The N&R writes up (unposted) the waiting game Greensboro city staff is playing while the City Council tweaks the $5 million Department of Energy grant:
U.S. Department of energy staff members, mingling at the same gathering as Greensboro resident Beth McKee-Huger, gushed over a proposal that won the city a competitive $5 million energy-efficiency grant.
…But with some council members balking at aspects of the implementation of the grant —–including the target area —-people like McKee-Huger, who helped write the proposal, are shaking their heads.
Mayor Bill Knight —no stranger to controversy these days —– is the center of last week’s Yes!Weekly article, which leads with community and sustainability manager Dan Curry’s bizarre ‘pregnancy’ analogy.
Knight questioned Rev. Nelson Johnson’s involvement in the processing of securing the grant. As Greensboro residents well know, any issue involving Rev. Johnson is a racial issue.
The mayor, for one, turned out to be ambivalent about the mix of groups that helped draw up the grant application and that endorsed it.
“I started reading the grant application,” Knight said from the dais, before casting one of three dissenting votes against the grant last November. “There were some endorsers to that application; the mayor, for whatever reason, was not one of the endorsers. I don’t think I was asked to. But I have some concern about some of the parties endorsing that grant. I’ve been here almost a year now, and I’ve seen some confrontations, some disruptions. I’ve seen it in years gone by. And I’ve seen some names of individuals or organizations. I would hope that they would not be a part of this program.”
Knight did not explicitly name the individuals or groups that he held reservations about, but Councilman Perkins said that in that meeting and in work sessions when the subject came up there was never any doubt about the object of the mayor’s distaste.
“One of the problems is that individuals were concerned about the genesis of the grant,” Perkins said. “Frankly, it was Nelson Johnson’s involvement, and they wanted to make sure he didn’t get a piece.”
The sticking point is the lending program the grant proposes. But lenders haven’t been falling over themselves to get involved, so the council might instead approve direct grants to homeowners in need of energy upgrades. Or they could simply vote to give the money back to the federal government.
