If at first you don’t succeed try, try again.
The City of Greensboro will hold a second public meeting on the proposed Good Repair Ordinance on Wednesday, June 5 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the District 4 Greensboro Police Patrol Station at 1106 Maple St.
The first public meeting the city held on the good repair ordinance ended up with 80 percent of the people who attended against the ordinance only 10 percent in favor and 10 percent on the fence. It was not the result the City Council was hoping to get.
Most of the discussion involved Assistant City Manager Barbara Harris answering questions or simply listening to long statements about why the ordinance was a bad idea and would be bad for business.
The Good Repair Ordinance would require every nonresidential and nongovernmental building in the city to comply with the stringent International Property Maintenance Code (IPMC). For example peeling paint, and cracked ceiling tiles are both violations. One speaker at the first public meeting said he doubted if there was a building in Greensboro that fully complied with the IPMC.
The City Council had planned to pass a good repair ordinance that would only apply to commercial buildings downtown. There are two buildings on South Elm Street in particular that the City Council wants to go after.
The problem the Council encountered is that a local government bill would have to be passed by the North Carolina legislature in order for the Council to pass an ordinance that only applied to the downtown area. The City Council in February requested that the legislature pass such a bill. But the far left Greensboro City Council doesn’t have many friends in the Republican controlled legislature and the Council abandoned the idea of getting the help from the legislature to pass a bill that many see as anti-business. The City Council needs no help from the state to pass the ordinance citywide and it planned to do so in May, but delayed the vote to have time for public input.
Now that the city held a public meeting and learned that there is a lot of opposition, no doubt those in support of the Good Repair Ordinance are lining up folks to attend the June 5 meeting in order to give the City Council some cover when it passes the ordinance this summer.
The city has said it plans to hire two new inspectors who will be charged with making certain that every nonresidential building in Greensboro is up to the stringent standards in the IPMC. But city staff members refused to even estimate how many buildings would be covered by the ordinance.
Why should governmental buildings be exempt? Are they also apart of downtown? Why should I have to look at an eyesore dump old courthouse or jail? Funny how these regulations always exempt the regulators…