The RFP Staff
♦ Welcome to Salisbury, North Carolina: “The City of Make Believe”
• The fabulous city of Salisbury comprises a total area of 17.8 square miles “surrounded by reality”.
• According to MSN, Yahoo, and CNN, Salisbury, N.C. has 28% poverty and is touted the 5th ranked city among cities in the USA suffering from “soaring poverty”. Here soaring poverty is referred to as a “disturbing demographic”.
• The city council proudly touts it’s gig municipal broadband Fibrant as having “turned the corner” on making a profit, yet close examination shows it to be an abysmal failure losing millions. It is proudly known throughout the state as the “Fibrant Debacle” Success is often freely granted in the “City of Make Believe”.
• The downtown area with its many vacancies, South Main blight, and ghost town lack of human life forms during daylight hours attempts to sell itself as vibrant.
• In the City of Make Believe the City Manager is “mutually terminated”, designs his own “no fault” contract, pens his own glowing reference, and is rewarded with a handsome “golden parachute”. No one knows why he is “mutually terminated”. City Hall illegally refuses to answer public information requests.
• In the City of Make Believe’s downtown area Salisbury has an overwhelming surplus of empty apartments, condos, and office spaces and they want to build more.
• Only in the City of Make Believe their bonds downgraded by Moody’s for failing to pay back millions to the water and sewer funds and the former city manager says the highly esteemed bond rating organization is mistaken. If the City of Make believe doesn’t pay back 7.6 million to the water and sewer funds, Moody’s is going to reduce Salisbury to junk bond status. That’s pretty real.
• For years the City of Make Believe ignored the gangs, the crime, the violence, and the drug pushing here–kept a lot of it out of the newspapers. Now communities are making it real and want to take the city back.
• Drivers in the City of Make Believe openly question why city hall is even considering “traffic calming” on East Innes Street notorious for crawling along during rush hour.
• The City of Make Believe’s public school system, with its poor performances, were smoke screened and covered over by “positive publicity”. Now the ABC Report Card and the State READY Report showed the school system performed poorly on “composite scores” and graduation rates slumped dramatically in Salisbury.
• The “disturbing demographic” in the City of Make Believe grows more alarming as urban flight increases. The young are not staying and people searching vainly for employment and better paying jobs are leaving Salisbury. The poverty, lack of substantive amenities, the crime, the substandard schools, the blight, the drugs, and the gangs are forcing people to move elsewhere to higher ground. For sale signs dot the Salisbury landscape–people don’t feel safe in most areas of the city. Outsiders have stopped checking the City of Make Believe out as a viable place to live and find work.
• Overnight the City of Make Believe grew in national celebrity when it was learned that ISIS “Holy Warrior” Don Morgan once shot up a bar in Salisbury and later founded the Islamic Center of Salisbury near Salisbury High School. Don Morgan called himself a holy warrior, swore allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, traveled to Lebanon in an attempt to join the Jihadist Islamic State forming in Syria and Iraq. Morgan went on Twitter as “Abu Omar al-Amreeki” and proclaimed: “Mujahid pledging allegiance to al-Baghdadi and Islamic state commanding good and forbidding evil. To brothers in Iraq, be patient. Many of us trying to come.”
Only in the City of Make Believe.
