Your PourGate update for Tuesday, September 3, and a letter to the editor.

NABC's dispute with the Floyd County Health Department remains in a Cold War phase, and that's about all there is to say. We will continue to pursue remedies.

• As for the FCHD's over-reach as it pertains to regulation of beer pouring, we await interpretation from higher-ups in Indianapolis. There are other potential fixes, but one must be patient and follow these various threads to their outcomes.
• As for the FCHD's defamatory web site posting, and our subsequent cease and desist and tort claim notice, we await an apology and are prepared to proceed, come what may, if adults in county government do not turn up. 

As for the letter below, I submitted it to the newspaper two weeks ago and have since grown weary of the draft residing at the top of the blog's queue. I'll link to the eventual placemarker in Hansonville when it finally appears -- but be sure to turn off your laptop's sound, lest you hear the dentist explain yet again her commitment to healthy teeth.

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To the editor of the News and Tribune:

The New Albanian Brewing Company (NABC) certainly appreciates the News and Tribune’s stance in “Cheers and Jeers” (August 17 & 18, by editor Shea Van Hoy).

Van Hoy jeers the Floyd County Health Department (FCHD) “for its petty posting of a photo on its website taken in front of a local business.”

Unfortunately, petty is the least of it.

The photo, now finally removed, is defamatory and retaliatory. It testifies eloquently to a hubris-laden institutional culture in desperate need of instruction as to the etiquette suitable for taxpayer-supported government actors.

The source of my company’s current imbroglio with the FCHD is its misstep in seeking to require temporary food serving permits for beer pouring events. Moreover, it’s about the proper regulatory jurisdiction of the FCHD in relation to the Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission (ATC).

Van Hoy writes, “The legality of such permitting can — and has — been debated,” and while this is true, readers may not be aware of the extent to which the FCHD’s legless argument has been demolished.

The crux is this: Who regulates NABC when it comes to pouring beer at temporary events, such as this summer’s excellent Bicentennial Park concert series?

The FCHD’s answer comes from thin air: Ignore both statute and precedent, wave a magic administrative wand, and declare without warning that henceforth, beer is food. Actually, no other county health department in Indiana currently is making this spurious claim.

That’s because seventy-plus years of Indiana regulatory history and all prevailing precedents indicate otherwise. As beer dispenser, NABC is governed solely by the ATC, and in the course of appealing the FCHD’s over-reach, we managed something the health department could not: We produced a court ruling clearly affirming our position.

In Fort Wayne v Kotsopolous (1998), the Indiana Court of Appeals clearly and succinctly confirms the ATC’s regulatory pre-eminence in Indiana. In short, NABC’s supplemental catering authority, as licensed annually by the ATC, is all we need to temporarily pour beer at Bicentennial Park or elsewhere – provided, of course, that we abide by the ATC’s guidelines … and we do.

The FCHD has absolutely no part in this permit process, and its attempted justifications to date have been arrogant, irrelevant and tortuous, reminding me of the way “The Economist” magazine once described a speech by the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson:

“It contained difficult passages in which it is impossible to disentangle what the words really meant to him from what they were intended to mean to others and what they might later be said to have meant at the time.”

Whether inventing baseless regulations or posting actionable photos, is this really the way we want county government to operate?

These machines kill fascists, pathogens and bureaucrats.

As of Friday, the Floyd County Health Department's web site has been purged of references to NABC and me, and there are no artlessly staged "stock photo" ops ("eco-lies", we call them), and no images of me purloined from my web site absent my permission. Seems they can take dictation, after all.

Meanwhile, last evening's Bicentennial Park concert gig was the occasion for another cursory inspection by the department, whose representative took little time in offering me the clipboard for signing, along with these words: "There isn't much to see here."

Yep. The foot soldiers keep getting it, while their superiors ...

ON THE AVENUES: When the whip comes down.

ON THE AVENUES:  The fruitless search for adults in county government.  When the whip comes down.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor. 

See Jerod Clapp's solid News and Tribune piece

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The cracks rapidly are turning into fissures, and it’s only a matter of time until the baseless edifice begins crumbling.

Neutral observers from here to Ulan Bator agree that the Floyd County Health Department quite clearly is losing ground, and rapidly, as PourGate 2013 enters its third month.

You’re more likely to uncover an atheist in Dave Matthews’s root cellar than find anyone outside of a lone figure on a Floridian grassy knoll who believes this saga hasn’t brought abject disrepute to Floyd County … but why focus on the obvious major themes when seemingly minor details can be so deliciously instructive?

As you may recall, Dr. Thomas Harris was oh-so-lordly-dismissive when quizzed by Eater Louisville’s Zach Everson about a government actor's webiquette.

"I'm pretty sure that was an accident," said Dr. Tom Harris, Floyd County Health Officer, pointing out that the picture was labeled "stock photo." When told that an NABC Bank Street Brewhouse employee witnessed the photo shoot the Wednesday before it was posted, and asked how many restaurant pics the Floyd County Health Department's photo archive contained and that Floyd County is 148 square miles, was it really an accident that its most recent website photo was taken in the 10 feet in front of the NABC Bank Street Brewhouse, Dr. Harris said that it was his department's prerogative to post what it wants on its website.

If this week’s bumbling deletions are any indication, Dr. Tom was mistaken.

On Monday, the FCHD was notified of NABC’s cease and desist demand, with accompanying tort claim notice. By Tuesday afternoon, the department had gotten the message, and it began somewhat belatedly exploring the esoteric nuances of a Word Press blog platform. It was time for the good doctor to put away the leeches and make a date for the modern world, except that it wasn’t quite so easy to be weaned from the patent medicine.

Having resolved to substitute a photo of me for the previous actionable view of the departmental truck parked illegally on the street adjacent to Bank Street Brewhouse, and to drop the E.coli incitement text in favor of dated and disingenuous agitprop, whomever was handed the site keys and password could do no better than add the new photo beneath the old, swap texts, and fail to discern how the heading might be replaced. It was a muddle, even by the department’s messy standards.

A few hours later, the riddle of removing the old photograph finally was solved, with the comic result that the health department now claimed to be protecting the integrity of county-wide food safety from the wiles of that nasty green-clad Communist with the beads in his beard.

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In the end, it took two legal documents, three days, multiple web site makeovers and a friendly note from me to the FCHD's web site host/admin on Wednesday, and the malicious and defamatory photo of the FCHD's photo finally disappeared. So did the photo of me, one deployed weekly here on my blog as the face of my column.

Actually, I hated bothering the site administrator about it, but after all, as rigorous sticklers for the rule of law and common savior’s etiquette, the FCHD never actually asked my permission to use the photo it cribbed from NAC. I appreciate the admin’s prompt and professional attention to niggling detail.

All that's left now on the front page of the FCHD web site is the corrected header and the new text, and while it isn’t E.coli, it's vastly misleading in terms of the department's creative depiction of its Keystone Kops-like public access "compliance," which in fact was a masterpiece of sneering evasion, but I guess we need to let them score a point every now and then -- just to keep the game interesting. 

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With more dust settled, and smoke clearing, let's be clear about where we stand. 

As county government vacantly wheezed, merrily whistled, rolled puffy eyes and scratched butts in a pre-Camm III stupor, its health department ineptly staged a defamatory "stock photo" and posted it, leaving the photo and E.coli text on a government web site for two full weeks, clearly causing damage to my business, and making just about any rational person ask:

Is anyone in charge here?

In short: Your tax dollars at dork, as opposed to work.

Now the photo finally has been deleted, and yet we've yet to the see the apology mandated in NABC's legal action, although it might constitute a welcome start toward rehabilitating the department's oft-self-shot feet.

As of yesterday, it's been two months since the health department operative first appeared in the alley by Bicentennial Park to cite NABC for failure to possess a temporary food service permit that we don't need to have. Insofar as this error of the department's judgment is concerned, I'm reasonably confident of it being sorted out sooner rather than later, at higher Indiana state pay grades than either mine or Dr. Harris's.

So be it. Too much time already has been lost to this foolishness, but perhaps the time has arrived to view the situation in broader focus.

What have we learned about Floyd County government, overall?

Healthblogger may need to instigate a mass narcoleptic prescription before we’re able to tackle that one, although these latest returns … well, they’re not at all encouraging, are they?