Why does Greensboro always seem to get dissed?
A recent promotion by Visit North Carolina – a promotion paid for by the State of North Carolina called Project 543 – lists a whole bunch of attractions all over the state. But in Greensboro it only lists one – Replacements Ltd.
Museums in other cities are promoted, but not the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro.
Other golf tournaments get play but not the Wyndham Championship. Bryan Park has one of the best public golf courses in the state but it gets no mention. Nor does Grandover.
The biggest Frying Pan in the state gets a post but not the Greensboro Science Center, LeBauer Park, the Greensboro Coliseum, the ACC Hall of Fame, Guilford Battlefield National Military Park or anything else in the city.
Someone going to this site looking for things to do in the state would think the only thing Greensboro has to offer is china.
It makes you wonder what Visit North Carolina has against our city.
By the way, 543 is the number of miles from Murphy to Manteo and a pretty clever name.
Only in the crazy world of North Carolina politics would this happen.
The State Board of Elections and Ethics – which exists only on paper – held a public hearing and people came and spoke. I haven’t seen any video, but I assume they spoke to eight empty seats because Gov. Roy Cooper has refused to appoint the eight members to the newly created board that combines the State Board of Elections and the North Carolina Ethics Commission.
Four on the new board have to be Democrats and four Republicans, which Cooper doesn’t like because, in the past, the governor’s party has always had a majority on the State Board of Elections as well as all 100 county boards of elections. But the legislature, being run by Republicans, changed all that as well as changing the county boards to four members – two from each party.
The courts upheld the changes, including to the state board, but Cooper is appealing it to the North Carolina Supreme Court and won’t appoint anyone until the Supreme Court rules.
But it’s causing some problems for Democrats.
The districts for state representatives and senators have been ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts because some districts have too high a percentage of black voters. The federal courts had considered ordering that the districts be redrawn and a special election be held a year early in 2017 to fix the problem. One of the reasons the federal judges didn’t order an election for state representatives and senators in 2017 was that there is no state board of elections. In 10 counties, including Guilford, because of resignations, the county boards of elections can’t officially meet and can’t take action because, on a four-member board, three is a quorum. The old elections boards were all three-member boards, so one resignation leaves two sitting members – not enough to meet the quorum requirement to meet or take action.
Cooper would love to see a legislative election in 2017 because, with the current veto-proof Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, the election might help and couldn’t hurt the Democrats. But the governor shot himself in the foot by refusing to appoint the state board even after a three-judge panel ruled it constitutional, giving the federal judges a good reason not to order a special election because with no state board of election and ethics there is no one to run an election.
I guess I have to keep harping on this, but shouldn’t City Council meetings be on the “Meetings” list on the City of Greensboro website?
Once again the list skips over the City Council meeting on Tuesday, August 15. The list includes the Community Sustainability Council Meeting on Monday, August 14 and the Planning Board meeting on Wednesday, August 16, but there is no listing for the City Council in between them.
Doesn’t the City Council want people to know when their meetings are being held? It seems like it would be particularly important this summer when the City Council met only once in July and is scheduled to only meet once in August, or if you believe the city’s own website, the City Council isn’t going to meet at all in August.
The National Review said North Carolina Lt. Governor Dan Forest “has established himself as a national leader on campus free speech.”
The National Review piled compliments on Forest and the North Carolina legislature for passing the first campus free speech statute in the nation.
It wasn’t all compliments – the column did note that North Carolina weakened the legislation in a couple of areas; but was mostly complimentary of the state for ensuring that students and speakers on state university campuses would have the right to free speech.
Gov. Cooper let the bill, which passed the legislature with bipartisan support, become law without his signature.
In an article in The Boston Globe, the City of Boston admits that those pedestrian crossing buttons at intersections in downtown Boston are mostly for show, meaning they don’t do anything.
As near as I can tell, the same is true for downtown Greensboro. The traffic light sequences are set for cars, not pedestrians. The city is not going to create a traffic jam so that someone can cross the street 10 seconds sooner. But for some reason it makes people feel good to press a button. So Boston has the buttons and so do we.
Call 811 before you dig. It’s what everyone is told to do but for some reason PCL Civil Constructors, which is building the Oregon Inlet replacement bridge, didn’t. You’d think a with a $250 million project like that, someone would have taken the time to find out exactly where the cables were.
If the company doesn’t have good insurance they are in big financial trouble, because Hatteras and Ocracoke depend on the summer tourists to get them through the year. Nobody’s making a lot of money out there in the winter and lawsuits have already been filed.
