Stolen in its entirety from RCC:
"On Tuesday, May 7, the Greensboro City Council will discuss the future plans for the Renaissance Shopping Center on Phillips Avenue. We need you to join us that night to voice our communities support for the Renaissance Coop grocery store!
We rarely ask folks to join us at City Council. We are doing so now because it is important for our community to show the Council, and the rest of Greensboro, just how broad support is for our coop grocery store. There’s nothing like 100 people at a Council meeting to bring this point home to Council members!
We’ll have stickers, buttons and flyers with us that you may use to show the Council members you want the coop grocery store included in the future development of Phillips Avenue.
The Council meeting officially starts at 5:30 pm, but our item (#31 on an agenda of 36 items) may not be heard until much later in the evening, perhaps as late as 10 pm, even. It’s hard to predict how long the other items on the agenda will take, and it’s possible that the Council may decide to move our item up closer to the start of the meeting. So bring a book and snacks and settle in for the long haul. Or, watch the meeting on the public access channel on TV, and come on downtown when it’s getting closer to the time for our item to be heard. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We’ll be sending updates throughout the meeting announcing progress through the agenda, and letting folks know when the time is right to come on down to City Hall.
Your support continues to be critical to the success of this effort. See you Tuesday night at the Melvin Municipal Building, 300 W. Washington St. You can park for free in the Municipal lot at Eugene and Washington. Enter the building on the Plaza side."
Just so you know, while the nice folks at RCC won't say it, I'll say it: For 15 years, no one was interested in the shopping center and grocery store until Marnie Tompson of the Fund 4 Democratic Communities decided to pay for a study to determine if a shopping center and grocery store in that location would be profitable. The study hired a 3rd party consultant used by Food Lion, Kroger, Winn-Dixie and others. The results: If the store could attract just 1% of the population within 1 mile of the store's Phillips Avenue location the Co-op could profit $2 Million Dollars in the first year and pay off all debts including all debts to the City of Greensboro in just 10 years while returning 100% of the profits from the store back to Greensboro and the community.
Now suddenly every developer Mayor Robbie Perkins is in bed with wants a piece of that shopping center! And being that the City of Greensboro currently owns the shopping center having bought it to bail out the previous developer who mismanaged the property, Robbie and the City Council have the power to give the shopping center to anyone they want.
To make matters worse, this is an outright slap in the face to East Greensboro, the RCC and to Marnie Tompson who founded the Fund 4 Democratic Communities not with public money but with money willed to her by her parents. Rather than live a life of excess, Marnie chose to live a working class lifestyle and help people with her money and Greensboro's elitest "leaders" and developers repay her and us by stealing her very efforts.
Please, forward this to everyone you know and please show up Tuesday night to give Mayor Robbie Perkins and City Council, and the elitist bastards who think they can steal anything they want from Greensboro's working class, a piece of your mind. Because Robme Perkins has publicly stated he only recognizes opposition that speaks out at City Council Meetings. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and e-mail don't count to him.
My words, not Marnie's.
