It’s Time To Rethink Your Thinking

The great City of Albany has been built on the backs of Immigrants. Beginning with the original Dutch settlers, there have been Italians, Polish, German, Lithuanian, Greek, and especially the Irish. These people settled in our area, and built it into the city that we now enjoy to live in, work in, and educate our children in. We also want to choose to socialize as we see fit in the city. It appears that the socialize part has taken a different turn. One of the most money making days for businesses along the Central/Washington Avenue corridor’s is what we call “Parade Day.” This is for the visitors to our fine city: This day occurs on the Saturday most close to St. Patrick’s day, but never after the actual March 17th event. People fill the bars and restaurants along the route, and when the parade is passing by, take beverages outside to watch. The bottom line is that the mayor has banned all outdoor use of any alcoholic beverage outside an establishment (there are some allowable areas.) Ms. Mayor, this is a once a year event. Is this going to happen on any city parade day? Some of these businesses depend on these days to make a bottom line. And this is after you tried to force these businesses to ante up to the tune of $20K to pay for the parade. Did you wake up one morning and decide this? Or did you just go off half-cocked and decide this on your own, which is pretty much how you run this city? And how is this going to be enforced? I guess a bunch of appearance tickets will make a city court judge real happy. You just dumped a great deal of pressure on our new Police Chief. Or maybe this is a goodbye to our outgoing Chief (who is going to a nice job, making more money, and spending more time with his family.) Thanks for that one Kathy. Good luck Saturday. This parade and celebration of this city’s Irish has happened in every year that I’ve live here, which is a lot longer than you. You’re Irish by name, and you’ll be marching proudly, alcohol free down Washington Avenue. The parade has been family friendly as long as I’ve known. Our leader is still dwelling on Kegs ‘N Eggs. That never happened before, and will never happen again. As always, the weather might not cooperate with the festivities, but I hope it does not hesitate our visitors from partaking in an annual Albany event. You’re here to visit Albany, go out and meet some people and enjoy the city.………And by the way. The city did a very poor job in removing snow this year. If you drive along some of the side roads, with all the pot holes, you’d think you were driving through a bomb zone. And don’t have the DGS waste their time putting down that patch material. Unless you compact that, it will stay for a day, maybe.……….And one more thing. I hope you can reap all the dollars you expect from the traffic cameras. They are not even in use yet, and we are reaching the end of the first quarter. I also hope that the city is ready for all of it’s tech savvy citizens to figure out a way to beat the tickets like they have in cities all over the country. Another nightmare for the cities courts.……….I am not much into delving into national politics, but the way Congress is treating the President is borderline treason. That letter — that was composed by some no-name Republican low level representative, but more likely composed by the speaker — to the Iranian government was a slap in the face of a sitting President that I never would have imagined from John Boehner. It seems that if the President told Boehner that the sky was blue, he would say “but only during the day.” To imagine that all those other Republican idiots signed the letter. “Afraid of Daddy.”