Funding the HP amphitheater

Indeed the roughly $2 million figure floated by architect Peter Freeman is ‘suspiciously close’ to amount of money the City of High Point has available in two thirds bonds.

Right now city officials are saying no way, but evidently Freeman believes there’s some wiggle room when he says “we feel like there is some synergy there that would lend itself to a community space.”

Gov’t pulls this these sleights of hand all the time, and a cities just gotta have their amphitheaters. Stay tuned.

Municipal money laundering

Pretty incredible story from the Rhino’s John Hammer, who covered last week’s Greensboro City Council work session:

The Greensboro City Council uses the Greensboro Partnership to launder money, according to what the council was told at its work session on Tuesday, Feb. 22.

The council allocates $200,000 to the Partnership to be used by the Greensboro Economic Development Alliance (GEDA), but of that money $25,000 goes to Downtown Greensboro Inc. (DGI) and $30,000 goes to the Piedmont Triad Film Commission.

Dan Lynch, president of the GEDA, told the council Tuesday that the money was simply a pass-through. He said they were told to write a check for $25,000 to DGI and $30,000 to the film commission and he did, but he did not know why.

Remember that DGI is doing a little money laundering of its own, allocating $15,000 to the downtown homeless day shelter after some council members asked questions about the shelter’s operating expenses.

Of course the solution to this problem is simply to defund these organizations and repeal the downtown BID tax while they’re at it. But who on the council is going make that motion?

Defending public unions

In fairness, the N&R did publish two columns critical of public unions, one by Jonah Goldberg and the other by Amity Shlaes.

But the N&R also published two columns vigorously defending public workers, neither of which is posted, but you’ll get the idea from the pull quotes.

From N.C. State professor David Zonderman:

We are told that states and municipalities have a “spending problem,” not a “revenue problem.” Again, this assertion is utter nonsense without any ground in the economy today. Most states have already slashed budgets in recent years; there is no “runaway” spending unless you count paying to keep roads paved, and poor children fed and waste and fraud.

From UNCG professor Lisa Levenstein and doctoral candidate Jason Brent:

We are where we are not because of the costs of maintaining a strong public sector but because we did not collect revenue and save when we should have, and then unforeseeable bad times hit.

…The idea that public sector workers earn inflated wages is simply not true. Indeed, since World War II, one of the primary attractions of the public sector has not been its high pay but its promise of jobs security.

I find it ironic that the authors claim that state and local governments have lost 400,000 jobs since mid-2008, then turn around and note that “job security” is the major attraction of the public sector. Here in North Carolina, where both authors reside, Civitas research shows that North Carolina state government has added almost 35,000 jobs while the private sector lost 49,000 jobs.

Needless to say, the authors believe states should just raise taxes, like they did in Illinois. We’ll see how that works out. By the way, when they say “we’ did not collect revenue and ‘we’ did not save, who are they talking about?