Project Haystack is located in the Gibsonville, Elon and Burlington zoning districts. Greensboro can never annex that land and yet Greensboro is preparing to spend $81 Million Dollars to run water and sewer to the project at Greensboro taxpayers' expense. What happens when people living in Greensboro, 20 to 30 miles away from Project Haystack get hired to work at those supposed jobs in Gibsonville, Burlington and Elon where they discover the cost of living is cheaper? And yes, it is cheaper than Greensboro. Those people move to Gibsonville, Burlington and Elon taking their money and their tax dollars with them.
The end result: Greensboro's economy and tax base is devastated and Greensboro paid to make it happen. The same is true of the proposed Randolph County Megasite. People have for centuries migrated to where they can find employment and putting jobs in other cities and counties will not keep them in Greensboro. Migration to where the jobs are is why we have a problem with illegal aliens. Like Detroit and Latin America, only the poorest of the poor will be left behind.
And that, my friends, is what really happened to Detroit. The jobs all moved to the suburbs leaving the city to die awash in economic development schemes, crime and handouts to developers and big business. Sound familiar?
Hyperbole? Perhaps, but it illustrates the problem.
Of course, the real reason for the push to build Project Haystack can be found in the Dam Scam for when the bonds default on the Randalman Dam Authority heads will roll from Greensboro all the way to Raleigh, Washington and the Army Corp of Engineers. All one need do is look at the first graphic and realize that data centers have huge water needs to understand what I'm talking about. If they can't come up with a way to sell the water and Greensboro is under contract to buy 53% of the water from the dam-- water Greensboro doesn't need-- then they have no money to pay off the bonds.
Project Haystack is a desperate act by desperate politicians to try and save their dirty hides from what award winning Greensboro water conservation director Mike Barron tried to warn us about all along. Go back and read the Dam Scam to understand the truth about why Greensboro is planning to build megasites far from Greensboro when there are already thousands of acres of empty industrial parks right here in Greensboro and Guilford County. And that, my friends, isn't hyperbole?
