The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 2: Of fire stations, amphitheater studies and Axis Architecture and Interiors of Indianapolis.

Previously: The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 1: Mysterious CRS Marketing and the inevitable HWC Engineering tie-in.

Some people watch movies for fun, but during the coming weeks we'll be plucking highlights from eight years of the Committee to Elect Gahan's CFA-4 campaign finance reports. Strap in, folks -- and don't forget those air(head) sickness bags.

Preceding is the record of campaign donations made to Mayor Jeff Gahan by the Indianapolis firm Axis Architecture and Interiors from 2011 through 2018. The total is $11,750, and Axis is one of three Gahan donors uncovered so far to have contributed in each of the past eight years (the others are the Clark Dietz PAC and New Albany contractor Terry Ginkins, who since the public housing putsch has been an NAHA board member).

The total is $11,750. Axis lists New Albany's newest fire house among its completed projects.

It's probably just a flip-of-the-doubloon coincidence that Axis is to receive the impending contract for the "Axis Downtown Conceptual Design" expenditure, an amphitheater and levee parking vicinity study.

Ah, but design studies, consultations, engineering preliminaries ... they're all discretionary, courtesy of appointed boards. Whomever makes the (ahem) "best pitch" gets the contract.

If you have supplementary information to offer about any of this, please let us know and we'll update the page. The preceding was gleaned entirely from public records, with the addresses of "individuals" removed.

Next: The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 3: Eight-year donor Terry Ginkins and a consistency of beak-wetting.

Redevelopment on the down low as city officials say they're cooking up an amphitheater move or remodel, but even Irving Joshua says "not so fast."

Preceding is the record of campaign donations made to Mayor Jeff Gahan by the Indianapolis firm Axis Architecture and Interiors from 2011 through 2017, omitting 2012; I don't have the finance form for 2012, but I'm guessing a donation was made (in 2018, too).

The total is just shy of $10,000. Axis lists New Albany's newest fire house among its completed projects.

It's probably just a coincidence that Axis was to receive the contract for the amphitheater study (below), which was tabled yesterday.

The Green Mouse was told that Democratic Party chairman Adam Dickey, longtime redevelopment commission member, was especially keen to study SOMETHING right away.

The question: What exactly is being studied?

Relocate the current amphitheater?

Remodel it?

Build the parking garage plaza once minted for use by Mainland Properties as a collateral for condo construction?

Why was Dickey in such a hurry?

And, the biggest question of all: who's paying for it?

Just imagine an administration proposal so vague that even Irving Joshua wants to think about it.

Has it ever happened before?

By the way, newspaper reporters are free to borrow these questions.

New Albany considering development between downtown, riverfront, by Brooke McAfee (Tom May Overkill)

NEW ALBANY — An amphitheater is just one possibility that could occupy a city-owned parcel downtown that New Albany officials are eyeing for development.

At Tuesday's Redevelopment Commission meeting redevelopment Director Josh Staten proposed a $25,000 contract with Axis Architecture & Interiors to look into the feasibility of creating a project on the property spanning State and Bank streets near the riverfront.

Many options for the property are on the table.

"The goal is to figure out the best land use for this public space," Mayor Jeff Gahan said. "There’s all kind of possibilities for what we could do to get downtown connected with the riverfront."

After discussion, the commissioners tabled the matter for the next meeting with the plans of broadening the scope of the conceptual study. An outdoor amphitheater was among the proposed options, but the city wants to make sure other concepts are explored ...

2-for-1? Scott Blair describes a better way to save the Reisz building AND get a new city hall.

Previously: 

Donald Trump would greatly appreciate the disruptiveness of Jeff Gahan's signature Reisz Elephant.

During the course of answering 35 questions at last Thursday's city council meeting, corporate attorney Shane Gibson attempted to navigate contradictions on more than one occasion.

For instance, Gibson argued that a minimum expenditure of $10,000,000 to render the "blighted" (and "neglected," and "dilapidated") Reisz Furniture Warehouse Store into luxurious, expanded work space for Jeff Gahan was the very best solution yet offered to the problem of salvaging the structure, while simultaneously conceding that no other options have been considered.

How can we know it's the best plan when there's nothing to compare it to?

As 6th district councilman Scott Blair (I) illustrates with this Facebook comment, plenty of options exist. It's just that Gahan, Gibson and their ship of fools won't consider them.

I agree that a better use of the Reisz building is mixed retail and residential. The city could offer less than $1,000,000 subsidy to a private developer (purchase the building for around $400,000 and $375,000 and fix infrastructure). The city would recapture the subsidy over time through property taxes. A new city hall could go into an appropriate size building or be a new build. $4,000,000 seems to be a good estimate for new construction. A site could be the parking structure next to Big Four Burgers on Main St. Advantages are lower overall cost, bringing more people into downtown, and infill of a blighted lot.

In short, two buildings -- one rehabbed, the other new -- for half the proposed expenditure. And yet an idea like Blair's HAS NOT EVEN BEEN CONSIDERED.

Redevelopment's request for proposal (RFP) period?

A whole ten days. How could this be sufficient time for other interested parties to participate -- assuming they weren't scared away by previous public statements strongly implying the single plan was a done deal. 

When it came to the two-way street grid changes, at least three traffic studies were conducted over a period of years before these statistics were handed to HWC Engineering to be ignored. Most of the final expense was borne by the federal government, and the campaign kickback gravy was especially succulent.

But $10,000,000 for the Reisz Elephant isn't being offset by a gift from afar, and Team Gahan has conducted no studies, and considered no other alternatives. It's Gahan's way, or down comes the building.

Blair's idea has one major flaw, because the work required to save Reisz and build city hall probably would not be finished before next year's elections, and completed bright shiny objects are essential to Gahan's flashcard campaign strategy.

At Strong Towns: "4 Reasons We Must Build Our Streets for People (Not Just Cars).

A reprise of the conversation (paraphrased) that I had with 3rd district councilman Greg Phipps last week.

Me: We need to talk about the street grid.

Greg: I know you have issues, but look, at times you have to compromise, and it's better than it was before. It's a start.

Me: Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say it is better than before (the two-way street project). It can still be improved, so we need to talk about the next phases for improvement.

Greg: Well, you know, probably nothing else is ever going to happen.

When the weather gets warmer, I'll be going back out with the radar gun, and then we'll see the degree to which traffic is being slowed by two-way friction alone.

4 REASONS WE MUST BUILD OUR STREETS FOR PEOPLE (NOT JUST CARS), by Kea Wilson (Strong Towns)

 ... Here are the four things I wish I could say not just to Jamie Wilson, but to anyone who thinks that stroads aren’t one of the most pressing issues facing our cities today.

1. Human life is not a traffic problem to be solved.

 ... Ask yourself this: Should the punishment for being a flawed human being who gets distracted (or plays too rough, or has an addiction, or any of the other messy human things we do) be a painful, sudden death under the wheels of a high-speed automobile?

2. Pedestrians safety is a two way street. But too often, that street is a stroad.

 ... To say that pedestrian safety is a two way street is to imply that pedestrians and cars are moving in equal lanes. And, both literally and metaphorically, nothing could be further from the truth.

78 people died in my city over the course of ten years when they were crossing roads designed almost exclusively for cars moving at high speeds, upon which they were also expected to walk. I have yet to hear of any comparable epidemic of automobile drivers being killed when they swerve to avoid pedestrians.

3. Fixing stroads isn’t expensive. And not doing it is what’s making us go broke.

 ... The idea that there’s only way to build a road network — that is, to vastly overbuild it, adding lane after widened lane until no one would blame a driver for forgetting he’s not on a highway — is not only incorrect, but deeply limited, and I think officials like Wilson are in for a pleasant surprise when they begin to think differently. For one, it’s forgetting hundreds of years of human history, in which roads were simply never built this way. For another thing, it neglects the vast range of creative solutions available to us when we dare to think even a little bit differently — many of which cost next to nothing at all.

4. Everyone is a pedestrian — or they were, or they will be.

 ... To say these people are “pedestrians” or “non-drivers” is to forget that they are all of us at some point in our lives. They’re people who are too young to drive a car, or too physically infirm in their old age, or too poor to afford one. They’re people who have visual or physical or other disabilities, and people who simply just want to go for a walk on a sunny day. When our city streets are designed properly, a pedestrian is, simply, anyone who feels like walking — and if you look at St. Louis’ many non-stroads on a summer night when the Botanical Gardens are hosting a concert series, you’ll see that more people than not will get out on foot if it’s even remotely an option.

Marohn: "The most successful places are full of congestion."

Not Wyoming.

Minnesota.

DEALING WITH CONGESTION, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... Most of Senator Murphy's conversation dealt with the chronic issue of congestion. Notice I did not call congestion a problem. It's clearly not. Within our places -- on our streets -- congestion is an indicator of success. As Yogi Berra reportedly said:

"Nobody goes there any more because it is too busy."

Indeed. The most successful places are full of congestion.

Between our places -- on our roads -- congestion signals many things but, for me anyway, it primarily indicates America's cultural -- and the engineering profession's technical -- misunderstanding of the systems we have built.

Consider the hierarchical road network. It's so commonplace today that we rarely stop to question it. Small, local streets empty into collector streets. Those collectors empty into arterials. The arterials empty into major arterials which eventually end up pouring into our highway systems. Small to big; it's the way things are done.

Stop a moment to examine a watershed. There you have ditches that flow into small creeks. Those creeks flow into larger brooks and streams. In turn these flow into larger rivers and, ultimately, these systems come together to form some of the world's major waterways.

We all intuitively understand that, when we experience rain or snow melt on the edges of a watershed, there is a compounding effect that occurs. We've become fairly competent at realizing that, by the time all this rain comes together, it very often produces a flood.

We've so grasped this concept that we've taken steps to address the problem at the source. We don't allow people to fill their wetlands. We require developers to retain their runoff on site. We build retention systems to hold back runoff and feed stormwater into the natural systems more slowly so flooding does not occur. We take these steps and others at the source to mitigate the cumulative, negative impacts of stormwater runoff. Namely: flooding.

Instead of a river network, examine a similar system of roadways during a typical commute. Here we have rain of a different sort: the automobiles that emanate forth from the development we induce, subsidize and cheer for out on the periphery of our cities.

Why are we so shocked when this produces a flood?

WE. CREATE. THE. FLOOD ...

Georgetown, look not to NA's Bicentennial Park as a harbinger of revitalization. Beak-wetting? That's another matter entirely.

A fitting and genuine national landmark in Georgetown.

When I was a kid, Georgetown was a place that had an identity of its own. Perhaps more importantly, until 1967 Georgetown had a high school, which was folded into Floyd Central amid the consolidation trends of the 1960s.

If you ask me, Georgetown's identity crisis began just then, and has proceeded apace during the subsequent half-century.

I'm supportive of any plausible suggestion to restore the "there" to there, but if hopes for renewal hinge on the creation of a boondoggle akin to New Albany's Bicentennial Park, I'd recommend overt and continuing skepticism.

In short, as we discussed exhaustively in 2012, Bicentennial Park's design makes little sense according to any coherent criteria, apart from being an excellent way to spend more than $800,000 on flawed symbolism.

Bicentennial Park, Part One: "Whom Does Design Really Serve?"

Bicentennial Park, Part Two: "When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"

Park comparisons get worse: Breaking ground on an overpriced copy.

Legacy Square? Nah, pie are round, cornbread are square.

Yes, folks certainly enjoy Bicentennial Park when summertime concerts are staged there, but these spectacles cannot take place without an ongoing weekly subsidy from City Hall -- thousands of dollars per event, spent over and over again just to make the park functional for a use that apparently no one bothered anticipating.

Good luck, Georgetown. The single best question residents might be asking themselves is how one restores vibrancy to a bedroom community primarily maintained as a component of a pervasive culture of auto-centrism. Just imagine if residents of Georgetown and places like it could make the suburban/regional transit station a centerpiece of its renewal.

One thing's for sure: If a single New Albany city official appears at your gates to offer advice, you'd be wise to send him or her packing.

Georgetown Downtown Revitalization Plan presented to the public; Plan includes economic, building and community design recommendations, by Danielle Grady (News and Tribune)

 ... That space could be a park, like Bicentennial Park in New Albany, possibly with temporary stages, playgrounds and a splash pad. A “far out” future plan, for after the town square is finished is what McCllelan's dubbed “Georgetown Village.”