jdm00

I saw he is under wraps right now (last I drove by). I assume there will be some sort of re-dedication ceremony?

Sometimes when Dusty complains about our "downtown streets being destroyed" by streetcar construction, I point out that all of the streets will be repaved when the project is complete. (That's 12 lane-miles as someone pointed out earlier in this thread.) Additionally, with all of the new sewer, gas, water, electric, telephone, cable, and filter optic cable that's going in because of the streetcar, we're going to be in good shape for the next few decades. What's funny is that there have been several interstate highway closures over the past few months because of the work on I-75 and the new I-71 interchange at MLK. Closing down an interstate highway is a much bigger deal than restricting traffic to one lane downtown (where people can go around the block and avoid it anyway). Yet no one is complaining about the highway work. Maybe not in the paper, but believe me, plenty of people are complaining about the highway work. Just ask someone who drives it a lot; 75 is a misery right now.

Does the BRT on the HealthLine allow for possible conversion to streetcar? Or is that just too expensive to contemplate at this point?

That article mentioned that a number of firms already located downtown are looking to expand, which could result in a new tower. However they also mentioned that some companies are looking to move downtown, so that might keep demand high for the existing buildings as well. They will not go to 309 Vine and I really cant see them at the banks. Chiquita Center is a possibility but I think they are holding out for a new tower by W&S. They need to be near P&G and I think with a couple of their chief competitors in QCS, they want a brand new premier office tower for themselves too. edited - didn't really add anything.

Is that call iLoft at the Square?

If you're going up Plainfield, it is almost always faster to get off at Stewart Road and cut up Plainfield through Deer Park. Not a bad idea, though.

Take 71 to the lateral and cut over to 75.

Right on, I'm with you on that. I'm guess I'm just nervous that if Flynn doesn't see guaranteed operating dollars pop up sooner than later he's going to get impatient. I'm probably just paranoid. It would have to be a switch of two council members to somehow cancel it (after having spent untold additional millions on it), not just one. Remember it was 6-3 to restart it after it was paused, because of the veto threat.

And it seemed to happen right after a cop car drove by. Weird timing for someone to decide to start shooting, isn't it?

My mistake. I didn't realize they passed a levy specifically for a police department in 2007. Though that explains why they would have a police department of their own (supplemented by Sheriff patrols).

Places like Colerain survive because they don't provide any services. You want your trash removed? Have to pay a private company. They don't have their own police, either. I assume they have some sort of fire taxing district, but I don't know that for sure.

What constitutes a "block"? Are the blocks the same size in the various cities? Because if not, doing a block to block comparison is kind of pointless.

That's a big plane. Bigger than pretty much all the Delta planes I get out of CVG, which tend to almost invariably be MD-88s and 737s.

In addition to the lease dispute, didn't the 4th and Race project miss out on tax or new market credits it was banking on? Financing a big project is a very tricky thing, I would imagine.

Saw chatter on Facebook that Tarbell might run. I would not expect that but I guess he could. Sounds like the Dems are viewing this as a real opportunity to put up a challenger.

I love XU, but I am not surprised by this. The XU campus has always been (in my view) about making it into a bubble. It's always felt like a suburban-type of college campus, despite its obvious urban location.

Great news and good momentum. By the way, that rehab of the Dreyfus building looks fantastic.

Well, this start after the break has been a catastrophe.

I blame Quimbob for all the problems there! Just kidding. Out of curisoity, is there a "trolling" policy that the mods employ? I know there can sometimes be a fine line between genuinely held differences of opinions and folks who only seem to show up to make snarky comments and antagonize. I think UO does a pretty good job with it, but I've often wished that message boards had some sort of "troll" button you could click on a post. Though I've seen boards that have "gongs" or "dislike" buttons for posts and I don't know that that helps. I do have one board where I am a member with a reputation function, which helps ferret that stuff out pretty quickly, but it's a sports board devoted to a particular team, so there is a communal understanding of what constitutes trolling.

Not to veer off topic, but the idea of a 100-story tower at the top of the hills is saner than 100 stories of senior citizen housing. Can you imagine a fire alarm going off and everyone having to take to the stairs?

Thanks for the guidelines. I thought that the undertsanding was that historically, most OTR brick buildings had originally been painted.

Not sure how it gets proposed. I got something in the mail about the special assessment (probably the same one Jim Uber did) and agreed to it.

Pretty sure the older one is not of Walnut, but of Vine. Again, it's impossible to know without the circumstances of the time of day, etc. If you took a shot looking north on Walnut at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning it would be full of traffic and people.

Don't the historic preservation guidelines actually encourage painting in OTR?

Something interesting about the wording of that story...are they making it clear that it's not for smokers of other substances?