Author: Scott D. Yost

They say there’s no harm in asking and that’s exactly what the Guilford County Board of Commissioners did in a very big way at their Thursday, Feb. 7 meeting: asked the State of North Carolina for $10 million so the state could foot half the cost of constructing a new adult care mental health facility on Third Street in Maple Professional Park in Greensboro.

The North Carolina Folk Festival in downtown Greensboro looks like it may be getting some much appreciated state help.

On Thursday, Feb. 7, NC Rep. Jon Hardister filed a bill – called simply the NC Folk Festival Funds bill – that would provide a $100,000 state grant for the festival that’s held in Greensboro.  State Reps. John Faircloth, Pricey Harrison and Amos Quick joined Hardister as primary sponsors of the bill.

At a Thursday afternoon, Feb. 7 work session of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, county staff told the commissioners that the clock was ticking and they needed to go for it – make a big play, that is – but the board, in spite of that advice, decided to drop back and punt.

The Guilford County Family Justice Center is best known for helping victims in cases of physical violence within marriages, relationships or families; however, this spring, the justice center will offer a program meant largely to help the county’s elderly keep from getting swindled out of their money.

One thing county officials in North Carolina hate more than anything is “unfunded mandates” – and boy is Guilford County being hit with a whopper of one this year.

Pick a number.

Pick one between 0 and 57 million.

It hasn’t received much publicity but the 100 counties in North Carolina including Guilford County have not had boards of elections since the courts declared the old North Carolina Board of Election unconstitutional in December. 

No one enjoys getting bills in the mail no matter what the size, but when a bill shows up asking for payment of $1.5 billion, it raises the consternation to a new level.

Guilford County no longer has a Board of Elections and, when it gets one back – whenever that is – it will look different than it did before, perhaps radically different.

High Point University is stepping in and attempting to play the same role the US Cavalry played in old westerns:  Save someone just in the nick of time. 

There wasn’t a whole lot of good news presented by a consulting group hired to assess the needs of the Guilford County school system, but one thing school officials apparently do not have to worry about is an increasing student population in the coming years.

Recommendations from the results of a just revealed consultant’s study call for closing down 10 schools in the Guilford County system including Kiser Middle School, Hampton Elementary School and Kearns Academy.

On Thursday, Jan. 31, representatives of Tallahassee-based MGT Consulting Group dropped a bomb on the Guilford County Board of Education and the Board of Commissioners. 

Right now, there’s a huge push to address school violence and other safety concerns – Guilford County commissioners and school board members are meeting this week to discuss school system security needs – and, on Friday, Feb. 1, the High Point Police Department will hold an active shooter exercise at Phoenix Academy to help students, teachers, administrators and the general public know how to respond in case of such an event.

No action by Guilford County government in the last decade has done more to bring statewide attention to the county’s operations than the opening of the Guilford County Family Justice Center in 2015, and that trend continues this week when more than 300 people from around the state come in to the county for the 2019 NC Family Justice Center and Collaborative Communities Conference.

The Cure Violence program proposed for Guilford County has taken another step closer to becoming a reality.

The Battle of Summerfield – the ongoing, nearly year-long battle over the Summerfield Town Council seat formerly held by Todd Rotruck – is about to heat up once again: Guilford County Superior Court has set a date of Monday, Feb. 11 to hear a very rare court action known as a “quo warrento” lawsuit that could remove a sitting member of the Summerfield Town Council and put Rotruck back into that seat until his appeal is heard.

High Point is thinking small but that’s not a bad thing.

The city is one of six in the country that has won a technical assistance grant to help manufacturers put unused and underused buildings back in business through the use of small-scale manufacturing operations.

The coming new cutting-edge mental health facility in Guilford County may not just be for Guilford County residents.  It looks now as though one likely consequence of getting state funding for the project is that the facility could not limit its patient care to Guilford County residents.

Guilford County Commissioner Skip Alston, who has served as chairman of the Board of Commissioners five times, can now add another accomplishment to his resume: Alston has been elected as the 2019 president of the Greensboro Men’s Club, one of the oldest, most storied and most significant clubs in North Carolina. 

Backers of a new initiative to jointly market four megasites in central North Carolina as the “Carolina Core” said in late 2018 that efforts to propel the plan forward would ramp up big time after the start of the year – and boy have they: Carolina Core ran the table in January, being a key topic of conversation at the meeting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority and the Guilford County Economic Development Alliance (GCEDA).

Guilford County has developed a very powerful secret weapon for recruiting new aviation companies to the area – in particular to the new 800-plus acre megasite under construction at Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA). 

The City of High Point’s checklist for the 2019 baseball season:

Build shiny new multi-million dollar stadium. Check.
Hire staff, vendors and players. Check.
Publicize the tar out of it. Check, check and check.

The Guilford County Economic Development Alliance (GCEDA), at its first meeting of the year on Thursday, Jan. 24, adopted a budget for 2019 – providing notice of the strategies the group will use in its attempt to bring more business to the county this year. 

Guilford County Board of Commissioners Chairman Alan Branson knows there’s no silver bullet for the economic challenges facing the county, but this week he said there is one thing that would help a great deal. 

A wily rooster that has been terrorizing late sleepers in Greensboro for over a week was finally apprehended this weekend by Guilford County Animal Control. 

“Thinking outside of the box” is one of the most clichéd phrases of all time, but it’s still a pretty good strategy when it comes to handling many difficult situations and it certainly is the strategy that the Guilford County Board of Education and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners are considering in light of hundreds of millions of dollars in capital projects that school system officials want to see in the coming years.

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, who screen airline passengers before flights aren’t getting paychecks right now due to the partial federal government shut down; however, so far, there’s been no negative effect on operations at Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA). 

Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Center & Museum is planning something special in conjunction with its annual fund-raising telethon this year on Friday, Feb. 1– a reunion of the people who participated in the Sit-In protests from February 1 to July 25, 1960.

The Guilford County Economic Development Alliance (GCEDA) almost never has a special guest, however, on Thursday morning, Jan. 24, the Alliance members were very eager to hear from the rare special guest who had been invited that day: Senior Director for Triad Aerospace Development Rick Reed.

Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA) is finally going to get the big runway makeover it’s been seeking for a long time – but it’s coming at a cost, nearly $21 million.

Most people have already unwrapped their Christmas presents, but now Guilford County and its contractor have wrapped the Old Guilford County Court House in downtown Greensboro in what looks like thick gift-wrapping paper, and, if the building had a big red bow on top, it would look just like a giant present that wouldn’t fit under any tree.

The Guilford County Board of Commissioners jumped out of the hot seat on Thursday, Jan. 17, but by doing so they may have landed right in the middle of a construction contract conundrum.

A rooster is on the lam in Greensboro.

A lot of people know the story of Martin Luther King Jr. but they might not know the story of the City of Greensboro’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade that will take place at 11 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 21.

The leaders of counties across the state of North Carolina have gotten together and come up with their Top Five list.

A panic spread across Facebook and other social media over what county officials say was merely an untrue rumor that eight healthy shelter dogs were going to be euthanized on Friday, Jan. 18 due to space issues the shelter faces during cold weather.

Well, you knew it was coming sooner or later and, if you drew “sooner” in your office betting pool, then you are the winner.

The ‘80s were a fun time for its Miami Vicepastel fashions and Def Leppard music, but the Guilford County Board of Commissioners has decided to move the county’s central computing system off of a legacy platform that still has computer code from the ‘80s and even some earlier than that.

The county has decided to cast off the old – a computing system from Lawson Software Inc. that the county has used for 13 years – and instead purchase a new iPhone- and iPad-friendly system expected to make the lives of county employees much easier – once they learn the new system.   

Like Lawson, the new system “Munis,” from Tyler Technologies, handles almost all aspects of Guilford County government: financial records, human resources functions, talent management, supply procurement, bidding events, payroll and more.

While Guilford County purchased the existing Lawson system in 2005, it was written in COBOL – a computing language introduced in 1959. 

The Guilford County Commissioners voted unanimously at a work session last week to throw out the old and bring in the new after Guilford County Chief Information Officer Hemant Desai made a compelling case why they should do so.  He said Lawson simply wasn’t keeping up with the times.

“The mindset is to keep the customer in an older platform for too long, and I think that is what caused me some grief over supporting that product that was so aged,” Desai said. “It depends on technologies that are 20th century technologies.  It’s actually written in COBOL.  I’m not kidding.  And we still have COBOL modules in 2019 running in Guilford County.”

Commissioner Jeff Phillips jumped in and said, “I was programming in COBOL in 1982,” and Commissioner Skip Alston said he was doing the same in 1976.

Commissioner Alan Perdue was the director of Guilford County Emergency Services when Lawson was implemented and Perdue said he still remembers the massive headaches.

“We tried to put a square peg in a round hole,” Perdue said. 

He added that, to make county employees feel better, county management put up signs that said, “We’re going nuts over Lawson!”

“I said we need to change that to say, ‘Lawson is driving us nuts,’ he said.  “It didn’t work and I think we’ve been suffering over that for quite some time.”

Perdue said that buying the new system looks like “a cost” but, really, when productivity and new opportunities are factored into the equation, it will be a cost saver.

Some of the key benefits of the new system include a modern user interface that plays well with mobile devices, enhanced reporting capabilities, more financial features and a design built from the ground up specifically for local government.

The county will pay recurring fees of $730,000 for five years and a one-time Implementation cost of $1.4 million for a total five-year cost of just over $5 million.

By making the move, Guilford County will save about $650,000 that it won’t have to shell out to upgrade its Lawson system this year.  

County officials expect to benefit financially from enhanced employee productivity since the system will hopefully be faster and easier to use.

County staff say they’ve experienced major problems over the last year and a half with the current system, which they say crashes often.  According to a statement from county staff, that has “negatively impacted users ability to perform their daily functions.”

The evidence seems clear now that one Guilford County project is cursed by supernatural powers and, no matter how hard the Guilford County Board of Commissioners tries to get the project done, it will always be thwarted in one way or another.

On Thursday, Jan. 17, after a long closed session, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners came out into open session and took an action that no one saw coming.

On Thursday, Jan. 17, the question of black participation in Guilford County construction contracts dropped and exploded like a nuclear bomb on Guilford County government. 

If you think it’s hectic dropping off or picking up passengers at Piedmont Triad International Airport (PTIA) on a busy air travel day right now, well, it’s going to be a lot more hectic later this year because PTIA is conducting a major renovation, repair and replacement project of the roadway and parking plaza in front of the arrival and departure gates.

A Guilford County staff selection committee has decided that Greensboro-based Samet Corp. is “by far” the right company to build a new $20-million adult services mental health building to be constructed on Third Street in Maple Professional Park in Greensboro, near the Guilford County Department of Health and Human Services Building on Maple Street.

It’s hard to keep track of all the pieces of the giant construction puzzle going on in downtown High Point as part of the city’s rejuvenation project these days, however, on Wednesday, Jan. 16, another big piece of that puzzle was put squarely into place.

Former Guilford County Commissioner Warren Dorsett passed away recently at the age of 91.  Dorsett, who served on the Guilford County Board of Commissioners from 1993 to 2002, died at Hospice Home at High Point. 

Guilford County has quite a few small towns, but it looks now like it’s going to get something else – its very own village. 

The US Census Bureau is best known for its wildly popular population results released once every 10 years; however, census workers don’t just lay down on the job and rest on their laurels the other nine years – in fact, they are very busy bees, constantly collecting all sorts of information you might never think they would.

According to reports out of multiple Guilford County departments and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners this week, the partial government shutdown isn’t having any effect on Guilford County government with one exception – some families will get their food and nutrition benefits earlier than usual.

Drivers in Greensboro often complain about crazy traffic patterns and dangerous intersections around the city – and now they can put that constant griping to good use.