ORBP and Tolls: An Urgent Message From The Clark-Floyd Counties Convention-Tourism Bureau.

(Press release from John Gilkey)

Greetings!

Your business viability could be at risk from Bridge Tolls! Please Attend Tonight's Meeting on the Ohio River Bridges Project at the Holiday Inn Lakeview in Clarksville

One of the most important meetings in recent history concerning the Ohio River Bridges project will be held today from 4 to 8 pm at the Holiday Inn Lakeview in Clarksville. It is imperative that you attend and make your concerns known! Tolls on the I-65 corridor will negatively impact your business!

While the Clark-Floyd Counties Convention-Tourism Bureau is in FULL support of the Ohio River Bridges Project, we are also in FULL opposition to any form of tolls on any of the downtown bridges and in particular the I-65 corridor. Tolls will create an economic barrier that will cost your company business and could have a negative impact on your long-term business survival.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we depend upon Louisville for a huge percentage of our business here on the Sunny Side of Louisville. There is almost nothing that people in Louisville NEED to come to Southern Indiana to buy or do. We need to face it; they have it all on their side of the river. We offer alternatives, options and something different ... but the fact remains that they don't need to come to Southern Indiana to do business.

Transponders have been proposed as a means to allow local residents to pay the smallest toll charge while everyone else will have to pay the maximum rate which will be applied to people tracked by a video surveillance system on the bridges. Consider the likelihood that the only people who will purchase transponders and have them installed in their vehicles and linked to their bank account are the people who absolutely need to come to Southern Indiana on a regular basis. That is a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE of the people in Louisville. All others will pay the highest toll rate.

Fees of up to $3 in each direction have been proposed. In addition, there will be an administrative fee applied at the time of billing that could run anywhere from $5 to $25 for motorists using the video capture system proposed to avoid toll booths. Bridge groups have said that the rate of people who fail to pay tolls imposed by the video systems is around 40 percent. That is most likely the group of people passing through the area from whom collection efforts would be difficult. Local residents could be forced to pay the fees. Those are your customers!

A proposal has been made to further scale back the project to lessen the cost of the downtown I-65 bridge to the point where it can be financed with existing local and federal dollars. The east end bridge could be fully funded using bonds retired by tolls. I urge you to attend today's meeting and voice your support for this approach. Keeping tolls off the I-65 corridor will reduce the impact of the bridges project on your business and your income.

We need to stand together in this issue as an industry! Tolls on the I-65 corridor will have a negative impact on tourism. And since tourism is our bread and butter, it will have a negative impact on us.

Sincerely,

John Gilkey
Director of Communications
Clark-Floyd Counties
Convention-Tourism Bureau

New twist to old tale: Trognonymity Express goes off the rails with a published death threat.

As we’ve informed readers in the past, a disgruntled local resident named Vicki Denhart, author of the Freedom of Speech blog, has spent the past two years posing pseudonymously as a male academic (“Erik”) during the course of frequent slanderings and obsessive slimings directed with all the tactfulness of a grammar school playground sprite at her apparently numerous personal and political enemies.

Among the most pilloried of these adversaries is the incumbent mayor, James Garner.

Ms. Denhart’s Paleolithic gurgling has been periodically humorous, commonly misdirected, often completely false, and always cowardly, but now the transparent charade has escalated to new heights since she declared her candidacy for an at-large city council seat and began planting yard signs according to the Kochert Dictum, which hold that illegal acts aren’t really illegal if they can be deployed to annoy a political opponent.

Of course, the very fact that each local election cycle is pockmarked by numerous controversies over irrelevancies like yard signage points to the virtually non-existent state of substantive, issues-based discussion on the part of candidates and their parties, a lamentable absence that is one of the most prominent indicators of New Albany’s enduring contempt for the human brain … but I digress.

Unsurprisingly, and with the municipal races finally heating up, Ms. Denhart now accuses the mayor of Stalinist intimidation, alleging that he is orchestrating a widespread and horrible purge of … yes, political yard signs.

Again, You Sir...have a policy of removing selective candidates signs, to go with your selective billing and selective enforcement … Do you really believe Jimmy that you are above the law? Are you this desperate to stoop to this level of intimidation of the voters?

And, according to the History channel, what typically happens to such tyrants?

A message will be sent to you loud and clear on May 8th. That this is no longer your kingdom and the citizens are no longer your subjects.

History should be your teacher. Look what happen to Marie Antoinette, Nicholas Romanov the Czar of Russia and finally King James!

Odd that Ms. Denhart proposes to assassinate LeBron James of the up and coming Cleveland Cavaliers – maybe she’s a closet … uh, Pistons fan -- but wait: Upon closer examination, it seems that the bilious, anonymous and pseudonymous candidate is threatening the incumbent mayor with the guillotine and/or a cavalcade of bullets.

Unless, of course, she bears another of her fabled vitriolic grudges against the former English royal’s sanctioned Biblical translation. But that king is already dead, as any real “professor of history” would know. Perhaps she wishes to have the skeleton exhumed, drawn and quartered.

(As a side note, isn’t it interesting that “history should be your teacher” is a hoary cliché most often heard emanating from the vicinity of Councilman Steve Price?)

From where we’re sitting, nothing could be more “intimidating” than a death threat published on the Internet for the whole world to see, and if I were the mayor, I’d take it seriously. Vicki Denhart’s long months of cowardly playacting might be tragic-comical and worthy of contempt and derision (heaven knows I’ve tried my best), but lunatic ravings often are harbingers of genuine instability.

Isn’t it time that Ms. Denhart’s charade came to an end?

After all, it’s the reason why people laugh at us.

Whatever happened to the Coffeyite diaspora to Birdseye, anyway?