The Greensboro City Council is meeting next week on Monday, March 2 at 5:30 p.m. in the Council Chamber instead of Tuesday, March 3 because of the primary election on Tuesday.
The meeting has a light agenda in keeping with the new format. The main purpose of the meeting is to hear from speakers from the floor on non-agenda items, which translated from city-speak means people are invited to come speak about whatever they like for three minutes.
The restrictions on what speakers can speak about have been re-written so that it’s pretty much the way it has always been. People are not supposed to advocate breaking the law and are not supposed to disrupt the meeting, but speaking about lawsuits and city employees is not forbidden.
At the beginning of the meeting the City Council hears speakers for 30 minutes, and, after a short business agenda, will hear all of the rest of the speakers who signed up for three minutes each.
The business agenda includes resolutions honoring the late J. Douglas Galyon Sr. and the late Steve Showfety.
Galyon, who died in 2019, served as a Greensboro city councilmember, a Guilford County commissioner and as a long term chairman of the North Carolina Board of Transportation. The old Southern Railway station on Church Street was named for Galyon in 2004 in honor of his work to improve transportation in North Carolina. Last year a section of I-840, the outer loop, was also named in his honor.
Showfety, who also died in 2019, had been president of the Koury Corporation. He served on the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority board for 10 years and was chairman for five.
There is also a resolution recognizing March 28 to April 4 as “Creek Week.” This is a week that residents of Greensboro are asked to go out and clean the trash out of the waterways in the city.
Some people don’t seem to realize that trash on the streets and sidewalks often washes into storm drains in heavy rains and ends up in the streams and creeks. The city has certainly had enough rain to wash a lot of trash downstream this year.
