No surprise, the Greensboro City Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting the Heart of the Triad.
Something strange happened during planning director Dick Hails’ elaborate power point presentation. Halfway through, somebody said something — I couldn’t hear what it was —to which Hails responded ‘OK’ and began zipping through the rest of the presentation. I’ll take a leap and assume Mayor Keith Holliday, knowing he had a long closed session ahead, gave Hails the nod to hurry it up. I realize Holliday and council members are more than likely up to speed on HOT, but someone watching the presentation would get the feeling they had absolutely no clue what they were voting to support.
One council member — Tom Phillips — expressed concern about infrastructure costs and supposed revenue sharing being promoted by the brains behind this whole deal:
“You better get this stuff in writing, up front, rather than just thinking we’ll all agree down the road. You need to have a plan in place of how costs are going to be shared. My big concern with this, and I stated it in our briefing session, is Greensboro has such a small portion of this, we’re going to spend a lot of time and effort on this, and we’re going to get down to the end of the road and they’ll say ‘well, you know, we decided to divvy this up amongst ourselves and thanks, but we’re not going to go forward.’ And in the meantime, we’ve devoted a lot of resources to planning the whole area for them, and I’m real concerned about that happening. The other thing that concerns me is we will shift infrastructure emphasis such as getting our northern loop done, to road requirements that might be needed in that area, and we’ve got to make sure the emphasis is on the needs for our citizens.”
Well said. Phillips still voted for the resolution, though.
