In his write-up of last week’s Greensboro City Council election, the Rhino’s John Hammer said “Wowdy wow, you don’t have elections like this one every day, or year, or even decade.”
Personally I thought it was a pretty boring election, although it could become more intriguing pending the results of tomorrow’s District 1 recount. As for the controversy surrounding the District 2 race between Jim Kee and Jamal Fox, I thought more than anything it displayed the pettiness of mid-size city politics.
I suggested earlier in the year that an issue that would really spice up this year’s election would be reopening the White Street landfill. But in yesterday’s (unposted) column, the N&R’s Allen Johnson points out that nobody touched that issue with a ten-foot pole:
It may seem like a distant memory. But it was only two years ago that the battle over the White Street landfill threatened to rip a deep gash in the fabric of this community.
That was then.
In a city that has become notorious for not knowing when to let go of an issue (FedEx, the downtown ballpark, etc. etc.) we’ve let go. Even the most ardent proponents of reopening the northeast Greensboro facility to household trash seem intent on moving on.
Fair enough –as a commenter pointed out at the time —any candidate who ran on the platform of reopening the landfill would have gone down in flames, although it didn’t matter anyway for former Mayor Bill Knight, who was soundly defeated in the District 4 race by incumbent Nancy Hoffmann.
Still, as former City Council member and state Sen. Trudy Wade pointed out, Greensboro still does not have a long-range plan to dispose of its trash. Johnson says Mayor-elect Nancy Vaughan “is right to list it as a priority, and it needs to be a forward-thinking discussion” because “dumping trash in big holes and covering it with dirt is fast becoming old school.”
The Rhino’s excellent reporting kept citizens in the know about the problems related to the city’s lack of a long-range plan to dispose of its garbage. It will be interesting to see how the new council addresses this pressing problem.
