At the recent N&R-sponsored One Guilford symposium, someone made the comment that watching the Guilford County commissioners’ meeting made her head hurt.
In my view, watching the county commissioners can’t be any more painful than watching the school board debate the smallest issue for two hours. Not can it be as painful as it is for the Rhino’s John Hammer to watch the Greensboro City Council discuss the city budget:
Imagine the board of directors of a midsized corporation talking about saving money by a reduction of paperclip usage and you have an idea of the City Council budget discussion…..The proposed budget is $395 million. The council spent a good bit of the morning discussing whether or not privatizing the dance program was a good idea. This is not a decision that the City Council should be making. The City Council shouldn’t decide the cost of tennis balls at city tennis courts or exactly how many golf balls should be in a bucket at the Bryan Park driving range. The City Council could and would willingly spend hours discussing either of those topics if City Manager Mitch Johnson brought them up for discussion.
But now you have this from the county commissioners:
So board members bickered over the proposed tax increase Thursday night. The discussion was fueled by Democrat Melvin “Skip” Alston , who blasted four other Democrats for cutting budget deals with Republicans and leaving him and the rest of the Democrats out of the talks.
Paul Gibson, the board chairman, said he had tried to include everybody, denied cutting any deals and called Alston “despicable.”
Alston mentioned a May dinner at Greensboro’s Lucky 32 restaurant attended by Democrats Gibson, Kay Cashion , John Parks and Kirk Perkins . A friend overheard their conversation, Alston said, and told him about it.
Geez. Hey, if that’s the way it happened, then Alston should use the information to his benefit. Yet I’m not too sure about publicly citing an eavesdropped conversation when debating the county budget. Call me crazy, but that just doesn’t look good.
