The votes have been counted, and now it’s time to reveal New Albany’s Person of the Year for 2014. This being New Albany, it’s a purloined idea:
Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year.”
Finalists for 2014, based on your responses:
- Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers … Chalfant, Resch, Carters, among others. They’re rehabbing buildings, and the city’s industrial park-centric economic development team has almost nothing to do with it.
- Jeff Gahan … during three years on the job, municipal government’s daily operations bear the mayor’s stamp: Inward, paranoid and hermetic. Agoraphobia never had it this good, but his hologram is the hardest working computer-generated image in show business.
- Our local Democratic Party … but logically speaking, can non-corporeal bodies capture corporeal awards? Quick, someone find a theologian, a ham-fisted censor, Connie Sipes or even Walt Disney. Meanwhile, let your mind’s eye conjure an ongoing implosion.
There were creative write-ins, but after all ballots were scrubbed clean of hanging chads, the winners are …
Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers … Chalfant, Resch, Carters, among others. They’re rehabbing buildings, and the city’s industrial park-centric economic development team has almost nothing to do with it.
Several voters commented that these genuine “doers” comprised the only real choice, and I agree.
Previous winners:
2011: The Sherman Minton Bridge.
2012: Bill Allen and his Dilapidated Main Street Paint Job
2013 (tie): Houndmouth and Quality of Life
