Ennui, come by honestly.

I've spent the morning rummaging through guttural vicissitudes, seeking to faithfully reenact the lingering consequences of council meeting attendance. Thus far, I have failed.

I suppose that makes this an open call for candidates.

My product's clean. It's those other products that keep spoiling the broth.

Previously: Dude -- you guys live over in that product over there?

From the landlords’ side of the aisle, the gist of last evening's argumentation was a repetitive tendency toward obfuscation.

All agree they’re not to be confused with slumlords, and that their attendance is proof of this. Fair enough, and I don;'t doubt it. But it seemed that just about any complaint peripheral to the fundamental questions before the committee – is there a problem with rental properties in New Albany, and if so, how do we address it? – kept being tossed out for ritual flogging so as to derail discussion of this basic consideration.

Muddying the scrum ... who'd have thunk it?

Of course, it doesn’t help to have a councilman present who is hostile both to any regulation whatsoever of his own business interests and to the commonly accepted tenets of logic on planet Earth … but enough about Steve "LLCs-R-Us" Price, whose Gahan-inspired presence on the committee is an affront to thinking people (and their house pets) everywhere.

First the building commissioner was permitted to meander into his difficulties with owner-occupied housing (does he ever answer a rental property query straight up without wandering off point?), then came the usual Anna-istic diversion into why the understaffed and underfunded enforcement agents already on the ground can’t reinvent the wheel in the absence of political will, and finally, Mr. Haesley of Property Solutions offered a couple of bona fide gems.

First, as documented previously, he insisted that each and every one of the inhabitable houses owned by his company in the city of New Albany are not to be confused with houses where tenants pay rent. Rather, they’re "products," and once occupied (money presumably having changed hands in the process), the people living in the spaces owned by his company are tantamount to owners of the property in question -- which might come as a considerable surprise to them.

All of this circumlocution on Haesley’s part pertains to an understandable frustration over the terms of engagement with the folks who collect the garbage on a weekly basis. If his “products” are understood as a “business”, then they’re ineligible for residential pickup, and he must contract elsewhere.

So, if I grasped Mr. Haesley's argument correctly, it went something like this:

There is confusion over residential vs. business garbage; therefore, my business is not a business, and it should not be regulated.

Whatever. Rental properties? My position remains the same.

Legalize 'em ... regulate 'em ... tax 'em.

Dude -- you guys live over in that product over there?

Tonight at the rental property inspection committee meeting, Mr. Haesley, the owner of Property Solutions, made these assertions.

(a) His business is located at (insert Floyds Knobs address here).

(b) All the many houses this business owns, from which the business derives income (dare we imagine … makes a profit?) by charging people a fee (that’d be “rent”) to live there, actually are not properties. They are products.

(c) Does a department store have to register each and every one of the products it sells?

I’ll leave it to Bluegill (who filmed the meeting) and others – was local media present? – to provide the in-depth coverage of the evening.

All I can say is this.

(a) Okay. I have an address, too. It isn’t a post office box, either.

(b) The beers I sell aren’t products, mind you. They’re dreams. How can we tax/register/license a dream?

(c) Pick an item in any store. Every step of the way, licensing is involved. Even if it comes from an unregulated Chinese sweat shop, the product is subject to some manner of importation licensing. What of the truck that delivered it? A licensed driver, of course. I'm sure we could follow this further. Why bother?

A product, huh?

Earlier in the session, Councilman John Gonder took a poll of the people in attendance, asking whether they were for or against a simple rental property registration program without registration fees. The vote predictably split along landlord/activist lines. Gonder did not permit stronger views to be enumerated.

Count me among the latter, though. So long as rental property owners insult my intelligence with arguments as weak as Mr. Haesley’s, then I advocate licenses for every rental unit in town.

Am I am extremist? Maybe. All I know is that my business is in fact a business, it is regulated to the hilt by multiple governmental agencies, and I accept regulation as the cost of doing business.

Business is business … right?