Yes Weekly link to the blog on Protest Petitions, click here
It is great to see that ethics might be coming to the local level of city govermnent.It is also interesting to see that they want state funding for this Heart of the Triad. This might call for all citizens who live in Guilford County to ask your representatives to have Protest Petitions in the county too. To keep people informed Protest Petitions are only in the city aspect of the North Carolina General Statute but if a county wanted to adopt Protest Petition as a part of the planning process they could.
Below is a few paragraphs from the Yes Weekly Blog:
The Greensboro City Council votes Tuesday on its legislative agenda. Notably missing from the list is any request for the restoration of the protest petition. That may be because the groundswell of support for reform caught the council off guard. And by all accounts, the Guilford delegation is already committed to overturning Greensboro's exemption, so the council's opinion probably doesn't count. For more information on the protest petition, read this.
Not that city government is indifferent to matters of land development and political influence. The memo created by Acting City Attorney Becky Jo Peterson-Buie for council members pledges that staff "will closely monitor" any amendments to ethics and lobbying laws. "It is expected that the proposed amendments will apply the concepts of the new [state] ethics and lobbying law to local government officials.
"Rep. Pricey Harrison, the same Democratic legislator who has promised to introduce legislation to restore the protest petition, has indicated she will sponsor a bill to extend to local officials the same ethics rules passed for state legislators in 2006.
“I have seen members of these governing boards vote on issues that they would have had to recuse themselves from if bound by the same laws,” she told me last month. “[The Heart of the Triad proposal] seems to be a prime example, conceived of by and for development interests with very little citizen input
.”Speaking of the swath of rural land between the Triad's three major cities, the legislative agenda contains an item backing funding support to "enable the success of the Heart of the Triad... to create a mixed-used development area that maximizes job creation and preserves the natural area."
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