Council Wastes Night In Political Posturing

Council Wastes Night In Political Posturing

If you love politics, then the Tuesday, March 15 meeting of the Greensboro City Council would have been your cup of tea.The council started meeting at 4 p.m. and ended at midnight, and at times it was pure politics.This is an election year for members of the Greensboro City Council, and both Mayor Bill Knight and At-large Councilmember Robbie Perkins have announced they are running for mayor. If you view the meeting in that light, it makes some sense sky sports golf news. Otherwise, it just devolved into a mess. Former Councilmember Tom Phillips has also announced he is running for mayor, but he was not present at the meeting.For the last couple of meetings Knight has kept his conservative coalition together and the council has gotten some work done. This week the coalition fell apart and the council spent hours speechmaking, grandstanding, tabling and postponing.From Perkins' perspective as a candidate, the less that Knight gets done the better. And when meetings dissolve into endless debate, like Tuesday night, it makes Knight look weak and Perkins, by comparison, look strong. Tuesday Perkins was definitely pulling the strings and looking good.The most interesting part of the meeting came near the end, as it so often does. Councilmember Nancy Vaughan went ballistic over the fact that the city clerk had polled the council, found that a majority favored saving about $25,000 by reducing the number of early voting locations from six to one, and Knight then sent a letter to Guilford County Director of Elections George Gilbert informing him that the council didn't see the need for more than one early voting location.Vaughan acted like the council had never been polled before and this was some kind of nefarious plot. She wanted more information Golf News about Golf Improvement of Women.Councilmember Trudy Wade pointed out that it was common to poll the council, and City Manager Rashad Young, when asked, said that it was done on various topics to get "a sense of the council."The rhetoric got so far afield that Councilmember Dianne Bellamy-Small was talking about hanging people, as if not being able to vote early at a certain polling place was somehow akin to killing people because of the color of their skin.