The Greensboro City Council is breaking with its usual pattern of infrequent meetings and has two special meetings and it’s regular town hall meeting next week.
Monday, May 6 the City Council will meet at 2 p.m. in the Council Chambers and the public portion of that meeting will last only long enough for the Council to pass a motion to go into closed session.
The purpose is to interview the final two candidates for the job of city attorney. The City Council interviewed three candidates in a closed session on Monday, April 29.
The City Council only hires two employees the city manager and the city attorney and it’s been years since a national search was done to fill one of those positions. City Manager David Parrish and his predecessor former city manager Jim Westmoreland were promoted from the deputy city manager position when the top job became open.
Tom Carruthers who resigned as city attorney in October 2018 was promoted from assistant city attorney in April 2014.
The City Council also has an unusual work session at an unusual location on Tuesday, May 7 at 3 p.m. The City Council will hold a joint meeting with the Guilford County Board of Commissioners in Guilford County’s BB&T Building at 201 W. Market St.
The purpose of that meeting is to discuss the plan to jointly fund a Cure Violence program in Greensboro to be managed by One Step Further. The executive director of One Step Further is City Councilmember Yvonne Johnson and not all city councilmembers and county commissioners have been privy to the secret meetings in which select councilmembers and county commissioners made that decision.
So there will be at least two questions for discussion at the joint meeting. One does each elected body want to spend about $250,000 to fund a Cure Violence program and two does each want One Step Further to run the program.
Finally, on Tuesday, May 7 at 5:30 p.m. the City Council will hold it’s monthly town hall meeting which in the past have been increasingly raucous affairs. At the last business meeting of the City Council on April 16 Mayor Nancy Vaughan had people removed for yelling and chanting in the audience. No doubt Vaughan will be tested again by the small loud group that has effectively monopolized these meetings for months.
The City Council has agreed not to do regular business at the town hall meetings, but it does handle boards and commissions. At April 16 City Council meeting, the Council dissolved the Greensboro Transit Authority (GTA) and created the Greensboro Transit Advisory Commission (GTAC). But the Council neglected to appoint anyone to the newly formed GTAC. As a result the scheduled GTA meeting on April 23 was canceled because the GTA no longer existed and the GTAC had no members.
The Council is expected to solve that problem by appointing members to the GTAC and scheduling its first meeting. The question is whether the former members of the GTA will all be appointed to the GTAC or if the Council will choose to appoint some new members to the GTAC.
Also on the agenda is a resolution honoring Greensboro Police Officer Jared Franks who died in a traffic accident in the line of duty on Nov. 10, 2019.
