Our town

Under a proposed amendment to the city's noise ordinance, fireworks will be limited to 13 days a year, a change made possible by state legislation this year. This is either, A) a sensible step toward peace and quiet or, B) more unwarranted government meddling by the usual suspects, an argument we've been having for a long time. I link to the post mostly because of the accompanying video by reporter Ryan Lengerich.

Could someone explain what a convention hotel complex planned for downtown Indianapolis has to do with Harrison Square?

Naysayers who continue to pick away at the Harrison Square project should take a look at Indianapolis, a booming city thriving partly because of officials' willingness to leverage public money with private partnerships.

This isn't the kinds of thing likely to lure me out of my neighborhood, but the Three Rivers Festival is bringing back an old favorite:

This year's Fort Wayne Newspapers Three Rivers Festival is bringing back, by popular demand, the bed race.

The race, or what organizers called a “real sleeper event” when it debuted in 1974, will feature teams of five

We will never run out of minutia to micromanage. Next up, LEDs:

Council will have to examine how often a message on a sign can change (Crawford suggests six seconds), whether messages can scroll (move vertically) or travel (move horizontally) and how bright and big the signs can be.

Crawford said he expects a preliminary vote Tuesday and a final vote May 22. He said he'll also encourage council to discuss the proper size and placement of all signs and give that to the plan commission.

Have we become such a big city that the terrors of daily life are too routine to report on? Of all the news operations in town, only WANE-TV bothered to carry anything on this:

A neighbor was the target of the drive-by shooting, but the bullets tore through the home of an innocent family. It happened around 4 o'clock Friday morning when the sound of gunshots woke a little girl.

Last evening, I happened to see a Matt Kelty TV ad and a Nelson Peters one about an hour apart, and something struck me about them. Maybe someone with some political campaign savvy can tell me how accurate my impression was. TV political ads can be used to highlight the candidates' good points, but they can also be used to misdirect us a little, and it seemed to me this was going on in the ads.

I have a question about government "encouragement" of the private sector -- the type we've seen plenty of lately and will see still more of shortly. It is my suspicion that changing where people spend their money does not make them spend more money. They aren't going to spend more than they were to fix up their houses because the big-box home-supply store is eight blocks away instead of three miles away. They aren't likely to go to more ballgames than they would have because the stadium is in one place instead of another.

Here is the video of the Republican mayoral candidates, at least four of them -- Duke Brown, Matt Kelty, Teresa Licari and Nelson Peters. Ivan Hood didn't come down for an endorsement interview. A few notes:

1. To keep the clip to a manageable length, I dropped the last question on "What is the best thing about Fort Wayne?" I trust you will still be able judge the candidates without seeing their answers to that.

My video of Republican at-large candidates threatened to be too big, so I split it up -- Part 1 has the six candidates -- John Crawford, Marty Bender, Bob Morris, Liz Brown, Adam Mildred and Kurt Gutman -- answering the first two questions, and Part 2 covers the other three questions.

This is the race for  which we had most of our no-shows -- only three of the seven candidates came for endorsement interviews. Don't Democrats like us? I think the three who came are probably the cream of the crop. Incumbent John Shoaff bucked his party and the administration on Harrison Square. Denise Porter-Ross is a neighborhood advocate and involved in Fort Wayne's All-America City bid. Tom Essex is a lawyer who took over the Wayne Township Trustee's office in troubled times.