Lots of people picking up on Greensboro City Council member Zack Matheny’s comment during last night’s meeting on the proposed downtown noise ordinance:

“We got some key people that live downtown that want to sleep,” City Councilman Zack Matheny said to the crowd of about 30. “We got some business owners that have been downtown and helped the revitalization. Can we not all get along? Can we not all figure it out?”

We know who the key people are —- developer Roy Carroll and Mayor Robbie Perkins, who live in the downtown Center Pointe high-rise condo.

Downtown business owners spoke out, saying a very “small group of people are complaining about noise levels.” With that in mind, here’s a not unrelated Rhino report on the Zoning Commission’s ‘smackdown’ of a proposed Neighborhood Conservation Overlay for the Kirkwood neighborhood. John Hammer writes:

Moreover, the meetings I attended had 40 or 50 people. The neighborhood as defined in this proposed NCO has 630 homes. That probably is about 1,000 adults. To rezone people’s property based on meetings where about 5 percent attended is just not right.

Hammer encourages the city Council to not only turn down the the proposed Kirkwood overlay, but also to put a hold on future overlays until the process can be revised.