The Greensboro City Council will be going on its annual two-day retreat on Thursday, Feb. 15 and Friday, Feb. 16.
There was a time when the City Council actually went somewhere on its retreat, but for more than three decades, the retreat has been held in Greensboro.
The 2024 City Council retreat will be held at Bennett College at 521 Gorrell St. and begins at 9 a.m. on both days. According to the agenda, the Thursday session will end at 4 p.m. and the Friday session sometime after 3:45 p.m. However, in the past, the City Council has often run out of steam during the afternoon of the second day and adjourned early.
These are official City Council meetings and open to the public, but historically very few people who are not members of the City Council, city employees or reporters have attended.
It appears that the 2024 retreat will be similar to retreats in recent years, where councilmembers were encouraged to create artwork to express how they felt about the city or use colored dots to express their support for a project.
After receiving the agenda, City Councilmember Zack Matheny sent a bunch of questions to his fellow councilmembers about how they will spend their two days together.
Matheny stated, “I find it hard to believe that there is no time set aside for council to discuss our own district issues, thoughts or concerns.”
Another question, “Why are we spending an hour and half on ground rules and framework, this seems like it should be covered in less than 30 minutes. We have been elected numerous times, this is not our first meeting. We will do our best, but, we will be who we are, and those goes for all of us.”
Matheny also had a list of eight topics he would like to have discussed that aren’t currently on the agenda. Here are the first four:
“1. Question: Where are we with the prepared food tax discussion and strategy – this is something we should discuss. For example the Tanger Center was a large part of a previous strategy session and through that difficult discussion, a positive occurred.
“2. Are there “big” plans for the city council to consider, such as the Tanger Center?
“3. Where are we with the city with the Nocho Windsor Chavis Center?
“4. What is our action plan for ARP funds we put forth for amateur sports, i.e. Bryan Park Soccer fields etc.”
Seems like an appropriate place to meet. Zack, thank you.
And what do we do about the mess we (city council) created by hiring a failure of a city manager?
I guarantee that Zack was given weeks, if not months, to offer feedback on the retreat agenda and never said a thing. Now it’s a day away and he is SHOCKED that the agenda isn’t to his liking. He does that crap all of the time and then points the finger at staff. He looooves to claim that no one told him anything, and then when when the accused produces the emails that he was included on, he’ll turn around and say “Well someone should have called me to tell me that they sent me an email.” I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if someone pulled up their phone records that they did call him to tell him that they sent him an email, he would say “Well someone should have sent me a carrier pigeon.” It is insanity.
A single voice cries out, “please use common sense going forward “
Anything to appease the black voters on the dark side of town