News in the New Year

Tim Fulton 00:09Welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly, Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week, as we ease into 2024, we're taking a quick look back into some happenings that you may have missed as the year turned over. Columbus Underground co-founder and editor Walker Evans discusses a myriad of stories including the latest in transportation, climate change, local politics, and a dash of comedy here in the capital city. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here with Walker Evans, the editor and co-founder of Columbus Underground. Walker, how are you?

Walker Evans 01:02Great, how are you, Tim?

Tim Fulton 01:04I'm good, happy New Year. Happy New Year. Hey, there was a lot happening with the holidays and everything. First of all, in the interest of making sure that we keep this thing weekly, and additionally, a lot of stories that we think some folks may have missed with all the family stuff and everything else that was going on in the city. So thankfully, you wrote me a little punch list here to go through the stories. First up: the Hyperloop is dead.

Walker Evans 01:32There were some rumors that started floating around that the company is winding down and laying off staff and selling assets. And so once that kind of got out into the larger ecosystem, everyone kind of latched onto it pretty quickly and said, yeah, we kind of knew this wasn't going anywhere from the beginning.

Tim Fulton 01:49Did they acknowledge it? Or I'd have to go back and check.

Walker Evans 01:52December 23rd was when I saw the report from Bloomberg. And so I reached out to folks at the city, whose responses were kind of like, yeah, okay, it's gone. But the silver lining, I think, that everyone was trying to paint — and I don't know if this is in retrospect, or this is the way it was kind of seen all along — was, we got federal funding to study this, but we studied it as, what would it look like if it was Hyperloop, and what would it look like if it was high-speed rail? So the study was kind of done knowing that the Hyperloop thing might not pan out. So at least leveraging the money to put in the study. And so some of that funding and study is going to be used for Amtrak.

Tim Fulton 02:33So always good to have a contingency. The money is not fully wasted. Yeah. City has a win on their belt. Yeah. So also in transportation news, Bird scooters, they're out of the market?

Walker Evans 02:46Well, they filed for Chapter 11. They filed for bankruptcy. They said out of the gate that nothing is going to change immediately. Probably, we might start to see them go away. But yeah, I mean, that's always the disclaimer right away. Chapter 11 does not mean going away entirely. It's a financial restructuring. So I don't know if any of these scooter companies have ever made a dollar.

Tim Fulton 03:10Right? Well, I mean, it's a novel idea, right? And I work in a space where — like Amazon fulfillment, or drop shipping, or anything — it was like, anybody can start a scooter company. So yeah, that's gonna happen.

Walker Evans 03:27If you get a whole bunch of venture capital upfront, so you can just burn through that cash until it's gone.

Tim Fulton 03:31If anybody wants to start an AI company, let me know. Yeah. Trees. And I will be honest, I don't know what this story is about.

Walker Evans 03:39The city of Columbus in December — sorry, I should say the city council — voted on December 11th to change the public tree code. So there's an urban forestry master plan: plant more trees, preserve more trees, the more trees the better. But they actually took a step toward some of those protections, basically making it more difficult for people to just cut down whatever they want on their properties and that sort of thing.

Tim Fulton 04:07Okay, good. And the big thing here is, cut down a tree, you either have to replace it or you're paying a fee. Pretty much.

Walker Evans 04:15Yeah, yeah. But before that, I think it said that the code had not been updated since '91. Okay, so multiple decades, you know. But kind of bringing it into compliance with where they want to head in terms of sustainability.

Tim Fulton 04:30Next, food trucks.

Walker Evans 04:32Yeah. So this was news announced today. We heard about it a couple of weeks ago. Off the record. Embargoed. Yeah, yeah. Chaz Kaplan and Mike G. They've been doing the food truck festival for, I think, like 13 years — this might be the 13th year. Originally, it was downtown at Columbus Commons. It was one of the first big festivals at Columbus Commons when that park was finished. Did it there for a couple years, moved it around. It's been out at the Franklin County Fairgrounds in Hilliard for the past three or four years exclusively. They are bringing it back downtown, over to the riverfront, like the side of the peninsula area. And they're doing both. So they will be doing that and the Hilliard version in 2024. So kind of exciting news. They're pumped to bring it back downtown.

Tim Fulton 05:14Any backstory there about, like, why back and why staying in Hilliard? Is it just because there's multiple audiences? Right, there's a municipality, there's a food truck, and there's the people that come and eat food. So are we trying to butter all sides of our cubic bread? Maybe? Sure. I'm not trying to be the naysayer all the time.

Walker Evans 05:38Well, I think — if anybody went to the very early food truck festivals, it was sort of like a victim of its own success. It was way more popular than they knew it would be. The lines for every truck were super long. It ended up not being the best location, because Columbus Commons is only six acres, the park. So it's kind of small. So moving to the riverfront, there's more parking, there's more room to spread out. They've kind of learned over the past decade how to run it more effectively out there. But I think they also have good partnerships in Hilliard with the county fairgrounds. They didn't want to just abandon them.

Tim Fulton 06:12There you go. Yeah. Climate change.

Walker Evans 06:15Yeah, we're the best. We're the third best.

Tim Fulton 06:15Where's the third best?

Walker Evans 06:15Yeah. And take this with a grain of salt, because this comes from a platform that does these kinds of studies. And it sounds like they do their due diligence, and they have methodologies and peer review and stuff. But it is a company that sells insurance, like homeowners insurance.

Tim Fulton 06:33That, frankly, is the type of content that they put out there, like, yeah, this is the most flood-prone.

Walker Evans 06:40Exactly. Yeah. So they looked at the top 50 cities in the US — the website is Policygenius, I should say, and all these articles are on Columbus Underground. The top 50 cities: they gave us the top 10 and the bottom 10. Columbus was third best. A lot of it obviously has to do with, we're far away from fault lines, we're far away from coasts. But it's not really good news. You know, you're not winning a real award by being the third least impacted by climate change.

Tim Fulton 07:09Well, and I enjoyed your cover photo, which — I don't know if you created this — the city of Columbus with, like, it almost looks like a heat filter over it. Third best, so gonna be hot.

Walker Evans 07:23That was a fun little Photoshop job that I did. But yeah, it said that our extreme heat days will rise from two on average per year to 20 per year — I'm sorry, yes, per year, 20 on average per year in the summer. And I can't remember off the top of my head what exactly extreme heat is, if that's like 110, or if that's like a heat index level or whatever, but it's a real bad day. It's not good news. But we could be Florida yet. Yeah. I think like five of the 10 worst cities were all in Florida. It's like Tampa, Orlando, St. Petersburg, Jacksonville. Like, yes, Miami will be underwater.

Tim Fulton 08:02There is a reason to like staying here.

Walker Evans 08:06I think, you know, to some degree, just to piggyback on this — and I didn't really go into this in the article — but I think folks like MORPC are studying, like, will Columbus be a climate refugee city? If people are going to need to escape from places like Phoenix that could become less and less habitable, where are they going?

Tim Fulton 08:24Well, and it only leads into my theory that we are actually headed towards Ready Player One, the film, where Columbus is basically the center of at least the United States, right? Because we got our Intel plant, start stacking those trailers. Yes. And now that the new Apple headset devices are coming out, that's how we're all just gonna work every day. I'm excited. Yeah, it's so bad. It's still real bad.

Walker Evans 08:50Well, just, we'll be playing Fortnite instead of the actual game. Yes.

Tim Fulton 08:55Up next on the list, we are saying goodbye to the Vanderelli Room.

Walker Evans 08:59Yes. Yeah, we just did. The final couple of events were in December. Had a great nine-year run. AJ Vanderelli, you know, became sort of an anchor in the community with the Artspace. Not all bad news. You know, she'll probably be doing something else. There's still a lot of cool things going on in Franklinton. But it was nice to give it a very good send-off, I think.

Tim Fulton 09:22Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. We have seated a new city council.

Walker Evans 09:29So their first meeting of the year was on January 2nd.

Tim Fulton 09:35Yep. They grabbed ping pong balls.

Walker Evans 09:39They did. Yeah. Which was interesting, because that was a part of the charter. And I wasn't sure — they said they were going to draw lots. And I ran into one of the city council members like a week ago and said, is that flipping a coin? Is that drawing straws? And they're like, I don't know. We didn't know.

Tim Fulton 09:52Yeah. So they didn't know when I interviewed them. I was like, so how does that work? And the one joke — sorry, I did not get ahead of you — was, Nick Bankston was appointed, and had to run the following year, and then had to run two years after that because of this new restructuring. My joke to him was, he's gonna get another two-year term, do ya, automatically gonna happen? But no, he got four. He got four. Yeah, Appalachian snake.

Walker Evans 10:20Shannon Hardin, Nancy Day-Achauer, Nick Bankston, Melissa Green, and Lourdes Barroso de Padilla got the four-year. Yes, those five got the four, the other four got the two. Yes. Yeah. But they do ping pong balls, orange and white ping pong balls out of a bag.

Tim Fulton 10:40Okay, that's one way to do it.

Walker Evans 10:42I watched on YouTube. I was excited.

Tim Fulton 10:47The minimum wage has gone up.

Walker Evans 10:48Yes. So it went up 35 cents at the start of the year. Hurray for an extra 35 cents. That's the state minimum wage, and it's non-tipped, so the tipped wage went up a little bit as well, but it's still a lower number. The other thing that went into effect at the beginning of the year was the flavored vape and flavored tobacco ban. You seem sad?

Tim Fulton 11:13I'm not. I don't have a comment on that.

Walker Evans 11:17No, you're dead. You can't get it.

Tim Fulton 11:21I am friends with the folks who helped get that passed, and am, in theory, in favor of it. But I do believe — and more so than I thought — how much it would affect local businesses. Especially sort of independent folks, maybe from Venezuela, who own a convenience store, who serve the minority community. And, like, while yes, they are selling — excuse me — a harmful, poisonous substance, it is culturally a harmful, poisonous substance to some extent. Yeah. And, yeah, that's...

Walker Evans 12:05I think it's just interesting, because in the past, we've seen these sorts of things where Columbus goes first, you know, other communities follow. Sometimes there's a set — like Bexley will sometimes ban things before.

Tim Fulton 12:17Like selling cigarettes to 18-year-olds, like, we were like, that's crazy. Or, sorry, smoking inside a bar.

Walker Evans 12:23Yeah. The smoking ban was in Columbus first before it went statewide. So I think within the next couple of years, we might see this become a statewide thing.

Tim Fulton 12:30Yeah, I will say, going back to smoking in bars, that was to the detriment of a lot of bars that, you know, certainly were maybe on the periphery of the city. And if you're going to make a choice between, oh, this place in — I don't know, Powell — and this place in, sorry, a place in Worthington and a place in the city of Columbus proper, and you're a smoker — which, I'll be honest, at the time I was a full-on smoker — like, that's a choice you're gonna make.

Walker Evans 13:07I mean, you still could see that on borders. I mean, like Cincinnati, Kentucky, you know, people might cross to spend more time and money in a suburban Kentucky community if they don't have a statewide ban. Yeah, I will say, the other unintended consequence — and I'm not going to name names — of the smoking ban back in the day was that you'd go into a place that just always smelled like cigarette smoke, and then once the ban was in place, you found out what the place really smelled like, and you kind of wanted it to smell like cigarette smoke. Yep. It was covering up the worst smells.

Tim Fulton 13:40Indeed. Next up on our list is the trans veto by Governor Mike DeWine of House Bill 68. If you want to talk through that.

Walker Evans 13:49Sure. Yeah. So that was approved and went on his desk, and sat for — you know, he let it sit on his desk for quite a while. So a lot of people were debating, you know, is he gonna sign it? Is he gonna just let the time run out? Is he gonna veto it? And to everyone's surprise, he vetoed the bill. Yeah, it sounds like he listened to a lot of caretakers, parents, doctors, the medical community, and kind of went with what they said, versus sort of the political rhetoric.

Tim Fulton 14:15Yeah. And I don't think it's a secret what my politics are here. I think your politics are probably not a secret here either. But he did have the ability to line-item veto. That's something we can do in the state of Ohio, which you can't do in every state. And to be clear there, that's him going into a law and taking out a part of it, right? And he chose to just go ahead and defer the whole thing, even with a supermajority that could override him.

Walker Evans 14:47Yeah, because this would have denied both gender-affirming care but also banned...

Tim Fulton 14:51For sports. Yeah, yeah. I think that's much more, like, what people are like, of course, I don't want a young man competing with my daughter — which, also, that's not what's happening. But yeah, whatever the most pressing issue of our day is. Anyway, it's a big news story right at the end of the year. I was surprised, I was pleased, but yeah, interesting how it went down. Of course. Yeah. Up next on our list, the surprise closing of Clintonville mainstay Raghu Rama.

Walker Evans 15:24Yeah, it had been in business for over 20 years. Suddenly, it was very abrupt. When I read — there's some discussion on the Columbus Reddit about employees saying, what do I do? Because this happened out of the blue, I don't even have paperwork saying I've been fired or laid off or anything. Like, how do I even file for unemployment?

Tim Fulton 15:43And I don't know, some sort of journalistic integrity on, like, I saw this on Reddit, just sort of the maneuvering that seemed to be happening. Even having what I would refer to as tenured employees, like, helping to pack boxes up, answering questions about what was happening. And then discovering that your employee handbook has been updated to make it easier to fire you.

Walker Evans 16:06Right. Yeah, I mean, it's all alleged, I guess, you know. We did reach out to Raghu Rama multiple times and haven't gotten an answer on anything. So at the end of the day, it's closed.

Tim Fulton 16:21It is closed. Yeah, you can't — I was gonna make a joke. There's a joke to really make. Speaking of jokes, the Columbus Comedy Awards happened. How'd that work out?

Walker Evans 16:34Great. Yeah. So Brock Lesnar and Neff Johnson threw it together, I think, pretty fast. I think they threw this whole event together in a span of about a month. I think they really just wanted to end the year in a very unified way. They have said, and I've heard other people say as well, that the scene is a little fractured between different groups of people, like it is with any kind of creative community — bands, artists, theater. Yeah. But they had a lot of different people there from a lot of different groups. They got a lot of different people on stage to do sort of mini performances. There was improv, there was stand-up, there was storytelling. Tonally, it was kind of all over the place, because, you know, someone's telling a little bit of a personal story, almost like slam poetry, followed by, like, stand-up comedy, followed by, like, a heartfelt, "I want this award, I want to thank these people." So it was a little up and down. I'm not saying it was bad, I'm picking nits. But I think they learned a lot. I think they're already planning on doing it again next year. But they gave out a whole bunch of awards, and they gave Columbus Underground an award, which is unnecessary, but very kind of them.

Tim Fulton 16:34What was the name of the award?

Walker Evans 16:34It was best media coverage of comedy in the city.

Tim Fulton 17:43I mean, I noted it. Yeah, literally, that is true.

Walker Evans 17:47We wrote a lot about comedy this year. It's a cool scene. I enjoy it on a personal level. I've gone to a lot of shows this year. But just really nice to see them doing something that was very, kind of, putting their arms around the entire scene, right at the end of the year.

Tim Fulton 18:02There you go. Yeah. I'm not going to ask what's good and bad in Columbus — everything's good, nothing's bad. I want to round out with, what are your New Year's resolutions? Who — personally?

Walker Evans 18:15Yeah, we're a couple days in and I haven't really thought about it a whole lot. I had a couple of things I wanted to do last year that I just didn't get around to, like silly little event-wise sort of things.

Tim Fulton 18:26So, do you want to do or just go to? Or do. Yeah, okay.

Walker Evans 18:31I want to have a video game tournament. Okay, did I tell you about this? No. So you pay to enter, everyone pays, you know, like an entry fee. So there's a prize pool. Do it somewhere big, like the Gateway Film Center or something like that.

Tim Fulton 18:46The big, you know, big open air? Oh, yeah.

Walker Evans 18:49So you can project.

Tim Fulton 18:51Wizard-going, exactly. So, but...

Walker Evans 18:53Here's the catch: no one knows what video games they're playing until the controller gets put in your hand. Okay, ready, go. And so you're figuring it out on the fly. The games are funny, ridiculous. It might just be the person that mashes the buttons fast enough ends up winning. But I think it could be a fun, silly — I love this idea. Yeah, it's not for hardcore gamers. It's for people who just want to play.

Tim Fulton 19:15What do you do, like, play for five minutes, and whoever's got the highest score? Yeah.

Walker Evans 19:19And it might vary by game. Some might be like a fighting game, so there's a definitive winner of that. But it wouldn't be a fighting game you'd expect.

Tim Fulton 19:25Right? Yeah.

Walker Evans 19:29So there's some stuff like that that I want to do this year that I just didn't get around to last year.

Tim Fulton 19:33There you go. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for your time, Walker. Thanks, Tim. Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, and share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite comedian. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson, our producer is Philip Cogley, I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.