Businesses on main street in New Albany won’t be getting money from the city

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - Businesses on main street in New Albany will not be getting money from the city.

The city council decided to pull a petition that would set aside $500,000 for businesses hurt by the construction happening on Main Street.

Business owners have been asking for help from the New Albany city government for months, and now they have their answer.

They had to sit and wait as the council discussed spending millions of dollars on a new police station, just to be denied the $500,000 they were asking for.

One owner called it “bad optics.”

The decision to pull the petition was made by one of its sponsors. Council member Greg Phipps told the crowd he couldn’t vote on it because it was illegal.

“I would rather give money to you than to give it to the large corporations in terms of tax abatements, but legally we can’t do it,” Phipps said.

So they decided to pull it altogether instead of voting on it.

This was after the council spent about 30 minutes talking about spending millions of dollars for a new police station.

“It seems kind of tone deaf,” the owner of Eureka Menswear, Dan Hardesty said. “As a citizen of this city, we gave a 52 million dollar tax abatement to a business last meeting.” This meeting we’re talking about spending 17 million on a police station.”

Some people weren’t surprised.

“It sounds familiar because the last time we had a city council meeting last month, they spent half an hour talking about a crosswalk that cost 250 thousand dollars as well,” said Andrew Nicholson.

The business owners said they’re suffering due to the construction on their street.

“I did my numbers just from today versus last year, this exact same day, the owner of New Albany Sugar Shoppe, Stevie Carper said. “66% loss today and I’m open an extra two hours.”

After the meeting, some of the owners said that they understand if the council legally can’t give them money. However, they also said the council has explored all the options and if they wanted to find a way, they could.

“I don’t see you guys coming in supporting us, and you’re not coming in and asking us what can we do to help,” Carper said. “Because I have a lot of ideas. I’m not just asking for a check. I have a lot of ideas.”

One of the council members said they’re close to setting up a program that could help out the businesses. He said they’ll know more in a couple of weeks.

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