…This time in Winston-Salem—the Journal’s Scott Sexton has the details:
Every few months, I ring D. Ritchie Brooks over in the city’s community and business development department and ask the same questions: What’s the deal with Malone’s? Is that place ever going to open up?
Malone’s, in case its slipped your mind, is the family-style restaurant on Liberty Street into which the city has sunk close to $500,000 in forgivable and low-interest loans since 2010.
It has yet to serve a meal, and it’s been a debacle since the day it was proposed. Members of the City Council know it, city staff members who’ve had to deal with it know it and Brooks surely does, too.
Crazy thing is funding for projects like Malone’s Family Restaurant came from the $15.5 million in incentives Dell returned after it closed its computer plant in 2010. Surprise—the system worked, but that wasn’t good enough for the City Council—always eager, as Sexton puts it, to “throw good money after bad.”
There is one council member—-Robert Clark—the W-S version of Greensboro City Council member Tony Wilkins—who says he’ “very frustrated” by the appearance that the city has been “defrauded by somebody who misrepresented having the financial wherewithal to finish the project.”
Welcome to Gboro’s world, our neighbors down Interstate 40.
