On the eve of her recall referendum, Greensboro City Council member T. Dianne Bellamy-Small agrees to an interview with the N&R.
Bellamy-Small addresses the controversy surrounding the RMA report. Her theory on how it got into the hands of the media is, to say the least, interesting:
“I got my copy. Mitch gave it to me. I took it back to my desk, I was working that particular day, and Mitch said, ‘Well, I’m getting ready to leave.’ Well, I said, ‘I’m leaving with you,’ and so I grabbed the stuff and left. OK? Didn’t look to get the report out of my car until four days later, and when I went to get it, I couldn’t find it. … So when I went back to the office the report was laying on my desk. I got it. Didn’t think anything of it.
“But our offices were totally unsecure. In fact, our little area, anybody could walk in there at any time, look at our stuff. In fact we had been warned not to leave sensitive stuff, you know, on our desk or even put it in the trash can because some of you media people would come in there and go through the trash can. Well, the next conversation that came up was after you guys ran the article the first of March saying that you had this particular copy that had this number of pages.
“And so they said, well, the only people who had that particular copy, because there were various copies out there with various levels of information, was the one that we had been given.”
There you have it. Bellamy-Small is accusing either another city official or the N&R of stealing her copy from her desk. Pretty serious accusation, if you ask me. Now let me ask this: Just how appropriate is it of a local official to so specifically assign blame? If Bellamy-Small truly didn’t leak the report, then why does just not keep saying it and keep her conspiracy theories to herself?
District 1 voters will hopefully ask themselves that question on Tuesday.
