A few minutes before the NC A&T University baseball team started warming up, George Hartzman slipped off his sandals along the first-base line and paced in the grass at the decaying War Memorial Stadium. The diamond conjures memories for Hartzman — the outsider candidate in the Greensboro mayoral race — of his days coaching the “Killer Tofu” softball team.
For eight years, the council critic coached barefoot, and with his help and his daughter’s arm, the tie-dyewearing Killer Tofu team became the city’s 2008 fast-pitch champions. Years later, Hartzman carried a photo of his daughter embracing him on the field, but he asked to meet at the forlorn stadium to talk about its future. He sees a hotel behind left field and a cheap land deal for a private developer to turn the historic site “essentially [into] littleleague Disneyland.”
It’s one of Hartzman’s big ideas for economic development — he also envisions an automobile factory sourced with local components that he claims would create 10,000 jobs and a charter school in east Greensboro for single mothers who didn’t graduate high school and their kids designed to break the cycle of poverty. City council doesn’t fund schools — that falls to the Guilford County Commission— but Hartzman said that’s no excuse for the city to avoid dealing with economic inequality head on.
...Hartzman’s three big economic development ideas — the hotel and stadium, school and car factory — are all designed to improve unemployment and prioritizing the city’s residents who are hurting the most. Unless the city teaches people in east Greensboro how to make money, Hartzman said, the playing field will remain uneven.
“We need to figure out a way to live together,” Hartzman said in an interview, adding that dealing with poverty is a top priority for him.
He draws inspiration from his wife who works with teenage parents, he said, describing himself as a reformed former vulture. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi profiled Hartzman as a whistleblower at Wells Fargo, where he used to work. Now he teaches ethics classes and is a fixture at city council meetings, raising allegations about a lack of transparency and unethical deals left and right.
The problem isn’t just a lack of focus on poor areas of the city, he said, but a corrupt inner circle cutting backdoor deals for their friends and business partners.
“There’s a small group of people that have a lot of control,” he said. “We’re a microcosm of a much larger issue.”
...Hartzman named a few ideas...: an occasional 21+ entertainment district on weekend nights, blocking off Elm Street for a car show and inviting 15 nearby Harley clubs for a motorcycle gathering.
Hartzman ...could save city employees $500,000 [per year] by ...cutting costs from the city’s retirement plan.
...Hartzman accused Vaughan of meddling to prevent the city from selling methane created at the White Street landfill because her husband — a lawyer who has performed legal work for [Cone Mills] — benefits [hundreds of thousands] from the contract that is in place with textile giant ITG.
http://www.yesweekly.com/triad/article-16628-greensboro-mayoral-candidates-sound-different-notes-on-economic-development.html
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