Summerfield Votes a Resounding "NO!" to FedEx!
Summerfield, N.C. held a town meeting Thursday night March 8th at the Summerfield Elementary school where the town council passed a resolution opposing construction of the proposed FedEx hub at PTIA. Fifteen people spoke at the meeting, and when one speaker asked if there were any FedEx supporters there, not one person raised their hand, and no one spoke for FedEx.
Summerfield Mayor John Wray had previously said that they (he and the town council) represented the citizens of Summerfield, and they must do what the citizens of Summerfield wanted. (A lesson many of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners should learn.) The citizens said "No" to the hub, and the resolution against the hub was unanimously passed.
Also in attendance was Guilford County Commissioner Linda Shaw, who represents Summerfield. She said she would present it (the resolution) to the Board of Commissioners. She was quoted by the Greensboro News & Record as saying "Thank you very much for doing something that the Guilford County Commissioners should have done three years ago. I'm really ashamed that I can't seem to get six votes to allow the people to speak." Six of the eleven board members have to vote "yes" to hold an open public hearing on this or any other issue. (An e-mail request to each of the board members has been sent by the webmaster of this site asking if they would vote "yes" for such a meeting, and if "no", to explain why not. The responses, or lack of responses, of each board member will be published on this web site in a few days.)
The meeting made the lead story at Fox 8 News at 10, and WSJS Channel 2 carried the story at 11 with a live broadcast from the school. The meeting also made the front page of the Greensboro News & Record. (Click here for their story.) According to the High Point Enterprise, they did not have anyone available to cover the story and had only a single line stating "Thursday Evening, Summerfield's town council voted to oppose the FedEx hub" in the Friday, March 9th issue. A phone call to the Enterprise brought forth the promise of having further coverage of the meeting in the paper, perhaps as early as Saturday's issue. As of Monday's issue, they haven't printed anything else about it that I could find. Perhaps they feel they don't have any readers in Summerfield, or else it wasn't significant enough for them. The Virginia State Lottery numbers obviously are as they are published on a regular basis.
Other towns and cities are being encouraged to do the same as Summerfield.