A new pedestrian bridge was bolted into place across Beale Street this week, marking figuratively, if not quite literally, the end of the great Battle of the Bluffwalk.
It was a war that raged in the courts and in the court of public opinion for nearly a decade. On one side stood the members of the Chickasaw Bluffs Conservancy, relentlessly insistent upon maintaining public access along the entire span of the bluff. On the other side were the bluff home-owners and developers, who saw the bluffwalk as unnecessary, environmentally unsound, and, not so incidentally, detrimental to their property values.
Emotions ran high. Threats were made. Names were called. The case ping-ponged through the judicial system for years, even involving Mayor Herenton, who at one point refused to sign the construction contract. But now, except for the possibility of one final appeal by the home-owners, the bluffwalk seems a done deal.
We can only hope that all sides will accept the inevitable in gracious fashion: that upon completion of the walk this summer, the Conservancy won’t hold a kazoo parade along the bluff and thumb their noses at the home-owners, and that the home-owners won’t follow through on Pepper Rodgers’ threat to “hose them down the hill.”
More seriously, we suspect that over time, if the bluffwalk is maintained properly, it will simply become another part of the burgeoning reinvigoration of downtown, no more significant or controversial than any other sidewalk, except for its stormy history. n
Last week U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala announced what AIDS advocates and medical professionals have been saying for years: Needle-exchange programs reduce the spread of HIV and do not encourage drug use. She went on to encourage AIDS service agencies to adopt needle-exchange programs supported by state governments and private sources.
Then, in a shameless display of Clintonesque fence-straddling, the secretary said that although the administration supports needle-exchange programs, it will not fund them.
Because of the political implications of using tax dollars to buy needles for junkies, the Clinton administration has made a conscious decision to avoid fiscal responsibility, adopting a “We support you, but you pay for it” attitude instead. Never mind that many AIDS service organizations receive the majority of their funding from the federal government, and private sources contribute to needle-exchange programs only a fraction of what the government could contribute. And never mind that the public health-care cost of treating a drug addict with AIDS far exceeds the cost of a 70-cent syringe.
A small but vocal minority has publicly opposed needle exchange because they say it sanctions drug use. However, most people who are addicted to intravenous drugs will use them regardless of whether they have clean needles. By declining to pay for sterile syringes, the Clinton administration is saying that people’s lives aren’t worth as much as the administration’s image.
The Clinton administration’s new needle-exchange policy doesn’t make it look soft on drugs. It makes it look soft on AIDS. In an attempt to wash its hands of a politically volatile issue, it’s gotten blood all over them. n