Twenty minutes after Thursday’s meeting began, it ended.
It’s amazing how very little our elected officials have to do. Apparently New Albany is a perfect society on par with North Korea, Walt Disney, or Eastridge Drive, where scenes like this seldom occur … for two weeks.
As we approach six months without a reporter charged with covering New Albany, the newspaper sent Jerod Clapp, who aptly conveyed the boredom. Two points stood out.
First, there is the ongoing mystery attendant to rental property regulation and inspection.
At the last meeting of 2015, Greg Phipps raised this trial balloon without the slightest indication of its origin — was it his idea, or Team Gahan’s?
When the trial balloon was riddled with pre-emptive gunfire from the same old slumlords, and with his fellow council members oozing fear as Pat Harrison danced around the room in a tutu screaming “Gestapo,” down came the ordinance, and up went Phipps’ hands, better to be washed of anything having to do with it in the future.
Then, with the legislative toilet flushed and a new council convened, and still without explanation of the ordinance’s origin or Phipps’ petulance two weeks before in discarding it, he embraced the concept yet again and announced it would go to a special committee for buffing and polishing; no landlords or tenants allowed, but two realtors on board, because … why?
We don’t know. They won’t speak to us, and the newspaper doesn’t ask. Welcome to Pyongyang.
I mean Orlando.
Then there’s Dan Coffey, who at the end of the meeting expressed relief that thank heavens, for once, with nothing on the agenda, none of the council persons had decided to grab the microphone and filibuster for hours about meaningless tripe.
Not that Coffey himself has ever done so, mind you. Except he has, on dozens of occasions. But the coiled Copperhead was not without his colic, and Coffey provided a brief glimpse of his traditional animus when he offered this:
I keep telling redevelopment that them people keep making it hard for poor folks’ wheelchairs and I’m not talking about the Coyle site and how the VFW blocks sidewalks with snow, no, I mean those nasty people eating expensive meals out on the sidewalk in tables and chairs and maybe there ought to be more semis go past to put an end to that stuff, so let’s pray …
Everyone nodded, Clapp duly recorded it, and no one asked Coffey why his diversionary tactic about eatery tables and chairs blocking sidewalks was aired in mid-February, when no one has dined outside since approximately October of 2015.
New Albany councilman plans to bring back rental property item March 7
