Remove ImagesPage 2 Column
Business Unfriendly
October 11, 2012
Go to any Greensboro City Council meeting and you are more than likely to hear one or several city councilmembers talk about being "business friendly," and the importance of small businesses to the area economy.
Don't be fooled; it's all talk. Greensboro city government is business unfriendly. The city staff doesn't even know what business friendly means, and the Greensboro City Council pays no attention to what the city staff is actually doing day in and day out.
A case in point is the recent lawsuit filed against the city by Signature Property Group. One city employee for whatever reason decided that she didn't like the way Signature did business. In the end, Signature had to take the city to court to get any kind of a fair hearing. According to Mayor Robbie Perkins, in court Signature Property got the decision it wanted.
City Councilmember Zack Matheny said that Yamile Nazar, the Enforcement and Youth Services Division manager for the Greensboro Human Relations Department, filed the complaint. He said about the Signature Property Group situation, "This seems to be one city employee's personal agenda to go after small businesses. I don't understand why."
The Greensboro City Council could put a stop to this kind of behavior, but it won't. The question that should be asked is, why not? Why do the members of the Greensboro City Council – who will be running all over Greensboro next year talking about how business friendly they are and how important it is to keep jobs in Greensboro – allow the city staff to constantly and for no good reason harass local small businesses.
Seth Coker of Signature Property Group said they felt like they had no choice but to sue the city in order to get a fair hearing. The problem the Human Relations Department had with Signature was that Signature charged people without a Social Security number or a credit history two months security deposit instead of one month, and the percentage of units they would rent to people without Social Security numbers and credit histories was limited.
Coker said that the city staff didn't even seem to understand the need for different credit qualifications for different communities based on the rent. He also said that the solution the city offered for people with no Social Security number and no credit history was not to rent to them. To a layman that seems even more discriminatory, but according to the Human Relations Department that is what Signature should have been doing.
Coker said that some foreign students, professors and employees of multinational companies who are only going to be in this country for a relatively short period of time don't need Social Security numbers, but they do need a place to live. So Signature came up with what they believed was a fair way to rent to people without credit histories or Social Security numbers. From a business standpoint it is certainly more of a risk to rent to people without a credit history or Social Security number, and therefore an increased deposit makes sense. But Coker said the Human Relations Department saw this as discrimination.
It appears the way this was set up the complaint came from the Human Relations Department. Then the Human Relations Department determined that it was a valid complaint, and then the Human Relations Department was going to have an administrative panel make a ruling on the complaint.
Coker said it didn't seem fair to them for the Human Relations Department to be the complaining witness, the arresting officer, the judge and the jury in the case, so they were forced to sue. When they got a hearing before a real judge, Signature received a favorable ruling.
Instead of spending its time Tuesday, Oct. 2 arguing about a Supreme Court decision over which the City Council has no control, the City Council could have tried to do something to make the city a little more business friendly.
One key to making the city more business friendly is to change the corporate culture of city hall, which is easier said than done. The Greensboro city government has been extremely business unfriendly for decades, and there is no impetus to change. Perkins will tell you that in his business he finds the city staff to be helpful, courteous, kind and all of that, but we can't all be mayor. During most of the time he has been in business in Greensboro Perkins has been on the City Council. It should surprise no one that city councilmembers get good treatment from the city staff.
Most of us who are not on the City Council find the staff maddeningly ignorant of how private business actually operates.
The city will block off or even rent to a third party parking spaces in front of a downtown business and never inform the business about why their customers can't park on the city street in front of their business or how long it will be. Perkins likes to compare the downtown to a shopping center. Imagine if a shopping center manager decided to rent the parking spaces in front of Target or Wall Mart to a third party without consulting those retail establishments.
The city will block off streets for events with no regard or notice given to the businesses affected.
The new "business friendly" entrance to city hall on Washington Street looks like it should be the entrance to Fort Knox. The cashiers are all behind bulletproof glass and a security guard sits behind a bulletproof glass wall watching every one who comes in to pay the city or get a permit. The city evidently believes that many nefarious people get permits and pay bills. If this is supposed to give Greensboro residents a warm fuzzy feeling about their city government, maybe the city should try again and actually allow people to speak to city employees face to face.
But it's hard to beat the privilege license for an example of how unfriendly to small businesses Greensboro is – from the way it is implemented to the tax itself. Imagine a reverse income tax scale based on gross income with no deductions, where those who made $50,000 a year were taxed at a 25 percent rate and those who made $5 million were taxed at a 0.5 percent rate, and those who made $50 million were taxed at an 0.05 percent rate. That is how the privilege license works except it is much worse. Big businesses pay nearly nothing compared to their gross income and small businesses pay a percentage of their gross income. It is the epitome of small business unfriendly.
The City Council is well aware of this, but year after year does nothing. The council doesn't even insist that the city reform the way that it collects the tax so that people paying the tax are not mistreated.