The Guilford County Board of Commissioners passed a 2021-2022 budget in June and now the board is going into the summer doldrums of Guilford County government – where typically the board doesn’t do much meaningful work until late summer.
The board normally meets on the first and third Thursday of each month – in addition to holding multiple work sessions and meetings of committees of the board.
However, the board has canceled its first meeting in July and has no work sessions or committee meetings scheduled for this month.
The Board of Commissioners is required by state law to hold at least one meeting a month, and the board has one scheduled for Thursday, July 15. The July meeting is usually a very short one with few members of the public in attendance and with little business on the agenda. That mid-July meeting also, notoriously, has a lot of commissioners phoning in from the beach to participate. So it’s not a great meeting for making monumental decisions that impact the future of the county.
After that July meeting, the Board of Commissioners will meet again on Thursday, Aug. 5, when the board resumes its usual schedule of two meetings a month. In August of each year, the committee meetings of sub-groups of the board also tend to start up again as well.
Most of the Guilford County commissioners will be making a “business” trip to the Washington, DC area for the annual summer conference of the National Association of Counties (NACo)
The commissioners met a great deal in April, May and June to bang out a $600-plus million budget – the most important thing the board does all year.
It’s not just the commissioners taking a break at this time of the year either. On Thursday, July 1 the county announced that the “Guilford Soil & Water Conservation District Board Meeting scheduled for July 7 was being canceled “due to lack of new business to address.”
Vote yourself raises, then take vacations, then taxpayer funded junkets. Voters get what they wanted; increased spending and largesse for officials.
What is their definition of meaningful work?
Why does the entire board need to go to this convention? It is merely a vacation that they do not deserve. Why not let one member go and then report back to the group? This is just a way for them to get an additional perc. Was the outlandish raise not enough? Vote them all out.
When have you ever seen a liberal democrat turn down a chance to spend someone else’s money. I’d be curious to know how many would go if they had to pay their own way.
The commissioners need to “phone home”. I’ll send a van for them.