Campaign silence ends as rental housing code and wi-fi appear on Thursday's council agenda.

It's the mayor!

Throughout the municipal election cycle of 2015, Pavlov's mutt was roused on numerous occasions.

Team Gahan's opponents would point to the mayor's perennial and secretive non-transparency, and both the mayor and his acolytes would deny it. Had Bob Dylan resided in New Albany, it would have been called "Saliva on the Tracks."

The election is over, and Jeff Gahan won. There is a final city council meeting on the schedule this Thursday evening, complete with an ordinance about rental registration and enforcement, and resolution shifting monies previously allocated for a lighting project to an as-yet undefined WiFi installation.

Needless to say, these issues were skirted throughout the year ... until now.

INTRODUCTION OF ORDINANCES:

G-15-05 Ordinance Adopting Chapter 160: Rental Housing Code (Phipps 1&2)

A-15-10 Ordinance for the Appropriation of Riverboat or EDIT Funds for Blessings in a Backpack (Baird 3)

INTRODUCTION OF RESOLUTIONS:

R-15-19 Resolution regarding WIFI (Phipps)

R-15-20 Resolution Approving the Extension of a Sanitation Services Agreement (Zurschmiede)

R-15-21 Second Addendum to Agreement for Collection of Residential Municipal Solid Waste, Recyclables, and Bulk Items in the City of New Albany, Indiana (Zurschmiede)

On Monday, at city attorney Shane "Thesaurus-Free" Gibson's request, the city clerk e-mailed the rental housing "exhibit" to council mailing list recipients. It runs 31 pages and is unusable as a .pdf file. Here are the contents headings:

These might be good developments, and I'd love to be able to provide readers with better background on these matters, but there is little I can do for now. Most of my recent questions to my own city council person go unanswered, and both City Hall and the local Democratic Party have spent the past nine months depicting me as a non-person.

No complaints: Live by the sword, die by scorched earth. I get it. That's life under the occupation, and why the resistance moves underground.

If New Albany had a newspaper, perhaps it might ask these questions. It will not, so I must defer to you, the readers. If you live in New Albany and care about these issues, ask your council person to explain them. Ask Team Gahan to explain them. It's too easy for the functionaries to shut down one voice, so please, at least make them break a sweat.

I'll continue doing what I do, as I'm able. But I need help.

Look: New Gahania is by no means a monolith. 53% of 28% of the city's registered voters opted for Oz. That's roughly 10% of the population as a whole. Jeff Gahan's bizarre cult of personality surely remains ascendant, though it isn't infallible, even if he's been unable to concede a mistake in 12 years.

Keep pushing, and thanks for reading.

NAC Reader Comments 3: On Chattanooga's fiber optic internet system.

NAC reader W read our post, On Helsinki and the importance of internet infrastructure, and offered a wonderful counter-example much closer to home.

Imagine a city that provides EVERY home and business with one GIGABIT PER SECOND fiber optic internet access.

That city is Chattanooga, Tennessee. They have already built the system:
http://chattanoogagig.com
The city built the system on it's own, offering iInternet service 200 times faster than the puny "service" offered by Time Warner. 10 times faster than the US FCC Broadband initiative set for 2025.

Chattanooga is a city with a population of just 167,000 people (40% smaller than Louisville) and they are actively seeking business investment, relocation and growth.

Some town around here will do this. That town will win. Other towns will get to the party late, if at all.

On Helsinki and the importance of internet infrastructure.

"Helsinki's Wi-Fi Is Super Fast, City-Wide—and Free."

Of course, there are caveats. Finland is not America, and government works differently there. Still, as our local economic development officials lob the usual blobs of cash at the usual sheetrock walls to see which ones might stick for a bit, is there a topic more consistently neglected than internet infrastructure?

In a city like ours?

Surely this is the single most frustrating aspect of the ongoing economic development discussion. Ideas for progress toward a "new" economy are never seriously considered. City Hall briefly mentioned working with the city's monopolistic cable provider (itself already obsolete, and an arrangement ripe for a rethink) to offer advance internet infrastructure, but that's as far as it has gone.

Apparently, game changing strategies need not apply.

Rather, we'll continue to accommodate heavy industry's use of the urban street network ... persist in erecting scattershot, disconnected capital intensive projects ... and neglect the city's emerging core of independent small business in favor of subsidizing outside interests.

Why not empower the creativity and possibilities inherent in our own people by studying the feasibility of projects like Helsinki's city-wide Wi-Fi? As it pertains to urban infrastructure, isn't this just as essential it today's economy as streets, sidewalks and sewers?

If we're to survive, how long can we wait to start sniffing outside our self-imposed boxes? Swimming holes are nice, but they're not the harbingers of a new economy, are they?

Helsinki's Wi-Fi Is Super Fast, City-Wide—and Free. It will make the Wi-Fi you pay for at home look sluggish, by Leo Mirani (City Lab)

... Helsinki’s excellent internet infrastructure is the result of some forward thinking on the part of the city, says Micah Gland of Helsinki Business Hub, an organization that promotes the city. When Helsinki’s city government was installing Wi-Fi in its offices and other facilities, it decided to concurrently install open networks for public use. According to Petri Otranen, who runs IT for the city administration, it was built in 2006 before the capital hosted a meeting of Asian and European heads of state.

The result is not necessarily blanket coverage, but wherever there is a building or space controlled by the city, there is Wi-Fi coverage. And it isn’t particularly expensive. Otranen says the cost is included in overall maintenance of the city’s internet and is not broken out separately, though Simo Volanen of Helsinki’s IT department estimates that the outside base stations cost some €40,000 to buy and install ($45,000) and have an annual maintenance cost of about €4,000. This does not include the cost of running the network, which Helsinki does for its own purposes in any case.

Evening News uses the "P" word; Citizens Faux Accountability threatens remonstrance.

Shea Van Hoy does the impossible. He looks at the calendar, notices it is 2010, and draws patently obvious conclusions from verifiable experiences outside the narrow boundaries of our locality. But then he ruins it all and uses that damned pesky "P" word. Subscriptions will be threatened!

CHEERS ... to Clarksville’s plans to turn a mile-long stretch of Eastern Boulevard into a Wi-Fi hotspot, once renovations are complete there.

People out and about along the soon-to-be-new roadway’s sidewalks and nearby will be able to get free Internet access from laptops, netbooks or phones.

But, the real lure should be for businesses, which can choose to pay to tap in to a fast connection that they then could use to entice customers. As progressive cities have learned, it’s a valid economic development tool.