Greensboro's Protest Petition

From Amanda Lehmert at the N&R:

GREENSBORO - Depending on who you ask, it's either an unnecessary impediment to development or a citizen's right to influence the political process. Council members will decide Wednesday which side of the debate they are on. The council will consider asking the legislature to restore the protest petition - a tool that requires a super majority of the City Council, meaning seven of nine votes, to approve a zoning amendment if it is opposed by 5 percent of adjoining property owners. Greensboro is the only city is the state exempted from the zoning requirement.

From today's N&R Editorial:

In 1971, the City Council quietly asked state lawmakers to exempt Greensboro from the state protest petition law. Now a growing -- and vocal -- number of residents sat they want the current council to return what was taken away. The council will decide Wednesday night whether to ask county lawmakers to sponsor a bill that would restore the right to file protest petitions in Greensboro. Local residents are right to wonder why they are they exception to the rule. And to be angry about it. The law originally was placed on the state books in 1923. If the owners of at least 5 percent of the adjoining land to the proposed rezoning sign a protest petition, it says, they can force a minimum three-fourths vote by a city council to approve it.

Keith Brown at Protest Petition for Greensboro posted in March the NC General Assembly's amendment of the City Charter.

I know you find this hard to believe, but in our quaint boro property developers have the temerity to run for City Council. Worse, the 20% who go to the polls vote them in. Keith Brown, from the red-headed stepkid of Guilford County, High Point, has waged a tireless campaign to have the protest petition exclusion repealed. You may well ask what business a High Point activist has poking his nose in Greensboro? If you'd ever driven out West Wendover, past the sprawl that continues at the HP city limits, you'd know.

Greensboro's developers are literally raping the landscape with a Fed Ex hub at PTI and no Fed Ex to show for it. That NC martinet known as the DOT has re-routed highways to accommodate the coming Aerotropolis.

Meanwhile, developers built a baseball park downtown after the 20% refused to pay for it and are spending much effort to revitalize the area. All they have to show for it so far are countless DWIs, a baseball fan who lost an eye to a foul ball and serial retail suicides.

The City Council, led by these neoliberal cads, has agreed to purchase eyesores on the route from I-40 past the Coliseum to downtown in preparation for the ACC Museum. The "miracle mile" will effectively mask the squalor which exists on either side.

Now that our PGA event is back at Sedgefield, the entire southern loop around Greensboro has been designed so that spectators can travel downtown without traversing the wild west known as South High Point Road. And the denizens therein go wanting.

Neighborhoods of McMansions with their attendant mixed-use shopping centers have popped up in the most unlikely places in northern Guilford County. Of course, in a few years these will be annexed.

The few citizens who care about Greensboro are tired of the property developers who hold sway in the halls of power. The very least we desire are those protections provided to other NC residents.