The Greensboro City Council has released a strange agenda for its virtual meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 15 at 5:30 p.m.
This is the final scheduled meeting of 2020 for the City Council, although special or emergency meetings could be held. Whether the City Council will continue to meet virtually in 2020 is unknown, but it had been previously announced that the council would meet virtually through 2020.
The agenda has some issues. Item 3 is “Ordinance Amending the FY 20-21 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Project Budget Ordinance in the Amount of $344.”
That might appear to be a typo, but the attached ordinance is also in the amount of $344.
Item 4 is to amend the “(HOME) Project Budget Ordinance in the Amount of $374” and once again the accompanying ordinance is also for $374.
The City Council does not ordinarily deal with such small amounts of money particularly in large grants.
Also, the attachments to the agenda are ordinarily PDFs, and instead the links are to Microsoft Word documents, which is strange.
Item 29 is a public hearing on rezoning 48 acres on Scott Road for a charter school. This item was before the City Council in October and councilmembers expressed their dislike of charter schools, their lack of trust that the applicant National Heritage Academies actually intended to build a school on the site and convinced the applicant to withdraw the application.
It is a confusing situation made more confusing because the attached zoning staff report is not for the Scott Road rezoning request but for an unrelated rezoning request on Summit Avenue.
Fortunately, the correct minutes for the Zoning Commission meeting in November are correct. The applicant, National Heritage Academies, changed the original request for a Residential Single Family-3 (R-3) zoning to Conditional District Residential Single Family-3 (CD-R-3) zoning. The condition that was added is that the use of the property is limited to a school, associated facilities and single-family dwellings.
The Zoning Commission approved the rezoning request by a unanimous vote.
At the meeting in October, when discussing the original rezoning request, Mayor Nancy Vaughan said, “I always think it is best to condition the application and I think most applications should have conditions on them.”
So maybe adding a condition this time will do the trick.
