Both City Councilmember Robbie Perkins and former City Councilmember Tom Phillips want to take the City Council back where it was when the decisions were made in the backroom off camera, and the council meetings were calm sedate affairs with everyone politely agreeing.
We are endorsing Mayor Bill Knight because he wants to continue to have the council make its decisions and fight its battles out in public in front of the cameras and because of what he has done as mayor – keeping the tax rate and water rates flat for two years and finding ways to cut spending.
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Knight has had some real difficulties as mayor. Anyone who has read The Rhinoceros Times for the past two years knows that I have not thought he was the ideal mayor. But so many of Knight’s problems that I have written about are maddening because they are matters of form, not function. Knight hunches over behind a wooden computer monitor cover so that often people in the audience can only see his eyes or the top of his head. He isn’t good at directing the council discussion – but he has gotten much better at it. He gets flustered by speakers from the podium and creates problems for himself by not being more considerate of them and less concerned about ending the meeting according to his own predetermined schedule.
But Knight’s two biggest problems in running the meetings are Councilmembers Dianne Bellamy-Small and Perkins. One thing is certain, Perkins will not be sitting over on the left thinking of clever ways to disrupt meetings next term because either he will be in the mayor’s seat or gone.
Bellamy-Small is disruptive. Former Mayor Keith Holliday could not handle her, and neither could former Mayor Yvonne Johnson. Knight can’t handle her either, which is no surprise. She sets out to disrupt the meetings and she does. The only way to solve that problem is at the polls, and hopefully the people in District 1 will want to be well represented on the council and vote for DJ Hardy in November.
Although the way the meetings have been run is annoying, it is also relatively minor compared to what Knight has done on the council. Knight has led the conservative effort to keep the tax rate flat, and the rate was actually slightly lowered in his first budget. He has also been a part of reducing water rates so that they are now also flat. Rates were raised temporarily, but when the water department got a $16 million court settlement Knight was one of the councilmembers who voted to lower the rates for the citizens of Greensboro back to where they had been.
The bond rating for the water and sewer fund has improved during Knight’s term, and the Greensboro water and sewer fund now has a higher rating than the United States.
Perkins is adamant that the water and sewer rates be raised even though the city’s bond rating has improved
Under Perkins the meetings would certainly be more sedate because Perkins wouldn’t be quietly lobbing hand grenades from the left side of the dais. It would also be because Perkins is in favor of small group meetings, where three or four councilmembers get together with the city manager, an assistant city manager and/or a department head and work out what is going to happen. The city staff members operate as conduits for information, telling one group of councilmembers what the councilmembers in the previous meetings liked or didn’t like. In this way the council can hold a meeting without breaking the letter of the Open Meetings Law. But meetings like that stomp all over the spirit of the law because issues are not discussed in public.
It is the way business was done under City Managers Ed Kitchen and Mitch Johnson. It is why the City Council could come out with a long agenda, vote 9 to 0 on everything and go home without much discussion on anything. All the meaningful discussion took place in the backroom behind closed doors. The public only got to see smiling faces, hear meaningless patter about recent events and the vote.
Often the vote wasn’t the real vote because councilmembers would be encouraged to show unanimity on major issues. So the councilmembers on the losing side of an issue would be talked into going along to make it look better.
Perkins has moaned and complained about the lack of small group meetings ever since they were abolished, and they weren’t actually abolished. Small group meetings are still allowed as long as they are open to the public, but that defeats the whole purpose of the small group meeting, which is to fight in private and vote together in public.
Phillips said that he is not necessarily in favor of small group meetings, but it doesn’t matter what they call them, his idea is to get all the decisions made before the council gets on camera. It is the way business was done when Phillips was on the council.
Take a look at the new amphitheater at the Greensboro Coliseum. Deputy City Manager Bob Morgan, who was then acting city manager, did not think that the council needed to be in on the discussion about the city building an amphitheater at the Coliseum. Whether or not you think an amphitheater is a good idea, it seems the City Council is the one that should decide whether or not there is going to be an entirely new facility that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Knight was one of the councilmembers who thought the council needed to be told, while Perkins was OK with Coliseum Manager Matt Brown and Morgan telling the council after the fact.
It boils down to a question of whether or not you want the city run by the city manager, with the council informed afterwards of what has happened, or if you want the elected officials to take part in major decisions on how the city will be run. The old way is for the city manager to do what he wants and inform councilmembers privately what he has done or is doing.
One reason Knight’s tenure has been so rocky is because the City Council is attempting to make decisions on running the city, not just seconding whatever the staff presents, and they are making those decisions on television at public meetings.
Perkins said that water rates need to be raised, and the city staff wants water rates higher because it gives them a huge slush fund to do whatever they want. What other department could add a $40 million construction project one year without borrowing money, selling bonds or raising rates? The water department did that when it unexpectedly had to replace the Lake Townsend Dam. It’s much easier on staff to just write a check for any outrageous expense, but Knight and the conservative majority on the City Council apparently don’t believe that making life easier for the staff is a good reason for the citizens of Greensboro to pay more for their water and sewer service.
One of the big things that got Phillips off the couch and down to file to run is that he doesn’t like the way Knight conducts the meetings, and Phillips is right. Knight is awkward. Sometimes Knight reminds me of watching a person play tennis who learned to play in their 50s. They can practice all they want but they are never going to move with the grace and purpose of someone who was out on the court when the racket looked bigger than they were.
But Phillips also thinks that Johnson was a good honest manager and had every right to fire former Police Chief David Wray. Of course, Johnson didn’t fire Wray, he locked Wray out of his office while he was still the police chief, forced him to resign and refused to pay him what he was due by law, and Phillips said he still thinks Johnson was a good manager.
All during the police debacle the mantra of the City Council was, if you knew what we know you would agree with us. I asked Phillips repeatedly what it was that he knew that we didn’t know.
Anyone who read most of the Cops in Black & White series by Jerry Bledsoe knows far more than the council was ever told, and I know now that Phillips really couldn’t answer the question.
Phillips, as one would expect, said that was history and not relevant. But in fact it couldn’t be more relevant. The City Council now has two employees – the city manager and the city attorney. Phillips was one of the ones who hired Johnson, and he still thinks that Johnson was a good manager. So he’s going to be looking for someone like that if our current manager leaves. Or he might want the current manager to act more like Johnson.
It was amazing what Johnson did to public records requests when he was manager. Just getting some memos or emails was an ordeal that took weeks. Once the Johnson administration told the News & Record an email it had requested didn’t exist. But it turned out The Rhino Times had not one but two emails that fit the description, and we kindly shared them with the News & Record and our readers on the front page.
Both Perkins and Phillips seem to want to go back to the days when the only way to get public information out of city hall was to pry it loose with threats of lawsuits. If the media was treated that poorly, imagine how the general public was treated. It was worse.
The same goes for the city attorney. Phillips said that he thought Linda Miles was a good city attorney. The new council will be hiring a new attorney. Hiring someone like Miles, who had meetings in her office that were so secret she instructed people to enter the building through different entrances, would be a huge step backward.
We caught Miles telling a bold faced lie to the City Council at a televised public meeting – a lie that resulted in the City Council holding an illegal closed meeting – and according to Phillips she was a good city attorney.
Perkins was not on the council from 2005 to 2007, but he was a big supporter of Johnson when he was there.
Both Perkins and Phillips voted to close the landfill to Greensboro’s garbage. The actual vote was to not expand the landfill, which provided some cover for the actual intent of the council. And both want to keep it closed.
Knight voted to take steps to save about $8 million a year by using the landfill for disposing of Greensboro’s garbage. Although in the end the votes were not there to start using the landfill for Greensboro’s garbage, the actual result of the two year long process is that Greensboro can now save over $3 million a year and continue sending its garbage to the landfill in Montgomery County. Republic Waste, which operates the Uwharrie landfill where Greensboro ships its garbage, came up with ways for the city to save over $3 million a year and continue to use the Uwharrie landfill. Republic didn’t offer these cost savings before Greensboro started looking at other alternatives such as using White Street Landfill for Greensboro’s garbage again.
Bradford Cone and Chris Phillips, no relation to Tom Phillips, both also filed to run for mayor. Cone said that he had spent $20 on his campaign, in addition to his filing fee, and that he hoped those who saw him at the forums would spread the word about him.
It doesn’t seem likely. Other than being opposed to using the landfill, mainly because of health concerns, one of his ideas is to make Greensboro a sanctuary city, where immigration status is not checked for people that commit minor crimes. He said this would encourage illegal aliens to call 911 if they needed help.
Cone has no political experience and doesn’t have a job, other than as a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT) in Cary. He is a certified EMT but said that he could not find any work closer to home and hoped that the job in Cary would turn into a paying job.
He struggled at forums with what many would consider routine questions and seemed to actually know little about local government. Cone, who is a Democrat, said that he didn’t like the fact that there were four Republicans running for mayor and that is one reason he got in the race, which is nonpartisan.
Chris Phillips is also running a citywide campaign for mayor with virtually no money and little evidence of support. He has been associated with the Conservatives for Guilford County, but speaking with other members of the local Tea Party group didn’t reveal any insight into why Phillips, who is a black conservative Republican, would choose to run against a sitting conservative Republican for mayor.
He has published a book, Takeover: Liberalism in America and is a graduate of UNCG and works at H.H. Gregg.
In the mayor’s race in a city of 260,000 you have to expect that it is going to take more than just paying your filing fee to get elected, but both Cone and Chris Phillips seem to think that the stars may line up and they might win.
At-large
Fourteen candidates running at large seem like too many to handle, but you can narrow the field down pretty quickly.
With 14 people running, any candidate who has not raised at least enough money to do more than put a sign in their yard is not really in the race, and in the case of the at-large candidates that eliminates a bunch of folks who filed evidently because they want to go to candidates’ forums.
Chris Lawyer who gets our endorsement is not one of those. Although he is young and doesn’t have big piles of money, he has raised some and appears to be doing a good job of spending it wisely.
Lawyer is conservative and is a health care professional, both of which separate him from most of the field. Lawyer is a physician assistant who works in the emergency room for Cone Health. He said working in the emergency room he saw people from all income brackets and all walks of life, and usually saw them when they were at a low point, so he has learned a lot about the community from a unique perspective.
Lawyer said he was used to making tough decisions and being honest with people, even when he knew that they didn’t want to hear what he had to tell them.
Politically Lawyer said, “we’ve got to have good, effective leaders or we are going to continue down this path we can’t afford to go down.”
Lawyer said he was in favor of opening the landfill temporarily to save money and then going to some regional solution. He noted that the landfill opponents thought it was horrible to reopen a landfill in Greensboro but didn’t seem to have any problem with reopening a landfill in Asheboro.
Lawyer said that it is irresponsible for local government to go about business as usual. He said government had to be run more efficiently and that “if there is a program that is not working and costing the city a lot of money, cut it.”
Our second choice in the at-large race is Jean Brown, who is a breath of fresh air at the candidates’ forums. She has a wonderful attitude and gets up, says what she thinks and apologizes if anyone disagrees. Sometimes she apologizes first and then says what she has to say.
Many candidates get involved because of a single issue, often it involves a rezoning request or a street issue in their neighborhood. Brown spoke at a council meeting for the first time against raising water rates. She said she told the City Council, “If you do raise them then I’m going to run and I hope I get one of your jobs.”
The council raised water rates anyway. Later they lowered them back to where they had been, but Brown said she had told them she would run if they raised the rates, and they raised them, so she is running.
Brown has a lot of ideas about how the city can be run more efficiently, and some of them are such good ideas the city is already doing them. But she is against raising taxes and very much against raising water rates. She believes the city needs to live within its means like everyone else.
Brown said she hadn’t made up her mind completely on the White Street Landfill, but “that to me that is a ridiculous thing losing millions of dollars by not using the White Street Landfill.”
She also said that city regulations were getting out of hand, and “People can come to your house but they can’t park on your grass.” She said it was the homeowner’s grass so she thought the homeowner, not the city, should decide who parks on it.
Brown is conservative and not afraid to say what she thinks. She would be a good addition to the City Council.
Even optimists are predicting less than a 10 percent turnout in the Greensboro City Council primary. In 2009, the turnout was 6 percent, but there was no primary in the mayor’s race. This year with five candidates running in the mayoral primary the turnout should be higher, but not much.
Endorsing in the at-large City Council race is always tricky because of the format. In the primary, voters can vote for three candidates and the six candidates with the most votes win. In the general election voters can vote for three and the candidates with the top three vote totals win.
There is usually quite a bit of movement in where candidates finish between the primary and the general election, and it is not uncommon for The Rhino Times to endorse different candidates in the primary and the general election.
You can vote for three, but you don’t have to. And we recommend that you vote for Lawyer and Brown. This will not be throwing away a vote, but rather will strengthen Lawyer’s and Brown’s chances of making it into the general election.
We try to endorse the best and most conservative candidates in each race and I think we are doing so in the at-large City Council race. However, City Councilmember Danny Thompson, who we endorsed two years ago, is not on the list of our endorsements.
There are certain attributes that rise above politics, and honesty is one of those. Thompson has already told three different stories about his campaign finance reports this year.
As an incumbent city councilmember, he filed a document stating that he did not intend to raise or spend more than $1,000 in this year’s race, but originally he also said that when he filed he intended to win. Thompson knows that he couldn’t run and win a race for an at-large City Council seat without spending more than $1,000. He also said that he filed the report saying that he didn’t “intend” to raise or spend more than $1,000 because he didn’t want the other candidates to know what he was doing.
Thompson avoided the 35-day report due on Sept. 6, but it appears that he did so improperly. He was out filming television commercials before that; he just didn’t pay for them. He finally filed a pre-primary report due on Oct. 4, and it appears to tell yet another story about his campaign finances.
The North Carolina Board of Elections has received a complaint about Thompson’s campaign finance reporting. Maybe by the general election all the mystery will be cleared up and we can judge Thompson on his performance as a councilmember, but from what we know now we cannot endorse Thompson.
Cyndy Hayworth is hard working and dedicated. She started attending City Council meetings four years ago when she ran for the District 3 seat and has been at most of the meetings since them. She was just elected chairman of the Zoning Commission and has served on that board for four years without missing a meeting. She is also well organized and has raised an impressive amount of money.
But Hayworth on the Zoning Commission has a history of voting against rezoning requests, even at times when there was no opposition and the planning staff had recommended in favor.
We have to hope that the economy is going to improve; if it is does then land will need to be rezoned to be developed. Hayworth is an impediment to that now because she is chairman of the Zoning Commission. It is fortunate that all the controversial rezoning requests go to the City Council, and the City Council can and often does overturn what the Zoning Commission has done. If Hayworth is elected to the City Council she will have more power to halt development.
When she starts talking about who she has consulted with about her campaign, it sounds like the who’s who of the Guilford County Democratic Party. Hayworth was an executive assistant to Mike Weaver for years, so she is well connected in those circles.
She said she sees the Greensboro Partnership as an organization that deserves more support from the city, while as a small business owner I wonder what the Partnership does that is worthwhile for the city other than support liberal candidates.
She said she didn’t think the White Street Landfill should have ever been closed, but for the City Council to reopen it Greensboro’s garbage would be going back on their word, so she is not in favor of using the White Street Landfill for the disposal of Greensboro’s garbage.
The Human Relations Commission appears to be a rogue commission. The members evidently think they, not the Council, should run the city. Running for an at-large seat on the Council from the Human Relations Commission are member Marikay Abuzuaiter and former member Wayne Abraham, and the commission’s chairman, Nancy Hoffman, is running for the District 4 seat.
Abuzuaiter is making her third run for City Council. She has made it to the general election twice and finished fourth both times. Abuzuaiter, who owns Mahi’s seafood restaurant, likes to note that she has businesses or lives in all five districts. She appears to have moved farther left after each election. She was an outspoken opponent of any consideration of using the landfill.
Abraham wants to put in place the Sustainability Action Plan, which the City Council found so far out there that it unanimously accepted it rather than approved or adopted it. The plan would cost the city millions of dollars and is supposed to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. If you think that former Vice President Al Gore is a genius and we need to do everything he says (not what he does) then you would probably like the way Abraham would vote on the council. He also spoke against using the landfill for Greensboro’s garbage and is generally to the left of the present City Council.
In the mayor’s race I wrote about going forward or backward it is the same for Yvonne Johnson. She was the first black elected as an at-large city councilmember, and became the first black mayor pro tem. In 2007 Johnson was elected Greensboro’s first black mayor.
Now Johnson is running for an at-large seat, and it appears largely to help get City Councilmember Robbie Perkins elected mayor. Johnson lost her reelection bid to Mayor Bill Knight in 2009. Now Johnson and Perkins have traded places: She is running for an at-large seat and Perkins is running for mayor.
Johnson has baggage. When she was on council she lobbied for the nonprofit she runs, One Step Further, to get funding, and she voted for city budgets that funded One Step Further.
When Johnson was mayor, for the first time in years the council didn’t have its yearly retreat where budget priorities are set.
Johnson voted to close the White Street Landfill, and voted to build the Taj Mahal of garbage transfer stations near the airport and ship our trash to Montgomery County.
One of the issues that kept being raised during the White Street Landfill discussion was that east Greensboro lacked infrastructure. Johnson was on the City Council for 16 years. If east Greensboro lacks infrastructure Johnson is as much to blame as anyone.
Nancy Vaughan is the mayor pro tem, meaning she finished first in the at-large race in 2009. She has been almost a no-show for the past year because she was recused from voting on the landfill issue from the very beginning. Vaughan was furious when, in April 2011, an assistant city attorney suggested that she was not participating in the landfill discussion because she didn’t want to. Vaughan had the city attorney write a strong memo saying that Vaughan had a direct conflict of interest and could face criminal charges if she participated in the landfill decision.
Of course, later, when Vaughan wanted to come back and participate, a new city attorney wrote another opinion that because conditions had changed she had no conflict of interest, despite the fact that her husband still represented one of the bidders on the operation of the landfill. At that point her vote blocked using the landfill.
Vaughan also had to be recused from two of the biggest rezoning cases of this term because her husband represented neighborhoods that opposed the rezoning requests.
In the redistricting map fiasco Vaughan agreed to vote for the map that was eventually presented by Councilmember Mary Rakestraw, but then acted shocked to find out what was in the map after she received calls complaining about it. She then made a motion to reconsider and the council passed a new map, but the first map never would have been presented if Vaughan had not initially agreed to vote for it.
Vaughan announced that she wasn’t going to run for reelection and then changed her mind and decided to run.
Vaughan has great name recognition and voters seem to like her, so she may end up at the top of the list again. She certainly doesn’t need our help in the primary.
Like most candidates, Sal Leone seems like he has good intentions. He is a former New York City police officer who is now a police officer in Thomasville, but he lives in Greensboro. He spoke at several council meetings against using the landfill. At one forum he took time out from trying to convince people to vote for him to say that we all needed to support President Barack Obama. So if you want a councilmember who is an employee of a different city and as part of his campaign speech urges support for Obama then Leone is your man.
Deborah Fae Brogden ran for City Council in 2000, and after she failed to win a seat on the City Council went to the home of a former boss and shot at him once with a pistol. When she was arrested she had two guns and a “pay back” list in her car. The top name on the payback list was not the person she shot at, but John Hammer. So I’m a little prejudiced on this one. Still I don’t think Brogden needs to be on the City Council.
Clarence Easter is a teacher’s assistant who said he doesn’t believe in cutting back any city spending. If something isn’t cut then taxes have to go up.
Hayden Jesserer filed to run for the City Council evidently shortly after moving to Greensboro because he moved here in 2011. It seems that a city councilmember should have lived in the city for longer than a few months when they serve, and if you haven’t been here long and haven’t raised much money, you should certainly attend all the candidate forums, but he has not.
Marlando Demonte Pridgen seems like a nice young man. One of his ideas is to have a town hall meeting every day of the week, which just doesn’t seem very practical.
Christopher McLaughlin appeared at the Greensboro City Council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 4, with his pastor and gave a campaign speech, something that is discouraged during speakers from the floor. But it was so quick he got away with it. He said he didn’t know much about how the City Council worked, but if elected he would learn. It seems he might have tried to learn something about the job he was running for before he filed to run.
District 2
The District 2 race is a no brainer. City Councilmember Jim Kee has done a great job of representing his constituents. He has also added some much needed humor to the City Council meetings.
Kee is reasonable and willing to discuss issues. He understands that discussing issues doesn’t mean that you are going to vote with someone, but in the discussion you may find some common ground.
Kee got in trouble with some of his constituents for not being against using the White Street Landfill enough. He was against it, and voted against it every time. But Kee was willing to sit down with those who wanted to start using the landfill again and discuss the matter.
Kee is the kind of councilmember Greensboro needs if we are ever going to resolve some of the long-standing issues that keep the city divided.
Kee is being challenged by C. Bradley Hunt II, who is a student at North Carolina A&T State University and was one of the members of the Spirit of the Sit-in Movement who was arrested after they took over the dais during a break at the City Council meeting on May 10, 2010. The City Council doesn’t need members who see getting arrested as the answer to problems. It needs people who work toward solutions. Does anyone even remember what they were protesting or why they were arrested? They were protesting a “subculture of corruption” in the Greensboro Police Department. At that time the Greensboro Police Department was run by Chief Tim Bellamy, who is black. They were arrested not for taking over the dais but for refusing to leave the building.
Electing Hunt would be like giving Rev. Nelson Johnson a seat on the City Council.
The other candidate challenging Kee is Dan Fischer, who is a retired Navy corpsman – what the Navy calls a medic. Fischer, when given a few minutes to speak, will talk about the need to pay federal taxes. The Greensboro City Council has a multitude of problems, but paying federal taxes is not on its plate. Fischer ran two years ago and must have had a good time because he is running again, and as a white man in a majority-minority district campaigning on the need for people to pay their federal taxes, he really doesn’t have much of a chance.
District 4
Some races don’t have enough well-qualified candidates, and some have too many. District 4 is blessed with two quality candidates who both want to represent the district on the City Council.
I wish Tony Collins were running in the at-large race because then I would be endorsing him, but he is running in District 4 against Councilmember Mary Rakestraw, who is one of the most effective members of the council and is a crucial link in keeping the council trending right.
It may be ancient history to some, but back when the city was torn apart by losing the whole command staff of the Police Department except for Tim Bellamy, who was made chief, Rakestraw was the only member of the City Council that attended the entire trial of Police Officer Scott Sanders.
The word from then City Manager Mitch Johnson had been that much of the command staff might be tried and convicted of serious felonies. However, after the investigation by the city, an outside detective agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as an investigation of 16 months by the State Bureau of Investigation, all of those supposed serious crimes came down to charges against a police detective for illegally accessing a government computer and obstruction of justice. Rakestraw went to the trial to find out for herself what the truth was after all the rumors and lies the council had heard.
After Sanders was found not guilty and the remainder of the charges were dropped, Rakestraw called for Johnson’s resignation, and 11 days later he was fired as city manager. A year earlier Rakestraw had made a motion to fire Johnson but the votes to pass the motion fell apart at the last minute. So the city endured another year of turmoil.
A lot of people talk about the story of the redistricting map that Rakestraw found on her porch. Much of what has been written about it is not true, or is such a selective truth as to be misleading. The redistricting map had been through countless renditions before one was devised that could garner five votes. Before this map was ever presented to the City Council, I, and those who follow the City Council closely, knew a map was going to be introduced at the meeting and that Mayor Bill Knight and Councilmembers Rakestraw, Trudy Wade, Nancy Vaughan and Danny Thompson had all agreed to vote for it. There wasn’t a lot of discussion at the meeting because there had been so much discussion beforehand in formulating a map that could pass. Both Councilmember Jim Kee and former State Rep. Earl Jones also had input into the final map.
The map did pass, but then Vaughan decided she didn’t like it and made a motion to reconsider and a new map was passed, which Rakestraw also voted for. The idea that Rakestraw found a map on her front porch, took it to a council meeting and four other councilmembers voted for it without anybody knowing where it came from is ludicrous, but that is the story that is out there and it won’t go away. What people should be asking is why did Vaughan, Wade, Thompson and Knight vote for the front porch map if they knew nothing about it.
Rakestraw knows how to get things done at city hall, which sounds like it would be a given for a city councilmember, but it is not. There are only a few members of council who have spent the time and learned how the city government actually works, and Rakestraw is one of them. Calling the city manager is often not the solution and Rakestraw knows who to call, and just as importantly they know her.
Collins would be a good city councilmember, but if Rakestraw is defeated she will be sorely missed by her constituents as well as the conservative majority on the council.
Collins grew up in Greensboro and is a partner in the commercial construction company Collins & Galyon. His partner is Jim Galyon, the son of Doug Galyon, who was the chairman of the North Carolina Board of Transportation from 2001 to 2010, so Collins has some political connections.
Collins was active in the Greensboro Jaycees back when they ruled the land, and was chairman of the Greater Greensboro Open (GGO) in 1992. Running a Professional Golf Association tournament with a bunch of volunteers is an amazing feat, and Greensboro is fortunate to have so many who have actually done it and survived.
Collins served as chairman of the Zoning Commission back before 2008, when it wasn’t unusual to have eight or 10 rezoning requests on the agenda. As Collins said, serving on the Zoning Commission is about as close as you can get to being on the City Council in city government. He noted that when he was chairman he expected the staff and the attorneys to strictly follow the procedure, but residents, who were before the board for the first and perhaps only time, he allowed more leeway. It’s advice the present City Council could use.
I think Collins would be a good, thoughtful city councilmember. Although I would be surprised if Collins became a Perkinette, I think his tendency would be to vote with Perkins more often than against him.
Nancy Hoffman – who when answering questions refers to herself in the third person, saying “Nancy Hoffman will …” – is the current chairman of the Human Relations Commission, which has spawned three candidates in the City Council race.
Hoffman didn’t see a big problem with the chairman of the Human Relations Commission getting up and reading a report from the commission to the City Council during speakers from the floor. The time limit on speakers from the floor is three minutes; reading the report took 12 minutes and the chairman didn’t ask permission, but just refused to stop reading. It was highly inappropriate but the Human Relations Commission seems to think it has special powers. Its members are, in fact, all appointed by the City Council.
Hoffman is quick to tell you just how experienced and successful she is. It is the beginning of the answer to many questions.
She objected to talking about it, but eventually admitted that she had been chairman of her homeowners’ association board when the board decided to fine a homeowner for keeping his garage door open when he did woodworking in his garage. The homeowner eventually took the association to court and won a settlement. Hoffman was then removed by the homeowners from the homeowners’ association board. When asked if she was impeached Hoffman said she didn’t think that was the proper term, but she was removed from the board by a vote of the homeowners before her term expired.
According to the homeowner who sued, there was nothing in the rules and regulations of the homeowners’ association that said he couldn’t open his garage door whenever he wanted. He said he noticed other homeowners opened their garage doors when it suited them and were not fined. He said that is why he refused to pay the fines and eventually sued and won.
I think it is a very telling incident, and the first time I heard the story I thought it must be highly exaggerated, but it was not.
It fits with some of the other things Hoffman has said, which include in answering one survey that the most important role of city government was land use planning. She said she didn’t remember saying that, but when asked said that planning, along with strategies for the future and all of that were the most important function of the City Council.
Many people would put public safety at the top of the list of most important functions of city government, while some would say water and sewer and streets. But land use planning – or in other words telling other people what they can do with their own property – is at the top of Hoffman’s list. It doesn’t seem that far from telling people when they can keep their garage doors open.
