IS IT TRUE that the Mayor of Evansville has three appointments to the Evansville Redevelopment Commission?…that of the three Mayoral appointments to the ERC that two of them will not be reappointed?…that Sara Miller of Old National Bank who lately has been the voice of sanity and practicality on the ERC is being reappointed by Mayor Winnecke but that long time Chairman of the ERC Bob Goldman and recent old boss appointee architect and buyer of the $500,000 Idea Home for well under $200,000 Jody Phillips will not be coming back to the 2012 edition of the ERC?…that the two and only two votes cast to quick slam a deal with the newly formed McCurdy Development LLC are both history so maybe some sanity can return and last minute cram deals will depart forever?…that the final two appointments are at the whim of the Evansville City Council and the incumbents are Greg Elpers, CPA who was absent from the last minute cram vote and Jay Carter who has been very quiet but did cast what may be the most powerful NO VOTE seen on the ERC in a decade in deadlocking the cram through vote so that the cram through could not happen?…that we will be very interested in what happens with the City Council’s appointments?

IS IT TRUE that Mole # 33 tells us that there are concerns haphazard nature of the Evansville Water and Sewer Utilities financial records?…we are hearing that the newly appointed CFO-Jenney Collins shall find a real mess concerning the financial records of that department?…if these concern are valid that the past President of that Board of Directors need to come forward and explain why these problems are just surfacing because this person since is a CPA and should have assured that all of the accounting procedures were conformal and that each audit was comprehensive and competent?

IS IT TRUE you can expect to read that the Evansville City Council shall be electing 4th Ward City Council woman Connie Robinson as its new President and 2nd Ward City Council woman Missy Mosby as its Vice Chairperson.? …that 5th Ward City Councilman John Friend, CPA shall be elected Budget Chairmen?…we urge you to watch who gets the Board appointments handed down by Council President Robinson because it shall signal if we can expect that there will still be a 5 person group of Council members to continue to vote as a political block? …that you can expect that well respected attorney John Hamilton shall be re-appointed as City Council Attorney?

IS IT TRUE that the Vanderburgh County Commissioners shall elect Commissioner Marsha Abell as its next President and Commissioner Joe Kiefer as its Vice Chairman?

IS IT TRUE that each and every person should drive across this United States at least once in their lifetime and that doing so every ten years is an enjoyable exercise that is a good way to keep in touch with other parts of our country?…that driving through Joplin, MO serves as a reminder of the power of nature as the people of Joplin lost lives and property to a tornado much as the people of Evansville did on that November night in 2005?…that it is both humbling yet reassuring that the spirit of humanity pulls together in troubling times just as the people of Evansville and Newburgh did during our tornado?…that Joplin and Evansville are forever joined together in both struggle and rebuilding?

IS IT TRUE that about every 50 miles in Oklahoma there is a toll booth to collect $4 for driving on Interstate 44?…that Interstate 44 is a beautiful road that is free of potholes and has a speed limit of 75 miles per hour and a surface capable of handling speeds of up to 100 miles per hour without vibrating one’s car?…that this writer will gladly pay $4 for such a road and the privilege of speed any time it is offered?…that this writer would also appreciate no questions from the Oklahoma State Police about that Indiana car that has knowledge of how their roads respond at 100 miles per hour?

IS IT TRUE that the Wall Street Journal headline “Kodak on the Brink” describes the once revered Eastman Kodak Company that much of the wealth of Rochester, NY was built upon as being near to bankruptcy and taking the action of liquidating its patent portfolio?…that a century of building things and the last remaining value is the intellectual property upon which the manufacturing dynasty was built yet collapsed when the inventing stopped?…that this writer was a young R& D engineer at Silicon Valley’s Verbatim Corporation when Verbatim was bought out by Kodak in 1985 and vividly remembers two experiences with the first six months under Kodak?…that during that six month period nearly every member of the R & D and Product Development staff of the former Verbatim left Kodak for reasons that lead to yesterday’s article?

IS IT TRUE that the first instance was in an orientation meeting with a Sr. VP of Something who was sent out via private jet to integrate our R & D team into the Kodak way?…that Verbatim was a very forward thinking company in which all employees had stock options, flex time, a sabbatical every 7 years, massages, free lunches, etc?…that it was sort of like Google is today as a place to work goes?…that all of that came to an end when Kodak took over and that we were actually told by Mr. Sr. VP of Something who travelled by private jet that “if you stick with us for 30 years you will retire with a gold watch”?…that this writer just happened to have been given a gold watch for a recent 27th birthday?…that the watch was offered to Mr. Sr. VP of Something that travelled by private jet as an advance against the accomplishments that he was sure to make in the waning years of his career?…that this went over like a turd in the punchbowl but that it did become a story told over and over as Kodak began its 25 year decline into “the Brink”?

IS IT TRUE that the other vivid memory came a couple of weeks later at a special meeting to review a rather novel patent disclosure that was written by this writer?…that during a particularly difficult incident during the debugging process of the focusing device for an erasable compact disk that the focusing mechanism focused on the substrate as opposed to the magneto-optic layer (where the bits are stored)?…that this guy was struck with the idea that if there were multiple focal planes in a disk each with a magneto optic layer that one could store the equivalent of many disks of information on a multilayer single disk?…that this guy wrote it all up in a patent disclosure only to be told by the Kodak tribunal that the idea was so far into the future that they did not want to pursue it at that time?…that 22 years later a multilayer CD Rom was successfully tested by the IBM corporation and published extensively as the next breakthrough in data storage?

IS IT TRUE that somewhere in the vault of Intellectual Property that will someday surely be auctioned off to pay the financial obligations of the Eastman Kodak Company is a two page description and 3 pages of drawings that predate the IBM work by 22 years, are signed an witnessed by the Kodak tribunal who decided not to pursue the invention, and bear the inventors name as this writer, Mr. Joe Wallace?…that there is a box in the attic with copies of that patent disclosure too?…that the real tragedy of this story is that a once great American company grew so large and fat that it put more emphasis on Sr. VP’s of Something and private jets than it did on innovation?…that Kodak essentially paid lots of money for Verbatim and proceeded to run off the only real source of value which was the talent of the people working there?…that this story has played itself out many times at Kodak and other formerly great businesses that forgot that it was innovation and ambition that lead to their successes in the first place?…that unfortunately many of these stories are rooted in the Midwest that just today was profiled for continuing to lose population?…that it is not just population that is migrating to the coasts, it is the very part of the population that has the potential to make profound positive differences?…that this is just a continuation of the brain drain?

Kodak on the Brink on the following Link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203471004577140841495542810.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection