news-record.com

For one brief, unsettling moment, the perfectly reasonable debate over the merits of a proposed new luxury hotel in downtown Greensboro turned ugly.

 “There are a bunch of citizens who are talking about a civil rights march in front of the museum,” on Feb. 1, local hotelier Mike Weaver said he’d been told by county commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston.

Alston, who is African American, was referring to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in downtown Greensboro, which officially opens Monday.

Weaver’s transgression? He and his business partner, Dennis Quaintance, who are white, had dared request that public documents about the $54 million Ole Asheboro Hotel project, which involves government financing, be made (horror of horrors!) public.

Among those mulling the protest option were another African American public official, school board member Deena Hayes, and members of the Ole Asheboro Neighborhood Association, a partner in the new hotel effort.

Now coolers heads have prevailed. “There will be no demonstration,” Alston said Monday. “That’s been cleared up now.”

Alston, who is a broker for the hotel project,  said he personally wasn’t threatening the protest — that others were concerned the proposed hotel was the target of racism because it would be 51 percent owned by African Americans.

But Weaver said Monday that he’d heard Alston’s words as many read them in Saturday’s News & Record — as a threat from Alston, not someone else.

Alston sounded more conciliatory Monday.  “I don’t think it’s a racial thing,” Alston said of the racism allegations. “It’s strictly a business deal.”

As for Weaver and Quaintance’s reasons for wanting more transparency in the hotel deal, they’re beside the point. When the ownership group of the hotel chose to seek financing through a government stimulus program, it became accountable to the taxpayers. That includes competing hoteliers.

Quaintance and Weaver  have said they will sue for access to the documents, if need be. Alston said that won’t be necessary. “He should be able to get anything he wants,” Alston said of Weaver.

Meanwhile, Alston’s role as a broker for the new hotel remains inherently a conflict of interest. For instance, he has recused himself from votes regarding the hotel, but sees nothing wrong with speaking to City Council members on behalf of the project. By North Carolina’s flimsy conflict-of-interest laws, that may not be illegal, but it’s still wrong.

Finally, the civil rights museum should never have been entangled in this imbroglio in the first place. The Ole Asheboro Hotel should succeed or fail on its own merits.

And the civil rights museum should open in six days as a national treasure, not as collateral damage in a backyard dust-up.