The Greensboro City Council is holding a “strategy session” beginning at 1 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13 in the Katie Dorsett Council Chamber in city hall.
The meeting was originally scheduled to be held under a tent at the Historic Magnolia House, but because the weather forecast calls for rain, the meeting was moved to the Council Chamber.
What is being called a strategy session is a longer-than-usual work session with four items on the agenda rather than the one or two items that would be typical of a work session.
One item on the agenda is “Legislative Updates” from the new Intergovernmental Relations Manager LaToya Caesar-Crawford and Deputy City Attorney Al Andrews.
There is no information on the agenda about the legislative update, but Mayor Nancy Vaughan said that Caesar-Crawford would be presenting a proposed legislative agenda for the upcoming session of the North Carolina General Assembly.
The legislative agenda is a list of items that the City Council would like for the state legislature to pass, and in the past the City Council has spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the legislative agenda and has had limited success getting items through the legislature.
Vaughan said that she hoped the legislative agenda would be divided into three sections. One section would have items such as the bill to allow Greensboro to use non-sworn personnel to investigate minor traffic accidents, which passed the state House and is currently in the Rules Committee in the state Senate. Vaughan said that legislation to allow more flexibility in releasing police body-worn camera videos would also be on that list of legislation already introduced in Raleigh.
Vaughan said that she hoped the City Council would limit another section, comprised of a list of new legislation to be introduced, to about six items. She said, “I don’t want that list to be 12 items long.”
According to Vaughan, the legislative agenda should also include a list of items that the City Council supports but would affect the entire state.
Vaughan said, “Our housing crisis is a statewide housing crisis.” She suggested that the state should have a department of housing, but it wouldn’t make sense to put that on the Greensboro legislative agenda.
The other items on the agenda for the strategy session are:
“Leadership Edge Capstone Presentation
“Police Workforce Challenges and Retention/Offc of Community Safety/Police Chief Search Update
“Strategy Frame Work.”
Huh….sounds like a normal do nothing, waste time and taxes city council meeting.
“Police Workforce Challenges”? Yeah, I would call missing over 100 cops with only a couple dozen new ones waiting in the wings a little bit more than a challenge. My sources tell me that the police academy is down to 15 officers, and about a dozen will or have already left the agency in October. So you have basically lost the entire police academy’s numbers over the course of just one month. Meanwhile, let’s sit on our thumbs and enjoy the ride while we see what happens. Maybe they will just start applying again out of the blue. Police brass, are you really going to let council be the ones deciding how to fix your staffing problem?
If I came in here as a new police chief, my first question to the council, manager, and police brass would be: “What the heck have you jokers been doing for the last 18 months?” There is absolutely no excuse for all the “executives” to have sat on their asses while this disaster formed. I mean don’t they know how many people they have and how many they are losing at all times? Exactly how many do they have to lose before someone decides to do something that makes a real difference?
I wonder if any of them remember that, less than a decade ago, we averaged under 30 homicides a year, but now we are averaging 50. We are already at 35 this year. Do any of them care?
What a bunch of buffoons.
Being unable to respond to complaints, crimes of all times; this may result in vigilante justice.
When you think of the homeless in center city, also think of the homeless & criminal mass in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Chicago, Philly…..
Coming our way.