Dear unrepresentative council member Rob Dorans,

May I give you a tour of Columbus or any other city in the US or the world? Have you ever been to a functional city with credible urban planners and traffic engineers? Do you know what an actual neighborhood is? Have you or another employee of the failing city, and city of Columbus studied cities, and their histories? NO!

You and your city flunkies, the paid agents of out-of-control tax abatements and TIFs with no accountability demonstrate your profound ignorance with your latest uninformed and dangerous “Where Do We Begin? Identifying Initial Focus Areas for Modernizing the City of Columbus’ Zoning Code.”

Look at the rhetoric and grammar itself. Can you translate any of this poor sloganeering into communicable English, let alone urban policy? Where does who begin what? Identifying initial focus areas? Modernizing? What do you mean? None of these terms speaks for itself. Do you or your scribal aides have any idea? Has anyone taken freshman composition, let alone urban planning?

Three museums are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, the darkest period in Tinseltown history. What happened during this period of rightwing repression? As actor Humphrey Bogart put it: “We saw it—and said to ourselves, ‘It can happen here.’ We saw American citizens denied the right to speak by elected representatives of the people! We saw police take citizens from the stand like criminals, after they’d been refused the right to defend themselves. We saw the gavel of the Committee Chairman cutting off the words of free Americans. The sound of that gavel, Mr. Thomas, rings across America, because every time your gavel struck it hit the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

When I excitedly shared the news on social media that Indonesia had refused to host the Israeli team as part of the Under-20 World Cup,  scheduled from May 20 to June 11 in Indonesian cities, some readers were unimpressed. 

RAPID 5’s “vision” to put parks and greenways within a mile-and-a-half of all Franklin County residents is arguably one of the most ambitious public-private development endeavors in the history of Central Ohio.

RAPID 5 stands for “Rivers and Parks Imagination Design” and has a “vision” – they refuse to call it “plans” – for all five of Central Ohio major waterways: the Big Darby, the Scioto River, the Olentangy River, Alum Creek and the Big Walnut.

Those behind RAPID 5 and on its board are some of the biggest policy makers and developers in the region: MORPC, Franklin County Metro Parks, Thrive Developers, Continental Real Estate Company (described as a full-service retail and hospitality developer), M/I Homes and City of Columbus, to name a few.

But so far, RAPID 5 has left one significant and extremely large public group out of its preliminary vision plans or draft reports – the pubic itself.