The High Point City Council usually meets in the council chambers in downtown High Point.
However, on Friday, April 16, the council is meeting at Grandover Resort Golf and Spa. When a staffer in the city clerk’s office was asked why the city councilmembers were meeting at Grandover, and was asked the purpose of the meeting, she said she could not give out that information.
She did say that the City Council planned for the meeting to be a closed session.
In order to go into a closed session, a council legally must declare a reason, and, when the woman was asked the stated reason for the council going into closed session, she said it was “Personnel.”
Even though no city official is saying the specific purpose for the meeting, it’s a virtual certainty that the personnel matter High Point City Council will discuss is the best way to fill the city manager position that needs to be filled. The meeting falls within the stated timeline the council has for selecting a city manager and in late March, High Point Mayor Jay Wagner told the High Point Enterprise that the manager search was down to an unspecified number of good candidates and that interviews would take place “probably in April.”
High Point has been without a permanent manager for nearly a year.
The City Council is keeping a tight lid on who those candidates are because some of them are no doubt currently in jobs that they’d like to keep if they don’t get selected by the High Point City Council for this job.
There are a couple of reasons that City Councils and county Boards of Commissioners interview important candidates in nice hotel settings. One is that they want the candidates to leave with a favorable impression of the area, and another is that it makes it much easier to shuffle candidates in and out of meeting rooms without them being seen by members of the media.
For instance, when the Guilford County Board of Commissioners interviewed former Guilford County Manager Marty Lawing and three other candidates for that manager job in 2013, they did so at the Sheraton Greensboro at Four Seasons for the same reasons.
Yeah.Those nosy taxpayers dont need to know stuff.Some matters are best left to the elite governing class.
Why do they need to meet at such an expensive location. Why can’t they have their meeting at a motel out on the highway instead. That is good enough for them.