Local Elections and the Creatives

I have decided to take a look at the local elections from the viewpoint of how the issues affect the creative community.

Greensboro

The effort by state senator Trudy Wade to redraw the city's district lines has been permanently shelved by the courts and the end result is a very high number of people filing to take out all nine seat holders. Since I hang out here, I know a lot of members of the artist community. Ultimately, my picks and opinions will stray away from conventional belief because I have seen and heard things that would make most people's heads spin.

Following the results of a 2015 referendum, this year's elections will be the last ones until 2021 since four year terms were approved by the voters. Choose very wisely, Greensboro.

There are a lot of issues that need to be tackled: 

• a salary raise the City Council gave itself in mid 2016
• the Tanger Performing Arts Center and its potential to destroy the city's arts scene
• this area has ranked #1 in food hardship since 2015
• the ability to stand up to the Gate City's various political clans
• this is the third straight election cycle where a seat holder appointed to finish an unexpired term has decided to run for a full term, which plays into the hands of said clans
• the continued neglect of East Greensboro

High Point

This is the first time since 2005 that elections are being held in odd numbered years and with primaries. Only 11 percent bothered to turn out for that year's election. The hope in moving elections to even numbered years was to boost turnout. Instead, voters often skipped city elections after voting in higher profile state and national elections and on top of that, every race was winner take all, which led to some candidates being elected with less than 50 percent.

Here in the Furniture City, it's been about the Three H's (which is a sadder riff of what my high school classmate once said about the city being famous for furniture and Fantasia, hence the Two F's): hunger, heroin, and homicides.

At the same time, baseball and revitalization have also become big topics. North Main Street may not be street dieted but other parts of town have seen their streets have reduced lanes in order to make neighborhoods more pedestrian friendly. Andres Duany was brought here in 2013, which was also the same time tactical urbanism was being bandied about. The end result was that some of ideas have been adopted while others have been ignored. North Main through parts of Uptowne was closed between the fall and spring furniture markets. The construction project led to rerouted traffic and one business closing but that has not made much of an impact to this point.

When it wasn't busy chasing young creatives out of the Pit, past City Councils were doing something stupid as getting a Chinese entity to do a sculpture and passing it off as "local" simply because the prototype was done by a resident of the High Point area. The good news is that the current city government eventually allowed murals to be done in the Pit again--the result was a project that was conducted in conjunction with a nearby beer festival back in May.