I think the answer is plain, the message is more important than the man.
And while it is true that the message I'm bringing you in If I Were Mayor of Greensboro pales in comparison to the messages those great men gave you thousands of years ago I am bringing you the message that if taken seriously, will make Greensboro, North Carolina the city the rest of the world hopes to become.
But it can't be put in 30 second commercials. It requires you do your part and learn the truth.
The following short film demonstrates the way Greensboro's status-quo have been fixing Greensboro for decades.
I don't know about you but I'm getting pretty tired of this kind of love for our city.
Something that has bothered me for a long time is the fact that City of Greensboro employees are, from time to time, forced to lie to cover up for the mistakes and crimes of their bosses.
Hell, I know I'm an asshole, reactive, hard to get along with and even abusive at times but never will any employee of the City of Greensboro be forced to lie to cover my ass or the asses of anyone working under me.
People who do their jobs make mistakes. We yell, we scream, we get over it and go back to work. We don't fire productive people for simple mistakes and we don't lie to cover them up.
When I am elected Mayor of Greensboro our employees will no longer have to fear losing their jobs for telling the truth. On that you have my word.
In case you are wondering, the State of North Carolina requires that candidates designate a recipient for any left over or excess funds collected by a political campaign. Most candidates simply roll their funding over from one election to the next and never pay anything to anyone, always figuring out excuses to spend every dime. State Senator Donald Vaughan donated his excess campaign funds to Mayor Nancy Vaughan's campaign for mayor as part of a dark money trail, but when this election is over, win or lose, I will donate all my excess funds to the Interactive Resource Center which works year 'round to help the homeless and others in need.
You see, my campaign is about helping Greensboro's poor and working class. And seriously folks, the roughly $22,500 a year the Mayor of Greensboro is paid is about as much as I ever made working. Having lived on so little for so long there's simply not much I need nor want for myself.
If you watched the short film above you understand you can't fix something by simply cutting it apart. You must also know how to put it back together again so that the wounds made by the surgery can heal. And often the cure is seemingly harder than the disease.
Greensboro and the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro is currently spending over $65 Million Dollars of taxpayers' money to build a downtown performing arts center. Now allow me to ask you a question: If you lived in a place where every road for 100 miles in every direction was a gravel road would you buy a $300,000 Ferrari?
I think you all know the answer to that-- our current leaders bought a $300,000 Ferrari to drive round on gravel roads and will ultimately find themselves stuck in a ditch with their dream car beat all to pieces.
Some more of my ideas:
* A regional stock exchange headquartered in Greensboro. Why didn't Jim "Bobblehead" Melvin think of that? And being I suggested it in March of 2015, why haven't Greensboro's bought and paid for economic development "gurus" latched on to the idea?
* In 2013, a Mr Steve Niu of Triangle Accounting approached the City of Greensboro on behalf of Mr Hua Cheng Zhu of Super Granger Group, wanting a $50,000 grant from the City to begin shipping Greensboro's leaves to Japan. Basically the $50,000 was to cover the cost of the pellet machine that would be needed to reduce the volume of the leaves so that he could actually squeeze 25 tons of leaves into each container.
I suggested the City of Greensboro do it themselves. Pellets made from leaves can be used for compost, mulch, fuel and in some countries, fish and animal feed.
Starting such an enterprise would have been the perfect excuse for Marty Kotis to open a container yard on that 20 acre heavy industrial zoned site he owns between the North Carolina Railroad and East Wendover Avenue (US70) just a quarter mile west of Mount Hope Church Road. The NCRR has no Greensboro location and the Port of North Carolina inland facility located in Greensboro is connected to the railroad tracks leading to Tidewater, Virginia, 2 hours farther away than the North Carolina ports.
I suggested to Marty he open a small rail facility there buy Marty seems to prefer spending his time out drinking with Mayor Vaughan, and generating PR materials to seduce the media into making us believe a few more Midtown restaurants and bars will turn our city around while making most of his money building fast food restaurants for others, rather than building things Greensboro actually needs. Yes, I do still have the e-mails between us.
By the way, Marty, when I was a kid I used to fish those ponds and play on the farms out there next to Meadowlane Circle and the NCRR. My cousins lived out there. The pond was full of crappie and we used to catch snakes and lizards in the fields and woods.
Greensboro could then spin off the operation by selling stock on that local stock exchange I mentioned. Would the business leave someday? Not as long as Greensboro still has leaves.
And Councilman Wilkins, part of the profits could be used to offset that $Million Dollars a year the City spends picking up leaves-- a figure that is only going to go up. You might have thought of that yourself if you weren't spending all your time sitting around Marty's restaurants getting drunk and stuffing your face with tacos.
Greensboro could start a lot of businesses that way and we wouldn't be competing with the private sector. Instead we'd be investing in the private sector in ways that pay returns. And Greensboro shoppers would buy the products these Greensboro businesses make because instead of wasting millions of dollars a year having our PR department try to advertise and brand this hollow shell of a city our PR department would start spending their every waking moment getting Greensboro's residents to buy Made in Greensboro. Even if we have to send them door to door hawking products.
You see, as the dates on the old blog posts show, I didn't just dream this stuff up yesterday, I'm years, and in some cases, decades ahead of anyone else they will put up against me.
Recently, Joe Wood of the Greensboro Community Resources Board and Guilford County Planning Board, previous Aureus Ltd, the Greensboro Redevelopment Commission, and the Guilford County Board of Commissioners wrote of me:
Name calling, accusations without any evidence... Mr Wood has a problem. Mr Wood is a very powerful man here in Greensboro with lots of power over the lives of thousands of people. But Mr Joe Woods is unable to accept the fact that the Greensboro he has spent his life building is a failed city. One only needs read Billy's Big List of Documented Reasons to know Greensboro is a failed city.
So Mr Joe Wood, rather than accept the fact that his life's work, as successful as it might seem in terms of personal property and money in his own bank accounts, has woefully failed Greensboro's working classes.
And so rather than criticizing the message, Mr Joe Wood criticizes the man. Why? Because Joe Wood wants the poor and working classes to stay down. Because if we are right then everything Joe Wood has ever done was wrong just like all the others who stand in our way.
Thank you Mr Wood, we've been waiting for someone of your "status" to make this mistake. Do you want to talk trash or do you want to talk about the issues? We can ruin a former County Commissioner as fast as anyone.
Come back for If I Were Mayor Of Greensboro: Part 31 and keep your place at Billy Jones for Mayor of Greensboro.
