The Greensboro City Council is expected to approve a five-year lease on office space in downtown Greensboro at the Tuesday, Oct. 17 meeting.
The five-year lease for 9,200 square feet in the Meyer’s Building at 200 S. Elm St. will cost the city nearly $1 million. Since the COVID restrictions, when people were required to work at home, businesses across the world have been downsizing their office space and allowing more flexibly work schedules.
The City of Greensboro is moving in the opposite direction, increasing its office space. It was announced this week that the Housing and Neighborhood Development Department would be moving into the old Glenwood United Methodist Church building, once that spaced has been renovated.
However, it should come as no surprise that the City of Greensboro needs more office space. In the two budgets that City Manager Tai Jaiyeoba has overseen, the number of city employees has grown by 57, and that’s a lot of new employees to try to squeeze into an office.
Those two budgets had tax increases equivalent to about 13 cents, and much of that additional revenue was allocated for employee raises and 57 new positions. Part of the expense of creating that many new positions is providing those new employees with places to work.
According to the City Council agenda, the Meyer’s Building office space will be used for the staff of procurement, parks and recreation and the city attorney’s office.
Moving those folks out of city hall is being done to allow the expansion of the Development Services Center on the Upper Ground level of city hall.
The office space being leased is on the fourth floor of the Meyer’s Building, and for the first year the monthly lease payment will be $15,666. The monthly lease payment will increase each year until the fifth year of the lease when the city will be paying $17,632 per month.
A top heavy government needing more space costing the tax payers a million bucks. Geez, ya think it’s run by democrats? Get rid of the deadwood and you could lease out space if your job growth is as great as you proclaim.
These “new positions” are for the faithful. Another burden for the taxpayer.
Next election may be the last chance to stop this. You can bet that the faithful will be given time off, and bused to the polls at taxpayer expense.
Maybe they should move the current City Council to the Furniture Market Building in High Point. You know…a Greensboro Beauty movement?
If you have seen “Walking Tall”, once scene shows the perfect location for the City Council to meet.
The city has a perfectly good building, that is for sale, sitting at the corner of 4th street and Maple street. It was used for many years by the city as a training center, to house parks and recreations department staff and some engineering and inspections staff. It just doesn’t make an sense to lease office space when you have an empty building just sitting there.. then again anything the city does these days… doesn’t make any sense.
Expand the work force to spend the extra money extracted from the tax payers..
Before you know it the city will have a debt the size of the Federal government!
What are these people doing?