Jonathan Morris, U.S. Army Ranger Ret. and Rowan County Sheep Baron
♦ It’s a given Downtown Salisbury ONLY has absolutely wiped-out Salisbury as a city with any remote future. Dream over Salisbury. City’s been a pretender for a decade and now you’ve sunk even lower with zip chance of ever climbing out. Now all they can do is sponge off their neighbors in the county and pad the pockets of a few of the old guard in Downtown Salisbury. Salisbury is way down at the bottom of the heap of North Carolina cities. Its over–look at the poverty, crime, debt, and trippy education. Latin gang drug sales are probably the leading commerce in Salisbury. You have no police force to speak of. The downtown is blighted with vacancies and the city’s best ideas are to:
• Slow down the traffic on Innes and elsewhere and force people to drive slowly into their decrepit and vacancy filled Main Street area. You don’t think that will influence people not to drive anywhere near Salisbury?
• Build cushy buildings on South Main so some friends of Downtown Salisbury ONLY can score. Remember the Taj Mahal they wanted built on the grease pit at 329 so they could soak the county taxpayers?
• Then the people over in the Gateway Building want to solve Salisbury’s abject 28% poverty by pulling in high tech jobs. None of the poor has the education or skills to get those jobs.
OK for 15 straight years Downtown Salisbury ONLY was in power. Look where Salisbury is now. Nowhere–begging for crumbs from the county. If anyone even thinks Salisbury can return to life the way it was in the 60′s–dream on.
It’s suggested by many that to finish off Downtown Salisbury ONLY you could do a combination of the following:
• Build websites that would tell the story statistically with videos about how backward and futureless Salisbury is. Have the websites coded to come up the same time the city government, Salisbury’s Wiki, and so forth show up in a search. While this has a large appeal to many and is quite doable–it would be a waste of money and time because Downtown Salisbury ONLY is rapidly hanging itself even faster by their own hand.
• Ice those businesses and banks who are Downtown Salisbury ONLY. Unneeded because nobody from the county is going anywhere near Downtown Salisbury for shopping and banking.
• Put up billboards (Like the one pictured above) warning visitors about Salisbury at all the entrances into Salisbury.
But none of that is required. Just vote for the Downtown Salisbury ONLY candidates running for county commission seats and you will see Salisbury dig its hole even deeper and faster.
Vote for Judy Klusman who promises to sell the West End Plaza if she sneaks in.
