The Greensboro City Council will hold its third virtual meeting on Tuesday, May 5 at 2 p.m. The meeting was originally scheduled for 5:30 p.m.
The meeting on the first Tuesday of the month is mainly to hold a public forum, aka “speakers from the floor on non-agenda items.”
The City Council has tried several methods to control the public forum meetings. The first was to dedicate the first meeting of the month to only hear speakers from the floor and allow no speakers on non-agenda items at the business meeting on the third Tuesday of the month. Then in the summer of 2019, the City Council started holding the first Tuesday meeting off site and held one public forum in each of the five City Council districts. Neither of those methods met with much success.
Limiting business items to one meeting a month caused some lengthy meetings and this year the City Council agreed to add noncontroversial items that don’t require public hearings to the first meeting of the month.
But it appears the City Council has finally found the way to keep their public forums from becoming yell-fests – the virtual meeting. With no speakers actually speaking at the meetings and with their comments not even being briefly summarized, the first virtual public forum in April went smoothly and fast.
Consent agenda items are not supposed to be discussed by the City Council, but one item on the consent agenda for the May 5 meeting might result in some discussion. The city is adjusting the Greensboro Coliseum budget to reflect the current situation where the Coliseum is closed to the public. The amount of expenditures for promotion is being reduced by $2 million and the amount of revenue from “admission and charges” is also being reduced by $2 million. The city is also transferring $1.6 million from the appropriated fund balance to the Coliseum.
An item that is on the agenda for discussion is the final item “City Manager Fiscal Year 2020-2021 Budget Cycle Review.” This is normally a presentation on when the recommended budget will be presented and recommendations on City Council meetings to discuss the budget.
However, with revenue down and expenses up, this will be far from a normal budget for the City Council and some discussion of that is expected.
What is not on the agenda is any mention of mandating that people in Greensboro wear masks, something that was discussed at the April 21 meeting.
The Tanger Center would be a good building to turn into affordable housing. That seems to be the main focus of the City Council anyway. Why not use the Tanger Center for a crematorium to cremate all the bodies that Greensboro is destroying. Fill the auditorium with three thousand dead bodies and seal the door shut and set the building on fire. This would save the citizens millions of dollars of future taxes. Greensboro needs better leadership.