Greensboro District 3

Incumbent: Justin Outling

Challengers: Antuan Marsh, Craig Martin

Withdrawn: Payton McGarry

Outling is a walking conflict of interest. His law firm does business with the city and the whole United Healthcare debacle stinks to high heaven. He might be the first black person to serve a majority white district in Greensboro but he can speak the language of the elites with the rest of them (after all, Irving Park does lie in this district).

While either one of the incumbent's remaining challengers would be a marked improvement, I have to give Martin the slight edge over Marsh. Martin seems to be the favorite from members of the creative community and Black Lives Matter activists.

Greensboro District 2

Seat holder: Goldie Wells

Challengers: C.J. Brinson, Jim Kee

Withdrawn: Felicia Angus, Tim Vincent

Jamal Fox resigned from his seat to move to Portland, OR with his girlfriend. He handpicked Vincent to replace him but the City Council opted to pick Wells (just like how City Council opted to appoint Justin Outling after Zack Matheny wanted former councilman Tom Phillips to replace him two years ago).

Wells is the third person in three election cycles to be appointed to her seat and then run for a full term. She represented District 2 from 2005 to 2009.

Wells's successor, Jim Kee, served two terms of his own before losing to Fox in 2013. The main reason to not support Kee's return other than the fact that he's been in office before is the fact that he's backed by developer interests like ex-mayor Robbie Perkins--hence, Kee's beholden to at least one of the city's political clans.

Both Wells and Kee had their chances and it's clearly time for a new generation to represent East Greensboro--Northeast Greensboro in particular. Fox should have been that person but he eventually got pulled in by the Marty Kotis and Roy Carroll factions.

Brinson is that person to represent East Greensboro because he gets it. He gets who Revolution Mill really caters to. I have seen some of my creative friends hold events there but most of them and the people who attended such events in the past aren't of the same skin color as me. As much as I enjoyed said events, East Greensboro residents are not the ones who are benefiting from the mill, it's the old money Irving Park crowd who once upon a time let Downtown Greensboro rot until the creative class helped revive it.

Greensboro District 1

Incumbent: Sharon Hightower
Challengers: Devin King, Paula Ritter-Lipscomb
Withdrawn: Charles Patton, Jr.

There's a sense from this post that Hightower has let her Southeast Greensboro community down even though she's only been in office for four years after a 10 year run by Dianne Bellamy-Small.

Her first opponent, Devin King, advanced to the second round of the 2015 mayoral race--only to garner a minuscule 12 percent. How he thinks his conservative philosophy lines up with the concerns of the district is beyond me.

Hightower's second opponent, Ritter-Lipscomb is the best bet to turn Southeast Greensboro around.

It makes me wonder why I'm still even here. The Triad is DONE

Greensboro ranks among worst metros for private-sector jobs growth

Hat tip EZ Greensboro

The Greensboro metro has lost 5,700 private-sector jobs during the past 10 years, lagging behind the growth rates of many of the nation’s major markets, according to a federal report issued Wednesday."
Greensboro is 65th in the national rankings. The local metro declined 1.8 percent from 325,000 private-sector jobs in July 2007 to 319,300 last month.
This 10-year comparison is an effective indicator of the extent to which any given market has bounced back from the Great Recession, which officially extended from December 2007 to June 2009.
Each of the top five metros, including Raleigh (ranked fourth, 24.1 percent growth, edit done by me), logged 10-year growth rates that exceed 21 percent. The five major markets at the bottom of the list — including Greensboro — are the only areas that now have fewer private-sector jobs now than a decade ago.
Charlotte ranked 16th with 14.8 percent growth.

Quite frankly, I would take a broom and sweep all 18 seatholders out of office in Greensboro and High Point but my options are limited.

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.

Exit National Folk Festival, Enter NC Folk Festival

The three year run of the National Folk Festival in Greensboro has come to an end and as it turns out, contrary to what I said last year, the big players in Greensboro do have a plan for next year and beyond, and it's called the North Carolina Folk Festival.

That was a big surprise to me given that I thought for sure that the city's leaders were going all in with the still unbuilt and structureless performing arts center and also I thought that Guilford County's long reputation of naysaying out of the ordinary stuff would have precluded such an event.

While I don't have any issues with the pending spinoff, I do have to question the logistics and public support. First, the bus issues have to be fixed because they were terrible this year. Instead of continuing the increased frequencies (they were every 30 minutes during the festival in '15 and three routes ran every 7-8 minutes while the other routes ran every 30 minutes last year), the regular hourly schedule was used. 

Second, a friend of mine pointed out last year some of the inner workings of the Greensboro arts scene and said that the midsized organizations had been getting less funding due to ArtsGreensboro giving all of its money to the National Folk Festival. I don't believe that 100 percent of ArtsGreensboro funding will go the NCFF, but if it does, then there could be trouble with other arts organizations in town--a prime example is that the Greensboro Fringe Festival almost went out of business due to it falling short of fundraising goals earlier this year.

The elephants aren't going anywhere

The Jim Hunt wing of the Democratic Party has made its choice and it’s to change parties. Politically speaking, North Carolina is the most backward state because of how long its political realignment played out. Moderate and conservative Democrats ran the state for much of the second half of the last century. As a result, immense GOP gains were difficult to impossible. What has happened since 2010 only means that NC is not a leader at all--it really means that it has finally caught up to the other southern states as the Nixon-Reagan realignment has made the state's GOP more in line with the national party.

Anti-urbanism’s power has shifted west. For decades, it was eastern Democrats. Now, it’s suburban Republicans joining forces with their rural counterparts to put the screws to the urban areas. Trudy Wade’s failed attempt to overhaul the Greensboro City Council was just a local example of this.

The right wing takeover could have been avoided (or at least dented) if only Dems had agreed to an independent redistricting plan in 2002!

Democratic corruption has given way to Republican stupidity and embarrassment

• Exhibit A: The lawmakers who said that the First Amendment didn't apply to NC.
• Exhibit B: The nipple ban bill that went nowhere
• Exhibit C: Making various elections partisan when nobody wanted it and attempting likewise with all municipal elections
• Exhibit D: Mike Stone of Lee County going out of his way to force a radio show off a college station after the hosts criticized him for interfering in local affairs
• Exhibit E: Attempting to reinstate a ban on same sex marriage, ignoring the high court
• Exhibit F: Drafting a laughable bill that would force NC State and UNC to leave the ACC if the conference calls the state on its bluff in the future
• Exhibit G: The law that allows people to run over protesters with impunity

Since the GOP will be in power until 2023 at the earliest, get used to this state being in the news for all the wrong reasons like the 2014 Jefferson Muzzles and all of the blowback over HB2.