Tuesday, September 13, 2011, 8:00 a.m.
Approximately 50 merchants representing downtown
Many people expressed the idea that the key to our continued success at keeping the current momentum going in downtown
Many of the positive steps we can take are as follows:
The meeting was extremely upbeat. Carl Malysz said it all when he expressed the following:
A follow-up meeting will be held at the Grand Theater next Tuesday, September 19, at 8:00 a.m.
New Albanian Brewery hopes business will still boom with Sherman Minton closed
Tuesday morning businesses in New Albany will get together to come up with a plan to make sure customers keep coming to southern Indiana.
Indiana Brewer Says Bridge Closure A Chance for Hoosiers to Visit Local Businesses
A New Albany business owner says the Sherman Minton Bridge’s closure has given him a better chance to connect with Hoosier customers.
Roger Baylor is co-owner of the New Albanian Brewing Company, which has two restaurants in the city. He says he’s not worried about losing business in the short term while New Albany’s connection to Louisville is severed.
“When you’re already a destination business and you’re already a niche business and people already know what you are and what to look for, the ones who are into it will still come,” he says. “But I think it’s a good opportunity for us in New Albany to make sure everybody on our side of the river knows we’re here.”
Baylor says he’s talking with his fellow New Albany business owners to determine a long-term plan to adjust to the bridge closure.
To see the traffic plan for the bridge closure, click here.
You Can't Get There from Here. Or Can You?
The emergency closing of the Sherman Minton bridge needs to be addressed with adroitness. Newspaper accounts put the daily traffic flow across that span at upwards of 70,000 vehicles a day. The ability of the two remaining car bridges, the Kennedy Bridge and the Clark Memorial Bridge, are woefully inadequate to handle the sudden increase in traffic which they will face for the duration of the closing of the Sherman Minton Bridge.
Some have called for reliance on car pools,staggered shifts, and flexible work hours to meet the challenge. This wake up call underscores the foolishness of ignoring maintenance. It points out at the local level the compromised status of our infrastructure. It should represent a true national challenge, something like the "Sputnik moment" of the late fifties. It should force us to question the sense of putting all the eggs of our transportation system in the single basket of personal automobile commuting.
It should, and it could, but it probably won't. And it certainly won't by Monday morning when some kind of "geddon" will await those damned to make the trip by car to Louisville and back to meet the requirements of their jobs.
So here's a modest, perhaps counter intuitive, proposal of how we might muddle through this "cartastrophe" in the coming weeks.
Close the Clark Memorial Bridge to personal vehicles. Allow that span to carry only buses and emergency vehicles on the traffic lanes. Pedestrians and cyclists could use the sidewalks. It will do commuters little good to jump on a bus which will be stuck in barely moving traffic. There will be little incentive for car drivers to leave their cars parked if there is no expedited way of crossing the river. If buses are given free flow through designated streets and a green light at the Clark Bridge, I think those who see the buses rolling as the car bound sit mired in traffic may quickly decide that, at least during this particularly trying period, it would be wise to rely on mass transit.
It would be up to transportation experts to figure out how neophyte bus riders can be directed to their destinations once they've successfully crossed the river and de-bused at Union Station or some other central point. The first and biggest obstacle will be the bridge crossing itself.
The need to provide for easy cross-river travel of emergency vehicles is simply obvious on its face.
Once normalcy returns to daily traffic patterns it will be up to us as a community to recognize the vulnerability of our transportation non-system and proceed with a reasoned discussion of Twenty First Century alternatives. The alarm has sounded. Will there be sufficient will to meet the challenges and prepare for a better future?
New Albany Strikes Back!!!!
New Albany done STOLE A MARCH and SHUT DOWN Sherman Minton Bridge. Diverts ALL that St Louis and Cinncinati Traffic right dad blast into Clark County and Jeffersonsville!!!
Thanks to Ted for the borrowed photos.INDOT wanted to shut the bridge down last week for a period of 6 weeks so they could finish construction without having to worry about traffic. They received a lot of opposition locally, sooooooo they found cracks ... bridge closed indefinitely ... or about 6 weeks ...
Tolls still on the table
The Ohio River Bridges Authority will be selecting a method of building the bridges in October, (Read CJ article) but tolls are still on the table unless the Federal Highway Administration intervenes. Please send a message to FHWA representatives below that you are opposed to tolls. Here's a draft message that you can edit to your particular concerns regarding tolls, but please send a message to the Federal Highway Administration representatives list below:
I stand with other members of this community who are opposed to tolls on I-65. Tolls on I-65 will have a negative impact on the local economy. Public comments are 3-1 against tolls on I-65. There are 9 resolutions from all surrounding local councils opposed to tolling I-65. Other resolutions against tolls on I-65 include two from local government associations, Southern Indiana Tourism Bureau, Jeffersonville Main Street Association, statements from Jeffersonville mayor Tom Galligan, and New Albany Mayor Doug England. Over 11,000 people signed petitions opposing tolls on I-65. Those signatures were collected over just 9 weeks.
Bob Tally, (FHWA co-chair) Indiana Division
P: (317) 226-7476
Fax: (317) 226-7341
Jose Sepulveda, Division Administrator, Kentucky Division Office
Federal Highway Administration
330 West Broadway, Room 264
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
P: (502)223-6720
Fax: (502)223-6735
Ray Lahood - Cheryl J Walker/ Special Assistant
Federal Highway Administration
Office of the Federal Highway Administrator
(202) 366-6378
New Albany First, the city’s first-ever grassroots, local and independent business alliance, held an information session last evening at the Public House, and among the participants were mayoral candidates DM Bagshaw (Republican) and Jack Messer (Independent).
Jeff Gahan (Democrat) was not in attendance, but he has been a supporter of NA 1st from the very start. Also absent was Thomas Keister (Libertarian).
I was hoping Keister would attend, so I could jokingly ask him about his Free Rein Media, which someone masquerading as “Jimmy” recently took to task in One Southern Indiana Pop-Up Newspaper (OSIPUN, an acronym which looks almost “insipid”) for selling items designed to draw fire from Reclaim Our Redneck Backwoods Superstitious Culture Kentuckiana (RORBSCK, which lacks only a “u” to suck out loud, and surely already does).
But, as is my habit, I digress.
Significantly, all four candidates are small business owners, and even more interestingly, both Bagshaw and Messer were willing to report bits and pieces of the interview process wherein One Southern Indiana’s (1Si) political aggrandizement arm asked them questions to see who merits political endorsements, ones calculated to obtain oligarchic orgasms at the highly likely ultimate cost of sacrificing voluntary funding from every last locally elected governmental body able to grasp that taxpayers of virtually every political stripe earnestly wish for entities like 1Si to keep the politics out of whatever it is the organization does to justify its existence – itself a debatable topic.
According to both Bagshaw and Messer, one question asked of them was if elected, whether they would “use” 1Si’s services for outsourcing their economic development tasks. Both candidates indicated they responded with wariness, if not outright hostility. It is rumored that Gahan was more vociferous in objecting to 1Si’s arrogance. Having read Keister’s blogs over the years, I’d expect the same from him. None of the four seem to be buying into 1Si’s errant shtick, and for this, we should be grateful.
It makes me guardedly optimistic to know that first and foremost, our mayoral candidates understand small business issues by virtue of being small businessmen themselves.
Furthermore, not one of them is eager to be co-opted by One Southern Indiana’s creeping and unnecessary interference in the political process, and in this, each candidate lies firmly on the side not only of the general public, but an ever-increasing number of 1Si’s own operatives, who see quite clearly that the Stemlerization (that’s a synonym for politicization, folks) of 1Si impedes whatever legitimacy lies in their daily work. They can’t say it aloud, but readers would be amazed to hear the chilling off-record comments.
In fact, 1Si is so squarely on the defensive owing to its leadership’s perpetual, self-defeating political missteps that it cannot even run the risk of linking its new, vaunted Think Local Southern Indiana diversionary tactic to 1Si, which founded it. Nowhere is the 1Si brand to be seen, which of course does little except deepen the depth of deception.
All of which, to me, seems curiously toxic in nature.
ON THE AVENUES: Tickling the master's creatures.New Albany Building Commissioner David Brewer has ordered a rental property at 1308 E. Main St. to be vacated by Sept. 16 because of unsafe conditions.The link to the newspaper article is here, assuming Internet surfers dare to risk publisher Bill Hanson’s bottom-line, auto dealerships’ pop-up fetish: Deadline set for vacating New Albany apartment.
Brewer made the announcement during a New Albany Building Commission meeting Tuesday, as he said the city will explore options, including razing the structure, which is owned by local businessman Matt McMahan.
The Irish Exit in New Albany and The Levee Bar and Grill in Jeffersonville are owned by McMahan.
Anybody know what McMahan did to piss off the City?These are my sentiments exactly, and while I can hear the accusations of toxicity being loaded along with black powder and grapeshot in the rhetorical muzzleloaders of those local power elites most recently ensconced in the good graces of City Hall’s current occupant, it remains that Jeff’s considerations are valid, and they embrace precisely the sort of questions the newspaper never seems to get around asking of the elites.
Countless other people and structures are worse, with the 8th and Culbertson building being just one example. It was declared out of code and in need of tens of thousands in repairs just to be habitable months before the corner collapsed. They bust McMahan, who has done at least some positive investing, and offer to enrich the other slum lord owner with no penalty. The McMahan house is in a historic district and they want to demolish it. The Culbertson building isn't and it's vital to the neighborhood?
