Jules Slowinski,
♦It is difficult to contain my anger at your so-called newspaper for all it’s nastyness spewed on Salisbury’s vibrant downtown. Your insensitive thesis that Salisbury is plundering county taxpayers to enrich a few bankers and a promoter goes far beyond human decency. Your previous week’s “Empiregate” article was truly a joy-ride through Salisbury hate. The kind of close-mindedness we hear so often from those cyclopean parasites dwelling out in the county. Have you no decency? To suggest that Salisbury is “using” the county taxpayers to fund various monopoly chips in our Master Plan and its Taj Mahal is disgusting. Your cartoons of our downtown hero Randy Hemann, the architect of so much that is good and vibrant in our downtown and fabulous arts community, demonstrates how contemptible you are. Take off your brutish masks and reveal who you are. The bankrolled minions of far right corporate greed?
I am thrilled for Randy Hemann, an all around fabulous guy, for fulfilling his life-long ambition to manage a small town in Oxford, North Carolina. Its population of 8,000 is ideal. His frustrations with your horrible county commissioners, born contentious toward anything smacking of true progress for our county and city must delight you naysayers to no end. Look at all the wonderous things Mr. Hemann did for our booming downtown economy. He helped bring “the Perfect Smoke” to North Lee Street. Thousands have flocked to this specialty shop. The revitalization of Flower’s Bakery. A 300,000 dollar NCDOT grant for a greenway in the virtually untraveled arts district. What victories!
Naysayers, please don’t rain on our parade with your abject lies that a number of establishments sailed down the tubes and suffered through bankruptcies. We are not listening. That Nashville Nights and a number of other establishments took forever to complete and opened against a hailstorm of regulations, codes, and overruns falls on deaf ears. Don’t keep up your ugly chant about the store front vacancies and empty widows along Main Street. So what if a “Little Somthin’ Somethin’”, Penny Pinchers, Grey Shores and an army of other retail shops drew their blinds and skee-balled it out of here. It is all a part of the natural cycle of growth, death, and rebirth in our glorious downtown shopper’s paradise. Stand back and observe with full attention. Please never forget that Waffle House is coming to liven the pulse of downtown Salisbury. The Wilco-Hess station, a true hotbed of late night and pre dawn community life, was just not enough.
Mr. Hemann’s herculean efforts to build the school central office on the county’s dime were negated and now an empty gap needs to be filled in down the street from the Empire Hotel. A true masterpiece of Jules Vernian 20,000 Leagues under the Sea architecture and a natural habitat for bats.
Mr. Hemann took a heroic stand against the planning board’s acceptance of multiple zoning revisions. Never forget the perenial six year long mantra of “new developer interest” in the Empire Hotel project our noble Downtown Salisbury, Inc. spoon-fed to our unquestioning public each year for six years. “The Empire is coming!” Downtown Salisbury Inc. made a commitment which grew to about $1.6 million when interest and maintenance costs are included. Meanwhile, short-term loans were renegotiated. The Empire’s roof keeps getting patched, so the investment of 7 remaining banks, in this luxury flophouse, would not fall into decripitude, black mold, and bat guano before the banks foreclose their loan in August 2016.
RFP and county commissioners you only have yourselves to blame if the city fails to nail down the glorious future of our Master Plan. The new buildings would have carried our downtown to visionary heights where our city would’ve surely become the leading technological and arts center of North Carolina.
But for a spiteful few.
Jules Slowinski
Salisbury, N.C.
