GREEN MOUSE presents NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW for 14 February 2020.

Overheard by the Green Mouse at a otherwise deserted local hangout: "Gahan's like a kidney stone -- he, too, shall pass."

Let's hope, but as we observe Valentine's Day 2020, it remains that 46 idolatrous months are left to go amid Gahan III: For the Love of Money. It's never too early to begin handicapping "next," so let's look at the presumptive favorites should our monetizer-for-life decide to take a pay cut and make this term his last.

With Courtney Lewis unexpectedly decamping for a job in Louisville -- women and minorities need not apply for advancement in Newbany given Dear Leader's white male goon ol' boy network -- one springboard lies vacant, and Deaf Gahan has a position to fill as assistant to the city attorney.

After all, it takes two people to lift the typical bond bonus.

These days most of the gratuitous propaganda and photo ops are being handled by redevelopment's Josh Staten, although this has more to do with the city's invisible communications director than intentional campaign prep. Staten would be the ideal purely technocratic candidate, except that four-syllable words like "technocratic" are banned in Nawbany by ordinance (one of the few we actually enforce).

Jason Applegate has two months under his belt as an at-large city councilman, which is enough time to have sold Extol advertising to every municipal vendor. He'll be ambitious, whether from internal or external sources, and he previously has run a city-wide political race, which is important.

So has David Brewer, current township trustee. He's probably the oddsmakers' favorite to follow in Gahan's wake, at least at this point. Second most likely to aspire to power is current police chief Todd Bailey. Has the chief managed to escape the stain of his support for Irv Stumler in 2011? Bossman Jeff has a long memory when it comes to perceived slights.

These are your mayoral contenders for 2023, but only the Shadow (Squire Adam) knows for sure, and he's busy lining up Deaf's photo-op with Michael Bloomberg.

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A month ago the Green Mouse asked why three street lights on the orphaned south side Market (between State and Pearl) had been non-functional since well before Harvest Homecoming last year.

Lo and behold, the sacred gatekeepers appear to have been listening, and the job has been passed to Duke Energy.

Yes, it was a slow news week. Still, there were two headlines.

Pillar Awards: It's high time Develop New Albany recognized downtown businessman Todd Coleman.

9 million tons of Duke Energy's coal ash, the EPA's proposal to loosen regulations about it, and Earthjustice's lawsuit against the EPA.

As an aside, Recbar 812 was packed all last weekend in terms of physical space, even as expert denizens of cyberspace continued to complain bitterly that no one goes there owing to crappy parking. Similarly, as local media fawned over the announcement that 190+ apartment units will fill the former StemWood site on Grant Line Road, no one asked about the details or the subsidies, just decried the effect on traffic.

It's Valentine's Day, and many of you will celebrate it by washing your damn car.

In closing, at Curbed is a commentary about a phenomenon that Greg "Indiana Landmarks" Sekula recently discovered: "Public meetings are broken. Here’s how to fix them."

Held at times of day that can make it hard for many people to attend without missing work, usually without day care options, and sometimes in locations not favorable to those with disabilities or who rely on transit, these meetings already exclude many groups before they even start. Then there’s the matter of format: Experts and officials typically sit behind a table and give speeches and make presentations, with a microphone set up to take comments from neighbors who can spare the time to spend hours waiting for a few minutes on the mic. No surprise that a Knight Foundation study from 2010 found that attending a public meeting didn’t make residents feel more or less connected to their communities.

Join us again next week as New Agony prepares for an early spring.

Peak inner city suburban Gahanism via faux "input," pre-determined outcomes, clear-cutting, IKEA chairs and raging HWC paranoia. Welcome to your "improved" Market Street.

First, the renderings, then some of our trademark "hurtful" commentary.

"Surprise, surprise, surprise," said redevelopment commission appointee Gomer Pyle when gazing upon favored city contractor (and frequent Jeff Gahan campaign donor) HWC Engineering's antiseptic and robotic pastel mock-ups of the latest in a series of shameless aesthetic abortions of urban design, this one pre-determined, pre-authorized and pre-monetized to grace Market Street between Pearl and State, but only the north side of the street.

Why only the north side?

Probably because whenever a New Albany city official pontificates about walkability, we've know what he or she really means is car-centric imperatives camouflaged by lofty rhetorical nonsense, and so recalling that city engineer Larry Summers originally referred to this beautification project's wonderful benefits for pedestrians, you'll see that the north sidewalk is halved and the unnecessary median (which should be dynamited) truncated to permit a westbound turn lane for drivers.

In turn, this means that once again -- have we reached 50 times yet, or 75? -- David "I'm Beaming About Buildings" Barksdale of the largely fictitious Treeless Board is merrily presiding over the felling of at least seven healthy trees, proving yet again that irony in New Albany is stone effing dead -- and moreover, with Barksdale the council swing voter of the moment, he's buffed to a high sheen by the City Hall patronage machine and encouraged time and again to lube the chain saw as a means of glorifying objects, as opposed to people.

Sadly, David Thrasher's Fork in the Road sculpture will not survive the signed, sealed and delivered Disneyfication of the block. There being no way for Gahan to take credit for a previous mayor's decision, he instead must intervene somehow, perhaps skulking masked at 3 a.m. to the installation and etching an anchor tattoo into the cheese.

The Gahan Monetary Arts Council proposes moving Fork in the Road to the northwest corner of the intersection at Market and Pearl, rendering it into a Fork in the Sidewalk, and revealing once more that the artistic sensibility of Team Gahan ranks right up there with field mice blind drunk on spontaneously fermented persimmon juice.

Following are some details. The sole debatable topic on the agenda yesterday was: "Which ironwork design for the fattened mid-block median is your preference?" Note that 1813 refers to the official (and incorrect) date of the city's founding, while 1817 is a nod to the inception of the city market, which used to stand in the middle of the street. 

Below: (8) marks the spot of the Fork in the Rectum relocation.

That's right: IKEA furniture ... with shadeless tables next to parking spaces by a street adding a traffic lane, all in the service of walkability. They're literally too stupid to be embarrassed by this farrago of power-play suburban white bread foolishness.

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On Thursday morning at 11:30 a.m., I learned that the Redevelopment Commission had scheduled a public "input" session about the Market Street median enfluffment and beautification project, to be held at 1:30 p.m. at appointed commission member Terry Middleton's gym on the north side of Market, between Pearl and State.

I sincerely thank my informant, without whom I'd not have known the meeting was taking place. As it was revealed later, the full extent of "official" public notification about this meeting, as ostensibly aimed at gathering public "input" toward a foregone conclusion, was limited to those unfortunates in attendance at Develop New Albany's self-congratulatory midday luncheon at The Grand.

Did the intellectual property pilferage seminar go well?

There's nothing new in any of this. We already knew that Team Gahan views the notion of open, honest transparency with the same reverence as a vampire views garlic -- and speaking of Transylvania, it's also understood that just as comrade Ceausescu sought to remake Bucharest in his own Mussolini-filtered image, Jeff Gahan is striving to render downtown's physical appearance into a tableau worthy of a veneer salesman's insipidity, with all the tasteful flair of an exurban outlet mall by the interstate.

As an aside, it should be noted that just last Thursday, at the conclusion of the city council meeting, I exercised my council speaking time to agree (!) with 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps, who earlier in the meeting had expressed interest in viewing the Market Street beautification proposals prior to their implementation.

Congratulating my councilman for this utterly atypical attention to detail, I added that there should be some way for the public to consider the hitherto guarded plan.

Councilman David Barksdale and redevelopment commission director Josh Staten were present and presumed awake, and heard me say this. Naturally, neither of them bothered to tell me about yesterday's meeting.

Perhaps they were in on the joke -- that the "input" meeting would come without any way of recording input aside from transmitting viewpoints orally to an HWC employee who didn't record them, but it matters little, given that as many as two, maybe even three members of the "public" were in attendance at a meeting few knew was occurring, otherwise lost amid the massed presence of City Hall's nepotistic, sycophantic governing clique, abetted by two of DNA's semi-professional grovelers and the duo of HWC operatives.

One of HWC's purveyors of drive-through expertise was in rare holier-than-thou form, but we'll return to baseball hall-of-famer Jim Rice's finger-wagging testimony -- which might be summarized as "engineers always rank higher on the food chain than nasty hurtful plebes" -- at another time.

As a postscript, the ever insightful Jeff Gillenwater inspires me to conduct a thorough analysis of spray paint options.

One day, someone much smarter than Gahan and his minions is going to tear down and paint over much of what they’ve done. I’m going to volunteer to help.

At Strong Towns: "The surprising difficulty our towns face when it comes to the basic task of informing residents about public meetings."

That's why he's here.

As we've seen countless times in the past, it begins with a measure of authenticity (often lacking in New Albanian ruling circles) with regard to genuinely desiring public input.

It extends through fiascoes like the famous potted Mt. Tabor project final gathering (above), when the city engineer finally mustered the candor to concede that decisions already had been made, but please, speak as much as you like so we can go home.

Time and again, Team Gahan has indicated its preference for pre-determined outcomes over give-and-take. There's a simple solution: #FireGahan2019

4 PROBLEMS WITH THE WAY GOVERNMENTS COMMUNICATE ABOUT PUBLIC MEETINGS, by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

Last week, I shared my frustrations about how hard it is to find out about public meetings in my city. I was overwhelmed by how many people responded to the piece. Some shared similar concerns. Others offered their perspective on these challenges as government employees themselves. Today, I want to review this conversation about the surprising difficulty our towns face when it comes to the basic task of informing residents about public meetings, and talk about some concrete solutions based on everyone’s feedback.

• 1. Requirements to publish public meeting notices in the local paper are very outdated.
• 2. Communicating in a variety of media is helpful, but it can also confuse people.
• 3. Restrictions on government communication make this whole process harder.
• 4. Some people just don’t think residents want to be involved.

To basics:

This whole discussion is about an incredibly basic thing: Making sure residents know about public meetings that are being held so they can get information and provide their input. We haven’t even touched on the issue of how meetings are held: where and when, what sort of transportation is available, what sort of childcare is provided, etc. — all of which have a tremendous impact on the ability of residents to really participate in local decision-making. (Check out these two articles for more on that.) But I think if we can't even get the communication aspect right, we don't have any hope of getting the access, timing and location right.

One of the core tenets of a Strong Towns approach is that you can't build a strong city or town without strong citizens. Let's figure out how to keep those citizens informed about what's happening in their community so they can be part of making it better.

Not really a caption contest as Gahan and Duggins bond over light beers.

Social media has delivered a clear verdict: That Kid for Mayor 2019.

"In a high chair, texting, and throwing back."

And this:

"At least the child has the proper glassware for his water."

The hits keep coming.

"Tastes great!"

"Less filling!"

Or maybe it's better this way:

Beer: no taste

Drinkers: no filling

Topically speaking ...

"I just bought 5 new tasers. You can get 'em cheap online."

But the best comment of all comes to us from Michael Wimmer, whose WE Studio preceded Hull & High Water at 324 E. Main Street.

I guess all I had to do was sell the studio to someone selling lite beer to have Gahan stop by.

Damn. The truth hurts, doesn't it? Thanks, BM, for a gift that will keep giving far into the 2019 campaign season.