The Greensboro City Council has a relatively short agenda for the Tuesday, Jan. 17 meeting.
The Jan. 17 meeting is the one business meeting that the City Council has scheduled for January and has no public forum also called speakers from the floor on non-agenda items. However, the public may speak on any item on the agenda.
The meeting officially begins at 4 p.m. but that 4 p.m. start is for a closed session. The open portion of the meeting traditionally begins at 5:30 p.m. or shortly thereafter depending on how long the closed session lasts. If the closed session finishes early, the City Council usually takes a break and begins the open portion of the meeting at the regular time.
There are only four public hearing items on the agenda, and two of those for annexation and original zoning for property on Bridgepoint Road have been withdrawn by the applicant.
The one annexation and rezoning request left is for property at South Elm-Eugene Street and Cahill Drive. The request is to annex 1.7 acres and rezone the entire site of about 30 acres to Planned Unit Development (PUD). For 29.4 acres of the site the request is to rezone the property from PUD to PUD with different conditions.
The City Council previously passed the PUD zoning for the vast majority of the site.
The one general business item on the agenda is to formalize the process of providing one-time financial assistance to nonprofit organizations that are receiving funds from the city’s general fund that were freed up in August when the City Council voted to dump all $59.4 million in American Rescue Plan money into the general fund. The agenda states that these organizations are receiving ARP money, but since all the ARP money was allocated in August that is not possible.
The City Council is requiring all of the nonprofits receiving this faux ARP funding to provide financial audits or reviews and the council agreed to provide funding up to $20,000 each to pay for those audits or reviews in addition to the faux ARP funds the organizations will receive.
The estimated $160,000 that will be provided to these nonprofit organizations to enable them to receive additional funding from the city will be paid for with interest earnings on the ARP funds.
So we pay $20,000 for audits for non-profits? It would seem that the less the council has on it’s agenda, the less damage they can do. Or, would it give them more times to think up things to create more vote-buying schemes.