After the clock ran out in the Greensboro City Council election filings, we’re left with 19 candidates, nine of them incumbents, for the entire slate.
Just two races managed to draw more than two bodies per seat, so only the mayor’s race and District 3 will be featured in the Oct. 6 primary.
And that doesn’t make any sense.
Where are the “business leaders” so insistent on the ineptitude of our leadership that they enlisted the aid of Roy Carroll and Sen. Trudy Wade to reshuffle the deck? Where are the malcontented citizens who constituted a plurality in the poll conducted by the Rhino Times in April?
We’d cite the numbers, but the story about the poll and its results appears to have been scrubbed from the Rhino website. And as long as we’re asking questions: Why would they do something like that?
And where, we ask, are the candidates who were supposedly waiting in the wings, ready to answer the call to service by running for these seats we were told had been taken over by an elite group of special interests that were running the city off a cliff?
According to everyone who aided and abetted Wade’s Gambit to recalibrate Greensboro City Council, we were in full crisis mode, amid an emergency that could not wait for clean process or the next election for rectification.
And now… what? Nobody wants to run just because she’ll have to face an incumbent?
In 2011 25 people ran in four primaries. In 2013 we had six primary contests, with 24 candidates.
And that’s why it makes no sense that we’re left with two paltry primaries, one of which barely merits watching. Mayor Nancy Vaughan shouldn’t have too much trouble advancing in her primary against 27-year-old political novice Devin King and straight-up jabroni Sal Leone. District 3 is another matter. Justin Outling, named to succeed departing councilman Zack Matheny, must fend off two challengers in fellow SynerG leader Kurt Collins and former Guilford County GOP head Michael Picarelli.
Add to that, Outling has the chance to become the first African American elected to a non majority-minority council district in Greensboro history.
For political junkies, it’s the only thing worth watching until November. We’ll never know what might have been, had only the proponents of Wade’s Gambit gotten their way.
Join the First Amendment Society, a membership that goes directly to funding TCB‘s newsroom.
We believe that reporting can save the world.
The TCB First Amendment Society recognizes the vital role of a free, unfettered press with a bundling of local experiences designed to build community, and unique engagements with our newsroom that will help you understand, and shape, local journalism’s critical role in uplifting the people in our cities.
All revenue goes directly into the newsroom as reporters’ salaries and freelance commissions.
Thanks for the jab, better a jabroni then lets say and alcoholic who gets popped for dwi
Twice!
That’s why I quit drinking. Coming up on four years now.
All credit goes to the GPD.
I had to look up jabroni to see what it meant when I read it last week. What a great word. Interesting to me that SL went on offense instead of defense. Must mean it’s true.