Columns
GALLIGAN: Mayor responds to column about canal
This is in response to Kelly Curran’s Feb. 2 column regarding the creation of the canal district. I’m not completely certain where to begin this response, because Curran’s column left a great number of information voids in a great number of areas.
I’ll begin with the one idea of Curran’s that I agree with. You do need to speak up and you do need to get involved. We will be seeking public input on the canal district’s development standards. We will advertise these meetings in a variety of ways and our hope is that honest input from the people who live and work here will help us develop a canal district that is meaningful to people who live here, tourists and businesses that operate within the district.
Curran seems to have a fundamental concern with government telling people what they can or cannot do on their own property. Government does this now. Building codes tell people how they can construct things. Zoning codes place a variety of restrictions on property, ranging from how a parcel of land may be used to how far structures must be from property lines to ensuring that property owners maintain their land and the structures on them. These standards are enacted and enforced in the names of public health and safety, not aesthetics and profit.
Since 1984, the city of Jeffersonville has had special development standards within its downtown historic district. These were updated in 1997. Special development standards were created several years ago along Utica Pike, at the request of a number of people who live there.
Curran states, “The plan as described would cause several adverse effects, namely a loss of diversity, harm to the poor and a loss of liberty.”
Here are some things to keep in mind when you consider Curran’s commentary:
First, there is no plan. We’ve defined an area, but know it will take months — including several opportunities for public input — to create the standards that will apply to the area. What we do know is that those standards must compliment what exists for the historic district which was first recognized by ordinance 26 years ago.
Second, the goal is to foster diversity in several ways. We want to further the idea of mixed uses that already exist in downtown today, which include residential, retail, restaurant and entertainment. We want the new development to increase the number of people who live downtown, strengthen our existing merchants by giving them access to new customers and provide everyone in the area with shopping, dining and entertainment opportunities that do not exist here now.
Third, Curran says bad things are certain to happen, but she provides no data or case studies to support her assertions, even as communities all over the world have adopted development standards. Clarksville has development standards for its side of Veterans Parkway. Who have those standards hurt? Louisville Metro Government has more than 20 neighborhood-specific development plans including three that include portions of the area known as the Highlands. Certainly, Curran wouldn’t try to convince us that the Highlands neighborhood is monolithic and oppressed.
Over the next few months, we plan on having a very public discussion about the canal district’s development standards. We will specifically seek input from the residents of the Rose Hill and Franklin Commons neighborhoods, downtown merchants, Jeffersonville Main Street Inc., and those with specific interests in historic preservation. Whether or not you belong to one or more of these groups, we want to hear from you, too.
I’d like to close by pointing out something that I think puts the rest of Curran’s column into its proper perspective. Curran expressed concern about government “dictating the color of street signs.”
Where do street signs come from now?
— Tom Galligan is mayor of Jeffersonville.
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BAYLOR: Dear Pat
“I can’t help but wonder if we’ve made a mistake in settling down in New Albany. This place is nuts.”
The words quoted above are real. I didn’t make them up. They were spoken to me by a friend who wasn’t raised here, like you and I were, you in the city, and me in the county.
Perhaps neither of us is able to see the counter-productive political dysfunction holding sway hereabouts quite as clearly as someone who views our home turf with clear, unprejudiced eyes — the type of person far too many natives persist in dismissing and deriding as an “outsider.”
Pat, we don’t know each other that well, and during the time since you were elected to represent the 4th council district, we’ve had a few heated debates over politics, policy and public affairs. Let’s forget those. The reason why I’m writing you today is because of my friend, who came here from somewhere else because he and his wife believe in our city’s largely untapped potential. In spite of our differences, Pat, it’s always been my view that at some level, you genuinely “get it.”
As such, what are we to tell my friend — tell him, and her, and “them people,” as your caterwauling council colleague Dan Coffey has oft times referred to anyone who is educated, artistic, productive and capable? Are we to follow Coffey’s lead and turn away the new blood — the sort of people that any community needs to build, grow and prosper — or shall we harness, integrate and welcome them to a city that values their presence and benefits from their labors?
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, Pat. It isn’t about newcomers alone. It’s about those who already live here — most importantly, about their children. It’s a cliché, but children are the city’s hope and its future. In the past, our best and brightest tended to leave town, because we couldn’t offer the sort of economic, cultural and lifestyle opportunities they regarded as necessary to stay. This needs to change, and in some respects, it has.
Surely we can agree: When it comes to education and educational opportunities, that selfishness, resentment and spite have no conceivable place in the discussion.
And yet, Pat, since you’ve served on the city council, can unbiased, neutral observers reach any other conclusion than this one:
New Albany’s city council, as permitted by its members to be dominated by a regressive, anti-intellectual faction led by Dan Coffey and abetted by Steve Price, has consistently stood against education, and educational attainment, and sustainable economic development flowing as a natural consequence of education?
I’m trying earnestly not to exaggerate the Coffey-led council’s anti-educational bias, which in practice might better be referred to as an aversion to human progress in virtually any quantifiable form, except you and I both know the malignancy is there, and profoundly damaging.
My question to you, Pat: If you know better, and I think you do, then why, at this late juncture, is your name so closely linked politically with theirs?
Consider last week’s tragicomic school closings. If ever there were a time for this pointlessly fractured, hopelessly divided council (and that’s just the eight strong Democratic contingent) to come together, call a special town hall meeting, posture, grandstand, point fingers and squawk, this was it: Neighborhood schools being closed in three downtown council districts, hampering if not outright crippling revitalization prospects and economic development for decades to come.
Predictably, none of it occurred. As a body, the council was silent, and the only way to explain its timidity is outright malice on the part of its movers and shakers. City Hall came out forcefully against the school closings, and almost certainly, that’s why the Coffey-Price “let’s pretend to be Democrats and hope that we all fail” faction refrained from comment.
That they fail as individuals to see any value in progress merely seals the deal on their crass political absenteeism. Either way, it’s another black eye for a city already ill disposed toward insight.
Understood: Times are hard. The business climate is tough, and yet quite a few people, many of them from elsewhere, have invested in downtown New Albany. To cite one example, the new State Street branch of Wick’s Pizza has been its best performing store in metro Louisville. Wick’s is situated in Coffey’s council district, and yet he hasn’t missed an opportunity to speak and act against such development, to bad-mouth entrepreneurs, and to urge future investors to stay away from New Albany.
Pat, is this really leadership?
(No, Roger, it isn’t.)
I know you believe that. I know you’re better than that. I know you have what it takes to lead. But Pat, here’s what bothers me.
Why do you tolerate it, and why do you persist in voting with Coffey and Price?
Sorry, no; you can’t explain it by saying that the issues upon which you’ve been marching lockstep with the council’s ward heeling looters — sewer rate votes, audit envy, public safety and dollar-and-cents issues —are somehow different in nature from the spiteful, repugnant, self-debilitating attitude toward the city’s future displayed by these same congenital “no” voters. The non-governing principles prefacing book burning and tea parties are exactly the same.
Pat, it’s eloquently simple even though it’s excruciatingly hard.
When the time finally comes for last call — not a quick pint before the trip home from the warm pub on a cold, desperate and anonymous night just like all the rest, but the punching of the big ticket and the cosmic bow prior to that most irrevocable of all curtains falling, how will posterity judge your political legacy?
Was it progressive or regressive?
Was it Dan Coffey’s legacy … or yours? -
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