News-Record.com

The commissioners are correct: Willie Best is a nice guy. But was he the right fit as county manager?

As I continue to consider fallout from the issue, some more thoughts:

1. Even once-embattled (some people say, always-embattled) Tax Director Jenks Crayton was given very specific directives for improvement in a performance plan. Best was not.

2. Whenever Jenks Crayton, who was treated terribly and attacked relentlessly, compares favorably in any way in how his case was handled to yours, you're in deep stuff.

3. The commissioners enumerated more detailed criticisms of Best in today's News & Record, which makes the idea of giving him a merit raise only three months ago even curiouser.

4. One glaring hole in the arguments of Best's defenders was any mention of accomplishments; anything he had done to distinguish himself in the job. There may be some, but I haven't heard them.

5. One of the commissioners complaints about Best was that he put a raise for himself in the budget without consulting them -- sort of like the commissioners, who slipped a 41 percent raise for themselves in the 2005 budget without consulting taxpayers. At the time, it made them the highest-paid commissioners in the state.

6. No matter who's right on this issue, everybody loses. Guilford County already had a reputation for raucous, Wild West behavior among the commissioners. Thought it couldn't get any worse? It has.

County managers don't last beyond one election in Guilford County! ... Guilford County politics is rough!"
— Anonymous e-mail sent to a county manager finalist in 1993

In one of the more ironic quotes of the year, County Commissioner Skip Alston lamented last week that "you don't play politics with people's livelihood."

Alston was referring to the successful gambit last week by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to fire County Manager Willie Best, which he characterized as dirty pool, motivated by racism, revenge and political ambition.

Best was the first African American county manager in Guilford County.
Yet Alston seems to forget that it wasn't too long ago that he was playing a similar game of hardball with County Tax Director Jenks Crayton.

That was different, Alston said, when reminded of his concerted efforts to fire Crayton, which included charges of racism and culminated in an SBI investigation — that found nothing.

Our colleague, Doug Clark, is back after two weeks in Africa.

Check out his blog and his column (coming Wednesday) for more about his adventures (including photos)in Tanzania.

Doug regaled us this morning with tales of petty politics and power struggles that amazed and confounded him.

Oh no, not in Africa. He was reacting to the news he'd missed in Guilford County.

Those salacious (and endless) NBC hidden-camera exposes of online child predators caught pursuing sexual liaisons with young girls and boys would be comical if they weren't so deeply disturbing.

In one case, a man strips naked while he awaits who he thinks is a teen-aged girl.

When confronted a camera crew, the man sheepishly admits the error of his ways as the lecturing reporter mercifully hands him a towel to cover himself.

What's even more amazing by the obviously popular "Dateline" series is the types of men snared in the stings: school teachers, coaches, a parent who dares bring his toddler along -- and even a rabbi.

Even more unsettling is that none of these scenes were set in the Triad. But they could have been.

Joe Killian's article notes the Greensboro Police Department's efforts to catch online predators usually similar tactics.

Here's part of Joe's Q&A with Cpl. C.E. Williams of the Greensboro police's juvenile services division:

Q: "So you don't have to look far for someone who's looking to solicit you if they think you're an underage girl?"

A: "No, not at all. When chatting online I would say I get an average of two solicitations every hour. That's not just guys who are saying 'hi.' That's solicitations for sex."

In a series of bloody sci-fi movies, an alien creature called a Predator hunts and kills for pleasure. He is cold, calculating and mercilessly efficient.

Yet the human variety that lurks on the Internet is three times as chilling. Because he's real.

As for NBC, when is enough enough?

The network seems to be getting so much mileage out of the exposes that one wonders if they might make it a miniseries.

Over and over they show one man after another snared by his own sickness and foolishness, some even after seeing earlier installments of the "Dateline" series.

But when does raising awareness cross the line into exploitation -- into using these predator traps as cheap entertainment?

I wonder if they haven't already.

Say you want a Revolution?

Well, maybe not.

While the Grasshoppers' classy new ballpark continues to draw big crowds, the city's new arena football team didn't draw flies in the air conditioned Greensboro Coliseum in its first season.

The Revolution averaged 1,671 in paid attendance a game, less than one-third what the city's previous arena team, the Prowlers, drew in their first season in 2000.

The Prowlers eventually folded.

This is not good news for the coliseum, which needs pro sports tenants to help boost revenues.

Concerts and circuses are nice, but they aren't as steady or dependable as a franchise that has a set, regular schedule and pays rent as a hometown tenant, not an occasional visitor.

Meanwhile, Coliseum Managing Director Matt Brown continues to pursue a hockey team to replace the defunct Greensboro Generals.

Brown said in an e-mail Thursday: "I have had and continue to have dialogue with ECHL Commissioner Brian McKenna, who advises me that the Executive Committee had quite a bit of discussion of GBO being a priority and continue to have conversations with a prospective owner about his interest in relocating a team here if the League can identify a team that would be interested in selling it to him. He wants it hopefully resolved by September to allow a whole year to properly market and sell the team. We'll see."

But Brown acknowledges that the economics of minor-league hockey are a lot tougher than they used to be.

Consider a recent news item from the Greenville (S.C.) News that notes the struggles of the ECHL's Greenville Grrrowl (no, my "r" key isn't stuck; that's how they spell it). Note that the team will need revenue sharing with its arena, the Bi-Lo Center, to stay alive.

The Greenville Grrrowl almost certainly will return next season with restructured ownership and a new revenue-sharing agreement with the Bi-Lo Center, according to the Greenville businessman who leads the private investor group that owns the minor-league hockey team.

Those six groups are the team, the arena district, city and county councils, a consortium of banks that backed revenue bonds used to finance part of the local arena's $63 million cost and officials from Spartanburg-based Centerplate Inc., which operates the Bi-Lo Center where the Grrrowl plays its home games.

The Grrrowl lost $1 million last season.

For what one man's opinion is worth:

1. "Superman Returns" is overlong and overdone. It has its moments, but it borrows liberally from the Spiderman movies and director Bryan Singer lays on the Jesus imagery way too heavy.

2. "The Devil Wears Prada" was an unexpected delight with a terrific performance by Meryl Streep as a tyrannical high-fashion magazine editor.

Has anyone seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet?

Those salacious, hidden-camera exposes of online child predators on NBC would be comical if they weren't so deeply disturbing.

Grown men bounce happily, one after another, into strange houses in hopes of twisted liaisons with young girls and boys they've made contact with via the Internet.

Armed with a goofy smile and, often, a six-pack of beer, each takes a seat while his unseen "blind date" asks him to make himself at home.

Then, suddenly, he finds himself on "Candid Camera."

"What were you thinking?" he's asked on national, prime-time TV.

In one case, a man strips naked in someone's kitchen while he awaits who he thinks is a teenage girl.

When confronted by a camera crew, the man sheepishly admits the error of his ways as the lecturing reporter mercifully hands him a towel to cover himself.

What's even more amazing by the obviously popular "Dateline" series is the types of men snared in the stings: school teachers, military personnel, coaches, a parent who dares bring his toddler along — and even a rabbi.

But there's more. Some have suddenly found themselves on national TV after having seen the show themselves. And some have made repeat appearances on the show.

Fool me once, shame on you ....

The stings were conducted in conjunction with an anti-online predator group called Perverted Justice and occurred in cities, suburbs and small towns.

None of these scenes was set in the Triad. But they could have been.

Joe Killian's July 5 News & Record article notes the Greensboro Police Department's efforts to catch online predators using similar tactics.

"So you don't have to look far for someone who's looking to solicit you if they think you're an underage girl?" Killian asks Cpl. Williams.

"No, not at all," Williams says. "When chatting online I would say I get an average of two solicitations every hour. That's not just guys who are saying ‘hi.' That's solicitations for sex."

The Guilford County Sheriff's Office conducts similar operations that have netted a dozen arrests over three years, says Sheriff BJ Barnes.

An update on an earlier post about the struggling minor-league hockey team in Greenville, S.C. (whose decline mirrors the demise of the Greensboro Generals):

The Greenville Grrrwl now is officially out of business.

That means the Bi-Lo Center, which has been the team's home arena, could lose as much as $400,000 without the Grrrwl.

More from the Greenville News.

First-blush impressions of the Greensboro City Council's discussion Tuesday of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report:

1. Every council member attended, except Florence Gatten, who is out of town tending to her ill mother.

2. The tone was respectful, civil and professional, even though there was sharp disagreement on some aspects of the report and the issue in general.

3. Mayor Keith Holliday made the obvious and eminently appropriate suggestion that the city's Human Relations Commission take up the report. (The Human Relations Commission should have been more engaged and more involved in the TRC matter from day one, if you ask me.)

4. Tom Phillips, an avowed TRC skeptic, not only came, but participated and even made a thoughtful suggestion that the council narrow its discussion topics for the Human Relations Commission to a critical few. Good idea, Tom.

5. The council briefing room was an absolutely lousy venue that was cramped and hot, with too few seats to accommodate observers. What were they thinking?

6. The council agreed that followup discussions should occur.
The spectators, who seemed primarily to consist of TRC supporters, appeared generally impressed with what they saw and heard.

This, from TRC Commissioner Bob Peters: "I can see potentially difficult conversations coming out of this, which I welcome. I can see disagreements coming out of this, which I also welcome."

More reactions from Ed Cone.

County Commissioner Skip Alston says he's concerned that some of his fellow commissioners plan to pull the plug on a national search and name interim County Manager David McNeill the permanent manager at Thursday's meeting.

But fellow Democrat Paul Gibson, one of the commissioners who voted to oust Willie Best from the post three weeks ago, says that's unlikely.

"I've not heard that and I'm certainly not of a mind to do that," Gibson said today. "I want to do a national search and see if we can't find Superman -- or Spiderman.

"That may be David McNeill but I'm not ready to do that tomorrow."

Such a move also would not be in McNeill's best interest, serving only to decrease his chances of winning over the commissioners who opposed Best's firing.

He'd be put in a position where only a slight shift in voting alignments on the board could almost assure him a pink slip as payback.

Not matter how good a job he'd do.

Three hundred photos from that recent, taxpayer-funded ferry junket by state legislators have been made available for public consumption, courtesy of the state Department of Transportation.

A good time was had by all.

Postcards to follow.

The report of an attack by a rabid coyote in Guilford Courthouse National Park has, well, freaked me out.

I often run in the park at dusk or walk my little lhasa apso. I don't know whether I'll continue that practice, at least for now. A coyote could eat my tiny dog as an appetizer.

Until, the most memorable vision of wildlife I'd seen there were deer and a huge, brown snake slithering across the road as walkers and joggers made wide turns out of its way.

Makes me wonder now whether thst alleged fox sighting downtown several months ago was a coyote.

It was good to see President Bush speak to the NAACP Thursday.

It was even more encouraging to hear him sound some hopeful, seemingly earnest notes.

"I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party," the president said.

"I consider it a tragedy that the party of Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community. For too long, my party wrote off the African American vote, and many African Americans wrote off the Republican Party."

Good start. The president needs to talk to the NAACP and the NAACP needs to talk to the president.

But Mr. Bush has spoken such words before,in the wake of Katrina and even before that, and his actions haven't always matched them.

When Democrat Paul Gibson surged to victory in 2004 as the leading vote-getter among Guilford commissioner candidates, he promised a fresh voice and a new day.

"We've got to go to work now," Gibson said then after a tenacious, door-to-door campaign that vaulted him past favored at-large incumbent Trudy Wade, among others. "I really do want to put an end to these old politics of division."

After 18 months on the job, Gibson, 60, certainly hasn't been bashful about making bold moves. He is a fervent supporter of a new jail and has butted heads with other commissioners on his eagerness to get on with the project. "I think we are making a terrible, terrible mistake if we don't move forward with a new jail as soon as possible," he says.

He was one of the commissioners who pushed for the ouster of County Tax Director Jenks Crayton, whom he still insists is a poor manager.
He brought to the commissioners the politically risky idea of paying for capital needs such as school construction through a county investment fund.

He and fellow Commissioner Bruce Davis took a trip to Hawaii for a national conference that some considered extravagant during a time of tight budgets.

And Gibson teamed with Democrats Kay Cashion and Kirk Perkins and the board's four Republicans to fire County Manager Willie Best three weeks ago. "I'm certainly not a stupid person and I realize the ramifications of firing Mr. Best," Gibson says.
"I felt it was absolutely the right thing to do for Guilford County government."

He acknowledges being often at the center of the storm among the traditionally volatile commissioners. And he plans to stay there.

"I like to drive," he says. "I have some strong ideas about where I think the county should go."

As for being a uniter versus a divider, Gibson appears so impassioned and impatient that he doesn't have much time for diplomacy.

"I'm a loner," he says of his management style, "and that probably doesn't work very well on an 11-member board of county commissioners. I enjoy being by myself."

He also is stunningly blunt. Consider responses to a brief game of word association:

On fellow Democratic Commissioner John Parks: "Kay (Cashion's) got bigger ones than he does."

Two steps forward and one back in the ongoing revitalization of the East Market Street area just outside downtown.

On the plus side, Greensboro developer John Kavanagh hopes to build affordable residences on Murrow Boulevard, where the old Galloway Buick/Flow Isuzu dealership and the Pet Dairy building now sit.

Also on the plus side, the parent demonination of a nearby church, the House of Prayer, seems very serious about remaking the old Post Office into something new and beneficial to the surrounding businesses and neighborhoods.

Mac Sims of the East Market Street Development Corp. said last week that several ideas are still in play, from housing to a community center to a hotel.

The House of Prayer also could move its popular basement restaurant from the church basement to the old Post Office, where parking is much more plentiful than the church's cramped lot.

On the negative side, the Lee-Dudley shopping center, at the corner of Market, Murrow and Friendly, appears to be struggling. The Krispy Creme outlet there went out of business and a new tenant for its corner spot has not materialized. Wright's Pharmacy was supposed to take that spot, according to prominent signs. But it has disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, a new restaurant in the center, Tuscana, is spacious and pleasant with good food and gracious service.

But traffic is slow at the restaurant, which is depending largely on a strong banquet business to build a customer base.

It would be nice to see the new eaterie do well. (I saw some Arts Council leaders there during a recent lunch.) So far, however, the only restaurant that consistently attracts business from "across the tracks" downtown is the House of Prayer, whose healthy helpings of soul food apparently have a universal attraction.

Call them gated communities -- without the gates, but chained shut and padlocked all the same.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Monday that increasing numbers of communities have flat-out said no to affordable housing.

For instance, in the Wake County community of Knightdale, the News & Observer reports,the town council has passed a policy that requires each new single-family home to be worth at least $185,000.

Other communities have rejected lower-income apartment developments for fear that (shudder) poor people would live in them.

To them, "poor" equals "criminally inclined."

Some advocates for the poor have lobbied for comprehensive plans that mandate mixed income housing in major developments so those with more modest means aren't excluded from the equation.

Meanwhile, Greensboro's relatively solid record on affordable housing can't mask a continuing need.

The most recent challenge is near downtown, where most residents have to be well-off to enjoy center-city living.

If the center city is supposed to be the heart of Greensboro -- the glue that keeps this community together -- we're leaving out an important element.

And that's a shame.

Maybe it's not safe to go back to the park just yet.

A rabid, grayish-red fox bit four people in Raleigh last weekend before being stomped to death by its last victim.

The incident recalls a recent attack by a rabid coyote in Guilford Courthouse National Military Park and the discovery last week of a rabid bat at UNCG.

It was a shock to hear of the death of Guilford County Schools Transportation Director Jim Moen.

Moen died Monday, according to an obituary in today's News & Record.

Moen was a pleasure to work with and routinely gracious and helpful to pesky journalists like me.

I'm very sorry to hear he's gone.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "work-force" housing has gotten so expensive in some cities that a real estate investment company has started a $250 million to finance for-sale and rental housing in Los Angeles, San Diego and parts of the Northeast.

The Phoenix Realty Group's strategy is to reducep prices by coaxing developers to make units smaller, to build on cheaper land and to provide less costly frills.

Of course, we're talking very different cost-of-living standards here. The median price of a home Phoenix intends to invest in is $400,000.

I picked up the first case of poison ivy in my life while clearing some brush in my backyard last week.

It all started on my forearms.

Little bumps begat big bumps begat oozing pinkish-red welts. And they won't go away.

Scratch and they spread. Don't scratch and they torture with tingling itching.

I've tried creams and other remedies to little avail. And apparently because I scratch and touch the infected areas in my sleep, there are bumps even on my temple.

I've avoided going to the doctor so far. Another day like yesterday and forget my male ego. Gimme a shot, gimme a prescription, gimme relief.

Born, innocently enough, as a vital connector road from east to west, Wendover Avenue has become something altogether different today.
Go east if you're meek, where over-development hasn't choked the life out of the road. Yet.

Go west, if you dare, into a bumper-to-bumper jungle where fat, gas-frothing SUVs lurch from one big box to another.

Wendover as we know it is approaching its 40th anniversary.
Begun as a model of foresight, the western stretch of Wendover has become twisted and gnarled into a terminally clogged artery — and a paved monument to missed opportunities and afterthoughts.

Afterthoughts about traffic volume.

Afterthoughts about pedestrians, who might actually want to get out of their cars and walk somewhere without being killed.

Afterthoughts about development and prudent planning.

Wendover, especially West Wendover, was clearly engineered for automobiles, not human beings.

How does the song go? We did "a bad, bad thing."

And we may not be finished.

As Margaret Banks' story noted Sunday, the Commission on the Status of Women has seemed to be a budget without a cause in recent years.

Some members of organization admit as much, saying they lack a sense of mission and clear purpose.

The programs are lightly attended and even commissioners don't show for meetings and special events.

Meanwhile, the Human Relations Department seems to be doing the heavy lifting as far complaints about discrimination, etc., are concerned.

That raises the question: Does this commission need to exist at all?