There is no official report on this but plenty of unofficial, off-the-record reports from reliable sources that City Councilmember Sharon Hightower stepped over the line on Sunday.
According to various sources, Hightower arrived at the Parks & Rec Fest at Gillespie Park on Sunday after the parking lot was full and they were using a shuttle to transport people from off-site parking to the event.
Hightower insisted that she be allowed to park in the area reserved for handicapped parking. She was told by a female police officer that she could not park in a handicapped space. Hightower insisted that she was a city councilmember and had to be allowed to park in the handicapped space. The police officer reportedly stood her ground and didn’t allow Hightower, who is not handicapped and has no handicapped sticker, to park in the handicapped space.
The sources also say that Hightower filed an official complaint against the officer.
So much for Hightower supporting the city’s police and fire departments. In June, and this is on the record, she boycotted the graduation ceremony for new firefighters because the class didn’t include enough black graduates for her liking.
Six or seven minority recruits reportedly did not complete the training. Hightower questioned why they hadn’t completed the course and wouldn’t accept the word of Fire Chief Bobby Nugent on the reasons they didn’t graduate. She said she had to talk to those who had not completed the course themselves to find out the real reasons.
The majority of the City Council supports the police and fire departments, but Hightower doesn’t appear to be in that majority, demanding special privileges for herself from a police officer who was just doing her job enforcing the law and questioning the integrity of the fire chief.
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Rumor has it that Downtown Greensboro Inc. (DGI) is finally going to move out of the Self Help Building at the corner of North Elm Street and Friendly Avenue and into a storefront on South Elm at the corner of Lewis Street. One of the constant complaints heard about DGI is that it should have a store front office that welcomes people rather than being hidden away in the back halls of a downtown office building.
A construction crew is working on the building right now, which lends credence to the rumor, as does the fact that one of the jeans statutes placed on the streets by Wrangler is directly in front of the building.
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More good news for the downtown: The Jerusalem Market is opening a deli at 310 South Elm St. next month. Whenever I’m in the neighborhood of the current Jerusalem Market at 5002 Gate City Blvd., I stop in and always enjoy the market itself and later enjoy the food I’ve bought. But now it will be just a couple of blocks from my office. This may be a diet buster for me.
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The News & Record continues its obsession with Rockingham County. In the Sunday, July 31 News & Record, both the lead story on the front page and the lead editorial on the opinion page were about events in Rockingham County.
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Where would Greensboro be today without blue jeans?
Between Cone Mills making denim and Wrangler making blue jeans a whole lot of what you see in Greensboro can be attributed to the pants recognized around the world as uniquely American, although they are worn by everywhere.
In recognition of the community’s role in the history of blue jeans Wrangler teamed with Cone Denim and on Tuesday unveiled six statues of jeans in downtown Greensboro and we put a photo of one of those statues on the cover this week.
The idea of placing statues of blue jeans in Greensboro was hatched last fall at the first annual Jeansboro Day and the jeans statues on Elm Street are the winners of a contest for area high school students.
Wrangler and Cone Denim plan to place 10 more statutes around town in the future. We think a great site would be in front of the historic office building at 216 West Market Street.
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It is not surprising that Elon University students started a petition to keep Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker from speaking at the university; students do all kinds of crazy stuff. However, the idea behind banning her from speaking is disturbing. The premise is that no speaker the students disagree with should be allowed to speak. What happened to free speech? The left wants to silence anyone who doesn’t agree with it 100 percent.
Students who disagree with Parker are free not to attend her speech, to protest in front of the speaking venue or to attend and boo at every statement they don’t 100 percent agree with. But the idea that speakers some students disagree with should not be allowed to speak on campus is going too far.
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I want to officially announce that because of the Zika virus I have decided not to compete in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. It was a tough decision because I would love to go to Rio and love to compete in the Olympics, but not this year. Any rumor that I am not competing because I am old, overweight, out of shape and couldn’t possibly qualify for even the least strenuous Olympic event is unfounded.
