No one knows what the future will bring.

However, even though 2024 hasn’t arrived, the Guilford County commissioners and other top county officials have drawn a pretty good picture of what will be in store for county residents in the New Year.

Here are a few things to expect based on what the current county leaders have said and done.

• The top three priorities the county will be addressing are (1) homelessness (2) homelessness and (3) homelessness.  Those three are not listed in any particular order, however, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Skip Alston, who ultimately calls all the shots for Guilford County government, has made it crystal clear that he wants more than anything to completely eliminate homelessness in Guilford County.

When asked about priorities for next year it is the first thing out of his mouth, and, during one work session in 2023, he came down hard publicly on Guilford County Manager Mike Halford for not implementing requested measures fast enough.  He rarely calls out Halford like that.

• There will be no tax increase.  Alston has promised as much and, besides, there’s no need for one.  The 2022 revaluation of all property in the county at a time that property values were sky high, combined with the failure of the Board of Commissioners to adjust the tax rate downward accordingly, guarantees the board a giant windfall of taxpayer money to spend for years into the future.

• County officials will be paying close attention to the large downtown Greensboro project that includes building a new Sheriff’s Department headquarters and new parking for the facility. If the county hadn’t killed a deal with Samet Corp. in early 2023 the project would be well down the road toward completion.  The county has been trying to provide the department a new headquarters for well over a decade, but every time it does the project seems to meet one hurdle after another.

• The Guilford County Board of Commissioners and Guilford County Schools will continue their lovefest. The current Democratic majority board of commissioners has given the county’s school system virtually everything they’ve asked for and people can look for that to continue when the schools bring requests to the commissioners in 2024.  The nine-member Board of Commissioners includes two former school board members, a current school teacher, a school system volunteer, and a powerful chairman who is positively head over heels in love with granting school requests.

 In 2023, when Alston was talking glowingly at a meeting about how the voters had approved $2 billion in new school bond fund money in the last two school bond referendums, he cautioned his enthusiasm buy saying that the schools needed “ten times that much,” which by the calculations of the Rhino Times amounts to somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion.

About