Gahan commits violence against our most vulnerable because our most beautiful can't get enough of "sanitary conditions."

It was another morning among many, walking back home from work, entertaining myself by watching as drivers of automobiles routinely violated the traffic rules, all the while ready to turn into road-raging beasts if a solitary bicyclist were to do the same by rolling through a stop sign, when from the shadows emerged a gargantuan 300-pound male pedaling frantically atop a terribly creaky ten-year-old’s bike.

This is the sort of contemporary phenomenon that eludes comprehension, these full-grown adults on kiddie bikes, and yes, I’ve certainly heard the litany of their vagrancy, drug abuse and petty thievery. Some of it may even be true, and deprivation in one of its numerous sanctioned forms surely plays a part, although I insist on thinking it goes deeper.

I believe they're the dispossessed protesting against the current reign of the fashionistas, or as I've termed them previously, the "beautiful" people.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Is there a -cracy word for government by the beautiful people?

... To me the term "beautiful people" is decidedly pejorative.

It's inevitably the people who fancy themselves as beautiful, not necessarily in some accepted sense of outwardly physical beauty, but those possessing the right ideas, the right look, the right connections and the right way of viewing their privileged place in the world.

Obviously I reserve the right to heatedly differ with "right" in these contexts, extolling a alternative definition in the process.

As an awkward and ungainly ugly duckling of a book reader, I've learned the hard way that trying to fit in with the beautiful people is a fool's errand. Whenever I've tried it, the story has ended badly.

I'm not sure whether these experiences made me into a defiant jaded contrarian or the other way around, but there we are. I've become fairly contemptuous of the self-centered milieu of the beautiful people, who know far less about the world than they profess, and who tend to dismiss the "little people" -- and this may be one reason why Donald Trump is president, among other things.

There are beautiful people and homeless people, and almost axiomatically, never the twain shall meet. In fact the beautiful people tend to view the homeless people as blotches to be removed, lest property values plunge and visitors come to believe we weren't taught about deodorant.

To close this post, give it up for this blog's co-editor, who has a knack for finding the center of the target.

---

We were out of town when Mayor Gahan lied to and then destroyed a community of homeless people here in New Albany. His personal actions and the usual lack of substantive response from other Democratic officials are deplorable but not at all surprising given their consistent track records of subsidizing the wealthy while seeking to limit or penalize nearly everyone else. 

What’s mostly gone unremarked, though, owing to them being wholly unremarkable in this country, are the other lessons again made clear: 

1. It’s not just possible but highly probable for working people to be unable to afford a decent place to live. 

2. Medical situations to which we are all susceptible make and help keep people homeless every day.

I’m sure, via occasional donations, thoughts and prayers, etc., some of you think you’re offering support for the homeless. The fact is, though, there isn’t a single good and justifiable reason why the factors above need to be true. When we continue to respect and re-elect a leadership class that doesn’t support a living wage and universal health care, we are choosing to make people’s lives look and function like the photos and videos we’ve all seen too much of lately. We are choosing, in the wealthiest empire to ever exist, to set the humanitarian baseline so low that “unsafe, unsanitary” housing camps are accepted as a “natural” consequence of our systemic beliefs and actions. 

Year after year, a bulk of the American voting public, regardless of party and desperately clung-to delusional self-images, actively chooses and reinforces numerous forms of poverty and violence. It’s what we electorally say we want and it’s precisely what we get.

For Gauleiter Duggins and Dear Leader, it's all about the timetable to transform Riverview Tower into luxury with a view.

We hope Mr. Straw and his dog are doing okay.

The news story is weirdly disjointed, with the perspective shifting too quickly from a cursory look at the fire at Riverview Tower and ensuing hospitalizations, to the ludicrously overpaid public housing commissar David Duggins' eagerness to indulge in yet another round of Team Gahan's nauseous public housing virtue signaling.

Gahanites always cover their own bedraggled asses first, don't they? Problem is the News and Tribune always lets them get away with it. Why is that?

Riverview Tower fire contained to kitchen, by Chris Morris

One person remains in hospital

NEW ALBANY — The fire at Riverview Tower in New Albany on Thursday, when three people were taken to the hospital, was contained to the kitchen area of the apartment.

Firefighters arrived around 8 p.m. to the fire in apartment 1203 at Riverview Tower and were able to contain the blaze. The unit's kitchen was heavily damaged by fire and smoke. Firefighters rescued Jeff Straw, who lived in the apartment, along with his dog. He remains in the hospital after suffering smoke inhalation. His dog was taken to a local veterinarian for treatment.

Verily, the stage is being set.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Are city officials really talking about selling Riverview Tower for luxury redevelopment? Trump might want a piece of THIS action.

Duggins said the outdated 44-year-old facility continues to deteriorate. The building is still being operated by temporary electrical service after last summer's fire, which displaced residents for more than a week. "We won't build units this size again," he said. "These units are just too small and residents have no storage."

It's hard to imagine the 44-year-old Riverview Tower being in worse condition than maligned Communist housing blocks in Eastern Europe, where rehabs are not an exception but the rule. Turns out the bones aren't as bad as thought.

Gdansk and the Falowiecs: "Can Poland’s Faded Brutalist Architecture Be Redeemed?"

Long derided as relics of an oppressive regime, the country’s Communist-era buildings are being given a second look, and a new life.

Doesn't it defy even this blog's high levels of skepticism to imagine that the architects and builders erecting Riverview in the mid-1970s didn't consider 16-story safety as part of the design process?

Duggins said the hope is to build four-story buildings where each unit would have a balcony, allowing residents to have more than one way to evacuate in case of a fire. "This is a 16-story building with a 160 units; any emergency is a real issue," he said. "There is only one way out of those apartments. Any small fire could be catastrophic in nature."

Will these four-story buildings replace Riverview at the current footprint, or will they be scattered around town at the many commercial properties NAHA currently is acquiring?

It's a follow-up question Morris might have asked, but of course, no.

Duggins said he is in weekly discussion with officials with the Department of Housing and Urban Development about Riverview's future. He said it would likely be a year before any decision is made on the building. He said he tries to meet with residents weekly to dispel any rumors about the facility's future.

He said he is no longer leasing units at Riverview because of the building's uncertainty. There are currently 60 vacant units in the building.

"Regardless of the plan, we wouldn't have to move folks for at least a year," Duggins said. "We just need to do a better job of communicating with residents .... we have their best interest in mind."

Whether Team Gahan's secretive final preferred outcome for Riverview Tower is outright demolition or its spiffy renovation for market rate housing (read: no more poor people enjoying great views), is there any doubt that chicanery is afoot?

You just don't move the back alley redevelopment fixer to public housing if helping people is the ultimate goal.

He said HUD is moving toward public/private partnerships, which include tax credits, in the future.

Morris' article ends abruptly with this reference to HUD, and so here's an article that explains Ben Carson's view of public/private partnerships.

It's too bad about the closing of the Arby's on Charlestown Road, because one gets the impression that Jeff Gahan, Duggins and Carson could enjoy a nice meal together there ... and come to a gentleman's agreement about the future of luxury in New Albany.

HUD secretary counters criticism that only rich benefit from public-private partnerships, by Dorothy Mills-Gregg (Market Watch)

WASHINGTON — Public-private partnerships are not just benefiting the wealthy but helping low-income areas, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson told a crowded ballroom on Tuesday at the annual National League of Cities conference.

“Some people have complained that, you know, it’s a mechanism for the rich to increase their wealth,” Carson said. “Well, what they don’t understand is rich people are going to take their money, and they’re going to invest it somewhere, so why not incentivize them to invest it into areas that have been economically neglected and deprived.”

He said HUD is “providing full autonomy” to local jurisdictions and encouraging public-private partnerships like the public housing maintenance program, Rental Assistance Demonstration, and tax incentives.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The My Scratch & Dent building has not changed ownership -- at least yet, but Loop Island luxury might depend on it.

The Green Mouse awoke to a tip.

Here is something for the Green Mouse to look into. Rumor has it the My Scratch & Dent property on Silver Street recently was bought by the company who built the Breakwater.

That'd be Flaherty and Collins out of Indianapolis, and this rumor almost surely reflects tangible back-alley spitballing on the part of forever secretive Team Gahan operatives and profit-seeking companies located elsewhere.

However, as of this precise moment the My Scratch & Dent property and the one immediately to the east of it (outlined in blue above) are owned by a company called Nickelin LLC.

You'll see that Nickelin LLC is Joe Zeller; Zeller owns Tiger Trucking, and uses these two properties for truck parking and all-purpose filth distribution.

2015 photo.

On the one hand, Tiger Trucking is no fan of Gahan's; on the other, everyone has their price. It appears that Nickelin LLC purchased these two properties in 2004 for $2.4 million. It's hard to imagine Flaherty and Collins, or any other well-heeled developers, buying these on their own dime. Tax Increment Financing? That's another story, even before the sewer tap-in waiver gifting.

To complete the overview, here are a few seemingly random news items from the past few years.

1. Mayor Gahan seizes the New Albany Housing Authority and includes NAHA's Riverside Terrace apartments -- the housing authority's newest and best units, outlined in yellow above -- on the wish-to-demolish list, confusing even Ben Carson, whose HUD agency wags a prohibitive finger.

2. After long, grinding years of 2:00 a.m. phone calls and drunk texting, the Horseshoe Foundation agrees to give Gahan a few million bucks if he'd just stop harassing it. Part of the lucre goes toward purchasing the Loop Island Wetlands (outlined in red) to be the next crown jewel for the city's quality-of-life, loss-leading parks system.

3. Taking control of the wetlands property, city officials conclude (connive?) that the major impediment to luxury development is the historic brick Moser Tannery building, which would be cost-ineffective to renovate by the matchstick 'n' sheet rock developers of the contemporary. With the city's historic preservationist contingent distracted and bedazzled by the ongoing Reisz Mahal high end city hall project, Moser Tannery doesn't stand a chance, and conveniently is torched -- presumably by the very same homeless people Gahan claims don't exist in his city. One of them probably is named Dmitrov.

4. Clark County finally succeeds in completing the bridge over Silver Creek, connecting the Ohio River Greenway to Clarksville and Jeffersonville, and enhancing the value of every projected "luxury" development in the vicinity.

Nothing against My Scratch & Dent, where we've shopped in the past, but quite obviously Nickelin's/Zeller's two poorly maintained properties are the next barrier to Gahan's skin-deep dreams of Loop Island opulence, as the Moser Tannery and NAHA's building were before this. The tannery is dust; give him another term, and he'll probably come up with a work-around to displace the Riverside Terrace occupants.

Or, conversely, you can #FireGahan2019 and restore a modicum of sanity to the existing megalomania and power trips. 

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Are city officials really talking about selling Riverview Tower for luxury redevelopment? Trump might want a piece of THIS action.

In Nawbany, the satire writes itself, as with this startling revelation from 2017.

Interim executive housing director Duggins eagerly welcomes student nurses to Riverview Tower.

After all, most everything of what little Duggins knows about anything he learned from Bill Clinton -- probably at Keeneland.

ON THE AVENUES: Could that be David Duggins paddling across Jeff Gahan's putrid cesspool? On second thought, I'll take the blindfold.

Let's review: In 2017 Jeff Gahan staged a hostile takeover of the New Albany Housing Authority, thus escalating the heart rate of every old white guy in town of Gahan's own vintage who'd spent the past 50 years insisting that if we could just remove the poor (read: mostly black) people, this town finally could be something. 

Seeing as Duggins already had assembled all the fixes our creaking TIF areas could allow while merrily monetizing at redevelopment, Gahan transferred our favorite Clark County transplant to NAHA, where he could abuse real human beings rather than funding and branding mechanisms.

File under "TASER Humor from Overpaid Functionaries."

Week in review: Jeff Gahan created the Duggins debacle at NAHA, so stop normalizing his efforts to remain aloof.

In 2018, things got really interesting.

Duggins spreads blame, manure as the air conditioning at Riverview Towers fails on HIS watch.

"I'm electric," says a kite-bearing Duggins to Riverview residents as Gahan disappears into yonder bunker.

Duggins, Gahan log into Priceline Dot Com as Riverview Towers residents are evacuated.

This brings us to the present day.

Queue the cattle cars, because Riverview Tower will be the next pawn in City Hall's luxury enhancement crusade.

From the moment we heard about the public housing putsch two years ago, Gahan's uncharacteristically transparent rationale was obvious.

1. Ship out the unsightly poor people living there -- and who cares where they go?

2. Use that land for luxury "redevelopment" in the vital cause of pay-to-play campaign finance enhancement.

For the cynics, stalker, trolls and creeps (gypsies, tramps and thieves?) populating the fevered corridors of NA Confidential, this meant one prime goal above all others.

The nevermindset of selected bloviators like Gahan and Duggins -- not to mention their hordes of slobbering sycophants and eager campaign donors -- might be encapsulated as "poor people simply don't deserve such a nice view, and we might far better deploy prime real estate for the elites." In short, Riverview Tower always was going to be the centerpiece of the NAHA takeover.

The NAHA putsch was many things, among them sheer expedience. Donald Trump had been elected, and he'd presumably appoint wastrels of his own to look the other way as HUD was summarily pillaged. Who better than Trump to empathize with Gahan's lamentation about the uselessness of a nice view if only wretched poor people have it?

What's more, if Gahan didn't act quickly in early 2017, Bob Lane might have been on the verge of succeeding in his long-sought goal of rejuvenating public/affordable local housing on a 1:1 basis, this being anathema to ranking local Democrats who've never been democratic at all when it comes to the challenges facing plain folks -- and especially for Gahan, who would not receive proper ego-brushing for Lane's hard work.

That's because Adamization means gentrification, and Gahanism embraces loads of cash far beyond the disposable income of minimum wage employees, hence our prediction about the probable outcome of Riverview Towers, which we made from the very start of the putsch.

Under normal circumstances, there'd be no way to co-opt Riverview Tower, but by seizing NAHA in Our Time of Trump, banishing Lane and packing the governing mechanism with gutless lickspittles, Gahan engineered the possibility with extreme opportunism.

• emphasize Riverview Tower's irreparable physical problems, blaming them on predecessors while ignoring more recent screw-ups committed by his own handpicked regime
• scatter the Tower's residents for their own good (as Gauleiter Duggins openly signaled to the forever inattentive Chris Morris of the local chain newspaper)
• sell off the property for for the sort of "luxury" high-rise development that's eternally more conducive to the engorged mayoral sense of self-importance than any conceivable dose of Viagra

All this has been written previously, and the Green Mouse is the first to admit that when we first began discussing the mayor's Riverview Tower adaptive luxury reuse plan, it was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. However, as the months passed, Luxury Riverview became ever more plausible.

Now an insider has informed the Mouse that far from being imaginary, these musings are real, and ranking NAHA officials recently have been overheard discussing precisely just such an outcome for the building.  

After all, the mayor has promised a slew of exciting new revelations during this, his majesty's electoral re-enthronement drive of 2019.

To be clear, currently this is classified as RUMOR. We've no proof, at least yet. But it's clearly something that could be done, and fits the DemoDisneyDixiecrat mantra.

In Nawbany, the satire writes itself -- but does life imitate satire?

#FireGahan2019

Meme wars erupt as the Reisz Mahal tops the Tom May Content Multiplier's list of top five reasons not to vote for Jeff Gahan in 2019.

As a New Year's resolution for 2019, let's work together to ensure that every last elected official responsible for the Reisz Mahal luxury government center expenditure is defeated at the polls.

Now, roll those memes.

Fire them all, each and every one, but first, kindly allow me to fix Morris' opening sentence.

There were many important stories during 2018 in New Albany and Floyd County, but only the most milquetoast made the News and Tribune cut as the biggest and most news worthy.

Accordingly, the choice is yours. You can hit the link and use one of your newspaper visit credits to read the cursory content, or you can save it for when Tom May gets another column in the Jeffersonville First publication.

Me? I'm having a refreshing adult libation instead, because life's too short for serial inanity.

Reisz building plans top list of 2018's top Floyd County stories, by Chris Morris (Tom May Content Proliferator)

NEW ALBANY — There were many important stories during 2018 in New Albany and Floyd County, but only five made the News and Tribune cut as the biggest and most news worthy.

Ranking these five proved to be more difficult than choosing them.

However, maybe the one that drew the most interest, both for and against, was the city's decision to leave the City-County Building at the end of next year. City offices will be moving from the third floor of the City-County Building into the old Reisz Furniture building at 148 E. Main St., which is currently being renovated.

Other stories making the cut include Sazerac Company buying the vacant General Mills plant off Grant Line Road, the opening of the Kevin Hammersmith Memorial Park and the New Albany Little League moving to the facility, a new Green Valley Elementary School opening and the old one being torn down, and the passage of a jail tax by the Floyd County Council to help pay for upkeep to a renovated jail.

Some stories that were also worthy of mention were the brush fires in the spring, Brad Snyder being named superintendent of the New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corp., ongoing building problems at Riverview Tower, the new digital library branch and Mansion on Main assisted living facility opening late this year.

Queue the cattle cars, because Riverview Tower will be the next pawn in City Hall's luxury enhancement crusade.

Satire alert: Trump tells Gahan,
"I can fix your Riverview Tower problem."

It's another underachieving puff piece by Chris Morris, who someday might consider ASKING some of those questions referenced in the banner, although if he did, journalism might break out — and then what?

Can we be honest? The Jeffersonville newspaper as currently constituted displays no interest in what lies beneath the Team Gahan's public machinations.

Morris invariably accepts what he's told by people with whom he's schmoozed for decades. In terms of information, it's a closed loop. The newspaper should be comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable; instead, it hoists a series of feel-good stories amid just enough Pavlovian click bait (crime and drugs and roundabouts, oh my!) to juice its advertisers -- which include THE CITY OF NEW ALBANY.

Meanwhile, Jeff Gahan is far more concerned with affixing blame to decapitated predecessors for Riverview's deteriorating condition than manning up to own the crisis sparked by his own ill-considered hostile takeover of public housing.

Gahan's is the least transparent mayor in the city's history, but when it comes to greed, his intent cannot be disguised.

If Riverview Tower is doomed owing to irreparable physical problems, then residents can be scattered for their own good (as Gauleiter Duggins ineptly signaled to the inattentive reporter, below). The building would come down, and then the property sold for for the sort of "luxury" high-rise development that's eternally more conducive to the engorged mayoral ego than any conceivable dose of Viagra.

It's "why he's here," forever fascinated by those bright shiny baubles capable of generating campaign funds, as opposed to actual human beings and their needs, which he simply cannot fathom in a month of Sundays.

By the way, hasn't Duggins long since shed the "interim" prefix?

It's a permanent, stupefyingly overpaid position at this point ... well, at least until January of 2020, when a new mayor graciously will allow Duggins to seek his panacea of a comfy sinecure in the private sector, and the next in a series of dismally failed career moves.

Questions still surround Riverview Tower in New Albany, by Chris Morris

 .. David Duggins, interim director of the New Albany Housing Authority, said Riverview is currently being serviced by a temporary electrical system. He said it would cost $4 million-plus to make a permanent fix and redesign the electrical system. So far NAHA, its insurance company and the Housing and Urban Development Department have spent $600,000 for repairs and other costs associated with the building.

He said decisions will have to be made down the road on the building's future.

"Everything is working and it's safe. We have an electrical contractor walk through the building twice a week," he said. "But it's not a permanent fix. The system dates back to the 1970s. We need to look and made decisions moving forward on what is best for our residents."

Duggins said he plans on meeting with each Riverview resident one-on-one beginning early next year to discuss their situation and see what fits them best. There are 160 units at Riverview but right now around 35 are vacant.

"We want to be more involved and help families make decisions ... let them know the services NAHA provides and other housing options," he said ...

 ... Duggins said there are some residents at Riverview who likely would be better off living in an assisted living facility which they would be eligible for with a Medicaid waiver. He said he has tried to show them what housing choices are available in the community.

"We have kept them informed with everything going on here," he said. "Our main focus has always been the residents, most of whom are elderly, to make sure they are taken care of and to educate them on all the services they have available to them."

The Residences at the Lofts at SoDoSoPa, or "Beware the Four-Letter Words of Vibrant Downtowns."

Gahan
Gatekeeper
Nawbany
Nash

GaGaNaNa -- be one of the beautiful peeples.

Beware the Four-Letter Words of Vibrant Downtowns, by Max Azzarello (Strong Towns)

 ... the most fun I have in such places is when I'm playing Vibrancy Bingo: The search for the four-letter words that inevitably advertise such luxury spaces. Whether they’re written on banners hanging from retro street lamps or projected onto impossibly clean sidewalks, you’re practically guaranteed to find some permutation of the words “Shop. Play. Dine. Stay.”, the rhythmic marketing mantra of the modern lifestyle center.

I think that it’s telling that for all the amenities offered, these lifestyle centers are so often interchangeable. From the four-letter words and impossibly attractive 30-somethings in ads, to the Cheesecake Factories and towering luxury condos, these developments are no more connected to the neighborhoods they inhabit than the strip malls and convention centers that came before them. It’s a modern twist on the suburban “geography of nowhere”.

(snip)

Perhaps surprisingly, a strong satire of these developments comes from South Park, a show that has consistently offered pointed societal critiques behind its trademark irreverent humor. In one multi-episode arc, the poor part of town is rebranded as SoDoSoPa (realtor-speak for “South of Downtown South Park”) and is heralded by town officials for providing necessary economic investment.

Faux commercials like this one take lifestyle centers to their absurd conclusion; The soothing narrator promises “A place to gather, a place to mingle with all economic classes, and now it’s a place to live," with both animated and live-action shots of pretty, well-heeled people enjoying the amenities. The running gag of the story arc is that the development is built surrounding the home of the town’s only poor residents (rebranded as “Historic Kenny’s House”). Though the ads promise economic diversity, the city’s poor are left completely out of its exclusive benefits.

While it may be difficult to take a cartoon best known for its fart jokes seriously, the show raises some important questions when it comes to luxury developments and lifestyle centers:

• Are these developments being driven first and foremost by the city’s residents, or do they come from outside investors with no connection to the place?
• What about the people who already live in the proposed development area? Do they have a say?
• Are such massive developments really in the best interest of the city’s residents, or do they find themselves swept up in the glitz of Adobe Illustrator mockups and four-letter words?
• What happens if the development fails? Is there another use that could take its place, or would it inevitably fall into disrepair?

'We Buy Cars": The face of luxury car sales in New Albany, in the form of an illegal yard sign in the verge.

A sign fairly oozing luxury.

Luxury car sales, my posterior -- even if the corner looks better.

Still, you gotta give the guy full credit for knowing the importance of meaningless buzz words. We're a city with 25% of its population below the poverty line, but City Hall is absolutely certain that if we keep repeating the word "luxury" over and over again, marketing alone will solve the problem. 

I remain fascinated: Why did the neighborhood association roll over so quickly for this guy?

Looks like ESNA and HyperCars are closerthanthis, which is why reality is so much more humorous than fiction.

It all started here:

That ugly word again: Plan Commission to consider "luxury" car sales at HyperCars on 13th and Spring.

Duggins, Gahan log into Priceline Dot Com as Riverview Towers residents are evacuated.

Not luxury hotels, though. That just wouldn't be right, would it?

However, it's nice to see City Hall's efforts to address the ever-widening Compassion Gap by sending the Rev. Toran to deal with the media instead of Gauleiter Duggins, who has been too busy blaming Bob Lane for Duggins' own multiplicity of shortcomings to notice that living, breathing humans are in need of attention.

It's a kinder, gentler public housing putsch, wouldn't you say?

UPDATE: Riverview Towers residents to be placed in hotels, by Aprile Rickert (Tom May 'Bune Picayune)

NEW ALBANY — The more than 160 residents of New Albany Housing Authority's Riverview Towers were evacuated Monday after the second small fire in a week cut power to the whole building.

The short happened around 10 a.m., when the fire damaged the wires that control the building's electricity. The process to get residents relocated began around 3:15 p.m. when electrical engineers determined there would not be a way to fix the electricity Monday.

“We were hoping for a fix and at that time we just had to call it and make sure our residents were secure,” Tony Toran, deputy executive director of NAHA, said.

Cha-ching: Wheelbarrows of someone else's money to Gahan for bright shiny objects, so let's hope them people don't get in the way.

On March 28, we surveyed the state of luxurious riverside improvements in the wake of the Horseshoe Foundation's "just give him some money and maybe he'll leave us alone" gift to City Hall.

City Hall describes the four major projects to be funded (in part?) through the Horseshoe Foundation's $5 million gift.

The gift is to help fund projects in downtown New Albany and along the Ohio River Greenway. Four major projects will be funded through this generous gift from the Horseshoe Foundation of Floyd County.

Greenway construction has proceeded throughout the year on the New Albany side of Silver Creek, and Jeff Gahan's deep-seated desire to make the waterfront safe for normal folks just like him was revealed when his original public housing putsch plans called for the demolition of Riverside Terrace ... after all, do suburban bicyclists really want to gaze down upon the impoverished and their tawdry clotheslines?

I mean, can't they afford the laundromat? Rest assured, Deaf Gahan feels your pain, appropriately perfumed (and gated) community residents, and by golly, he'll queue the cattle cars if that's what it takes to be re-elected.

One of the lingering questions about New Albany's patch of Greenway has to do with the disposition of the New Albany Boat Club. It's another of those queries rudely handled by Gahan's team of spin doctors, whose dismissive reticence is the best reason to believe chicanery has been at play all along.

Our most recent update came on January 26, 2017.

In New Gahania, only the riverside squatters survive.

Then there's the New Albany Boat Club. It clearly was squatting for decades (see links below), but was given an 11th-hour reprieve when City Hall exercised eminent domain against a property owner who'd only just emerged victorious in a lengthy court fight against the squatters -- who were given back the property, which hadn't been theirs in the first place, by a City Hall that operates by divine decree, and not rule of law.

All of which leads to the most recent heroic announcement in a series of North Korean-intensity screeds, as the tourism bureau now joins the casino foundation in paying Gahan to please-just-go-away.

It's free money, says City Hall -- just avert your eyes while we displace public housing populations; then, as the champagne corks bounce off the drop ceilings, we all can still pretend we're letter-perfect, Greg Fischer-style Democrats.

Gahan must play trombone, too, as he seems to have mastered slide lubricant.

City Council to Vote on Capital Development Bond with Clark/Floyd Counties Convention Tourism Bureau Mike Hall Press Agency)

At their meeting this Thursday, the city council is set to discuss a capital development bond for the Clark/Floyd Counties Convention Tourism Bureau. In June of 2017, the city, in partnership with the Culbertson Mansion, applied and was awarded $825,000 from the Tourism Bureau for the New Albany Visitor and Historic Generator Project. The Culbertson Mansion is currently undergoing many restoration projects, including a full restoration of the home’s original cast iron. As part of the $825,000 award, approximately $231,000 will be applied to the cast iron restoration at the Mansion.

The City is aiming to help promote tourism through several additions, including a new boat ramp, additional picnic areas, boat docks, increased walking and running trails, and more along the Ohio River, including updates to the scenic and historic Loop Island Wetlands.

The capital development bond will be paid for through the $825,000 grant awarded to the City. There is no financial obligation for repayment of the bond from the city – the Tourism Buereau is responsible and obligated to pay the bond.

“This generous gift from the Tourism Bureau will help restore one of our most historic properties, the Culberston Mansion,” stated Mayor Jeff Gahan. “In addition, the city will continue working towards connecting our citizenry back to our river heritage, and will provide opportunities for everyone to enjoy our Riverfront Greenway.”

City Takes Steps to Save $220,000 Per Year Through Refinancing

At today’s New Albany Redevelopment Commission meeting, the board moved forward with refinancing three outstanding bonds in order to save approximately $220,000 per year. The refinancing proposal will not increase the original term length of financing, and lowers interest rates significantly.

The three outstanding bonds have a current rate of 4.125%, 4.870%, and 5.700%. Under the refinancing package approved at today’s meeting, the rate is 2.500% for all three outstanding bonds, saving approximately $220,000 per year.

“I’m pleased that we are able to refinance these obligations at a much lower rate,” stated Mayor Gahan. “This end of year action will net savings for the citizens of New Albany.”

The proposal will now move to the New Albany City Council for approval at their Thursday meeting.