ON THE AVENUES: As Admiral Gahan steers his Speck study into the Bermuda Triangle, crewmen Padgett, Stumler and Caesar grimly toss all the rum overboard.
A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
“(Two-way streets) are being driven by about a handful of people that want to be able to turn right onto Bank Street from Elm Street."
-- Bob Caesar (exact quote, 2013)
It happened last Saturday, during the second of three scheduled public exercises bizarrely dedicated to flaunting City Hall’s all-encompassing political cowardice, and which have been hailed somewhat euphemistically as “forums,” designed to extract input about Jeff Speck’s downtown street network reform proposals, while answering neither a single earnest question, nor clearing even the lowest imaginable bar in terms of overall public education.
City Hall evidently views these meetings as tactical exercises. You can tell by the abundance of white flags.
As the forum neared its end, and the ostensibly presiding Bored of Works began openly contemplating lunch, perennially bloviating civic value extractor Jim Padgett yet again took the podium to argue that because at some undetermined juncture on a far-off future day, a single Padgett truck might experience inconvenience by being forced to wait a few minutes to make a turn, the remainder of the city must be held in a condition of abject bondage, and forced to wait forever.
Why? Obviously, it’s because Padgett’s business interests, and the similar interests of a handful of fellow Ayn Randian trucking fetishists, far outstrip anyone else’s interest in New Albany, anyone else’s investment in New Albany, and anyone else’s plain presence in New Albany. It’s all about Padgett, not you or me.
Hence the extreme irony in Padgett’s narcissism, because if
Speck’s street grid reform proposals miraculously are not sloppily aborted by the shameless pusillanimity of a City Hall frightened of its own cowering shadow, the measures are designed precisely to stimulate and speed along a municipal revival that already has been initiated with extensive private investment, and if thus abetted and for once genuinely supported, the revival eventually stands to inflate the value of Padgett’s own sadly misplaced downtown industrial properties, to an extent that his company might simultaneously relocate to a better transit location by an interstate somewhere (anywhere is fine – I hear Myanmar is wicked cheap in springtime), while converting his current acreage filled with machines and trucks into a massive redevelopment payday to benefit actual living people.
But this is New Albany, and increased value for all, as opposed to a few, is something to be feared and loathed, and so City Hall seems committed to a cynical strategy of taking any notion of hope fostered by the Speck study and tossing is like a scrap of rancid meat into the howling scrum, so that after we’ve all mauled each other, Jeff Gahan as Noble Squire can stride onto center stage and take credit for the healing “compromise solution” to a festering mess he has created.
It’s a cute Disney script, all right, but did Gahan ever receive the pressing memo about a revolution of rising expectations in the city’s historic core -- or did ranking minion David Duggins spot it first, lying there atop the toilet tank in the executive washroom, and suddenly realize that he might someday be held to a higher contemporary creative economic development standard than that which suffices to throw wads of endlessly reprintable taxpayer money at the smoldering tire tracks of an already departing Pillsbury?
Is so, then the memo probably got hauled away with the rubble of 922 Culbertson, never to be seen again.
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Imagine the hilarity if I were to produce a blacksmith to lecture Padgett on the quality of his trucking fleet’s tires, prior to it being revealed that the blacksmith actually is a purveyor of twenty-mule teams.
On Saturday morning, Padgett amusingly played a desperation card from Bob “My Way Is the Interstate Highway Every Day” Caesar’s well-worn deck of antebellum Luddite tricks, referring somewhat vaguely to “research" dating to ancient times (2005), as compiled by the
American Dream Coalition, which is a component of the Independence Institute’s Center for the American Dream.
Check out the donor list. It’s like a who’s who of crusted centerfolds in the magazines stashed beneath Kerry Stemler’s yellowed mattress.
The Independence Institute's Center for the American Dream opposes zoning in cities, and argues against Colorado's rail public transit initiative called Fastracks, saying that 'rail transit reduces the livability of every urban area in which it is found.'
The
American Dream Coalition is a predictably vapid yawner from a Potemkin think tank, deploying the same cooked data once solemnly cited by a caterwauling
Caesar at a forgettable city council meeting, as lifted at the time from something outlandishly called the Thoreau Institute. The tired screeds are aynonymous because there is a common shill to these oligarchy front groups, a fellow named Randal O'Toole.
Randal O'Toole's self-styled 'Thoreau Institute' lies at the core of his ferocious jihad against urban planning, Smart Growth, New Urbanism, public transport, and rail transit (a jihad that he also promotes through spin-offs and front groups such as his American Dream Coalition).
That’s right. This is what passes for scholarship in Nawbony, where men are men and sheep managed higher SAT scores.
Isn’t it fascinating that as City Hall incessantly soft-pedals the culturally transformational aspect of Speck’s study in favor of wonkishly insisting that Larry Summers patiently explain induced demand as part of Gahan's tragic ORBP pass-through rationale, the city’s Neanderthal right-wingers are cutting straight to the chase and instigating culture war as their pre-emptive reply?
The simplest way to debunk O’Toole’s cockamamie one percenter’s fodder is to consider what motivates him and his various, proliferating “research” institutes: Gobs of money from the very same oil, automotive and construction interests who profit the most from the roadway status quo, and who happily fund entities like the
American Dream Coalition.
Apparently
they’re everywhere.
“Right-wing billionaires, corporations and the Bradley Foundation pay for junk studies that prop up their agenda”
A handy analogy can be seen in the realm of climate science. There are legitimate climate scientists who follow the evidence where it takes them, because they’re being paid to be climate scientists. Then, there are those scientists who are paid to return a verdict against the evidence produced by the legitimate climate scientists.
You know, the ones paid to be political pawns.
In terms of analogy, professional planners like Jeff Speck must be numbered among the former. They are remunerated for their expertise, and run the numbers to see where reality leads them. It’s what Speck did in his study of New Albany.
For-hire polemicists like O’Toole can be classified among the latter. Their wheels are greased to provide “facts” that favor one-way streets and auto-centrism, and obligingly, they manufacture them, so that otherwise intelligent individuals like Padgett, Caesar and Irv Stumler can muster the flimsiest possible backing to declare culture war against modernity.
Impenetrable ironies never cease in New Albany. Stumler slavishly agrees with Padgett, as does Caesar, which is the best indication that ideologically, all three are pure, unadulterated Republicans, and yet as we recall, Stumler ran for mayor as a
Democrat four years ago, and in 2015 opposes Caesar as a
Republican in the 2nd district council race.
That’s right, you abused, long-suffering residents of the 2nd district: Both of your declared council candidates unalterably oppose street grid reform, which means both of them reject enhanced economic development in the core and renewed quality of life in our neighborhoods. It doesn’t matter which one of them wins; either way, you’ll be faced with governance by old and stodgy white males who look to places like Eritrea Haiti and Mississippi for free-market inspiration.
It looks like throwback time for the 2nd district; all the way back to open sewage ditches, leeches and lynchings in the middle of one-way streets for YOU, unless a principled independent candidate can be found, and quick.
Please try to find one.
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I almost forgot, but only because he’s so recurringly and incompetently forgettable.
In September of 2013, the
News and Tribune’s Chris Morris supposedly helped
author an
editorial strongly supporting two way streets and street grid reform.
Yesterday
he published a column expressing alarm that the hoity-toity book readers might be allowed to steal a march on his preferred milieu of father-figure-icon-worshipping datedness.
NAC promptly polled folks in Iceland, and we couldn’t find anyone
there who is surprised at Morris's flip-flop, either, although a woman in Hveragerði questioned whether Morris had actually bothered to read
Speck’s Downtown Street Network report.
Silly Icelandics. Of course he didn’t
read it. It isn’t about
sports, is it?
Put Speck on a baseball card, and maybe then … nah.
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