As Ricky Ricardo used to tell Lucy occasionally, “Someone’s got some ‘splaining to do.”
That’s our reaction to this week’s convoluted unfolding of the situation surrounding the county having allowed the Koury Corporation of Greensboro to seek a rezoning of property owned by the county in Mebane, where county officials have said they intend to build an EMS substation.
Even with an attempt at greater transparency (on Wednesday than they demonstrated on Tuesday), we still think there are major holes in the county’s outline of how it came to be that county-owned land was included in a rezoning project for a private company.
The first question is why in the world the county would have allowed it in the first place?
The county has owned the property for about 17 months.
County officials could have picked up the phone and asked Mebane city officials to rezone their property for the future EMS station that they purchased the property last year to build.
So why become involved in participating in that company’s rezoning project for a major shopping center and apartment/townhouse complex?
Much less when so much “confusion” (to put it mildly) results over what kind of zoning the company was going to actually request for the county’s property.
It just really doesn’t pass a fundamental “smell” test.
It looks to us like a bit more than just the “misunderstanding” county officials were, finally, willing to acknowledge.
Here’s always the best approach: be open.
After all, it’s the taxpayers’ money that paid for this land in the first place.
The county commissioners could have been asked, at an open meeting, whether they wanted to engage in some sort of cooperative rezoning with the Greensboro company.
While we originally thought the county was being evasive and potentially deceptive, it seems that’s there’s more than enough blame to go around in the whole episode.
Koury Corporation’s attorneys clearly exaggerated – or made up out of whole cloth – to Mebane city officials that they “owned” all of the 19 properties for which they were seeking rezoning.
They certainly showed a development (see page 1 illustration) that seemed as though it was entirely theirs.
But it wasn’t.
There’s been no mention whatsoever in the several months that the Koury project has been pending that the county had any stake at all in the outcome of the project, or its rezoning request.
One potential silver lining in this imbroglio is that perhaps the county will actually end up with a better deal out of this debacle than it has now.
Invariably, they’ll have the Koury developers over a barrel inasmuch as the company is certainly going to want to keep its two South Third Street entrances into its development – one of which requires the county’s current EMS site in order to meet Mebane’s, and DOT’s, requirements.
Still we’re not sure that a “land swap,” orchestrated by the county and the Koury Corporation, is really fair to all taxpayers.
The more common, and fair, practice is that the county’s land should be put up for sale where everyone can bid on the property – not just one designated company as the recipient, even if by “swapping” properties. The objective is supposed to be for the county’s taxpayers, who already shelled out $300,000 for the property, to get the best possible outcome.
We also give credit to Mebane officials for their transparency throughout the process – and their promptness in responding to our public records request for documents related to the city’s consideration and approval of the rezoning request since Monday night’s city council meeting.
Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for similar information from county officials.
This episode may not be as much of the scandal as it initially appeared to be, but it still doesn’t reflect very well on the county manager or other top county officials who have put the county into an uncomfortable, and unnecessarily embarrassing, situation.
