The Watauga County
Commission, in its post-Nathan Miller honeymoon phase, is a decidedly different
place. Case in point at the two-day budget workshop that started today:
Right off the bat, the
commissioners heard a consulting firm's feasibility report on a new county
recreation center, with a whopping bottomline of $25,169,200 (including
"soft costs"). The question that County Manager Deron Geoque posed to
the sphinx-like Republicans: Do we proceed with more feasibility costs on this
project, namely civil engineering (detrmining the water table, for example),
surveying, etc.
Everyone was waiting for
new Chair Jimmy Hodges to speak, and he finally did. He said he was in favor of
a new rec center ("I support this," were his exact words), but he
threw a curveball as he began channeling his inner real estate broker. Hodges
wants to pursue acquiring new property for the project, namely the original
Lowe's property where Appalachian State University now has its warehouse and
purchasing department.
Hodges has a vision of a
new county recreation center operating in tandem with the new school of nursing
and an expanded medical center campus, which is indeed an arresting, in fact
invigorating, vision for a county that has been extremely cramped for any
progressive vision since, oh, 2010.
God knows how this will play
out, but without Nathan Miller sandbagging their thought processes, the other
two Republican members of the Commission appear ripe for seduction by a more
liberal spirit on the board.
No comments:
Post a Comment