I find it curious that the very folks you would think stand the most to gain from the 'millions sought to groom downtown' (N&R) are saying 'no thanks, we're doing fine'.
Milton Kearn and Joey Medaloni are two of the neo-founding fathers of our center city's resurgence as the happening place to be. Without overt help from the taxpayers, Action Greensboro, or any other organization who depends on tax money/exemption to make things happen, these two men double-handedly started the downtown redevelopment wave that so many others are now clamoring to ride upon.
So where Ray Gibbs, president of Downtown Greensboro, Inc. (a publicly funded organization), goes all alarmist on us with this piece of hyperbole"...We've got thousands of people out there tripping on sidewalks." Kearn, who walks more downtown sidewalks every day than anyone else in Greensboro, sees things a little differently, "...While there may be cracks in the sidewalk, those could be fixed without a grand redesign of the street."
Where Action Greensboro proposes building three new parking structures within the organization's $84M wish list for downtown improvements, club owner Medaloni is making sure the existing parking decks are fully utilized by spending his own money to station some of his security people in the structures to make sure the late-night crowds feel safe.
Joey and Milton obviously know the value of a dollar and where those dollars need to be spent for the maximum benefit. Others... not so much.
Reporter Matt Williams states in the opening paragraph of his article that it only took "$1 million in 1990 to spruce up Elm Street". For the unknowing, that pitance was spent just a decade ago to tear out the very expensive, ill-conceived remnants of our 'downtown-as-mall' project that all but choked the life out of not only Greensboro's center city... but hundreds of other downtowns across the nation. That idea was heralded by the hired city-planning consultants of the late 1970's and implemented by the City Councils of the day as the needed way to combat the draw of suburban shopping centers. In other words, we threw a little smart money around 10 years ago to fix the aftermath of throwing a ton of trend-following dumb money around some years earlier around the time of Mayor Melvin's tenure.
Let's go the smart money route again this time around. Sure downtown needs some infrastructure improvements and perhaps even a new parking deck down along South Elm Street, but first we need to prioritize the essential projects and jettison the frivolous ones.
I think we should hire Milton Kearn and Joey Medaloni to parse the AG wish-list into a 'need-list' and then let the taxpayers vote the financing bonds for the truly needed projects up or down.
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Oh, and one more thing. What's wrong with this picture of minimal-cost way to promote downtown business? Again, from Williams' reporting:
"There are other ways to free up parking for the late-night crowds. A city-owned parking lot for employees at the bus station has been virtually unused for more than a year. Gibbs said he's tried to persuade the city to raise the gates at night to accommodate more cars."
So why won't the city 'raise the gates'? Sandy? Tom?
8:57:42 AM 
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