The City of Greensboro needs to bring back small fishing ponds to underprivileged communities as a means of reducing teen violence.
When I was a kid my northeast Greensboro neighborhood had several ponds where kids of all ages could take a simple cane pole and go fishing day or night almost assured they would bring home fish for supper every time. Where Goldie Wells lives today was my favorite fishing hole of all. That's right, day or night, fish don't sleep, at least not like we do. Night fishing is some of the best fishing you can do.
Then the developers filled the ponds and we've been putting up with Goldie ever since.
Yeah, Greensboro has the city lakes and I think Hagan Stone Park still but the closest city owned public fishing hole to East Greensboro, Keeley Park, isn't even located in Greensboro. The address for Keeley Park is 4100 Keeley Rd. McLeansville, NC 27301. And even if the Greensboro Transit Authority did have a Keeley Park bus (they don't) I promise you the GTA bus driver is not going to let your child on that bus with a 10' long cane pole, hooks, line, worms and a stringer full of fresh caught "catchable-sized channel catfish" bass, bream and bluegill.
You see, despite what the Greensboro City Council would like you to think, Keeley Park was never built to serve what is now northeast Greensboro. Keeley Park was built to serve areas the Greensboro City Council hopes to annex in years to come and provide valuable amenities to future neighborhoods without saddling developers with the cost of building those amenities.
And there you have yet another reason the teens of East Greensboro are getting into trouble and another means of staying out of trouble that the City of Greensboro has taken away from our youth. The problems we are having with Greensboro's youth are born in corporate welfare and crony capitalism and as long as the tax dollars are taken out of our neighborhoods and invested on behalf of developers the problems will only get worse.
