Todd Paris, Salisbury Attorney and Candidate for Salisbury City Council
♦ First, a local realtor and well known apologist for our heroes on council informed the public in local print media Saturday that the 90K annual expense of maintaining the Empire Hotel and its debt comes from Downtown Salisbury’s budget and does not reduce services to city tax-payers. Of course DSI’s money is delivered by fairies each year from one of Santa’s secret slush funds. DSI is funded by Salisbury’s Municipal Service District Tax which is a special tax levied on downtown property owners that is “passed through” to business owners that lease their buildings through higher rents. This year DSI’s director is now a city employee and support staff is directly supported by the city budget. DSI masquerades as a private non-profit corporation to keep its budget and its expenditures secret and has claimed in the past it is thus exempt from Chapter 132 public records requests. They will not say how they spend tax dollars.
Second, a local print reporter said that I recently called for the Empire hotel to be razed and replaced with a parking lot. Not completely accurate. RFP gave North Carolina’s “largest artificial bat habitat” a break for a while this year, hoping it would be sold. We were slightly encouraged when the “non-binding contract” was signed and the tax-payers were promised an August 2017 closing date that collapsed.
Look, I love historic downtown buildings. I own one. I ship in excess of 30K per year to a local bank for the privilege of living and working in one. You can’t save them all. Spending nearly 1 million dollars over the past ten years to just maintain council hobbyist Brian Miller’s pet Empire project when we have 25% poverty and charge poor children an admission fee to get into the municipal pool seems wrong to me. What I said was if Empire does not sell this coming year, we should look at paying off the loan and building desperately needed off-street parking. We can’t keep this South Main Badlands “centerpiece” forever. However, I do understand that compared to the 3 million dollar per year deficit caused by the Fibrant black hole, it seems small. We have downtown business owners almost at war over parking in each other’s spaces and they do not need DSI setting up competitors on the ground floor of the Empire. I completely support any sale as long as it pays off the mortgage and does not require some “synergistic partnership” that is attached to the city budget, DSI’s budget, or our municipal service district taxes.
Last city council meeting Lane Bailey, the City Manager, kind of inferred that I was liar regarding asbestos being in Salisbury Rowan Utility water. I have included a portion of their self-published water tests showing that it was present several years ago and well as SRU Director Jim Behmer’s video from earlier estimating that 10% of Salisbury water mains are made of cement asbestos. The local paper already public an exposé this year regarding cancer causing chromium 6 in SRU water. Wonder if Karen Alexander and Brian Miller get re-elected if we will just ignore this water problem and perhaps build a monorail to Spencer.
Folks need to get out and vote and not for Karen Alexander and Brian Miller who have had five and eight years respectively to fix this city’s problems and have failed miserably. If you vote for me I will turn my attention to fixing things instead of hiding them. To my way of thinking, the mechanic who can tell you what’s wrong with your car probably has the best chance of fixing it.
Jim Behmer, Director of Salisbury-Rowan Utilities, Confirms 10% of Salisbury Water Supply from Asbestos Water Mains:
Lane Bailey, “current” Salisbury City Manager, contradicts both Salisbury-Rowan Utilities Director Jim Behmer and SRU water report showing asbestos in the water:
