LETTER: Reader doesn’t buy property value claims

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March 3, 2010

Anonymous newsroom@newsandtribune.com The News and Tribune Wed Mar 03, 2010, 12:15 AM EST

>>SOUTHERN INDIANA — It seems the Utica Town Council and Jeffersonville Mayor Galligan have a difference of opinion. Recently, while reading columnist Kelley Curran’s article in The Evening News regarding the proposed “canal district,” I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Curran’s fears of governmental control of her property and the very real situation Utica residents have been facing for several years. There is a certain group of people here in Utica — some of them council members — who believe they have the right to tell everybody else “how things will look.” And, although the mayor, in his response to the canal column, says certain controls are in the interest of public safety, not aesthetics and profits, these folks make no secret of the fact that it’s all about aesthetics and profit here in Utica. Public health and safety have never been a part of the conversation. Anyone who regularly reads the Evening News opinions page knows half the story. The part about the so-called “clean up effort” in Utica. But, attend a few council meetings and listen to the council’s reasoning and you’ll get “the rest of the story,” as radio personality Paul Harvey used to say. You’ll see very clearly that it’s all about the property values. Utica residents are expected to work our tails off and spend money we don’t have or don’t want to spend just to keep up with the Joneses. It’s somehow supposed to be our duty to satisfy the expectations of “carpet-bagging” speculators and a few wannabe dictators currently viewed by many here as “traitors” to their own people. I, too, have no sympathy or patience for those who try to tell others how to live and try to decide for me what I cannot do, or what I must do, on my property. Our council should abandon their tired, worn out, old rhetoric about diminishing the property values of neighbors, That dog just won’t hunt. It’s all meaningless drivel. In fact, I’ll make a deal with the council and all (half-dozen?) of their nonrelated, non-native supporters. Prove to me that I’m diminishing anybody’s property value and I’ll shut up. — Kenneth Hall, Utica

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