No Gameday Vendors?

If there's one thing I can admire about Iowa City, it's this town's propensity to constantly shoot itself in the foot. The latest in a long, long line of head-scratchingly amusing errors of judgement: banning vendors on Melrose Avenue during GameDays.

Wow. Remember far back in the mists of time when the school district banned Halloween? We couldn't have kids dressing up and witches because it might offend you know, witches. In my incredibly innocent elementary school kind of way, I was amused by this controversy: after all, it turned out that Regina, the Catholic hub of elite snobbery in town was the only school to have a Halloween Parade, complete with costumes and all for awhile there.

For an encore: they wanted to build a new mall. Iowa City thought about for ten minutes and decided that they wanted none of that action. So Coralville said, 'We'll take it' and downtown Iowa City has been a gutted wasteland of what it was once was ever since.

For a double encore: they wanted a convention center/hotel combo somewhere. Iowa City should have been all over this like a fat kid on a candy bar, but noooooooooo, we didn't want that either. It's not as if a Division I University would have found any use for one of those. So Coralville took that too.

I could go on and on and on, kids, I really could. Whether it was the quixotic attempt to block the First Avenue Extension or the way Elite Liberals in this town automatically assume in that wonderfully racist they have that any arrested south of Burlington has to be 'one of those people' or 'obviously from Chicago,' Iowa City never ceases to amaze me with it's collective stupidity.

And now this: after years of these vendors operating without problem along Melrose on gameday, they want to ban them. Yet curiously, they don't want to enforce the ordinance against parking on the grass- which brings up once again the age old question of 'cui buono' or 'Who benefits?'

The answer should be obvious: money-grubbing homeowners have decided to start wringing their hands in despair over the state of their poor, poor neighborhood so they can score more parking and therfore more money on gamedays. After years of these vendors operating on gamedays with nary a problem, the fact that this has crept up so suddenly is suspicious indeed. Not conspiracy theory suspicious, but suspicious nonetheless. Personally, I think fans should boycott all parking on Melrose if these vendors are banned. Or at least demand that the City enforce ALL ordinanances along Melrose Avenue.

(Two more things to note as a mild post-script: first of all, I have no sympathy whtsoever for these homeowners. You made the choice to live next to a 70,000 seat Stadium. Your choice. Not mine- yours. Therefore, suck it up and deal with it or move somewhere else. Second of all, is anyone else tired of whiners? People whine about urination and out of control tailgating and yet whine when law enforcement produces a plan to start doing something about it. People whine about the out of control drinking in downtown then whine that the cultural character of downtown is being destroyed when the City passes a 21-only ordinance- because One-Eyed Jakes with such a throbbing center of light and culture. Please.)

UPDATED: See? People agree with me.