News-Record.com

Two items from our memos department:

Former at-large candidate David Hoggard joined the press table last night to blog a city council meeting live. David quickly figured out what many reporters know about covering meetings: It's not easy to write an interesting story on the fly about discussions that are often terribly wonky.

But he does include a short item detailing a conversation he had with Council member Yvonne Johnson, who has long been seen as a future mayoral candidate. According to David, Johnson says she hasn't been able to get an answer out of Keith Holliday whether he intends to run again.

Holliday told me in an interview in December that he will make a decision by February or March.

David also reveals that Council member Tom Phillips will be starting his own weblog by weeks end. Ed Cone says that political pair Don and Nancy Vaughan plan a joint blog that will start up at the end of the month. They are joining Yvonne Johnson, who has had sporadic postings at her blog since November. We'll get you links to the new blogs when they go live.

Boiling down five hours of staff briefings and council discussions into a short story means that everything of note doesn't make it into the soybean extract on pressed wood pulp edition of the News & Record. The print edition talked about mixed-use developments and the trash transfer station, but they also covered...

City employees will start getting more vacation and sick time starting next month, according to a memo sent out by City Manager Ed Kitchen. He details it here, but the change basically increases the number of leave hours accrued per month to bring Greensboro in line with other governments.
Kitchen also proposes giving health and dental benefits to city council members for the first time. He estimates the benefits would cost about $37,000 per year if all the council members take part.
Kitchen said he is implementing the citywide vacation change starting Feb. 1, but he left it up to the council to vote on giving themselves additional perquisites.

You may remember that Commissioner Bruce Davis has decided to hold the board's annual retreat in Chapel Hill this month, rather than somewhere in Guilford County.

The board's Republicans don't like that idea and have kicked up a bit of a fuss. Here's the continuation of the fuss:

At his new blog, Greensboro council member Tom Phillips said that after hearing from SCAT users, he'd support keeping an unlimited ride pass as an option for disabled users of the SCAT van system. He says in his post...

"What I have begun to realize and I believe other Council members have too, is that many of these people who are using SCAT a lot are simply trying to remain active and not give in to their disability. Even though most cities don't offer it, doing away with the unlimited monthly pass would make it prohibitive for these citizens to continue to live the lifestyle they have become accustomed to. I do believe our rate is too low and would recommend that it be increased to $45 per month."

Last Friday, Scoop blog wrote about the proposal to give health and dental benefits to council members for the first time. Yesterday, City Manager Ed Kitchen wrote a follow-up memo (.pdf) proposing that council members who already have insurance from other sources be allowed to take the cash value of the coverage as a "supplement" to their regular pay.
The proposal will have to be approved by the council, and a vote is scheduled for Jan. 18.
There's also bonus material in that memo for those particularly interested in changes to the city's comprehensive land-use plan.
UPDATE: Here's a look (Excel spreadsheet) at what other North Carolina cities pay their elected officials, courtesy of Greensboro's Human Resources Department.

My colleague, business reporter Nate DeGraff, brought to my attention that the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce is boasting on their web site that Dell Computer picked their city for its new plant because...wait for it...they have "Really Smart People."

Go to www.winstonsalem.com and you'll be directed to a page on a site called reallysmartpeople.org. There you can watch a video about entrepreneurs in Winston-Salem that presumably have academic abilities commensurate with the name of the web site. It poses the question, "Why did Dell choose Winston-Salem? Really Smart People."

Now Inside Scoop is not suggesting that people in Winston-Salem aren't smart -- several of the people featured in the video were wearing white lab coats. But the page does come awfully close to suggesting that Greensboro, High Point and Guilford County lost out on the deal because we're not as smart.

That's unpossible.

To set the record straight, Inside Scoop consulted the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the two counties:

Sunday's paper edition of the News & Record will carry an article about eight elected officials who owe outstanding property taxes either personally and/or through their businesses. (It'll be in the B section if everything stays as it is now.) For those who don't remember, 2004 property tax bills were issued in July and payments were due to the Guilford County Tax Department by Jan. 5, 2005.

We typically do a story like this every spring, although we were prompted this time by a tip e-mailed to at least three of us at the paper regarding two of the officials in question. The information was interesting to us for couple reasons:

We may not know what the Guilford County commissioners are going to do on their retreat in Chapel Hill at the end of the month, but we do know one thing they shouldn't be doing:

Voting.

A memo by County Attorney Jonathan Maxwell tells commissioners that the board "shall not vote upon or otherwise transact public business while in attendance at such a gathering."

The section of the law Maxwell cites is 153A-40(c), the full version of which you'll find after the jump.

(By the way, prior posts on this topic can be found here and here.)

For those who missed the dead tree version, here's today's dead tree version of Inside Scoop:

Wells has no plans for City Council run

Neighborhood activist Goldie Wells says she has no plans to run for the seat held by Greensboro City Council member Claudette Burroughs-White.

Wells, a retired teacher and the chairwoman of the neighborhood group Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro, said she's been approached by several people about running but hasn't agreed to run.

"At this point, no," Wells said. "I'm not thinking about it."

Burroughs-White said on Jan. 6 that she hadn't made a decision on whether to seek a sixth term. She said then that she would gladly step aside if she could convince Wells to run for the seat.

More after the jump...

It's often mentioned, usually in letters to the editor, that Greensboro's property tax rate is "among the highest in the state."

Is this the case?

The answer is that it depends on your definition of "among." The city's rate of $.5675 per $100 assessed value plus the county's $.6184 means that a property owner shells out 1.1859 percent of the value of their home every year in taxes.
As far as large cities go, Greensboro is just about in the middle of the pack. The city-imposed tax is higher than average, but the lower than average county tax evens it out. Here's the total tax rate (city plus county) for large N.C. cities:

North Carolina's election impasse over the Commissioner of Agriculture race has apparently garnered noticed in the City that Never Sleeps.

Click here to read the New York Times opining on lessons learned from what it calls "the agriculture commissioner race fiasco." (A mildly annoying login process may be required to see the editorial.)

Sometimes, political animosity or anxiety over one issue can spill over into other issues. Case in point, this memo from County Commissioner Billy Yow.

Those who aren't loyal Scoop readers (and the 11 of you who are) may need a little background:

The city and county have been at odds over whether to allow billboards along the Greensboro Urban Loop, a new highway being built around the city. The city leaders don't want them, but the county commissioners who have jurisdiction over more than half the territory have been more permissive.

To try to persuade land owners to eschew billboards, City Council members proposed a policy to withhold water from landowners outside the city limits with billboards on their property. The proposal failed narrowly and there has been talk of resurrecting it.

In a seemingly unconnected story, Commissioner Melvin "Skip" Alston proposed a merger between the city's fire department and the multiple rural fire departments that serve people outside the city limits.

Which brings us back to Yow's memo, which objects to the merger idea and cites worries over the billboard proposal. In particular, Yow worries out loud that council members Robbie Perkins and the blogging Tom Phillips "could possibly threaten county property owners by withholding fire service if these property owners have outdoor advertising..."

Of course, Yow says he won't be there in person at commissioners' retreat at the end of the month where this issue might be discussed. But that's another story or two.

As Austin Powers once said, "Allow myself to introduce ... myself."
I'm Eric Swensen, the new High Point city government reporter. I'm replacing the very talented Sue Schultz, who's sliding over to cover the furniture industry, business and downtown High Point.
I've been in the High Point office for about two years, covering everything from arts and entertainment to nonprofits and downtown while doing a whole bunch of general assignment work.
I've been a frequent reader of this and the other blogs on the site, and I'm looking forward to joining the conversation. If you have comments for me, my e-mail address will hopefully be on the side of this page shortly. If not, it's right here. I'm especially interested in hearing from any bloggers out there who focus on High Point issues.
Other than saying a quick hello, I also wanted to expand on an item tucked away at the end of my story on Tuesday's City Council meeting (and if you didn't read all the way to the end, I'm very disappointed in you).
More to follow after the jump...

Thursday night, after arguing for hours about several other things, the Guilford County Commissioners argued about where their next opportunity to argue would be held.

As we wrote (here and here and here), Commissioner Bruce Davis wants to have the commissioners' annual retreat outside of the county.

But a memo by County Attorney Jonathan Maxwell quotes state law that say the board "shall not vote upon or otherwise transact public business while in attendance at such a gathering," outside the county limits.

At the commissioners' regular meeting Thursday, Republican Billy Yow said he would not go because without the ability to take votes, the retreat is "going to be a touchy feely thing."

Chairman Bruce Davis responded, "at least you won't be there for us to touch and feel on you."

Other Republicans chimed in, saying they don't know how the commissioners can get anything useful done if they aren't allowed to "transact public business."

Commissioner Trudy Wade said she'd "never been to a retreat with this board where we didn't take any votes."

Democratic Vice-Chairman Paul Gibson voiced support for the out-of-county trip saying there's plenty of consensus building that can happen without taking votes.

In the end, the five Republicans on the board voted against setting the meeting but were overruled by the six Democrats. At least there was consensus within each of the two parties.

On the up side, the School of Government, will not charge the county to rent space for the retreat Rental costs had previously been estimated to be about $500.

On Tuesday, we may get the first outlines of a citywide bond referendum in 2006 to pay for big construction projects. You may remember the last round of voter-approved borrowing in 2000, which brought you the East Market Street redevelopment, new fire and police stations and libraries and road improvements.

It's unclear how big 2006's referendum could be, but City Manager Ed Kitchen laid out some possible items:

You may (but probably don't) remember a short story I wrote about a redevelopment plan for High Point's Southside neighborhood, which is just south of downtown and bounded by these four streets: Taylor Avenue, South Main Street, West Green Drive and West Ward Avenue.

The city paid a consultant about $49,000 from a community development block grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to work with residents to develop the plan. Its highlights include turning the Main Street-Elm Street-Hamilton Street into a mixed-used development featuring office, retail and residential developments while rebuilding Main Street to make it a tree-lined street with a median. Other notable elements include lots of new housing, building a greenway along a creek that runs through the community and rezoning industrial land for residential use.

Want to see precisely what the taxpayers' money paid for? You can check out the full report right here.

The city's next step is to use about $190,000 it has set aside from the same HUD block grant to begin purchasing property in the neighborhood for new housing, said Michael McNair, the city's director of community development and housing. Developers would then be brought in to build and sell the new houses.

Depending on how quickly land can be purchased, McNair said, there could be activity as soon as this summer.But the revitalization won't be quick, he said.

"We're going to be in Southside for a while," McNair said. "(It'll take) 10 to 20 years to pull it off."

The area around High Point's downtown could change radically in the coming years. Along with the city's plans for Southside, there's the ongoing rebuilding of the Macedonia community - which has produced a community center, new houses and a ballfield - GTCC's plans to expand its High Point campus and the High Point Housing Authority's proposal to rebuild the Clara Cox public housing community.

(This post was updated at 4:05 to clarify where the money is coming for the Southside improvements)

Whether it's for your current neighborhood or for one you're interested in buying a house in, Scoop's got one more way to find out what's really going on.

Already, John Q. Public can go online to find out the tax values and sale prices for their neighbors homes. But let's say you're buying a house on the 200 block of S. Mendenhall St. and you want to make sure your future neighbors don't leave junk cars in the yard or let their houses deteriorate.

All you have to do is go to the City of Greensboro's online Code Enforcement database and type in the name of the street and the first numeral of the street address.

For Mendenhall, you'll find that in August of last year, 211 S. Mendenhall had a problem with trash piling up in the yard. City inspectors ordered it cleaned up and it was completed a week later. The next month, the same property was inspected and ordered vacated for numerous building code violations. As of Dec. 28, the property has not been repaired.

Whether you still want to buy a house on that block is your call, but at least you'll know. The service also comes in handy for apartment renters, who can look up what problems have been found by inspectors in their building. And if there's a condemned house in your neighborhood, you can check up to see whether the owner is making any progress to fix it up.

Try it out on your street and see if anything catches you by surprise.

Commissioners Chairman Bruce Davis during a meeting Thursday night: "There was nothing shaky about how this happened," Davis said. "I know that these things were handled properly."

Commissioners Chairman Bruce Davis in a memo he signed Monday: Click here (PDF).

More to come in in Wednesday's paper.

Update: Here's the story.

Whatever happened to all those great things we were promised in 2000? Remember that $137 million in borrowing Greensboro voters approved for road projects, libraries, police, fire, and neighborhood redevelopment?

Well Scoop's got your update, with a list of all the projects promised and how much has been spent so far. Two new libraries: Check. Carolyn Allen Park: Check. Greensboro Sportsplex: Check. Zoo at the Natural Science Center: Ehh, not so much.

I've also got detailed information on individual projects mentioned on the list, but it's too long to post all of it at once. If anybody wants to know more about a specific project, let me know in the comments below and I'll put it out there.

For those struggling with the decision of whether to truck down to Chapel Hill to watch the Guilford County commissioners retreating, here's some help.

Click here for Saturday's tentative agenda.

Although it's a pretty spare outline, there's at least one intriguing item on the agenda: a talk on Amendment One by Mac Williams, president of the N.C. Economic Developers Association. N.C. voters passed the constitutional amendment on Nov. 2, although it was far from a slam dunk.

The change would - among other things - allow cities and counties to issue bonds for certain types of economic development projects without getting taxpayer approval.

No municipality in the state has put the new authority to the test yet.

According to Scoop's scorecard, six of the eight public officials we wrote about two weeks ago who owed property taxes are now paid up.

The latest are County Commissioner Bruce Davis, who owed through his Kid Appeal Learning Center daycare in High Point, and Yvonne Johnson, who owed on a private residence. Commissioners Kay Cashion, Mike Winstead, Steve Arnold and Skip Alston paid last week.

That leaves only School Board member Deena Hayes ($690.93) and City Council member T. Dianne Bellamy-Small ($1,432.19), who owe on single family homes.

Our pior entry on this topic is here.

Remember this?

A group of Greensboro businessmen led by Bill Black and Don Brady have yet to make a $200,000 payment to the city it promised as a part of the city's management of the team.
The Generals Brigade, a limited-liability corporation, was formed a year ago by Brady and Black to lease the Generals' franchise rights from the team's original owner, Greensboro attorney Art Donaldson. The company then turned the team over to the Greensboro Coliseum and agreed in a contract to pay the city $200,000 to help cover the team's expenses.
The city-owned coliseum operated the team, paying all the team's bills and collecting ticket and advertising revenue.
The city lost $259,000 operating the team partly because the Generals Brigade never followed through on the payment.

We here at Scoop are strapping on our hiking boots and making sure the Scoopmobile has plenty of wiper fluid. Saturday's Guilford County commissioners retreat in Chapel Hill is still on as of 1:45 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Of course, not all the commissioners seem happy about the prospect of driving to or from Chapel Hill in the predicted inclement weather. (Saturday's forecast: "Mostly cloudy with a mixture of light wintry precipitation later in the day. Cold. High 34F. Winds light and variable.")

But Chairman Bruce Davis says the weather is nothing to worry about.

For those not up on why the commissioners are going on a road trip, see previous posts:

Remember the state Agriculture Commissioner race? You know, the one where there's no decision yet because of a bum-fuzzled voting machine and two unsuccessful attempts by the N.C. Board of Elections to settle things?

Well, depending on how things shake out, that race could be heading back to court even before the state board has a chance to meet again.

Click below for the details.

The commissioners wrapped up their retreat at about 1:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon.

Seven of the 11 commissioners showed up: all six Democrats and Republican Mike Winstead. There were about 20 Guilford County staff members on hand along with a handful of others, including Greensboro Fire Chief Johnny Teeters and Andy Burke and Dan Lynch from the Forward Greensboro Economic Development Partnership.

Retreats are a chance to float big ideas. Those ideas tend to generate a lot of questions.

But by far, the question of the day might be this: Would you be willing to pay an extra five-cents on your property tax rate every year for the next 20 years to help Guilford County build a capital project's trust fund?

(Update: To be clear, this would be an added 5-cents in the property tax rate. So, for the owner of a $100,000 house, that would mean an extra $50 a year in taxes.)

Democrat Paul Gibson hopes so and pitched that idea at the end of Saturday's session. The plan, he said, would create a $1 billion endowment that Guilford County could then use to pay for capital projects. Of course, for 20 years, the county would just be socking away money.

More to come in tomorrow's paper for sure and possibly here today, time and weather permitting.

Update (4:50 p.m.): Paul Gibson faxed me six pages on his proposal, which I'm giving to you as three PDF files: