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Morning, gang.
Tonight the Greensboro City Council will choose a candidate to finish out the late Yvonne Johnson’s unexpired term. Among the most pressing issues the newly constituted council will face this year: housing.
This week reporter P.R. Lockhart brings you a look at voter-approved housing bonds, how little of the money from them has actually been distributed. The story also looks at what the council can and will need to do if it wants to address the pressing issues of housing stock, especially affordable housing, for what is likely to be an influx of residents drawn by new manufacturing jobs.
Assembly reporter Ren Larson also brings us new details from the bizarre saga of Summerfield, where seven months ago all nine town employees quit. Larson, an award-winning data reporter who knows as much about the story as anyone, brings us up to date on the ongoing investigation into a long list of improprieties there.
Let’s get into it.
— Joe Killian
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City Looks to Ease Affordable Housing Crunch
In 2022, as Greensboro’s housing issues persisted, residents approved $30 million in bonds to support a number of programs in the city. These included affordable housing, efforts to increase homeownership, and funding for neighborhood reinvestment and improvement.
In the three years since, the city has moved $8 million, a little less than a third of the money. This week the Greensboro City Council will vote on releasing another $10 million in housing bonds, opening the money up for use in the city.
“We have money that we really need to spend,” District 1 Council Member Sharon Hightower said at a council meeting earlier this month.
The money could be an antidote to Greensboro’s ongoing housing crisis, which has been a topic of discussion for years. The council faces mounting pressure to address several interconnected issues: rising rents, a shortage of affordable housing, a limited number of available units, and an expected boom in the area’s workforce that will require thousands of new units, straining the housing market even further.
Read the full story here.
– P.R. Lockhart
Read this newsletter online or contact The Thread team with tips and feedback at greensboro@theassemblync.com.
Clouds Linger Over Summerfield
Seven months after the town of Summerfield’s nine employees resigned, several are back in the spotlight over allegations of improper vacation payouts, “tampering” with town equipment, and removing files from the town’s server.
At the town council’s January 14 meeting, former State Auditor Beth Wood, who now directs GWI Tax & Accounting’s rural government services unit, presented her review of payroll, expenses, and town equipment that claims departed employees appear to not have followed some town policies.
The allegations caught the town’s former employees by surprise.
“I was going to dinner with my husband,” said the town’s former finance officer, Dee Hall, who is implicated in four of the seven allegations. “We were riding down the road, and my phone started blowing up.”
The alleged actions include improperly paying out vacation time, paying a credit card bill that included a conference hotel stay for a since-departed employee, and allowing one employee’s final check to not have federal taxes withheld. Apart from the federal taxes, which Wood said she did not have time to fully review, the amount in question is under $10,000.
“I’ve known for a fact that I did not do anything unethical, I did not do anything illegal,” Hall said. “Now, if you want to go through eight years of stuff, you might find a mistake that I made, and there may be a mistake in the things that she’s alleging, but you will not find anything unethical or illegal.”
Wood’s report also references the removal of a fuse from the town’s irrigation system as an instance of “sabotage” to render “systems temporarily inoperable.” The fuse, Hall said, was removed as part of the annual weatherization process, left inside the fusebox, and instructions to replace it ahead of irrigation season were given to the incoming contractors.
“It’s twisted the way they said it,” Hall said. “The allegations go from a complete falsehood to being twisted and misrepresented.”
The report also alleged the town manager deleted 119 Terabytes of data from the town’s server — roughly the amount of storage for 30,000 HD movies. On Tuesday, the town’s former IT network administrator said in a statement that he was responsible for removing data, and “was simply discarding redundant archives to ease the data migration.”
Halfway through the four-hour meeting, Mayor Tim Sessoms questioned whether the former employees were asked about these expenses and whether a public meeting was an appropriate venue for the accusations.
“I was not asked to conduct an investigation,” Wood said in an interview, affirming that in her review she did not speak with the town’s former employees. “I just assessed and proved with evidence that there needs to be a deeper dive.”
At the meeting, the council’s five members voted unanimously to solicit bids for a forensic IT audit, which could identify what files were removed from the town’s server, and to engage with Wood’s firm to put a proposal together to dig deeper into the financial allegations.
Since the meeting, the town’s clerk resigned, Council Member John Doggett has withdrawn his support of the forensic audit and financial probe, and Council Member Jonathan Hamilton has called for the mayor to resign. (The town’s mayor only votes in the case of a tie.)
“Spending taxpayer dollars on unnecessary investigations instead of meaningful improvements for the town is irresponsible, short-sighted and self-serving,” Sessoms said in a statement. “Summerfield’s dedicated past and present employees deserve dignity, fairness, and adherence to the principle of presumed innocence under U.S. law.”
— Ren Larson
This story was updated to include a statement from the town’s former IT network administrator.
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Around the Region
Boom Shakes the Room: This morning at 10:45 a.m., Greensboro’s own Boom Supersonic is staging the first supersonic flight of its demonstrator aircraft, the XB-1. Watch a livestream of the flight from the Mojave Air & Space Port in Mojave, CA here.
Big Shoes to Fill: Tonight the Greensboro City Council will choose someone to finish the unexpired term of late Council Member Yvonne Johnson. More than 40 people applied, but just 20 met the qualifications—among them, as we’ve reported, is Johnson’s son Vernon. Triad City Beat has what you need to know about the applicants.
Around the State
Short-Term Rental Owners Steel Themselves for Long Recovery
Western N.C.’s vacation rental industry, a key component of the tourism economy, faces an uncertain future after Hurricane Helene.
Some N.C. Supreme Court Republicans Seem Willing to Overturn Griffin’s Defeat
While the justices remanded the case to Wake County’s superior court on Wednesday, it’s likely to return.
The Reading Wars Go to College
Nearly everyone backs the latest research on teaching kids to read. Why did it take eight years to update curriculum?
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