The Emperor’s Nonexistent Clothes

I’ve been trying to avoid the dueling ads and other ephemera that inevitably accompany a mayoral campaign, so I didn’t attend the first debate between Mayor Ballard and Melina Kennedy. But now, three people (2 Democrats and 1 Republican) have reported to me that–in the process of defending his record–Ballard several times insisted that he was “the first Mayor” to do something: the examples reported to me were addressing issues in the police department and promoting the City nationally and internationally.

Excuse me? Can we spell hubris? Or perhaps cluelessness?

I served in the Hudnut Administration, so I had a front-row seat for Hudnut’s efforts to address issues in the police department. And those issues were considerably more fraught than today’s.

The assertion that Ballard’s junkets to international destinations were necessary because before that, few people had heard of Indianapolis, is not only delusional, it’s just plain offensive. (Hell, if nothing else, the Speedway put Indy on the map when Ballard was in diapers.) During the Hudnut Administration, we used to collect newspaper stories from around the country and world praising Indianapolis as a city on the move. Both Goldsmith and Peterson generated extensive media recognition for the city–far more than we have seen during the Ballard Administration.

Ballard isn’t even the first Mayor to sell off city assets and reward political supporters with government contracts. Goldsmith did that.

Mayor, if you want to defend your own record, fine. We’ll each decide whether we think it’s defensible. But if you really believe that you are the first mayor to do what mayors are supposed to do, if you are willing to ‘diss’ your predecessors in order to build yourself up, you don’t deserve a second term.

Those clothes you think you are wearing are invisible to the rest of us.

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Watch This Space

If you have missed my posts (I hope!) this past two days, chalk it up to the  intersection between good intentions and new technologies.

My laptop–which is also my office computer–had been giving me serious problems, and yesterday I got a new one. Much, much better–but there’s a learning curve. Plus the fact that when our wonderful tech support folks configured it, some things were omitted. One of those was  the link to the site on which I enter my posts.

I should be back in form (what that form is, I prefer not to notice) by tomorrow!

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Herman Cain? Really?

In the continuing saga that is the GOP’s presidential contest, yet another WTF moment: Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll-and by a significant margin. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney were neck and neck for second and third, but both were far behind Cain.

Of course, the pundits are having a field day trying to make sense of this. Most are interpreting it as a repudiation of Rick Perry. Perry was going to be the GOP savior just last week; his big mistake, apparently, was opening his mouth and letting people listen to what came out. Meanwhile, Cain is all over my TV crowing that the result “proves that people who say Herman Cain can’t win are wrong.” (What is it with these people who refer to themselves in third person?? But I digress.)

As an outsider–defined as someone who definitely does not have a dog in this fight–I have a slightly differently interpretation of the straw poll results. I think that every sentient being realizes that Herman Cain absolutely cannot win, and that made him the perfect stand-in for “none of the above.”

“None of the above” is pretty understandable, given the choices.

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A Wise Choice

On Thursday, the Indianapolis-Marion County Library board chose Jackie Nytes to be CEO of the library system. I was hoping for that result, but I’ve seen enough searches  to know that just because she was the ideal candidate and obvious best choice didn’t guarantee anything. (National searches, particularly, always remind me of the old definition of an expert as someone who lives at least 50 miles away.)

I’ll admit that I am anything but unbiased: Jackie is a friend, and she was my husband’s co-worker when he worked for the library system. That said, she brings a collection of knowledge and skills to this new job that seem uniquely tailored to the position. She not only has the appropriate educational credentials, she not only has experience working in libraries, she has experience with this library system. Furthermore, her expertise is financial management; she was IMCPL’s Chief Financial Officer. In an era of shrinking fiscal resources, that ain’t chopped liver, as the saying goes.

Even more fortuitous, in the years since she left the library, Jackie’s political activities have given her a whole new skill set that will serve her well in her new post. As a highly respected City-County Councilor, she made important connections and learned how the city really works (or doesn’t). In a political environment that requires the library to fight for every nickel of public support, political skills and access are incredibly important.

Knowledge and skills are important. Political savvy is important. But most important of all is something that everyone who knows Jackie remarks on at one time or another: she genuinely, passionately loves the library.

It’s nice to see a love affair consummated.

Let me be the first to wish this particular couple a long and successful relationship.

Driving Us Nuts

We are hearing a lot about the need to elect a Mayor with a big vision for the city. I agree, but we ought not forget that management skills are also very important. It’s great to have leadership that knows where it wants to go-but it doesn’t do much good to know you want to go to San Francisco if you think you need to drive to the East Coast to get there.

We can argue about the financing of all the road work being done in our fair city–this administration’s willingness to sell off capital assets to fund operating costs, its willingness to shift costs from taxpayers to ratepayers, and the other games it has played, but done is done. What has me frustrated is the lack of management, co-ordination and plain common sense I see daily as I try to navigate the relatively short distance from my home to IUPUI.

I served in City Hall “back in the day” and I know it’s never easy to avoid traffic tie ups when you are fixing streets. Some inconvenience is unavoidable. But I remember the efforts made to minimize those problems, the planning that went into the process. There is no evidence of such planning in the current frenzy to pave every possible street before the Super Bowl (or perhaps before the election.) Work interrupts rush hour on our busiests streets. Equipment needed in Fountain Square to remove buried rail tracks is being used somewhere else, so traffic to stores in Fountain Square remains blocked for weeks more than necessary (with the result that some of those businesses didn’t survive). Streets are torn up, base pavement put down, then ignored for long periods until suddenly the paving crews are back to finish the top coat. If there is any method to any of this, it isn’t apparent.

I’m glad our streets are being paved, even if I worry about paying for it with fiscal smoke and mirrors. I just wish there were someone in City Hall with the ability to recognize the challenge of doing so much work with so many different contractors in so abbreviated a time frame–someone with the skill to manage the process.

Instead, the simplest trip is driving us nuts.

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