The City of Evansville is currently accepting applications for the new Commercial Façade Grant Program. The program, funded through HUD Community Development Block Grants, is aimed at rehabilitating existing commercial buildings as part of the city’s continued efforts to revitalize core areas of our community. The program provides reimbursement grants up to $50,000 to eligible property owners for exterior-only renovations to commercial or mixed use buildings located within the city’s community development census tracts.

“We look forward to assisting business owners who seek to transform their spaces or revive vacant places in our urban core,” said Philip Hooper, Executive Director of the Department of Metropolitan Development. “The eligible grant area is central to our city, and through this tool we will leverage our grant resources at a one to one match, while increasing the vibrancy and vitality of our historic corridors.”

Residential properties are excluded under the grant program, with the exception of buildings that have a commercial use on the first floor. Eligible expenses include exterior work, landscaping (within project guidelines) and permanent signage that is attached to the building and meets all design review requirements. Inside renovations such as floor coverings and interior painting are excluded.

The grants cannot be used on private residences, apartments, condominiums or duplexes. Property owners may apply for more than one grant; however, a project will only be eligible for one grant during the grant-cycle year. Grants may not exceed $50,000 per project over a five-year-period.

Property owners must obtain bids and award contracts to the lowest bidder or pay for the difference, and follow other HUD guidelines.

The Department of Metropolitan Development is accepting applications for the first round of funding through April 15. For more information, contact Kelley Coures at 812-436-7823 or follow this link:
http://www.evansville.in.gov/DMD 

TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – He’s just a guy.

Over the years, I’ve run into Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay a few times.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

I don’t know him well, but I’ve been impressed the times I’ve been around him. He seemed like a sharp guy, a man with charm, smarts and drive.

Perhaps the best of those occasions was when I got to attend a sneak peak at the Indianapolis Museum of Art of the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript of “On the Road,” which Irsay had bought for $2.43 million. Years ago, I taught a course on Kerouac and the Beat Generation, so I have an understanding and appreciation for the novel. A few minutes conversation with Irsay about the writer revealed that, while the Colts owner may be a billionaire and an NFL powerhouse, he also was just a guy who loved a book and knew it well.

Just a guy.

When Jim Irsay was stopped for erratic driving near his home late Sunday night and police found four different controlled substances in his car, the chatter went into overdrive. There was speculation about what this would mean for the Colts, for the National Football League and for Indianapolis’s bid to host another Super Bowl.

There was not much thought given to what it might mean for the man.

From left, former Colts center Jeff Saturday, Colts owner Jim Irsay and Mark Miles, who headed up the city’s previous Super Bowl bid, talk during an announcement that the city will compete to host the game again in 2018. Photo by Jesse Wilson, TheStatehouseFile.com

We tend to think of wealth, power and prominence as forces that insulate human beings from trouble and misfortune. We tend to think that people with money, influence and fame can’t have doubts, can’t have weaknesses, can’t stumble, and can’t fall.

We tend to forget that a guy like Jim Irsay is, in fact, just a guy.

Right now, he seems to be a guy who’s dealing with some difficulties.

He’s going through a divorce. He and his estranged wife, Meg, married when he was 21. They have been separated for a decade, but it’s no easy thing to put an end to a marriage that has lasted for more than 30 years, produced children and, for all of his adult life, helped define who Jim Irsay is.

He also has some health troubles, a back and hip that don’t work quite the way they used to – typical stuff for middle-aged guys. Particularly middle-aged guys who used to be jocks and subjected their bodies to repeated poundings.

Colts owner Jim Irsay said at an announcement in 2012 that he would support and participate in another Super Bowl bid for Indianapolis. Photo by Kendra Rhonemus, The Statehouse File.

And he’s has a history, a father who had his own struggles with substances, a sister and a brother who died young, a fight with his stepmother over who would control the family business, which just happened to be a world-famous sports franchise.

And then there’s Jim Irsay’s own history, which is well-publicized. He’s admitted that he had a problem with prescription drugs in the past, one that brought him to the edge of serious legal trouble, but he’s said he dealt with it.

While it’s important to note here that Irsay hasn’t been convicted of anything – and if he can produce prescriptions for the four controlled substances, the felony charges go away – the notion that his drug problem was something he could put in the past tense might be part of the issue.

The really nasty thing about addiction is that it never goes away. Every day is another day to fight, another opportunity to slip and fall.

Perhaps Irsay has taken another stumble.

He certainly wouldn’t be the first guy to do so.

The difference between Jim Irsay and a lot of other guys is that hundreds of thousands of people are fans of his football team and the city is banking heavily on again landing the biggest event in the world of sports.

For those reasons, Irsay doesn’t get to make his mistakes in obscurity.

And, for those reasons, we sometimes forget that there’s a human being at the center of the sports franchise and the spectacle.

We forget that Jim Irsay is just a guy – a guy going through a rough patch.

He’ll either deal with his difficulties, make peace with his past and handle his health problems or he won’t – and he’ll continue to stumble.

In that way, Jim Irsay is just like the rest of us.

He’s just a guy.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Francois Rabelais said it best

“Nature abhors a vacuum.”

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

So, apparently, do the political and news cultures of the Western world. Even when pundits and politicians don’t know what’s going on – even when they acknowledge that they don’t know – that doesn’t stop them from speculating and talking, talking, talking even when they have nothing to say.

Consider the strange case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished an hour after it took off for a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. There were roughly 240 people on board and not a peep has been heard from any of them since the plane disappeared.

The only things that are “known” about the disappearance – and those things aren’t known with sufficient firmness to call them facts – include some inconclusive and not well confirmed pieces of evidence that the plane altered course and that its automated communications and tracking systems either were turned off or seriously malfunctioned.

In fact, the things we don’t know far outweigh the things we do know.

We don’t have a plane, a crew, a passenger, a black box or any other person or piece of that flight, so we don’t really know what we’re looking for or even where we should be looking for it.

We don’t have a crash site because we don’t even know for sure that there was a crash.

We don’t have a landing site because we don’t even know for sure where or if the plane landed somewhere.

We don’t have a crime scene because we don’t know for sure that there was a crime.

The paucity of concrete evidence, though, hasn’t stopped the major news networks from exploring at endless length the possible outcomes or storylines. Nor has it stopped a steady stream of public officials and other “experts” who spin speculative tales about possible scenarios, as if they were pitching ideas for made-for-television movies.

I understand and to some degree accept that these forays into fantasy inadequately disguised as analysis are products of two ravenous appetites.

The first of those appetites is the hunger many political figures, consultants and hangers-on in the political world have for exposure. In a culture in which both clout and cash often are measured by face time on camera, many people are eager to speak at length when the red light goes on, even when doing so requires them to blather like the village idiot.

The other hunger is more basic – and more understandable. We try out answers even when we don’t have enough information to supply proper questions much less answers because not knowing scares us. If we don’t know enough to know how something happened, then we also don’t know enough to stop it – whether it is an accident or an attack – the next time it might occur.

No one likes to feel that vulnerable.

And in this era in which information that in years past would have taken months, years or even decades to compile now can be assembled with a few key strokes and about as many seconds, we tend to think that all matters of interest should yield themselves to our curiosity.

But they don’t.

There are some things we don’t get to understand, some mysteries we never unravel. We still don’t know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried or where Amelia Earhart died.

Speculating about what happened to them and why can be satisfying parlor games but that speculation shouldn’t be confused with newsgathering, scholarship or honest-to-goodness analysis.

It’s guessing and nothing more, but we try to use those guesses to fill the vacuum because the vacuum frightens us.

The famed journalist H.L. Mencken tried to rebut Rabelais. Mencken said, “Nature abhors a moron.”

That statement is demonstrably not true, because nature has created so many morons.

And, right now, a lot of them are fighting for air time.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.