Our town

Here is one way the new media are changing the way we learn about things.

Suicide has always been one of those subjects the press tiptoes around. If someone killed himself at noon on Main Street, the thinking was, that was news. If he did it in the privacy of his home, that was a quiet family tragedy we did not want to intrude upon. Sometimes "newsworthiness" factors came into play -- the victim was a public figure, for example, or had been involved in public events. But there was a dividing line, and a sense that suicide was a delicate subject.

Fort Wayne is not Detroit, and a baseball stadium downtown would not be the equivalent of the Super Bowl. But there's lesson to be learned here:

Yet with the exception of a few square miles in the center of town, many residents say they have not seen any improvement. And they don't expect the Super Bowl to have an effect on their lives.

I wonder if city planners thought reaction to their billboard ordinance would be tame, since nothing that drastic is proposed; billboards would be have to be smaller and a little lower. But it turns out a lot of people are unhappy. Those who own and use the billboards don't want any changes at all. And many of the "make our city beautiful" types would like the things outlawed altogether.

I saw two stories in the morning paper on different pages that would have been more interesting if they had been put side by side. The bigger story, on Page 1, talked about the impasse between Glenbrook and county officials on the mall's tax value:

A court-ordered reassessment of properties in 2002 increased the mall's tax value from less than $50 million to $114.7 million. The move also increased annual property taxes for the mall by $1.4 million, to $2.3 million. [. . . ] According to the original appeal, Glenbrook argued its value should be $38.8 million.

Hooray for the City Council (or, more precisely, the five Republicans on it) for beating back the Richard administration's attempt to get $1.25 million more out of taxpayers. Considering the billions and billions we read about in stories of the federal and even state government, it's a piddling amount. But it's a small victory for taxpayers who sometimes wonder if there's anybody left in government who still realizes it's the public's money that's being spent. A spark of old-fashioned conservatism still exists here.

On Monday, I had an editorial in the paper putting forth a proposed plan for consolidation of city and county government. We've been chewing this issue over for decades, and nobody had taken that simple step of drafting an actual proposal to argue about. Now, it seems like others have had the same idea. I've heard that both the Northeast Indiana Corporate Council and representatives of City and County Councils have been drafting proposals and that all three are similar.

Further thoughts on the case of expelled Carroll student Jeff Fraser.

I'd really like to read the book.

Changing some one-way streets back to two-way is good news for downtown-revitalization efforts. One-way streets are good for mostly one thing: moving traffic quickly. If you want people to slow down and see your downtown area, they suck. If you're trying to navigate through neighborhoods, or explain to out-of-town visitors how to get to your neighborhood, they suck more. The block of Oakdale I live on is one-way east. The next block east is one-way west.

Indianapolis has picked "Catch Me If You Can" as its latest One Book-One City subject, which seems like a pretty lightweight choice. Here's the list of 25 finalists, which had a few that seem more likely to generate lively discussion.