. “Maybe we can come up with a couple of options” ...

... Floyd County Council President Ted Heavrin said he understands the need, but said it would be difficult to build a Little League complex at Community Park.

“It would take a lot of the park to build that kind of complex. And you can’t build under those power lines out there,” he said. Heavrin also said there are better options in the county, “but nobody is going to give it [land] to them.”

I'll hand this one to Heavrin, because he's right. A county solution, while not free, makes the most sense to me. It's where the land is.

At the same time, today's article is another wake up call for the city of New Albany. All of us need to begin the mental re-education process of identifying Community Park as an iconic green asset that stands to grow in value as the years pass, not just as a remaining collection of land suitable for better use as something else when the mood strikes.

One last brief consideration, and I'm off to Indy for my guild meeting.

Seeing as my business lies just around the corner from the current Mt. Tabor Road baseball complex, I've had many years to observe the Little League phenomenon of parking cars on the street to be as near to the field as possible.

Road widening evidently would "squeeze" the diamonds and cost a few parking spaces used by parents and followers, and yet within a few hundred yards, there are parking lots aplenty -- at K-Mart and Kroger, among others.

If I'm reading this correctly, the fields already there are usable, if not state of the art (some of the places I played growing up resembled glacial moraines more than ballfields), and to require folks to walk a hundred yards does not seem out of the question. It's a sport, after all, so walk.

County solutions, anyone?