Now that Guilford County Schools is set for years with a credit line of $2 billion thanks to two county bond referendums, it’s time for the county’s other major educational responsibility – Guilford Technical Community College – to ask the Guilford County Board of Commissioners to help meet more of their funding needs.
To that end, the county commissioners have called a special afternoon work session for Thursday, April 4, to hear a request from GTCC staff, who are expected to ask the commissioners to approve an expenditure for a project that money has already been set aside for.
There could also be more talk of a major bond referendum request from GTCC.
Last fall, GTCC staff gave the county notice that it would like to see a bond referendum on the ballot at some point in the near future so that county voters could support large-scale community college projects in the same way – though not to the same extent – that they’ve supported Guilford County Schools.
Currently, nearly half of Guilford County’s budget goes toward education salaries and costs, school repairs and paying off debt from school construction.
The Board of Commissioners has scheduled the work session for April 4 at 4 p.m. in the Carolyn Coleman Conference Room – formerly known as the Blue Room – on the first floor of the Old Guilford County Court House at 301 W. Market St. in Greensboro.
In addition to hearing a budget presentation from GTCC staff along with a request to move forward on a project, the commissioners are also going to hear an update from county staff on Guilford County’s proposed “Integrated Services Delivery Cohort.”
If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is; however, basically, that’s an attempt to make county administration more efficient by allowing the various software systems to work together in better and more intuitive ways, as well as to streamline county administration in other ways.
Guilford County Manager Mike Halford began calling attention to the need for the project about a year ago and the work session this week will no doubt be used to fill in some of the details.
I can suggest a few practical and common-sense way to spend the borrowed money that they taxpayers have to cover in the future.
Can streamline mean DEI reductions and county administration reductions? In other words, fire the dead wood and reduce taxes. A novel idea I am sure for Skip and company.