In his trivia column in last week’s Leader, staff writer Kevin Carbery quizzed readers on some of his favorite movie quotes.
One movie quote that Kevin didn’t use offers a perfect summary of the recently killed-off Arnold Parkway fiasco.
It was a line from the 1967 prison movie “Cool Hand Luke,” starring Paul Newman as a rebellious prisoner doing hard time for cutting the heads off parking meters. Luke got sideways with a sadistic guard captain who delighted in making him dig deep holes in the prison yard in scorching heat until he knuckled under, which he never did.
The captain stood over the hole with his rifle as Luke dug and explained to the other prisoners what was happening.
“What we’ve got here,” he said, “is failure to communicate.”
Bingo.
Arnold city officials apparently had been working about three years on the Arnold Parkway project, which would have been a 2-mile road basically along the east side of I-55 between Hwy. 141 and Richardson Road. The project would have required demolition of 38 homes and several businesses, and cost $75 million.
Sadly, as it turned out, the planning was done in the dark – Arnold had a massive failure to communicate.
When the Leader first reported the plan on Aug. 8, including that eminent domain would be used if necessary to take the needed property, public reaction was immediate, and it was not good.
The villagers were angry.
Pitchfork sales went through the roof. There was a run on tar and feathers. Muskets were cleaned and oiled, knives sharpened.
Not really. But the outrage was real, and any benefit the road might have provided was quickly swept away in a tsunami of anger.
Fortunately, the Arnold brain trust reacted as it should have, better late than not at all.
After the years of secret planning, and a standing-room-only crowd of ticked-off citizens at the next City Council meeting after our story ran, they folded the project in less than three weeks.
To paraphrase another famous movie quote: Ding, dong, the Parkway’s dead.
It’s not uncommon for anyone planning a major real estate project to try to acquire the property quietly. Developers don’t mind paying market prices usually, but when word gets out before the land is secured, prices tend to escalate.
It’s trickier when the developer is not a mall operator, but your hometown. There is a greater need for transparency. The Arnold Parkway should have had a thorough public vetting, with town hall meetings, public hearings, maps and a schedule of what the city wanted to do – the works.
If some individuals hold out and it costs a little more, that’s the price of being straight with your citizenry.
The alternative is to keep it secret and find out the price of not being straight with your citizenry.
In this case, it was a petition drive to throw all the rascals out. It quickly drew hundreds of signatures.
Online outrage is easy and cheap, but this one had a more substantial feel to it. Mayor Ron Counts, City Administrator Bryan Richison and presumably a majority of the City Council read the tea leaves correctly and did the right thing by pulling the plug.
This may not play well in Arnold, but I have empathy for Richison and especially Counts, who has long demonstrated his dedication to his community as mayor for almost 16 years, and before that as a school board member, ambulance board member, business owner and fully involved, civic-minded dude.
Counts, 78, is in the final year of his fourth four-year term as mayor. He says he has not decided whether to run for a fifth term. After all he has done for his community, it would have been a shame for him to go out in a hail of digital bullets.
How could Counts and the well-regarded Richison, two veterans of city government, get so far down the pike on a project that so many of their constituents absolutely hated? How could they not know?
Because they didn’t ask.
Insulated human beings, especially in small pods, can convince themselves and each other that a bad idea is good if they talk among themselves – and only themselves – long enough.
They are not necessarily dumb or evil. They are isolated. They fail to communicate.
We at Leader World Headquarters naturally try to be advocates for transparency because that’s what we do – we report stuff. Transparency makes that task easier and helps keep people informed.
Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is spent, and how the people they elect to office vote to spend it.
In the end, Counts ate his humble pie with exactly the right words.
“My hope has always been to try to do what is in the best interest of our city,” he said. “I want to do what the folks really want in our city.”
Now that’s communicating.