Harrison Square passes City Council

If you are looking for links to the press coverage the best source of information is Downtown Fort Wayne Baseball, check out their post on last night's vote:
<http://downtownfortwaynebaseball.blogspot.com/>

I am certainly not surprised by last night's vote given the large number of big business owners who support the project. The vote came out exactly as I predicted on this blog back on March 8th. The City Council voted in favor of the proposal by a margin of 6 to 3.

Three Republicans and three Democrats voted in favor of the resolution. Two Republicans and one Democrat voted against it.

This project was passed by a bi-partisan majority at Council and had broad support from many elected officials in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

On the Republican side Liz Brown, Bill Brown, and Linda Bloom spoke in favor of the project. On the Democratic side Kevin Knuth and Denise Porter-Ross spoke in favor of the project.

This project is supported by the "powers that be" in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

There were two things that I thought were extremely interesting last night:

1. Tom Hayhurst made eight predictions about what would happen if the Harrison Square Project was approved. I cannot remember his exact words; however, he predicted that the wages in Fort Wayne would increase so that they are above the national average.

That is an interesting prediction and I wonder if anyone reading this blog agrees with Councilman Hayhurst?

I do NOT.

2. Councilman Crawford deferred his vote until the end of the roll call vote. I was fairly irritated when he deferred his vote. I thought he was waiting until the end so that he could vote "no" once he was sure the project had enough votes to pass.

Councilman Crawford surprised me by waiting until the end and then supporting the project...

Harrison Square will move forward from this point. It will be approved by our City Council when the final details are worked out.

At this point we have to hope that The Mayor's office negotiates the best possible deal and we have to hope that the project works.

I hope the project works, I really do; however, I am skeptical to say the least...

Mike Sylvester