Just so happens I’m heading there later this week, so I read with interest NYT coverage of ‘broke-ass Wilmington,’ as Ed Cone called it.
You can imagine what jumped out at me. I took the liberty of linking up the usual suspects:
What makes Wilmington’s reversal so striking is that the city had so much going its way.
Until 2007, the general fund budget for this endearing port of cobblestone streets and moss-draped oaks had been expanding by about 7 percent a year. Fueled by in-migration and a series of annexations, the population surged 40 percent for the decade, to 106,000.
The growth helped pay for glittering capital projects all over town — a convention center on the Cape Fear River, a police headquarters with its own crime lab, a 20-mile bike and jogging trail, tennis courts and softball fields, a host of road and streetscape improvements. The mayor’s calendar was crowded with ribbon-cuttings.
Note how the NYT doesn’t even bother to identify the “Tea Party-esque gadfly” elected to the New Hanover County Commissioner by the same “exasperated taxpayers” Mayor Bill Saffo encounters every day at the local diner.
