Mayor to start wearing flame retardant pants

GREENSBORO, NC -- Although it was captured on video, nobody seemed to notice that Mayor Robbie Perkins' pants were on fire when he told citizens of east Greensboro last October that $20 million in private contributions had been raised for a downtown performing arts center.

In the mayor's own words (24:43)

"We have a task force of 83 members of our community that have been working since February on that project and they successfully raised twenty million dollars in private sector community, uh, private sector dollars for a sixty million dollar project."

Not only were people who were paying attention aware then that the $20 million claim, although repeated by other community leaders, was incredulous, it has now been revealed that there were only $15 million dollars in "soft" pledges.

From Amanda Lehmert at the News & Record:

"Kathy Manning, who helped led [sic] the performing arts center task force fundraising effort, said earlier this week that she has been careful to call the commitments 'tentative' or 'soft.'"

The task force never had $20 million in private contributions or even $15 million in contributions. Contrary to the mayor's assertions, they had zero contributions. What they had was $15 million in soft prospects — possible contributions. That's it. The Mayor was wrong to tell the people of east Greensboro that $20 million dollars had been raised. That was not true and the mayor mislead his audience.

(Hat tip to Billy Jones who brought the mayor's statement to my attention.)