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Happy Labor Day from Scoop! See you Tuesday night.

What: Greensboro City Council meeting.

When: 5:30 p.m. today

Where: Melvin Municipal Office Building, 300 W. Washington St., Greensboro.

Watch it: Time Warner Channel 13 or www.greensboro-nc.gov/citygovernment/council.

How to speak: Sign up before the meeting. Speakers have up to three minutes for items not on the agenda. The speakers-from-the-floor section is limited to 30 minutes.

On the agenda: The City Council will consider whether to allow a change to the land ordinances to allow for a strip club to be located on 4922 Mary Street.

The council will also consider adopting new design guidelines for the center city.

The Water Resources department will also ask the council to adopt new billing changes that will reduce the overdue notices water users receive from the city.

Former City Council members Florence Gatten added a new item to her resume last week: Chairwoman of the Greensboro Coliseum Commission.

The role comes with a special distinction. Gatten is, according to the city, the first woman to ever have the position in the 50-plus years the volunteer commission has been around.

Something tells us Gatten won’t be intimidated by the role. Plus, it’s a cushy gig, being perhaps the only city board that gets served a nice, hot lunch every time they meet.

Good luck in your new gig, Madam Chairwoman.

Greensboro’s rental program advisory board will take another month to consider changing the ordinance before making any recommendations to City Council.

Tuesday morning the advisory board heard from a task force appointed and asked to explore a rewrite of the ordinance that would eliminate some of the inspections under the program and focus on the worst housing.

Marlene Sanford, president of the Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition and a member of the task force, presented the task force’s recommendation. The task force – sans the two members who represent neighborhood and housing advocacy groups – suggested getting rid of the requirement that all rentals be inspected and certified.

“You are no longer guilty until proven innocent,” Sanford said.

Sanford pointed out that the city has spent $3 million -- her estimation -- inspecting luxury apartments when there are still substandard properties in Greensboro.

The task force also recommended tweaking the rules to make it easier for inspectors to review multifamily complexes.

One of the dissenting members of the task force, Beth McKee Huger of the Greensboro Housing Coalition, said her organization cannot support getting rid of the pro-active parts of the ordinance, which she said have resulted in repairs to more than 4,000 properties since its inception.

Council Robbie Perkins and other members of the board asked for the city staff’s opinion on whether the inspections program was working.

City Inspections Director Butch Simmons said it is working well in its current form, after a variety of adjustments that have been made to the original program over the years. Simmons said that includes things like the requirement that everyone get an initial inspection and a requirement in the law that that city randomly re-inspects a certain number of properties every year.

“The pro-active piece keeps everybody understanding. ‘My turn could come next time. so I have to keep my property up to a certain standard,’” Simmons said.

“I’d also like to not take any more away from this ordinance that has already been taken away from it over the years.”

Advisory board member Derrick Giles agreed that if the certification and the pro-active inspections were taken away, the program would revert to reactive program.

And Perkins took a jab at the whole process of the task force. He said he had a problem with Sanford, whom he called a lobbyist for TREBIC, presenting the ordinance change to be approved by the advisory board, which is committee that contains other TREBIC members -- including Perkins himself.

The board appeared split on whether members agreed with the task force’s proposal. Ultimately they decided to mull over the recommendation for a month and take up the discussion again at their October meeting.

Meanwhile, advocates on both sides have already begun to drum up support for their positions. We may see some at City Council next week, putting in their two cents.
 

Labor Day marks the traditional start of the Fall campaign season in North Carolina, which means you’ll be seeing a lot more political advertisements hitting the mailbox and television set, particularly in state legislative races and Congressional campaigns.

A few questions come up again and again watching looking at these campaign ads: Are the claims true? Can anyone be as truly objectionable (or desirable) as they’re made out to be in an ad? Do those footnotes really support the claims?

Well, that’s what your friendly neighborhood News & Record political reporters are here for. If you send us the ad in electronic form or can mail it to us, we’ll try to do fact checks on as many as we can. We’re most interested in fliers regarding races in Guilford, Rockingham and Davidson counties and will look at everything from the U.S. Senate race on down to county commissioner and city council campaigns. If you see an ad but aren't able to get a copy or recording, send an e-mail describing it and who aired it and we'll go looking.

E-mail: mbinker@news-record.com

U.S. Mail: Political Ads c/o Margaret Banks, News & Record, 200 East Market Street, Greensboro, NC 27420.

In case you need to brush up on your judicial candidates, you can check out a Federalist Society’s Triad Chapter event next week in Winston-Salem.

The free event will be held at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 7, at 425 Cherry Street, Winston-Salem. A pre-forum reception starts at 6:30 p.m.

The candidates include:

• Supreme Court candidate Judge Barbara Jackson
• North Carolina Court of Appeals Steelman Seat candidate Judge Sanford L. Steelman, Jr
• Elmore Seat candidates Steven Walker and Judge Rick Elmore
• Calabria Seat candidates Judge Ann Marie Calabria and Judge Jane Gray
• and Geer Seat candidates Dean Poirier and Judge Martha Geer.

Find more info

here

.

When you’ve got to get stuff done on a limited budget, sometimes you have to get creative.

For the Greensboro Coliseum staff, that means wheeling and dealing with anything they can: advertising space, VIP parking and even event tickets.

All those things have been traded for things like grading and demolition work on various Coliseum projects, going back years.

“It’s a way of reducing government spending,” Coliseum Director Matt Brown said.

In legal terms, these are trade and barter agreements. But are they legal, folks like Triad Watch have wondered?

Earlier this month City Attorney Terry Wood give the practice a thumbs up on what seems to be a technicality.

State law allows cities to barter for things like goods and services.

The law, however, requires that construction projects over a certain amount of money be publicly bid and awarded to the lowest bidder.

By that policy, it would seem as though the Coliseum violated the law by hand-picking companies to give tickets or other goodies in exchange for, as in the case of a to-be-built VIP lounge, construction of a new heating and air conditioning system.

Not so, Wood said. The law discusses an “expenditure of public money” and case law shows that must refer to actual cash.

Although the case law does not specifically talk about trade and barter agreements, Wood feels confident it applies.

“What it says is, if you are going to spend city money, you must bid it,” Wood said. “We aren’t spending city money.”

UNC School of Government officials suggested that this is kind of an iffy situation. Professor Eileen Youens suggested it would probably best to bid things like the heating system.

“It’s kind of an interesting situation. They are not actually paying for (goods or construction) with money. They are paying for them with this stuff that would be equivalent,” Youens said.

The barter process does raise some question in Wood’s mind, however. For instance, picking a vendor to barter with might mean the city doesn’t follow its own rules for trying to work with minority contractors.

He suggested the city develop some procedure to fix that issue.
 

From the latest Guilford County fundraising invite to hit the e-mail box:

House Speaker Joe Hackney will headline a fundraiser for Marcus Brandon on Sept. 8. Brandon, a Democrat, defeated Rep. Earl Jones, also a Democrat, in the May primary. He faces Republican Lonnie Wilson, of High Point, in the fall General Election.

According to an e-mail invitation, Hackney will be the "special guest" at the event, hosted at Mark Holder Jeweller on State Street in Greensboro.

Costs to attend the event range from $100 to $1,000. RSVP here.

Last night the Guilford County Commissioners approved sending a quarter-cent (0.25 cent) sales tax increase to the the ballot for the November elections.

But a number of commissioners are already wondering whether they can sell voters on a tax increase of any kind in the current economy -- especially one that was already defeated twice by voters in 2008.

Commissioners Paul Gibson has been a vocal supporter of the quarter-cent increase since the state granted the counties the ability to put it to a referendum back in 2007. But Gibson said unlike the 17 out of NC's 100 counties that have passed the increase, Guilford County has never started educating voters on the tax early enough and has never thrown its weight behind it.

"With the bond for the county jail, the sheriff did it right," Gibson said. "He got people together, he educated them on the need for it, there was a campaign, billboards, he got people on board with it. We've never done that."

While the county would be legally prohibited from spending money to convince voters one way or another, Gibson said county leaders can and should work with outside groups to make the argument that the quarter cent increase is the least painful way to increase county revenues at a time when the cash-strapped county is facing massive bond debt.

Commissioner John Parks said he'd like to see voters educated on what the increase would and wouldn' t mean. People need to understand that it won't include non-prepared food, medical equipment, motor vehicles, prescription drugs and a host of other items, Park said. He said it would also let some non-Guilford residents help to ease the burden.

"Estimates suggest that non-residents generate 20-40 percent of retail sales in Guilford County," Parks said.

Commissioner Carolyn Coleman moved to have some specific language inserted into the commissioners' proclamation on sending the increase to the ballot that would remind people exactly what they're using the money to pay for -- voter approved bond debt for education, law enforcement and parks and recreation. Coleman said she knows that language won't appear on the ballot, but she still plans to tell people exactly where the money's going when she talks to her constituents about it.

Wednesday's story about the City Council's trash discussions didn't get into the depths of the work done by a group of citizens on the issue.

Councilman Jim Kee created an Environmental Safety Advisory Committee to help review those requests for proposals the city got. The members included two former council members and a variety of residents.

According to the report the group submitted to the City Council Tuesday, they evaluated the companies based on the cost to the city, what they offered the community, environmental impacts and company history.

The group traveled to Raleigh, Durham and Columbia, South Carolina to tour various facilities.

They offered Kee and the other council members three recommendations:

• Find a location other than the White Street Landfill for solid waste disposal.
• Consider advanced technology for trash disposal.
• Consider the impact the landfill has on the community and its impact on economic development.

The committee also suggested three companies they liked: local groups CICO and Ulturnagen, and Waste Connections.

What, if anything, the council will do with these suggestions is not clear. But the committee itself was an interesting idea -- and a campaign promise of Kee's. He will be one to watch on this issue, not only because it is in his council district, but because he is taking a very different approach on the issue than the previous two district council reps.

Now here is one way to get people to recycle: buy bins that will tattle on folks who don't recycle regularly.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother will hang out in Clevelanders' trash cans, but the city plans to sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling -- and fine them $100 if they don't.

The move is part of a high-tech collection system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes.

The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn't been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.

Recycling saves the city the $30 a ton dumping fee, and earns it $26 a ton. So the move is partially about the dollar sign. Perhaps Greensboro City Council should consider optimizing its recycling program too, while it considers its trash disposal options.

Read the whole story here.