Earlier tonight Guilford County Commissioners unanimously voted to do pretty much nothing about funding construction of Eastern Guilford High School. Letting the county staff and the school system figure it out doesn’t count, either. Anybody with a direct interest in seeing Eastern rebuilt quickly should be concerned.
The problem is some commissioners are too fixated on the insurance settlement. Commissioner Linda Shaw even dropped the bomb that word had come from Insurance Commissioner Jim Long that they were preparing a $42 million settlement. Kind of odd that Superintendent Terry Grier, who was speaking before the commissioners, hadn’t gotten the memo. Neither had school system attorney Jill Wilson, who said she’d be surprised if they got anywhere near that considering the fact that the building was appraised at $16 million.
Before supporting the motion to just let everybody figure it out, Commissioner Skip Alston continued his particular fixation with using the $31 million in remaining bond money to help rebuild Eastern. Grier insisted that money was for other projects:
The district does have $31 million available, and if you spend that $31 million at Eastern, again, you won’t build the Gateway Education Center West, or Jamestown Middle School or Pleasant Garden Elementary of Ragsdale High or Union Hill. And you could say that’s fine, just put them on another bond referendum. Well, the public’s already voted to approve those once, and if you delay those projects again, you will spend a lot more in inflation costs to delay those projects or forego them altogether.
Funny that Grier mentioned Jamestown and Ragsdale, because —guess what—they are on another bond referendum — the $450 million bond GCS hopes to pass this fall.
So you can see they are a lot of different realities out there. Shaw summed it up pretty, saying she felt like she was in the “Twilight Zone.” She’s not the only one.
