Look who’s behind GSO’s waste management task force

I caught a rerun of Tuesday night’s Greensboro City Council meeting and took note of a very interesting late-night item.

Council member Jim Kee was sponsoring a resolution “establishing and providing parameters for Greensboro Waste Management and Recycling Task Force.” Sounds like a good idea, and Kee assured the council that the task force would consist of members representing all parts of Greensboro. But when fellow council member Trudy Wade pressed Kee about who was driving force behind the task force, Kee admitted it was none other than the Citizens for Economic and Environmental Justice.

Remember CEEJ sued the city when the previous council considered reopening the White Street landfill. I see a conflict of interest here, and you have to wonder what conclusions such a task force would reach.

Wade wondered aloud if the White Street landfill would be part of the task force’s discussion, and Mayor Robbie Perkins shot that notion down quickly, saying White street will not be on the table. That’s why he’s mayor.

Update: The Rhino’s John Hammer takes note in his coverage of the meeting. “So the attorney who last year was taking the city to court is now writing policy for the city. How times change,” he writes.

GTA’s phat new HQ

The N&R has a front-pager on the Greensboro Transit Authority’s phat new maintenance and operations building:

Welcome to the city of Greensboro’s new green roof.

The 16,500-square-foot garden is just one of the items city officials hope will help earn the $18 million facility a U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, gold certification.

….Its water is heated by the sun. Its rooms are cooled, in part, with giant ice cubes. No, really.

The flashy zinc and muted terra-cotta panels that wrap the building serve as a rain screen, a system that keeps the elements out while helping to regulate the internal temperature of the building better than an ordinary wall.

“A lot of the parts and pieces to the building are very European,” said the building’s designer Brian Slevar, the same Moser Mayer Phoenix architect who designed Center Pointe.

A municipal ‘maintenance and operations building’ as paen to environmentalism. It’s government’s world —-we only live in it.

Edwards campaign –Alive and living large

AP reports John Edwards’ presidential campaign owes more than $2.1 million in taxpayers’ matching funds.

Though Edwards dropped his presidential bid in 2008, “it’s not unusual for presidential campaigns to remain open years after the election is over, especially if there is an unresolved audit or unpaid debts.”

But check this out:

Edwards’ campaign reports show more than $15,000 spent in 2011 on airfare, though the destinations or purpose of the travel were not listed. In January, August and December, the campaign spent $2,268 for tickets on Alaska Airlines, a transcontinental carrier that does not offer flights between East Coast cities such as Raleigh or Washington.

Most of the $12,811 in credit card charges for lodging were made to websites such as Hotels.com and Kayak.com, providing no information about where the rooms were booked, when or for what purpose.

When contacted by AP, nobody involved in the campaign seems to know anything.