John David Dyche: Columnist Makes The Case For Hal Heiner.

Columnist makes the case for Hal Heiner
By John David Dyche

Louisville's mayoral campaign has, until recently, been a model. It has given voters everything they should want, indeed everything they should expect, from politics.

There are three credible candidates. The Democrat, Greg Fischer, is a liberal, but has some redeeming entrepreneurial instincts. The Republican, Hal Heiner, is a conservative, but a tolerant one.

Independent Jackie Green offers voters an alternative to the major parties. He defies easy labeling and provides a perspective that the community needs to hear.

Each contender has valuable business experience. Each has issued detailed policy platforms and displays a humility so long and regrettably lacking in the current administration.

There have been lots of debates and candidate forums that have focused on different topics in a variety of formats. Any citizen who has wanted to ask the candidates a question has had an opportunity to do so.

The candidates have challenged each other aggressively, yet respectfully.

Local media have done an admirable job of covering the campaign and candidates in a full and fair fashion. The candidates have, to their credit, refrained from negative ads, but more about that below.

Each candidate has been impressive in certain respects. Heiner displays a dazzling mastery of the details and history of metro government. He is obviously the most knowledgeable about what the Mayor and council have done since merger and how metro government actually operates.

Fischer would require considerable on-the-job training. He has apparently never attended a Metro Council meeting, but has watched some on TV. During the primary, he could not state the size of the city's general fund budget, and more recently had no idea of the facts or how he would have voted on a $47 million general obligation bond for the Museum Plaza project.

Protecting taxpayers is Heiner's trademark. He played a leading role in defeating a library tax increase, challenged the current administration's secretive sweetheart deals with out-of-state developers and battled to bring transparency to city finances. Fischer has not been a factor in any of these good government fights.

Heiner has shown courage and leadership on the toughest issues. He has simultaneously defied two cliques of local elites by pushing for immediate construction of an East End bridge and raising the possibility of reopening the record of decision that dictates a downtown bridge and massive Spaghetti Junction makeover. Fischer has now followed suit on the latter.

Despite the venomous editorial denunciation that was sure to follow, and did, Heiner also had the guts to call for rethinking the Jefferson County Public Schools' student assignment plan. At first, Fischer said it was “deplorable” for Heiner to address this critical community issue. Now he is doing so himself, presumably after polling, and parroting Heiner in the process.

Green was actually the first to call for scrapping the student assignment plan. Displaying considerable common sense, he condemned the misguided social engineering exercise as economically, educationally and environmentally unsound. In this respect and others, Green thinks big about making urban existence smarter, more sustainable and more humane in pace and scale.

When it comes to consensus-building, Heiner has earned bipartisan backing that can translate into a truly successful administration. Democratic mayoral hopefuls Tyler Allen and Shannon White have endorsed him.

Allen is a hard-working visionary with support among young professionals, while White provides the much needed perspective of working women. Both have bravely transcended the petty partisanship that has too often held Louisville back.

Heiner is also the candidate most clearly committed to changing the culture and personnel of the current administration. Fischer has already hired staff from the administration and pledges to keep police chief Robert White despite the top cop's poor handling of problem officers.

Heiner represents real change, whereas Fischer means a good deal more of the same. The public can decide which alternative it prefers.

Unfortunately, only three weeks before Election Day this exemplary campaign has veered off the high road it has traveled thus far. The Louisville-Jefferson County Democratic Party, acting as a surrogate for Fischer, has produced a shabby YouTube attack ad against Heiner. It is truly deplorable that desperate Democrats have decided to spoil this campaign's heretofore splendid example of what modern American politics can be.

Fischer should publicly repudiate his party's pathetic product. If he keeps silent, it signals that he is behind and afraid, and too craven to be mayor.

John David Dyche is a Louisville attorney who writes a political column on alternating Tuesdays in Forum His views are his own, not those of the law firm in which he practices. Read him on-line at www.courier-journal.com; e-mail: jddyche@yahoo.com.