Looking back at year of mishaps

The most important event in Guilford County politics in 2012 happened in 2011.

That's because 2011 is the year Republican legislators in Raleigh shrunk the Guilford County Board of Commissioners from 11 members to nine and drew new district lines that made it likely that Guilford County would be run by a Republican majority for years to come. Going into the November election, many people thought Guilford County might remain a county controlled by Democrats. However, in hindsight, it turns out the Republicans in Raleigh did their work well.

Before that change, Guilford County had the largest board of any county in the state – not to mention one of the most contentious. Now the board should be a little more manageable and a little calmer. Many other changes have taken place this year as well, as a result of Guilford County's radical political makeover.

In early 2012, it looked like Guilford County's new board structure might be in jeopardy due to a lawsuit over a lack of representation in a newly formed District 6. However, on Thursday, Feb. 23, US District Court Middle District of North Carolina Judge William Osteen slated an election to provide representation for District 6 while keeping the basic structure of the redistricting in place.

On Tuesday, Nov. 6, the Republican plan that had begun a year and a half earlier in Raleigh was hatched in Guilford County.

In the election, former Democratic Commissioner Kirk Perkins, who had been a commissioner for eight years, lost to Republican newcomer Alan Branson in District 4, and, in a big shocker for many political observers, Paul Gibson, a highly popular at-large commissioner for the previous eight years, lost the District 5 race to Republican Jeff Phillips – a candidate whose only prior political experience was a failed congressional race two years earlier.

Those two victories, along with Republican Hank Henning's defeat of Linda Kellerman in District 6, gave the Republicans a 5-to-4 majority on the board – which hadn't seen a Republican majority in 14 years.

The new board proceeded to elect a Republican chairman, Linda Shaw, as well as a Republican vice chairman, Bill Bencini.

So Guilford County government at the end of 2012 looks markedly different than it did at the start of the year.

As important as the new arrivals were to the board in 2012, the departure of the commissioners who had been a part of the board for many years was even more profound.

Gone was Commissioner Skip Alston, who had served on the board for 20 years and been chairman for the last four. Also gone was 12-year Commissioner Billy Yow, the county's fiery conservative counterweight to the liberal Alston.

Commissioners John Parks and Mike Winstead were also off the board, and the new board – which was made up of younger faces – had lost 76 years of commissioner experience.

Citizens are still waiting for perhaps the most important change in county government: In 2012, Guilford County Manager Brenda Jones Fox announced she would resign on Jan. 31, 2013.

Sometimes dramatic change is a thing to worry about. However, in the case of Guilford County, big changes from the recent past are a very welcome occurrence. From October 2010 straight through the end of 2011, Guilford County saw a string of one scandal after another and, at the beginning of 2012, it would have been hard to imagine that Guilford County could continue to generate such an impressive number of scandals. However, this year Guilford County government did its best to keep the scandals and outrageous actions at 2011 levels.

In May, The Rhinoceros Times reported that Fox, before announcing her retirement, had slipped into the board's consent agenda a removal of the cap on retirement bonuses for long-time employees such as herself. The commissioners therefore unknowingly approved a $61,000 bonus for Fox after failing to read the fine print in their meeting packets.

Fox then threatened to sue the county if the commissioners took her large bonus away. However, the commissioners still voted to reinstate the cap, thus doing away with Fox's large retirement bonus. Fox has not sued as of yet, and it will be interesting to see what she does once she's out of county government.

In June, The Rhinoceros Times revealed that Fox was under investigation by the FBI and the IRS for several questionable actions she had taken in 2010 and 2011 – as well as for a shady deal she orchestrated with Wachovia Bank several years earlier.

The federal agents were interested in Fox's secret real estate deal in 2010, when she signed over the county's entire real estate acquisition rights to a High Point Realtor who, Fox claimed, walked into her office on a cold call.

The federal agents were also interested – the highly unusual circumstances surrounding the purchase of a building at 325 E. Russell Ave. in High Point, which the county purchased, without any attempt to negotiate the price, from a close friend of former Commissioner Steve Arnold.

Fox was front and center on many other scandals in 2012 as well, but none of it was enough to get the willfully negligent majority of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners to fire Fox. However, one commissioner finally made that motion in 2012: At a meeting in June, out of the blue, former Commissioner Perkins blurted out a motion to fire Fox.

Though there were certainly other commissioners who wanted Fox gone, Perkins' motion failed to get a second from the stunned board. Some commissioners said later they were caught totally by surprise by the motion. For years, Perkins had remained steadfast in his desire to keep Fox as county manager, and, as Perkins' critics pointed out, it was only after the election heated up and Perkins found himself in a tight race – one he eventually lost – that Perkins made the motion, which he did without so much as consulting other commissioners who he was well aware wanted Fox gone.

One particularly interesting major mishap this year happened when Fox, along with Tax Department Director Ben Chavis, worked very hard behind the scenes to open a county-run DMV office that would have operated out of the Tax Department's downtown Greensboro headquarters in the Independence Building.

The plan to have Guilford County run a DMV office was voted down overwhelmingly by the Board of Commissioners once the board found out about it in The Rhinoceros Times – but that was only after Guilford County staff had invested many man hours and other resources into the failed initiative.

Also, because Guilford County drew out the process for so long, that meant much longer lines than usual for county residents at the county's two open DMV offices. In August, after Guilford County's failed attempt to open a DMV office downtown, a private vendor finally opened a new DMV office in Golden Gate Shopping Center – the same shopping center where a DMV office had been shut down by the state in 2010 due to allegations of fraud.

In October 2012, the Board of Commissioners went into a closed session where staff discussed giving raises to 15 county department heads, seven of whom the board sets salaries for. County staff claims the commissioners approved the raises by consent. However, it's hard to know because there was no vote in open session as is required by law.

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On Thursday, Dec. 13, the new Board of Commissioners, in its first regular meeting, got off to an inauspicious start by voting to uphold the raises for department heads that staff had illegally given out. Only Phillips and Branson voted against affirming the raises.

In 2012, Guilford County continued to destroy the long-standing relationships it has had for years and years with other local governments. For instance, the county has always outsourced the operation and maintenance of its parks to the cities of Greensboro and Burlington and the towns of Gibsonville and Jamestown. However, in 2012, the county decided to end those relationships and instead bring all park operation and maintenance in house. That will happen on Tuesday, Jan. 1, and it remains to be seen how that will work out for the county. Some county officials are very apprehensive about the prospects of the new Guilford County parks and recreation department.

In 2012, Fox angered many City of Greensboro employees, as well as state court workers, when she kicked those city and court workers out of county parking places they had had for years – in some cases, 30 years. The parking spots went to county employees who had been on a waiting list for parking, and that move led to the dissolution of other longstanding agreements between the county and the city.

Fox also upset many residents in eastern Guilford County when she filed to rezone hundreds of acres of the Guilford County Prison Farm from agricultural to corporate park. A food distribution company had shown interest in building a large facility on the Prison Farm land, but that company pulled out and, even after it did, Fox continued with her rezoning efforts.

Fox does not own the property; the county does. Her attempt to rezone the property was what is known as a "third party" rezoning, and the move greatly alienated county residents in the area. The Guilford County Planning Board shot the idea down quickly when they heard Fox's request.

One of the biggest advances for the county is that, in 2012, the county finally opened its giant 1,032-bed jail in downtown Greensboro. The jail, which cost nearly $100 million fully furnished, was the largest single construction project in Guilford County history and it went off without a hitch.

Well, almost without a hitch: Guilford County may be the only county in the world that could put a giant labor-intensive building in the middle of a downtown area already strapped for parking without planning any parking for the new facility.

The funny thing about the situation is that Guilford County owned the giant parking lot behind the YMCA that was right across the street from the new jail. Many said that lot would be an excellent parking lot for the jail and also a perfect site for a large parking deck to serve the jail and other facilities in the area. However, in one of the most bizarre decisions of the year, the Board of Commissioners voted to sell that lot to the YMCA for $2 million rather than keep the prime property for much needed jail parking.

Still, Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes is delighted to finally have his new jail that he fought for for years, even if his employees have nowhere to park.

On Thursday, June 7, the 2012-2013 county budget was adopted by a unanimous vote for the first time since anyone in county government can remember, and the second surprise was that the budget contained a tax decrease – the first time a Guilford County budget has brought taxes down in 14 years. That is a little deceptive, however, because the commissioners were helped by a countywide revaluation of property – which happens every eight years – a revaluation that left many questions in its wake. Some citizens are now paying a lower rate but paying more in taxes due to a higher assessed value on their property.

The 2012-2013 county budget, which was thrown together quickly in the days leading up to the June 7 commissioners meeting where it was adopted, lowered the county's property tax rate to 78.04 cents per $100 of property value from the previous rate of 78.24 cents.

Looking forward, the good news is that, despite the supposedly unlucky number 13 in the year 2013, next year should be a much better year for Guilford County government than recent years – largely because the county will have a new manager.

The commissioners now seem interested in finding a new county manager who is very different from Fox. Many commissioners have expressed a desire to find an open manager who works well with others and can hopefully repair the damage Fox and her administration has done in recent years.

Given the last several years of county government, there's really only one direction to go. It's hard to imagine that the new board could select a worse manager, and some new commissioners have expressed a desire to provide actual oversight in 2013, rather than to continue the board's tradition of turning a blind eye to wrongdoing and failing to honor the duties they swore to uphold.