Have at John Hammer’s write-up of the latest Greensboro City Council debate over the possible reopening of the White Street landfill. I did not watch the discussion, but it seems to me like the council spent a lot of time figuring out if so-called ‘option B’ should go before ‘option A,’ never mind options ‘C’ and ‘D.’
An interesting sidebar is former Mayor Yvonne Johnson reinserting herself into the landfill debate, addressing the five council members who would vote to reopen the landfill.
But Hammer says the votes shouldn’t be counted yet:
The five votes Johnson writes about have to be Knight and Councilmembers Matheny, Wade, Thompson and Mary Rakestraw. This is the conservative bloc that was elected last November and was expected to bring about big changes in city government. Reopening the landfill would certainly fall into that category. If that group could get together, changes could be made in city government, but there has been so much infighting that it is difficult to say that the group agrees on much of anything.
This is why Greensboro city politics still have such a long way to go. Note also that interim City Attorney Becky Jo Peterson-Buie had problems with a substitute motion during the landfill debate, just as she had problems with a substitute motion during debate over the downtown design guidelines.
Hammer has more on the situation, quoting council members who descfribed Peterson-Buie’s previous tenure as interim city attorney as a ‘train wreck.’
