RFP Staff
♦ While the City’s Fiber network optic added gigabyte internet speeds, large barriers against bringing and keeping business in Salisbury, N.C. continue to grow especially with the recent cover-up scandal in City Hall of the former city Manager Doug Paris’s “mutual termination” and “golden parachute” and former Information Director Elaney Hasselmann’s “resignation” and mysterious severance package. City employees are talking. The Rowan Free Press has no doubt that an independent investigation is on the way.
Let’s examine the large and growing barriers to bringing and keeping business in Salisbury:
• City’s lowered bond rating status by Moody’s due to Fibrant’s performance.
• The city’s high debt.
• The city’s substandard livability statistics with soaring poverty, violent & property crime, and poor performing public school’s within Salisbury proper. This is a huge barrier.
http://rowanfreepress.com/salisbury-nc-statistics/
• Rising taxes, solid waste fees and a water & sewer hikes in a city where 1/4 of the city dwells in poverty.
• The current City Hall cover-up scandal hints of a very unstable government. Unstable governments are a major turn-off prospective businesses.
• Salisbury’s long standing reputation as a “play for pay” city with a history of reprisals and vendettas.
• Visible diminished city services with understaffed Police and Fire Departments. City properties largely unkempt appearing.
• Downtown Business District having the highest downtown taxes in North Carolina.
• Downtowns are traditionally bell weathers of a city’s economic health. Downtown Salisbury, with its army of vacancies, gang tag graffiti, vandalism, and South Main tenderloin, leaves a strong impression of economic ill health.
• Many chronically unemployed here.
• A city with many vacant, abandoned, and obsolete buildings.
• Overreaching historic codes add obstacles to downtown businesses.
