The first Schmoozefest of fall is Thursday, Sept. 28 from 6 to 8 at Lee’s Sports Bar at 2618 Lawndale Dr. in the shopping center across from Target. Free beer, wine and hors d’oeuvres will be available while supplies last for those who sign in and wear a name tag.
*****
I watched the video online of the confrontation between the bike cops downtown and some young black men in 2016 that has caused a new controversy.
My first reaction was, I don’t want to live in a city where a man can punch or slap a police officer in uniform doing his job and not be arrested.
What I saw in the video was police officers being extremely patient with a bunch of unruly guys on the sidewalk in front of a bar where at least one of them had been thrown out. It appears that if one of the group had not decided to hit a police officer, the cops would have moved the group down the street and the whole thing would have been forgotten. In fact, even though the men were arrested, it appears to have been forgotten for a year.
My guess is that the guys who were arrested saw people like the Scales brothers and Dejuan Yourse getting paid by the Greensboro City Council and decided to get in that line.
*****
At-large City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson has been called a liar on a website for saying that the nonprofit she runs, One Step Further, doesn’t get any money from the city.
I talked to Johnson, who is upset about being called a liar, as most of us would be. It turns out One Step Further got $100 from the city in February 2012 because someone from the city attended one of its training sessions. It doesn’t seem right or fair for One Step Further to refuse to train someone in mediation because they work for city.
In 2012, One Step Further received $4,313 from the city for a program to counsel the parents of gang members. Johnson said that the money was part of a grant the city received and she thought it was a federal grant that came through the state, but that no city tax dollars were involved. Johnson said it was a pass through of federal or state money.
Technically, Johnson should have said One Step Further is not funded by the city.
But to call Johnson a liar is going way too far even in an election season. She could have been more precise in her language, but I heard the statement at the time and understood her point without any explanation. The city does fund a number of nonprofits and One Step Further isn’t one of them.
I certainly hope that One Step Further doesn’t start denying city employees access to their programs because Johnson is a city councilmember. That would be downright silly.
*****
Good news at both the Greensboro Zoning Commission and the City Council meetings this week. The Zoning Commission rezoned a piece of property on Old Battleground Road for multi-family residential. This was a project that was started in 2007 and has been sitting there about one-third finished ever since.
The City Council agreed to fund water and sewer for a heavy industrial site in east Greensboro that had originally been zoned in 2007 and had been sitting waiting for the past 10 years and now has a business that is going to locate there.
It appears the 2008 recession might finally be ending.
*****
The baby boomers are the first generation to grow up in a country with 50 states. It seems to me that first there were 13 colonies and then, voila, there were 50 states, but I know that isn’t true. From 1912 until 1959, the country had 48 states.
*****
Greensboro, or the triad – whatever that means – is going to go after Amazon’s 50,000 jobs.
If you read the minimum requirements that Amazon listed, this area barely qualifies. One of the requirements is a mass transit system.It’s hard to believe that the Greensboro bus system, or PART, is what they are talking about.
But Greensboro is going to spend a lot of time and money going after Amazon for the same reason that when the lottery gets up around $1 billion, people who never play the lottery go out and buy a ticket. The chance of winning is tiny, but the payoff is just too hard to pass up.
A better plan would be to take the time and energy going into the Amazon bid and use it on trying to attract companies that might have 100, 200 or 500 jobs. The time and money spent on Amazon will be gone and we’ll have nothing to show for it, except maybe some “Greensboro Amazon” T-shirts that they had made to go with the “Greensboro Boeing” T-shirts they probably already have.
*****
Sometimes I wonder about the efficiency of the City of Greensboro.
Lindsay Street has been closed off for two years, but at the Lindsay Street and Battleground Avenue intersection, the drivers on Battleground have stop signs while the drivers on Lindsay can drive right through – although there is no place for them to go or to come from except a construction site.
With all the construction going on at the Smith Street, Battleground Avenue, Eugene Street confluence of streets, making life miserable for everyone who has to come through that area for months, the city could at the very least eliminate the traffic light where Battleground Avenue now ends at Smith Street. It isn’t a real intersection anymore; you can only turn right off Battleground Avenue on to Smith or turn right off Smith on to Battleground. There is no need for a light.
But then again, the city insists on keeping a traffic light at the intersection of February 1 Place and Greene Street, even though there the only choice is to turn left from Greene, a one-way street, onto February 1, also a one-way street.
If I were cynical, I would think that the city simply likes to tell people what to do.
