RFP Staff
♦ Yesterday’s city council retreat tossed out numbers sure to impale Salisbury taxpayers down the road. Our city hall infamous for concentrating solely on an 8 block area of Downtown Salisbury were at it again yesterday touting two new incentive grants they were calling a “homerun” and a “game changer” for its decaying ghost town. If left to their own devices, City Hall and their downtown cult will construct and rehab more empty monuments to “build it and they will come-ism”. Just look at what “build it and come-ism” has accomplished over the last 15 years. Lots of empty buildings, decaying South Main, empty office spaces galore, vacant store fronts, empty streets, nowhere to park, and a 90 seat teleconferencing theater rented by a foreclosure lawyer. And in the future plenty of Salisbury taxpayers feeling more lint in their pockets with the taxman and city hall’s “friends” grinning at them.
Before our city hall mind hive takes several more mincing steps ahead and starts throwing taxpayers money around with abandon, they need to look at their track record of extreme non accomplishment leading Salisbury to soaring poverty, ranking crime, and public education most noted for illiterate students and abysmal performance scores. The correction of such items is more likely to attract more investment here. The construction and rehab of alleged historic buildings will not attract more investment. The ridiculous pet theory that “investment attracts investment” is disproven all across the USA where poverty, abysmal education and crime abound. Just like you see in Salisbury.
City council needs to think of something other than tossing away taxpayer funded incentive money and giving away property at bargain basement prices to create more empty spaces in a downtown where nobody goes. Sure a few people enrich themselves at taxpayer expense, but that isn’t prospering the city. Tasty cream filling does nothing for a stale cake with rancid icing.
Salisbury needs to have safe streets, better than average education, and to measurably chop down its immense 28% poverty. It needs more attractions than what it has. It requires far more than beautification and a superficial makeover of its eyesore downtown. It needs guts and a heart–the very basics of a successful urban livability. It needs a rescue 8 and a dismissal of its old guard who keeps doing the same as its its always done and getting carbon copy negative result.
Folks, not members of the Salisbury Downtown ONLY cult, see the city clearly and they are loading moving vans and exiting the sinking ship. They share little interest in Salisbury’s penchant for respecting “architectural integrity and historic features” or building “crack and heroin” parks. Nor are they interested in creating more congestion on East Innes to force unfortunate drivers into driving downtown.
As the immortal Chuck Hughes once said (paraphrasing): “I don’t see anyone coming to Salisbury to gawk at a domed school Central Office on the corner of South Main and Horah.” Neither do we. Salisbury needs to take care of the real business at hand–”build it and they will come-ism” and “investment attracts investment” is played out in a town that may have already croaked. Salisbury has urgent priorities and they are not being addressed.
