Last night, WFMY News 2 reported some good news for The Aycock Neighborhood.
During the contentious days last October building up to the Guilford County Board of Commissioner's vote on the land swap agreement that cleared the way for the new Bellmeade baseball stadium, at-the-time Board Chairman Mike Barber invited me to lunch.
We in Aycock had just finished the initial work on our plans (PDF,160 pages) for War Memorial Stadium and other important improvements to our neighborhood that cost us over $70,000 that we raised ourselves. To help make it happen, the neighborhood borrowed $20,000 from Preservation Greensboro, Inc. and set up a payment schedule with them to repay the loan. We made the first installment of $2K in July with money raised with a very successful Neighborhood Tour. Subsequent fundraisers over the next five years were scheduled to pay the balance of the loan.
Aycock gained a lot of support for our plans from the public and that translated to a sticky situation for the Commissioners: How to support an extraordinary grassroots neighborhood vision and still get the County the new DSS Building? Mike Barber had a plan.
During our lunch meeting last year, Mike committed to help Aycock execute our plan by offering the County's grant writer to search for available funding sources. Later that night, Mike went before the Commissioners and stated that the Aycock Plans for neighborhood improvement were every bit as important as the new stadium/DSS land swap and that both should get done.
Last night, Mike agreed to ask the Board of Commissioners to pay off the $18K balance of the loan for us. Aycock's representative and now Board Chairman Skip Alston agrees that it is a good idea and will support the initiative.
Thank you Mike, for being a man of your word. We are still looking forward to working with the grant writer to execute our now-fleshed-out Stategic Plan, which we will present to City Council next Tuesday.
10:13:47 AM 
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