The Best Laid Plans of Perkins

This is the story of 2012 in Greensboro, also known as how Mayor Robbie Perkins lost the Perkinettes or how not to build a music hall.

One theme that has played out over and over again during the year is just how fat the Greensboro budget is. At the beginning of 2012, this City Council, with a new mayor and three new members, was told that it was facing about a $5 million deficit if councilmembers didn't make some cuts in the upcoming budget. The City Council effectively ignored the budget and instead focused on getting the music hall built downtown, known to supporters as the Greensboro Performing Arts Center (GPAC).

But look at what the City Council has done with that $5 million deficit. Nothing of note was cut, but the city wrote a check for almost $2 million for the old YWCA and then paid to have it torn down. The city didn't finance it or make any cuts, it just wrote a check for more than the full asking price.

Perkins is president of NAI Piedmont Triad Commercial Real Estate. It would be interesting to know how many times his company has paid more than the full asking price for a piece of property that has been on the market for over a year and had no offers. City Manager Denise Turner Roth was told to negotiate a price. She didn't negotiate them down a dollar, and ended up paying more than the asking price. There are problems with having a city manager with virtually no business or management experience.

But taxpayers might want to ask how a city that was facing a $5 million deficit could suddenly write a check for $2 million. The city also wrote checks for $263,000 for the music hall task force and consultants. Nobody in city government has been told how all the music hall money was spent, but the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro assures the city that it was well spent.

According to Councilmember Jim Kee, $100,000 of the $450,000 spent by the Community Foundation was used to pay Ross Harris, who is paid manager of the all-volunteer GPAC Task Force. Harris in 2011 was the manager for the Perkins' campaign for mayor. Rarely has Greensboro seen such obvious patronage on a city level.

The City Council also found $100,000 in incentives for a downtown grocery store and $200,000 for a downtown Mexican restaurant. It seems the City Council saw a great shortage of Mexican restaurants in Greensboro.

Back to the music hall that has been an obsession of Perkins and his council. It seems fitting that the music hall got its beginning in a series of secret closed meetings. At the very beginning of 2012, then-interim City Manager Roth and Coliseum Manager Matt Brown held a private meeting with each councilmember in order for Brown to pitch improvements to the Coliseum Complex, including a new performing arts center. Brown had to give the same presentation nine times and Roth had to listen to it nine times, but since they wanted the meetings to be secret and private it was a price they were willing to pay.

The estimated cost of the new performing arts center built on the site of War Memorial Auditorium was $40 million, and Brown was proposing a $30 million bond be placed on the ballot. Two such bonds have already been voted down.

When this was brought up at the budget retreat in January, it took over. There was very little talk of the budget at the retreat and lots of talk of the new music hall, which Perkins said should be built downtown even though the figures showed it would cost up to $20 million more to build it there.

By now the price has gone up to $60 million, not including land costs or, for that matter, the cost of storm water runoff.

The council appointed an 80-member task force that held meeting after meeting mostly to talk about how great a new performing arts center would be, but sometimes to hear from the public about some potential problems. No one outright opposed it, but there was lots of opposition to bonds.

The music hall was an idea that had not been discussed during the 2011 campaign. The issue then was jobs. But Perkins took it on as a personal cause and a new music hall went from an interesting idea to something "Greensboro had to have to be competitive." It became the number-one priority, if not of the council, of Perkins.

The plan was to put a bond on the ballot in November, and the council took two of the three votes necessary to put the item on the ballot. During both votes Councilmember Yvonne Johnson made it clear that she was voting to continue the process, but not to put it on the ballot.

District 2 Councilmember Kee said that his constituents just weren't that interested. District 5 Councilmember Trudy Wade said at a community meeting she had asked for a show of hands of people who supported the GPAC and no one raised their hand.

The decision was made not to try for a November bond referendum but a discussion was held on holding a special election in the spring of 2013. The idea is that with nothing else on the ballot the turnout would be incredibly low. The theory being it is easier to get people out to vote for something than against something.

Then the city finance department came up with a plan to finance the music hall with bonds that don't have to be voted on by the people. The interest rate is higher than the rate on general obligation bonds, which is the kind the people approve, but it is a way to finance projects that the people don't want.

Councilmembers Nancy Vaughan and Zack Matheny discovered that if the city chose to go that route, it would use up all of the city's available borrowing capacity. So if there were a cost overrun, or an emergency, then the city would not be able to borrow the money to pay for it.

Considering how much money the city has lying around that might not be a problem.

But it was enough of a problem that Wade, at her last meeting before resigning to take her state Senate seat, made a motion to put the bonds for the proposed music hall on the ballot in November 2013. The motion passed 7 to 2 with only Councilmembers Dianne Bellamy-Small and Nancy Hoffmann voting against it. Evidently Hoffmann didn't get the nod from Perkins on how to vote. In her first year in office Hoffmann has been the most loyal of Perkinettes.

When the YWCA was bought Perkins said it absolutely was not being bought for the performing arts center. But then the city hired consultants who said that was the best site and the only site they really considered. It is now the accepted site in part because it is "free." Isn't it amazing? The taxpayers paid nearly $2 million for that site and now it is free.

One of the plots of 2012 was the rivalry between Wade and Perkins. Wade is a conservative and Perkins is so liberal he makes some of Greensboro's more liberal mayors like Carolyn Allen, appear if not conservative, at least moderate. But Wade, who often cast the lone vote against some of the schemes dreamed up by Perkins, managed to get a lot done.

For instance, the city staff plan was to renew the contracts with Republic Waste Services to dispose of Greensboro's garbage, and with ReCommunity to take care of recycling for the city, without putting the contracts out for bid.

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City staff didn't have any idea who else was available. Hoffmann, who generally says next to nothing, made the bizarre statement that it was none of Greensboro's business how much ReCommunity was paid for the recycling collected from Greensboro citizens.

Wade insisted that the city put the contracts out for bids and in the end the taxpayers of Greensboro saved several million dollars.

The Rhino Times had a part in causing the city to hire a second consultant to consider the bids on the garbage contract when we reported that the consultant hired by the city had a possible conflict of interest.

It was also discovered that Matheny worked for a company that was in direct competition with one of the companies bidding on the contract. But it was determined that was not a conflict of interest.

The recycling contract was also a huge mess, which at least pointed out to the City Council what a terrible contract the city had had before. Once again the staff was insistent that the city stay with the same contractor, but at least the city is now being paid for its recycling rather than paying someone to recycle the city's recyclables.

Perkins and his followers are supposed to be this savvy group that knows how to get things done, but they proved to be complete incompetents when they tried to get a ticket tax implemented to help pay for the music hall. The council asked soon-to-be-former Democratic state Sen. Don Vaughan, the husband of Councilmember Nancy Vaughan, to introduce the bill.

In the past this might have been a smart move, but evidently unbeknownst to the leadership on the Greensboro City Council, the Republicans had won a majority of both the state House and state Senate. The bill didn't even get introduced because Republican state Rep. John Blust, who wasn't even informed about the bill, had some questions when he found out about it.

Later when the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce wanted to get the Jordan Lake Rules implementation delayed, they called Blust and it was done in no time.

Note to the City Council: If you want to get something done in Raleigh, call a Republican. They now control everything.

This City Council hardly talked about the city budget, allowing the city staff to handle it. Since the City Council could write a check for any amount it wanted at any meeting, the councilmembers didn't complain. The fact that rather than the city having all that money in the bank, the taxpayers could have been given a tax cut never seemed to occur to anyone other than Wade.

Perkins is known for his short attention span, and when a topic like the budget comes up he will suggest that the councilmembers read the material and call staff if they have any questions.

Perkins and the Perkinettes moaned and wailed all during Mayor Bill Knight's administration that the people who came to meetings to speak were not being treated properly. However, when a whole group of people wanted to talk about the right to legally carry concealed weapons, Perkins didn't want to hear it and after making them wait hours refused to let them speak, saying they would have to come back at a future meeting.

Many came back and spoke, and the City Council still voted to make it illegal to carry concealed weapons in city parks, even for those with concealed carry permits.

Perkins and the Perkinettes also passed a resolution in favor of same-sex marriage. The state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman passed by an overwhelming margin in North Carolina in May.

This City Council has shown a knack for doing things in the most expensive and complicated manner possible. It came to the attention of the council that food trucks were not allowed in the Central Business District. Eventually the council fixed this by allowing food trucks to operate on private property in the Central Business District like the rest of the city.

But first the city staff came up with a way to spend a wasteful amount of taxpayer money for a pilot program this fall. It involved blocking a street every weekday and having a mid-level city employee on hand at lunch for two months. What it proved is that some people like food trucks. Something that should have taken a two-minute discussion and vote turned into a months' long process that hurt restaurants downtown because there was a designated food truck zone on a blocked-off city street that got free advertising on the city website.

When downtown residents and office workers asked for some relief from one particular rooftop bar that plays music really loud into the wee hours of the morning, rather than giving the people who live and work downtown some relief, this City Council voted to increase the legal decibel level. So now that Greensboro has the ordinance with the loudest allowable noise level in the state, thus prompting the new city motto: "Greensboro – First in Noise."

During 2012, the libel lawsuit filed against The Rhino Times and Jerry Bledsoe for the Cops in Black & White series in 2007 finally ended, but not without one more trip to court. The lawsuit had been thrown out of court on summary judgment, a decision that was then upheld by a unanimous decision of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. After the time period ended to appeal that decision, we assumed the case was over and retired Police Officer Julius Fulmore and Police Capt. Brian James, who had been ordered by the judge to pay court costs, would do so.

Their attorney challenged the court costs and our attorney, Seth Cohen of Smith, James, Rowlett & Cohen, had to take them back to court to have a judge set the exact amount of the court costs, which the judge did, and was what Cohen said it was. Cohen won every single time he appeared in court for this case, but despite his efforts it still dragged on for nearly five years.

Court costs, by the way, are the cost of going to court, taking depositions and making copies, but not attorney's fees. So we were reimbursed a pittance compared to what we spent.

Wade was serving two masters during most of the year: She was serving as the only conservative on the Greensboro City Council and running for a seat in the state Senate – a race that she won handily.

In May, Wade won the Republican primary against Justin Conrad, and High Point City Councilmember Latimer Alexander.

But her race in November against Democrat Myra Slone did allow News & Record reporter Joe Killian to come up with one of his unique stories. According to Killian, in July a former News & Record reporter Eric Townsend was push polled by the Wade campaign. It was a bizarre story from the beginning, and Wade demanded that the State Board of Elections investigate. The state board didn't find much of anything, which is not surprising considering the source.

Wade's final battle for the year with Perkins was over her replacement on the City Council. Wade wanted Republican Tony Wilkins, a member of the Coliseum commission and, earlier in 2012, a candidate for Guilford County Commissioner. Perkins wanted anybody but Wilkins and tried to get support for several candidates. In the end, Bellamy-Small presented some caricatures that Wilkins had done of her and former Councilmember Goldie Wells on his blog site. She said they were racist. What she and Perkins didn't show anybody were the 15 other caricatures of white people, including several of Perkins that Wilkins had done.

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The majority of the City Council didn't buy Perkins' attempted smear campaign and Wilkins was elected to replace Wade.

In fact, this was the final straw for some of the Perkinettes, who go into 2013 with a mandate to represent their constituents, not just sing back up.