The next Schmoozefest is Thursday, March 29 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Community Theatre of Greensboro at 520 S. Elm St. There is plenty of parking at the Railyard, which can be entered from Barnhardt or Lewis streets. The entrance to the Schmoozefest is off the alley next to the theater. Free snacks, beer and wine will be provided to all business professionals who sign in and get a name tag while supplies last.
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With Greensboro in the hunt for a new city manager, there are some danger signals out there. Riverside, California, a city of about 320,000 – which puts it in the same small city category as Greensboro with over 280,000 in population – is paying its city manager $471,000 a year. Since it seems everything in this country starts in California and moves east, in Greensboro we can expect to more than double the city manager’s salary, which is currently right at $200,000, in the not too distant future.
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Downtown Greensboro needs more public bathrooms. This conclusion is the result of an exhaustive study I have been working on for the past six months. It’s actually not that exhaustive, but it is fairly constant.
The old Investors Title Insurance Building at the end of our alley is being renovated and, by the way, is going to be a great addition to the downtown. The glass facade of the formerly nondescript building has been removed revealing beautiful brickwork underneath, including some arched windows.
Because of that work, there is a porta-potty at the end of the alley in view of the window by my desk. That porta-potty gets used all the time, not just by the workers, but by people walking past. Some of these people appear to be carrying all of their worldly possessions, some do not. It seems if you are in downtown Greensboro and have to go, you don’t have many options and a porta-potty is considered by many to be a good option.
When the Greensboro Bats were playing in War Memorial Stadium and the toilets regularly overflowed when the stadium was full, the city’s solution was not to repair the ancient plumbing in the city-owned stadium but to place a number of porta-potties in the stadium.
Perhaps the city should consider doing the same for the downtown. If it was good enough for people who had bought tickets to attend an event at a city-owned stadium, it should be good enough for people walking around downtown.
Greensboro could become known as porta-potty city.
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City offices and most services are closed Friday, March 30, for “spring break.” Isn’t it interesting that “spring break” for the city always falls on Good Friday, the Friday before Easter? Since Easter can be any Sunday from March 21 to April 25, it’s silly for the City of Greensboro to pretend that this holiday is not connected to the Christian holy day of Easter.
Why not be honest and admit that this is not just some random day off for city employees but a day off in recognition of the Christian celebration of Easter?
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I expected to write an article about the new Greensboro Minority and Women Business Enterprise (MWBE) disparity study this week. I have a copy of the study and have read most of it. I’m pretty good with government reports. I’ve been reading them for over 30 years and I’ve even read a handful of disparity studies, but I couldn’t make enough sense out of this one to write much about it.
The City Council is holding a work session on the disparity study on Tuesday, April 3, and I’m hoping the explanation will be in plain English.
Usually there is an executive summary with these reports that gives the basics, followed by all the statistical information. I haven’t found the executive summary, if there is one, and can’t follow the statistical information.
But I did note that the statistical area that the consultants studied included Warren County, a small rural county about two hours to the northeast. It’s hard to imagine any contractor from Warren County driving past Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill to come to Greensboro to do a small construction job, and if an MWBE contractor did come to Greensboro from Warren County, that wouldn’t count as an MWBE contractor for Greensboro because it is outside the designated area.
That is only one example of why I’m confused. I hope to be able to explain it next week.
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I haven’t seen A Wrinkle in Time and don’t plan to. But that’s not going to stop me from writing about it. The director, following the lead of Hillary Clinton, is claiming that people who don’t like the film are racist.
But from what I’ve read, the problem with the film is that it is an adaptation of a Christian book – a book where Christian themes underlie everything.
The writer and director decided to remove the Christian themes. This is akin to taking a war book, say Catch-22, and removing the war.
The book makes no sense without the war. The vast majority of Catch-22 is not about being shot at or shooting or dropping bombs. There are a multitude of great scenes that aren’t about war at all, but if you remove the war the book makes no sense. Or MASH, about the Korean War. I would argue that the majority of what most Americans know about the Korean War comes from MASH. Remove the war from MASH and it makes absolutely no sense, although I don’t remember anyone in the book, movie or television show firing a gun.
You can’t take the Christianity out of a Christian story and expect it to hold together.
