Speaker of the House Tim Moore has “brought home the bacon” for the Cleveland Community College Advanced Manufacturing Facility. Millions of dollars worth of “bacon” at that. Only thing is the CCC Board of Trustees are plowing ahead with plans to spend the money without knowing what kind of advanced manufacturing they will be teaching. And with the well acknowledged “crisis” in workforce development for Cleveland County students, very few of CCS graduating students will be qualified to take any classes there anyway..
So, one has to wonder about the sanity of the CCC BoT regarding this facility. Will it turn out to be a hog slaughtering facility specializing in curing bacon (since I mentioned “bacon” in the lead in to this article). But this is how much the public knows about this 60,000 sqft facility that is expected to cost $16 million.
ZERO, the public knows zero and that is because the BoTs pretty much only know zero too.
At the CCC BoT meeting Monday, July 9, 2018, the Agenda Exhibits for both the workforce development and the Advanced Manufacturing Project were left blank. A sure sign that the BoTs don’t know what to report and they don’t want the public to know that they don’t know what to report for these topics. It is obvious that all they know is they will be getting $16 million for the Advanced Manufacturing Facility and that much money will build that big of a building, no matter what goes into the building. And the facility will open in 2021 whether there are any students or not.
I will also note that I officially and lawfully requested the recording for this July 9, 2018 BoT meeting to share with the public, but the CCC BoTs have purposely refused to provide that public record even though NC law requires them to do so. So, not only do they not know what they are doing, they are crooks.
All I can say about this is wrapped up in a simple question. Is this stupid or what?
And guess who the CCC BoT chose for Architect? Roger Holland. Holland and Hamrick have gotten basically 100% of county work for years and invariably goes overbudget 40%.or more. So, it’s a stupid way of doing business on top of foolishness all around.
Also, four BoT members were sworn in at this meeting. Wes Westmoreland and Wayne King were re-appointed and Chris Monroe and Dennis Bailey were new appointees. Let us hope that Chris Monroe and Dennis Bailey will start asking the hard questions that the rest have ignored for so long.
Stay tuned.
