At tonight’s meeting, the Greensboro City Council will discuss funding for Downtown Greensboro Inc., which lately has been quite busy passing out the consultants’ reports.
Surely the reports will come up during tonight’s discussion, considering the fact the council (once again) was the last to know that they’d paid for the HRA report that recommended spending $14 million to create a Church Street ‘cultural mecca.’
Hopefully there will be council members who recognize that when Downtown Greensboro says they’re paying for something, taxpayers are actually footing the bill:
City Councilmember Trudy Wade asked how much the report had cost and who paid for it. City Manager Mitch Johnson replied that it cost $125,000 and that the City of Greensboro and Downtown Greensboro Inc. (DGI) paid for it, but he didn’t know how it was divided. Ed Wolverton, the president of DGI, spoke up saying that Greensboro paid $75,000 and DGI paid $50,000. Since Greensboro funds DGI, what that really means is that the taxpayers of Greensboro paid $75,000 out of one pocket and $50,000 out of the other.
