Author: John Hammer

The City Council is holding a work session next month to discuss a proposed economic development incentive policy. The council was expected to pass the new policy at its meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 16, until Councilmember Sharon Hightower brought up a new requirement that the council had not considered during its three work sessions on economic development in November and December.

All nine seats on the Greensboro City Council, including mayor, are up for election in 2021, but it may be that the 2021 election won’t be held until 2022.

In this topsy-turvy coronavirus world, it’s time for high school football.

Both the Men’s and Women’s Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Basketball Tournaments will be played at the Greensboro Coliseum the first two weeks of March.

However, at least one commission has escaped this effort for race and gender equity.  The Commission on the Status of Women has no gender diversity at all.  The City Council has appointed nine women to the nine-member commission. The last appointment in December 2020 was after the City Council held an entire work session to discuss race and gender equity on boards and commissions.  And that appointment was another woman, making no move toward bringing the Commission on the Status of Women in line with the demographics of Greensboro, where 46.5 percent of the population is male. 

The City of Greensboro and the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority are at odds over the proposed new Airport Overlay Districts, what is commonly called the noise cone. Both agree that reducing the size of the noise cone to comply with a study that was done in 2007 to open up 1,464 acres to more residential development is a good idea. As is usually the case, the devil is in the details.

The City Council was all set to approve a new economic incentive policy at the Tuesday, Feb. 16 meeting, but instead it decided to discuss additional requirements that not all councilmembers support.

Amendments to the airport noise cone map and regulations – which the City Council continued at the Tuesday, Feb. 16 meeting – have become controversial, but it is difficult to understand why. The Zoning Commission unanimously approved the map and text amendments proposed by the city Planning Department, but it was not clear at the zoning meeting of Jan. 20 exactly what the commission was approving.

The City Council had three zoning requests on the agenda at the Tuesday, Feb. 16 meeting. Two were annexations and original zonings, and two had neighborhood opposition.  All three were approved unanimously.

The Economic Development Incentive Policy that was on the agenda for the Tuesday, Feb. 16 City Council meeting did not have a requirement that Councilmember Sharon Hightower wanted included on the list, so the policy was continued until the legal department can formulate that policy in proper legal terminology and the council can hold a work session to discuss the proposed new policy with the Hightower amendment.

Before the City Council work session on Tuesday, Feb. 16, the majority of the City Council held a meeting to discuss the Airport Authority Overlay District, commonly called the noise cone, which was not in compliance the North Carolina open meetings law.

The Greensboro City Council had a curious virtual work session on Tuesday, Feb. 16. Hearing from a Guilford County department that the city has no control over.

At the Tuesday, Feb. 16 City Council meeting, Mayor Nancy Vaughan said the shooting in which one man was injured, “Brings to everyone’s consciousness the importance of policing and the importance of quick response.”

A wild card in the 2021 Greensboro City Council elections, which has been talked about behind the scenes for a while, is getting some press. The wild card is redistricting.  Once the 2020 Census figures are official, Greensboro may be required by law to redistrict.

District 5 Greensboro City Councilmember Tammi Thurm, on Monday, Feb. 15, announced that she is running for reelection.

The Executive Committee of the Guilford County Republican Party has officially censured North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr because of his vote in favor of the impeachment of former President Donald J. Trump.

The Tracy Furman campaign sent out a press release on Monday, Feb.15, announcing that Furman is running for Greensboro City Council.

Mayor Nancy Vaughan officially announced she was running for a fourth term as mayor of Greensboro in a video posted on her Facebook page on Saturday, Feb. 13  

The Greensboro City Council spent some time discussing violent crime statistics at the virtual retreat on Friday, Feb. 12. The City Council did not discuss what could be done to stop the increase in violent crime or what it had done in the past year to try and decrease violent crime.

There was mostly bad financial news presented at the City Council virtual retreat on Thursday, Feb. 11. Sales tax revenue is $2 million under expected growth, utility tax revenue is down $1.5 million, hotel-motel tax revenue is down $1.1 million and the Coliseum reports a loss in revenue of over $7.5 million.

What’s not on the agenda at the two-day virtual Greensboro City Council retreat this week is as telling as what is. Two items that are supposed to be high on the City Council’s priority list are missing from the agenda – public safety and economic development.

At the first session of the two-day City Council virtual retreat on Thursday, Feb. 11, the City Council discussed issuing $16 million in two-thirds bonds in 2022, putting a $120 million bond referendum on the ballot in November of this year, and to pay for all that by raising property taxes by 3 cents.

Chip Roth has officially announced he is running for the District 3 City Council race, and the word on the street is that Downtown Greensboro Inc. President and former District 3 City Councilmember Zack Matheny is going to run for his old seat.

Here is some good news in the saga of two new downtown parking decks. According to Greensboro Department of Transportation Director Hanna Cockburn, the Bellemeade Deck – across the street from First National Bank Field home of the Greensboro Grasshoppers – will be open for use maybe as early as next week. And the deck will be free for probably the first month to six weeks of operation.

At least in one statistic 2021 in Greensboro so far is worse than 2020.

As of Tuesday, Feb. 9, there have been seven homicides in Greensboro in 2021.  In 2020, by the same date, there had been four homicides according to Greensboro Police Department Public Information Officer Ron Glenn.

The February 1 parking deck and Westin Hotel project is still on hold as far as actual construction goes.

Jane Sellars “Jan” Scott who worked for Congressman Howard Coble for 20 years, died at her home on Jan. 31 at age 71 after a short battle with lung cancer.

The City Council retreat is scheduled to begin on Thursday, Feb. 11 and Friday, Feb. 12 at 9 a.m. and presumably can be viewed by going to the city website and to the City Council calendar page at greensboro.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx and clicking on the video for the date.  There is no agenda available to the public.  The information that is available is that the meeting will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 11 and 9 a.m. to noon on Friday, Feb. 12.

An item on the legislative agenda that was presented to the Guilford County Legislative Delegation last week asks for Greensboro parking tickets be linked to the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles annual vehicle registration.

This week Gaston College announced that Gene Banks has been hired as the athletic director and John Horshok as the director of athletic program development and sports marketing.

The North Carolina House on Thursday, Feb. 4 approved legislation that extends deferrals for ABC permit renewal fees to help bar owners who were hit with renewal fees in January.

UNCG is celebrating the opening of its new $105 million Nursing and Instructional Building, as it should. Or perhaps celebrating as much as it can in this time of limited gatherings and social distancing – there is no ribbon cutting event planned.  It’s taken three years to construct the five-story, 180,000-square-foot building that is commonly referred to as “The NIB.”

The Greensboro City Council at its regular virtual meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 2, after much discussion, passed a policy by an 8-0 vote that will allow the city to pay for damage caused by the Police and Fire departments doing their jobs.

Robinson, who is North Carolina’s first black lieutenant governor, held a press conference on Wednesday, Feb. 3 to express his concerns about a cartoon on the WRAL website that depicted the Republican members of the North Carolina Board of Education as a Klansman.

Greensboro city councilmembers noted several weeks ago that Greensboro isn’t popular with the state legislature and the Greensboro Legislative Agenda almost seems designed to keep it that way. The City Council held a virtual meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 2 with members of the Guilford County Legislative Delegation to discuss the Greensboro Legislative Agenda, which is a list of items that the City Council would like to see passed in the 2021 session.

It appears the state government in Raleigh is united in the effort to have public schools in the state reopen their classrooms. A bill was introduced in the state House Monday, Feb. 1 that would require all public schools to offer in-classroom instruction for parents and students who choose it.

The City of Greensboro is selling the 1.6 acre cloverleaf from Summit Avenue to Murrow Boulevard for development.

The COVID-19 vaccine distribution debacle in Guilford County even has red and blue working together. The co-chairs of the Guilford County Legislative Delegation Democratic state Rep. Ashton Clemmons and Republican state Rep. Jon Hardister sent a joint letter to Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Dr. Mandy Cohen.

Former District 5 City Councilmember Tony Wilkins has announced he will be running for City Council in 2021.

To describe the agenda for the virtual Greensboro City Council meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 2 as light would not do it justice. Perhaps ultra-light would be better.

Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate are working on a bill to reopen schools.

Mecklenburg County held a mass vaccination event last weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway that vaccinated an estimated 16,000 people. The mass vaccination event planned for this weekend at Bank of America Stadium is expected to vaccinate 20,000 people. Durham is planning a mass vaccination event to vaccinate 17,000 people a week. Chair of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston reportedly spent all weekend on the phone tracking down and getting 400 doses of the vaccine for Guilford County, so the county would not have cancel appointments that had already been made.

Tuesday, Feb. 2 at 3 p.m., the Greensboro City Council will meet virtually with the Guilford County Legislative Delegation.

The Greensboro City Council has rescheduled its annual retreat for Thursday Feb. 11 and Friday, Feb. 12. The two-day meeting will be held virtually rather than in the board room at the ACC Hall of Champions at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.

Greensboro received word that it has been awarded nearly $9 million from the federal government for rental and utility assistance payments.

The restaurant and entertainment ordinance proposed by Mayor Nancy Vaughan hasn’t gotten past the proposal stage, but already the City of Greensboro is being threatened with a lawsuit.

The Triad Business Journal this week published the salaries of the top 25 city employees in both cities, making that comparison pretty easy.  All salary figures are from the Triad Business Journal. Overall, Greensboro pays its top city employees a lot more than Winston-Salem.  Although cities organize their governments differently, the most basic comparison is that Greensboro pays more.

The leadership of Greensboro and Guilford County don’t seem to be sure why Guilford County was shorted over 11,400 vaccines this week and don’t seem overly concerned about it.

NC State Sen. Jeff Jackson from Charlotte announced he is going to run in the Democratic primary for the US Senate seat currently held by Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who announced he would not run for a fourth term in 2022.

This weekend Guilford County, for whatever reason, got shorted over 10,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine. At a press conference on Monday, Jan. 25, neither Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston nor Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan had a good explanation as to why the vaccines were not delivered as expected.  The result was that over 10,000 appointments had to be cancelled.