Rabbi Will McCubbins, China Grove, NC
♦ It appears the chickens finally came home to roost for Salisbury, N.C. this week when within a six day stretch the citizens learned they had close to 2,000 vacant and abandoned houses within the city limits in a town of 14,000 houses and achieved superstardom of sorts when areavibes.com made Salisbury the 442nd ranked city/town in North Carolina.
Salisbury has it all: The Fibrant debacle losing over $3 Million a year, 27.2% of its residents are dwelling in poverty, a police department, existing mostly on paper, while us county taxpayers have to fork over $100 grand to pay for the Sherriff’s Office to patrol violence-ridden Salisbury. All this because the city irresponsibly blew their money on one the biggest losers in the history of municipal broadband.
On top of all that crime is through the roof with shooting, robberies, and unsolved murders and the characters running the Salisbury Police are alleged to be “tinkering” with the FBI stats.
People are fleeing the Dodge City of the Piedmont in increasing numbers and are unloading their houses at a loss if they are not abandoning them out right. They’d like to live another day without being bullet-riddled or having a knifepoint come out of their back.
All four of the public schools within the city limits received D letter grades on the N.C. Department of Education’s Report Card.
There’s talk of toxic hexavalent chromium in the city’s water. Will the city cover that up like everything else in the astounding “City of Make Believe”?
And now we’re hearing the alleged Empire Hotel project slated for $20,000,000 is likely just another DSI, Inc. “bargain for time” like all the other yarns over the years that developers were pouring into the Bury wild-eyed with excitement to bring the Queen of the South Main Badlands back to life. The hurdles the developer named were many and huge and the project wouldn’t be shovel ready for two years.
Does it get any worse than this? Even the most rabid true believers in Downtown Salisbury must be reassessing what is going on in their Municipal Service District.
I have to hand it to Councilman David Post for bringing some semblance of transparency to Salisbury’s city hall when he told city council about Fibrant’s immense losses and then told city council there were 2,000 vacant and abandoned houses within the city.
The city of Salisbury is not the only practitioner of the “Fake It Until You Make It”. County Commission Chair Greg Edds is a major booster of the “Fake It Until You Make It” philosophy that doomed Salisbury to the trash pit. Here’s Mr. Edds’ quote on Facebook from the other day. Click on the image below to enlarge:
Rah-Rah-Rah-Sis-BOOM-Bah! SHOTZBURY! SHOTZBURY! SHOTZBURY!
