Author: Scott D. Yost

Yes, it’s true: The practically brand new county animal shelter in Guilford County does indeed have rats; however, they are the nice, adorable, friendly kind of rats that many people love to have as pets. 

This week, Guilford County Animal Services Director Jorge Ortega asked the Rhino Times: “Would you like a rat?”

“A what?” came the response.

“A rat.”

It took a little more conversation to clear up the matter, but Ortega explained why the shelter is now pushing rats….

On Tuesday, Jan. 14, at a Summerfield Town Council meeting, former NC Auditor Beth Wood – who had been hired by the town – gave her preliminary findings regarding a large number of allegations of financial wrongdoing by former town staff.  Claims to be investigated included that some former town employees were given more pay than they were legally entitled to, that someone had manipulated the town’s computer system and destroyed records – and there was a host of other allegations as well, such as one that an employee had been using town resources for the employee’s personal business…

The Joint Capital/Facilities Committee – a body consisting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners and Guilford County Board of Education – has scheduled a meeting for Tuesday, Jan. 28, and it should be a very interesting one indeed…

What was formerly the City of Greensboro’s Office of Community Safety, led by Latisha McNeil, is now a city department: the Community Safety Department.

According to a statement from city officials regarding the new department, “This endeavor to create a community-centered and safe Greensboro for all residents and visitors, will continue to convene police, community partners, and City leadership to discuss crime, mental health and the root causes of violence.”

The department will be part of the City Manager’s Office, under the guidance of Assistant City Manager Andrea Harrell…

The Guilford County Board of Commissioners will be earning their salaries on Thursday, Jan. 23 and Friday, Jan. 24.

That’s because the county’s commissioners – along with other key county staff – will take part in the first of two retreats, where the board spends almost two full days doing a deep dive into issues affecting the county and hearing reports from county department heads…

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston said this week that, even though the county has passed bond referendums totaling $2 billion for Guilford County Schools’ capital projects and repairs in the last four years, it’s highly likely that a new round of school bonds will be needed “within the next two or three years.”

Alston made his remarks to the Rhino Times when he was being asked about the disappointed Page High School students, parents and alumni who expected to get a new high school after the passage of the $1.7 billion school bond referendum in 2022 – but instead the old school is continuing to limp along with heating and air system repairs and facing other issues….

The City of High Point is very lucky to have High Point University – which educates a lot of youngsters, draws worldwide attention to the city and, oh yeah, is also known for its year-round charitable and service work that helps the city, the county and the region.

In another big gift that helps the city out, High Point University is donating $250,000 to Business High Point in order to support local minority entrepreneurs and to help develop the Washington Street Historic District in the city….

The National Weather Service is warning everyone in Guilford County and central North Carolina to remain very aware of how cold it will be this week – and, combined with the wind, wind chills as low as 1 degree Fahrenheit can be expected in parts of central North Carolina. 

The cold weather advisory will be in effect until at least Wednesday, Jan. 22, with those who spend too much time outdoors without enough protection in danger of frostbite and hypothermia.

At noon on Tuesday, Jan. 21, it was 19 degrees at the Bryan Park weather station, which, combined with the wind, made it feel like 13 degrees….

There are a whole lot of legitimate criticisms that can be made against the Guilford County Board of Commissioners; however, one of those criticisms is not that the board’s lack of funding for the schools has caused the recent repeated problems with the HVAC system at Page High School – which has led to several days of lost learning for the students.

Page High, in what has been a highly publicized controversy, has been closed multiple days in January due to heating problems – and the school would have lost more days had the snow and ice not later halted the entire school system.   

On some days when the rest of the school system has been open, Page has been holding virtual learning; however, parents of students say that, in most cases, online classes are a sad substitute for actual classroom learning….

Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston, who almost single-handedly got the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade established in Greensboro decades ago, discussed this year’s upcoming parade and other related celebrations at a commissioners meeting recently, and he encouraged everyone in the community to hit as many celebrations as they could in honor of the most important American civil rights leader in history.

Alston made his comments at the Thursday, Jan. 9 meeting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners….

Contec Industrial Automation Solutions – an international engineering firm that specializes in automating industrial processes and equipment – has selected Greensboro as the site for its newest sales and engineering office.

The company provides a wide range of services to various business sectors such as the food and beverage industry, petrochemicals and consumer goods.

This latest addition to the really large number of companies who are choosing Guilford County for economic expansion will lead to the creation of 24 jobs in Greensboro, which the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce says are very good jobs.

  It will also mean an investment of a quarter of a million dollars – not the largest addition to the tax base in recent years but every new company that comes to Greensboro helps put the city on the radar…

Everyone knows that the city of Greensboro and Guilford County as a whole have a tremendous problem with homelessness, and, by the very nature of homelessness, it’s hard to get exact numbers on the situation.

Despite that inherent difficulty, each year, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development requires Continuum of Care organizations – like the collective battling homelessness in Guilford County – to count the number of homeless in the service area; and it’s almost time for what’s known as the annual “Point-in-Time Count,” which is a two-day collaborative effort to get a good assessment as to how many people in Guilford County have nowhere to live…

The Guilford County Board of Commissioners usually holds one two-day retreat each year, however, 2025 will be special in that regard because the board has decided that it will hold not one, but two retreats.

The first two-day retreat will be held at North Carolina A&T State University on Thursday, Jan. 23 and Friday, Jan. 24. 

The second is currently planned for Bur-Mil Events Center on Thursday, March 20 and Friday, March 21.

Unlike regular meetings and work sessions – which usually only last a few hours and are often limited to the most immediate issues at hand – commissioner retreats are the time each year that the board, the county manager, now Mike Halford, county directors and other top staff get to do a deep dive into major county projects, address less-pressing issues and formulate long-term plans…

The City of Greensboro’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience has a couple of things going on at the start of 2025 in an attempt to keep residents cognizant of being green and eco-friendly.

For one thing, the office is seeking artists for its “Trash Bash Competition,” which will be held on Saturday, March 1.  

In partnership with the non-profit organization Reconsidered Goods, the Trash Bash will run from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on that Saturday at the Grove Creative Coworking Space at Revolution Mill, 1200 Textile Dr. in Greensboro…

Golfers sometimes get a mulligan and sometimes entire golf courses do also.

This week, Starmount Forest Country Club announced a major renovation project that’s meant to “elevate our members’ golfing experience to new heights.”

 The Country Club calls the move a “comprehensive revitalization initiative that aims to enhance the aesthetics and functionality of our history-rich golf course, ensuring a world-class experience for golf enthusiasts of all levels.”

There are a lot of parts to the big renovation project, which will involve a course redesign.  …

Dr. Devdutta “Dev” Sangvai was sworn in as the new Secretary of the North Carolina...

At the Thursday, Jan. 9 meeting of the Greensboro City Council, the council members officially...

Assuming that you’ve already been to the store and bought your milk, bread and very expensive eggs, it will be a very good weekend for you to stay indoors starting on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 10 and staying there until things clear up.

While this will not be a massive winter weather event that cripples the Triad, local authorities are warning that it does bring real danger and people should remain home if they can.

Last week the Greensboro area got somewhat blindsided by a winter storm, one that wasn’t bad, but one that was worse than predicted. Therefore, it caught some people out and about on the roads when they should not have been….

As you do your financial planning for the next few years, there’s one large cost that you should plan on: A hefty increase in the property taxes that you pay in Guilford County.

 It’s true that the coming tax increase will come on the heels of 2022, a year when many county residents saw their property tax bills jump 25 or 30 percent as a result of the countywide property revaluation.

In 2022, property values had jumped tremendously from previous years, and that dramatically increased the cost of property tax bills because the Guilford County Board of Commissioners decided not to adjust the tax rate downward to account for the increased property values, but instead decided to leave the tax rate at the same level and take all that newly generated money and spend it. …

The City of High Point just lost one of the most notable and important leaders in the history of the city. And when it comes to female leaders in the city over the years in particular, Mary Riddick Long Jarrell – who died Sunday, Jan. 25, at the age of 95 – was clearly one of those at the very top when it came to influencing the history of the city and promoting the interest of the city she loved.

In 1977, former civic leader and former High Point Mayor O. Arthur Kirkman asked Jarrell to run for the High Point City Council, which she agreed to do….

The people in the Guilford County Tax Department are, for the most part at least, pretty nice. However, when it comes to collecting taxes, they take their jobs very seriously, and Guilford County usually ends up somewhere near the top of the list each year when it comes to the percentage of taxes collected versus the amount of taxes owed when compared with other counties in the state.

Reverend and Guilford County Tax Director Ben Chavis runs the department, but this week it’s the county’s assistant tax director – Donna Bailey (pictured above) who’s been chosen to serve on an important worldwide body: the Advocacy Task Force of the International Association of Assessing Officers….

In the wake of the death of former At-Large Greensboro City Councilmember and Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Johnson, the Greensboro City Council had to, at its Tuesday, Jan. 7 meeting, decide who would fill the role of Mayor Pro Tem.

 It came down to two councilmembers who sought the job – and the matter of the race of those candidates played a central role in the debate that followed. 

The black candidate, District 2 City Councilmember Goldie Wells, sought and lost the vote to Greensboro’s new Mayor Pro Tem: At-large Councilmember Marikay Abuzuaiter…  

Guilford County officials were extremely upset recently to find out that, in a final act by former NC Department of Health and Human Services Director Kody Kinsley, much of the power that Guilford County has to manage its mental health and developmental health services was robbed from it in a secret and underhanded move that all but did away with the county’s ability to control its efforts in those areas.

Guilford County has now filed a lawsuit against Kinsley and against the administrative management entity that the county was forced to join several years ago in a shotgun style marriage arranged by the state.  That entity now controls the fate of county services and the say on how federal funds meant for Guilford County’s mental and behavioral services areas are used….

The City of Greensboro has established a South Greensboro planning workshop set for Saturday, Jan 18, which will be the latest step in a wholesale plan to enhance the appearance, safety and unity of the southern part of the city.

Residents, business owners and frequent visitors of South Greensboro, along with other interested parties, are invited to attend the event – billed as the “Environment and Economics Workshop,” which is being put on by the City of Greensboro Planning Department.

The event will be held on January 18 at Brown Community Recreation Center at 302 E. Vandalia Road and will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m….

Late last year, when Guilford County Animal Services Director Jorge Ortega spoke at a work session before the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, Ortega addressed some of the challenges the county’s animal shelter is facing and he offered an analogy: that the shelter was a hospital patient that had been in intensive care but was now on the road to recovery.

At that time, the county commissioners and the county manager added some mid-budget-year funding to the Animal Services budget to help the shelter through a hard time.

Now some money from private citizens is coming to the rescue as well….

The Guilford County Sheriff’s Office has very little to say about the matter at this time; however, on Friday afternoon, Jan. 3, Guilford County Sheriff Danny Rogers reported that, on Thursday, Jan. 2, deputies arrested a Guilford County detention officer on a felony charge of “Maintaining a Dwelling for Controlled Substances.”

The Sheriff’s Office is the arm of the county that’s responsible for staffing and overseeing the county’s two jails…

In the past, High Point has at times been envious of Greensboro.

For instance, Greensboro usually gets county offices first, and, over the years, some Guilford County commissioners who represented High Point have felt that High Point never got a fair share of county funding.           

However, these days, in at least one area, Greensboro residents may be looking at High Point with envy: Specifically, while Greensboro has very strict guidelines on how to prepare leaves for collection, High Pointers still enjoy the option of piling their leaves up near the street so the loose-leaf collection trucks can suction them up and whisk them away…

Every year, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners’ fiscal budget that’s adopted in June includes a good deal of money – usually around $2 million – that is handed out to a wide range of non-profit Community-Based Organizations. 

Since the turn of the century, there have been many attempts to establish a rational formula for which groups should get money; however, even in years when those guidelines have been unanimously adopted by the Board of Commissioners, the board has thrown those guidelines out the window at budget time, with some of the money always going to groups run by friends of various commissioners…

You might think that, now that election season is over, people would stop sending out negative attack mailers about politicians, but that’s not the case when it comes to those who oppose Rep. Cecil Brockman (D-Guilford).  His critics sent out a holiday-themed attack ad to High Point residents portraying Brockman as the Grinch and criticizing him for missed votes that they say have helped Republicans get their way….

The voters in Guilford County have been very generous to Guilford County Schools in the past four years – approving $2 billion in school bond debt for new school construction and other capital projects – so there’s no question that the learning habitats of the county’s school students are getting a major upgrade…

January 2025 is the start of the new year, but it’s also ‘National Radon Action Month’ and, in observance of that month – and in order to raise awareness of the threat of radon in homes and buildings – the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is providing thousands of free radon test kits for state residents…

The City of Greensboro has grown like kudzu over the last decade, and, while economic development leaders love that to no end, there are some downsides to all this new development and the huge influx of workers into Guilford County. 

Traffic on Battleground Avenue, to take just one example, is now ridiculous at all times of the day; more light pollution makes it very hard to enjoy the night sky, and establishments from restaurants to the DMV that had manageable lines and wait times years ago are now often jammed…

Do you find that you start your day with good intentions to be productive and then, nearly right from the start, the realities of life and the world intrude and throw you off your game plan – and you end up just firefighting those unexpected fires like you do every day?

Would you like to have a more efficient and strategic plan for getting things done in the coming year?…

The City of Greensboro will begin accepting applications for the City Council’s vacant At-Large seat beginning on Thursday, Jan. 2 and that application period will remain open until Friday, Jan. 17.  The City Council seat became vacant upon the death of longtime City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson earlier this month…

Just before Christmas, the Rhino Times wrote about the long extensive death of local media in Guilford County and the fact that Triad City Beat looks very likely to cease to exist soon. It’s expected to join a long line of newspapers that have gone out of business in the last decade and a half. The publication, which longtime editor Brian Clarey is leaving at the end of the year, is attempting to raise $20,000 to continue operations, but it doesn’t sound hopeful for that decade-plus-old publication.

However, that’s not the only longtime area newspaper that announced the end of publication this week after a lengthy run of providing news in Guilford County….

The story of independent local newspapers going out of business in recent years is certainly nothing new and it looks like another example of this is happening in Greensboro: Triad City Beat, a left-leaning newspaper that has covered the Triad for over a decade, has lost its long-time editor and is now asking its readers for financial support in order to continue publishing….

After nearly ten years of pursuing the goal, a historic section of Greensboro has “cemented its legacy” by being entered into the National Register of Historic Places: Recently, the National Park Service listed the South Benbow Road Historic District in its national register.

 According to City of Greensboro officials, the designation represents the first time that a historically black neighborhood in Greensboro has been entered…

Last year, the center for golfing operations at Bur-Mil Park was demolished due to its deterioration and dilapidation, but now the Guilford County Parks Department – once the Board of Commissioners approves the move on Thursday, Dec. 19 – will get a much-wished-for new golf operations building at the park at 5834 Bur-Mil Club Road.

The Guilford County Facilities Department estimates the cost for the entire project will come in at about $635,000…

We here at the Rhino Times like to take a vacation just like the rest of the world from time to time.

The Rhino publishes 50 weeks out of the year, with no publication one week in December and one down week in July each year. 

Next week, the Rhino Times will be off.

Since The Rhino site came under new ownership in mid-2024, managing the transition while keeping the paper up and running has been something akin to changing an airplane engine midflight, but the transition has gone very smoothly and readership has been growing steadily….

Yvonne Johnson, who passed away on Wednesday, Dec. 4 at the age of 82, was known for her service to the city – as a Greensboro City Council member and as the city’s first black mayor – however, on Thursday, Dec. 19, it will be the Guilford County Board of Commissioners that honors her life. 

At the board’s last meeting of the year, the commissioners will read and adopt a resolution celebrating the life and service of Johnson, who was born in Greensboro in October of 1942….

Many readers are too young to remember it, but once upon a time, like in the 80s and the 90s, office Christmas parties were actually fun.  You could drink to your heart’s content, make some off-color remarks during the Secret Santa game, and even use the event to chat up that saleswoman you’d had your eye on.

Now, however, office Christmas parties are barely really parties: Cost cutting has reduced the treats, everyone is expected to be on their best behavior, and – no matter how much you don’t want to be there – you still have to show up or it’s considered a reason for a demerit….

High Point University, which has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past two decades, has been gaining a worldwide reputation as a very nice and extremely interesting place to go to school. It’s known for its exceptional campus amenities: The campus is designed to resemble a luxury resort, with attractions like waterfalls, outdoor pools and perfectly manicured gardens. Also, students enjoy concierge services, free transportation within a 20-mile radius and even complimentary ice cream from ice cream trucks that roam the campus.

In 2014, London’s Daily Mail newspaper published an article with the headline: “Is this the best university you’ve never heard of? The $700 million Disney-style campus complete with an ice cream truck, a movie theatre… and Skee ball!

On Friday, December 13 at 5:30 p.m., the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office is, as it has in past years, holding its special ‘Celebration of Life’ event. At the ceremony, the Sheriff’s Office will honor the lives lost in traffic-related incidents in 2023.

The annual event honors those lives lost through a tree-lighting ceremony and speeches…

The Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department will hold two holiday events for seniors – ages 50-and-up – on Thursday, Dec. 19.

One called “Oh Gingerbread” will take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Craft Recreation Center at 3911 Yanceyville St. in Greensboro. The event will have games, holiday-themed Bingo, a hot chocolate bar, refreshments and other festive holiday activities…

The Guilford County Board of Commissioners has been spending a boatload of money in recent years. That’s not good for taxpayers, who saw their tax bills skyrocket after the 2022 countywide revaluation of property, however, according to a recent review by a government financing association of the county’s annual report and budget, Guilford County is doing a very good job of composing its public-facing finance documents and explaining where all that money comes from and where it all goes.

Guilford County government has just been recognized by the Government Finance Officers Association for the composition, clarity and presentation of the county’s recent annual financial report and its latest budget…

This year, the city’s Mayor’s Committee for Persons with Disabilities will hold its annual “Shopper’s Day” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 12 at the Four Seasons Town Centre in Greensboro. 

This is the 39th annual Shopper’s Day, which is an event that brings together hundreds of people with disabilities and volunteers – many of whom are local high school students – for a day of holiday cheer, shopping and entertainment….