Our town

Every city needs a theme song, don't you think? Fort Wayne's should be Vince Gill's modern country classic, "One More Last Chance," which contains the memorable refrain: "Give me one more last chance/Before you say we're through/I know I drive you crazy baby/It's the best I can do." We are talking, of course, about the Harrison Square project:

High-speed-rail advocate Geoff Paddock reaches for common sense and almost makes it:

Before rail supporters set their sights on a sleek, new rail system to Chicago, they should focus on bringing Amtrak back to Fort Wayne for the first time in more than 20 years, said Geoff Paddock, co-founder of the Northeast Indiana Passenger Rail Association.

Negotiations between the Fort Wayne Education Association and Fort Wayne Community Schools have hit a snag. The main dispute seems to be over whether to immediately start using new state rules disallowing bargaining over working conditions or to do a new contract before June 30 that would do without those rules for the next two years. This is the eye-popping sentence:

It's do-or-die time for some Hoosier schools:

Eighteen Indiana schools, including two in Fort Wayne, have a lot riding on statewide test scores that will be released this summer. If the schools fail again — marking a sixth consecutive year of being on academic probation — the state could turn them over to private companies charged with spurring improvement.

It can get kind of tricky when you have two experts testifying in court who contradict each other, as happened in the case of Latisha Lawson, on trial for the murder of her 2-year-old son:

Another unanswered question is whether Lawson was sane at the time of Jezaih's death. Two doctors

While Fort Wayne struggles to get its downtown going, Indianapolis has done so well that downtown might be entering the "victim of its own success" stage. Nordstrom, the only anchor tenant originally committed to taking a spot in the new Circle Centre Mall, is leaving downtown, which is causing some to worry about the future of the other anchor tenant, Carson Pirie Scott, and the whole future of the mall. But the upscale company's departure doesn't mean downtown has stopped thriving.

Today's government tap dance comes from City Hall.

Indiana's NewsCenter voiceover:

Wednesday night, important road closure and flooding information was not relayed to the public, leaving some to question the Mayor's office.

This, after tax dollars were used to pay a consultant more than $70,000 just months ago to help with their social media efforts.

Cut to video of Mayor Tom Henry:

I really lucked out with this afternoon's storm. It uprooted this tree right across the street from me but left the big sycamore in front of my house alone. It could have done serious damage to three houses, but it appeared mostly to have hurt the one in the middle.

The JG today has this long story about how the franchise fees paid to the city indicate how the cable companies are doing. Comcast shelled out more than $376,000 for the first quarter, compared with about $343,000 from Frontier, which indicates Comcast nabbed some customers. In the pervious quarter, however, Frontier paid more than Comcast, so it probably had the most customers then:

The Fort Wayne City Council is considering an ordinance that would require the city to maintain existing brick streets, a costly proposal that only the council's self-designated penny-pincher protested: