One of the pleas of the Embassy Square Foundation board members who met with the Henderson City Council on Tuesday night was for help getting out their message — a message they said has been distorted or lost amid critics misinformation.
In the interest of supporting the effort to drive out misinformation, we found that several statements in support of Embassy Square on Tuesday were not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
We can’t say whether the statements were slips or were meant to mislead the elected officials and reporters at the meeting of the Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee. But we’re sure that such inexact comments only contribute to the confusion and suspicion with which some people view the downtown revitalization.
Some of the misleading comments and our take on them:
* The city spent the $1.3 million (or $1.8 million — who’s counting?) before the Embassy foundation existed. That’s certainly news to the Disabled American Veterans, to cite one of the former property owners on the block between Breckenridge and Winder streets that is becoming the Embassy cultural center. It wasn’t until 2002 that Henderson paid the DAV to retreat from its downtown headquarters in favor of a former grocery store on East Andrews Avenue. Remember, City Manager Eric Williams pointed to the roughly $400,000 cost of the DAV building when looking for the cause of the city’s Embassy overruns.
The point behind the overly broad statement is valid: The city made the decision to buy and redevelop the block before the foundation existed. But the idea that all of the city’s upfront spending came while Henderson was flush with a 40 percent fund balance isn’t quite right.
* The Embassy Square Foundation has raised $9 million. Well, it all depends on your definition of “raised.” As Embassy executive committee member Rick Palamar said Tuesday, the foundation has received pledges for $9 million, but it has only $3 million to $4 million in hand. Foundation Chairman Sam Watkins said construction is proceeding with a $5.5 million bank loan that required the foundation to spend $1.5 million of its own money first. Foundation members warned that in order to collect on the millions of dollars of pledges, they need to avoid any appearance of community discord on the project.
Aside from the uncertainty of collecting on pledges, there’s a real question about how much credit the foundation deserves for the governmental side of the fundraising. After all, arguably the No. 1 contributor to the project isn’t Minerva McGregor, who pledged $1 million in memory of her son, Clifford, but the federal government, which gave $1 million to the Embassy foundation and $1 million to the Embassy streetscape project. And we’ve been told repeatedly that the Ferguson Group, the D.C. lobbying firm the city pays $78,000 a year, deserves the credit for landing those grants. We have to figure the city could have won at least that money, as well as a $475,000 state grant delivered by Rep. Jim Crawford, with or without a special nonprofit group in place.
We’re not denying the excellent work the foundation has done pursing corporate, foundation and individual donations. But as Watkins says, it’s a public-private partnership, and the public side has played a big role in fundraising.
* The H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library is the only place for public access to computers. Well, it’s certainly the best place, particularly on a Sunday afternoon when it’s not football season and you’re eager to search for a job that pays more than minimum wage. But the only site? Not quite. As council member Elissa Yount noted, the public schools and Vance-Granville Community College also provide a valuable computer service. And if you can afford the $400 or so for a secondhand notebook computer, there are places to get online free, such as The Java House downtown on Garnett Street.
Again, the main point is correct: There’s no place like the library for free computer and Internet access. But we’re looking for accuracy here.
* Henderson’s voters showed their support for the Embassy project by electing a City Council full of Embassy supporters. This one, repeated a couple of times by Watkins, made us want to laugh. First, two council members, Ranger Wilkerson and Harriette Butler, had no opposition; they could have campaigned on a platform of sacrificing baby seals every Friday night on Wyche Street and they would have been re-elected. Second, we participated in interviews and debates with all of the candidates for the other six council seats, and all of them expressed support for the Embassy project. No one won a seat as a pro-Embassy candidate because no one ran as an anti-Embassy candidate.
The election statement is only worth an argument regarding the mayoral race, in which third-place finisher Jeanne Hight ran as an Embassy skeptic. But both winner Clem Seifert and runoff runner-up E.C. Terry backed the Embassy project. And Seifert was arguably stronger in his statements anticipating a foundation reimbursement of the city’s initial investment, and he was clear in his opposition to spending money to move City Hall downtown any time soon.
* If not for the courage of the fearless foundation, the city would be stuck with a lot of useless downtown land and worthless architectural and engineering plans. Well, the city probably wouldn’t be less than a year from opening the desperately needed new library, and the foundation board deserves our thanks for its tireless work in that direction. But let’s not rewrite history. Not only weren’t the properties the city bought worthless, but they included productive businesses and tax producers until the Embassy-inspired evictions and demolitions.
The Embassy project contributed, in however slight a way, to removing property from the tax rolls, although it also inspired at least one downtown revitalization of private property, the Uptown Rose restaurant.
* If not for the Embassy project, we would be talking about all of the abandoned and burned-out downtown buildings on that block as part of the Clean Up Henderson campaign. This statement from council member John Wester stretches too far in following the previous point. It’s absolutely true that the city demolished disgraceful buildings as part of the Embassy project, but those buildings were on the north side of Breckenridge Street, the civic, city-financed side of the revitalization. That side has nothing to do with the Embassy Square Foundation.
The block set aside for the foundation’s efforts, the future home of the library and the theater, looked pretty good. The houses fronting Chestnut Street were downright beautiful, to the point that Preservation North Carolina forced the city to try to sell some of them before demolishing them. With all of the dilapidated houses only a few blocks from Embassy Square, we doubt anyone would have complained about the buildings between Breckenridge and Winder.
Speaking of blocks, on a final note, we lost count of the number of times people at Tuesday night’s meeting talked about the importance of the “Embassy Block” project. The project certainly is important; it also certainly is named Embassy Square and has been for a couple of years now.
We don’t know what effect community discord has on fundraising, but we have to think big-bucks corporations and foundations are turned off when the very people asking them for money can’t keep the project’s name straight.