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Thursday, January 24, 2013
Music Hall (Continued from page 1)
An earlier final presentation was given by the task force at the June 19 council meeting last year. The task force had been proposing that the center be funded with $20 million in private donations, $20 million in user fees and $20 million in general obligation bonds. However, it is widely believed that a bond referendum for the GPAC would not pass, and the task force later presented an idea to use $40 million in public funds by issuing limited obligation bonds, which, like certificates of participation, do not require voter approval. That idea was squelched in December of last year by the Greensboro City Council, when it voted to put a general obligation bond referendum on the November 2013 ballot. Since then the task force has shifted its focus to user fees, and the council has taken no further action to place a bond on the ballot. The task force is not expected to address how to fill a $20 million hole that leaves in the plan to raise $60 million. Instead, the financial presentation is scheduled to focus on how revenue from city-owned parking, a fee on GPAC ticket sales and revenue from the hotel-motel tax could fund the debt service on $20 million. In January of last year the City Council was considering contributing $41 million to the project with a combination of general obligation bonds and money from the hotel-motel tax to fund $11 million in certificates of participation. The whole process began when council was considering a proposal by Coliseum Director Matt Brown to tear down the War Memorial Auditorium and build a
performing arts center at that location. However, the council, led by Mayor Robbie Perkins, that decided building the center downtown would be better and appointed a task force to look into it. The only paid member of the task force, Ross Harris – who was Perkins’ campaign manager before becoming GPAC Task Force manager – said the last presentation will also involve an overview of the task force’s work. Harris was hired by the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro for the project, and the foundation has refused to even tell councilmembers how much she is being paid. Harris said that after the presentation on Feb. 5, the work of the task force will be complete. Harris said that sources to fill the $20 million gap in funding had not been identified, but said, “We are confident that we’ll find those sources.” According to Councilmember Nancy Vaughan, who sits on the Finance Options Committee of the GPAC Task Force, the project has lost some of its momentum. “We are kind of stuck,” she said. Vaughan said that several things were contributing to the delay in the presentation, including the Christmas holiday, and disputes between Brown and AMS Planning and Research, about the overall cost of the project. According to Vaughan, Brown has said the facility as currently proposed would overrun the $60 million estimated by AMS, the consultants hired by the task force. “People have really taken a more serious look at the financing,” said Vaughan. Using money from the hotel-motel tax fund would require approval from the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, which is controlled by Republicans.
The New York Times Hyper-Sudoku sudoku_350B
Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz
7
9 1 1 3 8 6
3
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1 6
6 (c) PZZL.com
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7 350B
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Solution sudoku_350B
Vaughan said she hoped the commissioners would approve the funding request. She added, “I don’t believe they’ve ever turned us down before.” Vaughan said the parking fee revenue would be taken from “enhanced parking revenue,” meaning new revenue attributable to the GPAC. This would require the city to raise rates for some parking in decks at night. The city started charging drivers $2 to enter parking decks after 9 p.m. in April of last year. Vaughan said that rate will need to change to between $5 and $10 for lots near the GPAC in order to fund it.
Uncle Orson (Continued from page 12) anything at all to do with how they treat their local environment. Even Jared Diamond’s own examples are actually proof of the opposite of what he believes they prove. For instance, in Collapse he talks about the fact that the statue-building Easter Island culture “ended” when their misuse of the fragile ecosystem of their tiny island eliminated the surpluses that gave them time to build their statues. But what he fails to recognize is that the people did not die out. The statue-building culture continued with only one difference: They stopped building statues. That culture was not replaced by another one; new people did not come in and drive out the old; there was no genetic discontinuity. In other words, all that happened was that they adapted to environmental change – just as cultures everywhere adapt to environmental change. There was no “collapse,” just change. This is precisely the area of history that Guns, Germs, and Steel did not address. The inexplicable thing about Easter Island is not that they stopped building statues – it’s that they ever started. Because they never had enough surpluses to make the building of stone monuments an obvious thing to do. I’ve found that most criticisms of Guns, Germs, and Steel are either nit-picking that doesn’t undermine his thesis, or straw-man arguments that attack Diamond for saying things that he does not say. However, Collapse, being a religious tract, is wide open for serious criticism at almost every level, mostly because Diamond’s philosophy is faith-based: He starts from the premise that human beings foul things up, and then proceeds to provide only the information that will support that premise. In other words, he’s doing exactly what Creationists and Intelligent Designists do: He bears witness to the faith through which he filters all his data, and thinks he has proven something. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong; it just means he hasn’t actually said anything scholarly or scientific.
The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
She also confirmed that the city was not currently considering any contribution above $20 million from user fees and the hotel-motel tax. Vaughan said she would love to have a performing arts center in Greensboro, but said, “We just need to make sure it’s the right time.” The city doesn’t operate in a vacuum and Vaughan said she was concerned about what effect North Carolina’s new Republicanled General Assembly might have on local budgets, particular a proposal to eliminate the state income tax and replace it with a consumption tax.
Which brings me to the interesting but imperfect anti-book Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (ed. McAnanay & Yoffee). The book consists of a series of essays refuting, or trying to refute, the examples that Diamond uses in Collapse. Some of the essays are closely reasoned critiques or scientific corrections that leave Diamond’s arguments – never very strong – in tatters. The articles on Easter Island, the Andean Indians and Mesopotamia, for instance, make it obvious that the religion of environmentalism is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of human history – unless you know nothing about that history, or are willing to overlook all the inconvenient truths that don’t bear out the eco-apocalyptic theme. Other essays, however, are by believers in competing religions; Michael Wilcox’s answer to Diamond’s assertions about the collapse of Southwest Indian cultures is more petulant than scholarly. Wilcox has a couple of valid points, but mostly he makes equally specious claims about the continuity of Indian cultures and the rectitude of Native American claims to ownership of all artifacts found in “their” territory, even though all genuine evidence indicates that the artifacts have nothing to do with the tribes that happened to occupy the ground when Europeans came. When two faith-based groups argue over points of doctrine, those of us who care about the actual scholarship must politely close the door and let them have their little quarrels. Truth is so elusive and complicated. So are individual human beings. Jared Diamond made a valuable contribution to our present way of thinking about the past with Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I still recommend it – and the way of thinking it represents – as part of the basic education of anyone who wants to go into history, fiction or any related story-telling art. But often the author of a Great Book goes on to write books of a very different caliber. Just as Stephen Pinker went on from the fascinating and valuable Language Instinct to write books of absurd overclaiming (Continued on next page)