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Mr. Mayor The Information Came From You

NOTE: This article has been updated to include a short online conversation that took place between Mayor Shaw and myself after publication.

Last Monday I published an article, Questionable Behavior Everywhere I Look, in which I detailed several disturbing behaviors by members of our Board of Commissioners and Mayor Shaw. One of the issues I covered in that post was a special meeting the mayor planned to call to interview two candidates for the town clerk position.

On Friday, August 23, I sent an email to all members of the board and the mayor requesting comment about this and several other issues our governing body has been wrestling with in recent weeks. I wrote, “[It] is my understanding that Mayor Shaw plans to call a special meeting for next Friday, knowing that at least one commissioner will be unavailable as we enter the Labor Day holiday weekend. Continue reading “Mr. Mayor The Information Came From You”

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Remarks To Randolph NAACP, 11 May 2019

I was asked to post a copy of my remarks to the local NAACP chapter this past Saturday. I spoke to tell my side of a complaint that Grant Cheek, a Ramseur Town Commissioner, filed against me with that organization. He spoke to them at their regular meeting last month. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have a copy or a recording of his remarks to compare.

On 10 November 2015, Grant Cheek was elected to a seat on the Ramseur Board of Commissioners and was appointed to “head” Ramseur’s water and sewer department. That same year, I ran and lost a race for mayor of Ramseur against Danny Shaw.

By about February of 2016 the position of water-billing clerk had become vacant and Commissioner Cheek began volunteering, doing that job, until a replacement could be found. Eventually his peers on the board took action, first voting to compensate Mr. Cheek for his time, and later voting to hire him full time. Thus Grant Cheek became Ramseur’s water-billing/deputy town clerk, and a sitting commissioner in charge of the department he is employed within. Continue reading “Remarks To Randolph NAACP, 11 May 2019”

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“If we don’t do it and they do it, then we can’t do it.”

The quote in the headline above was spoken by Commissioner Grant Cheek at the May board meeting earlier this month. You can watch the full discussion in the video linked further down the page. The commissioners were discussing a resolution to approve a five month old trademark application. To understand the issue it might be helpful to look back about six months to last December.

It all started with an attempt to quash free speech when Adam Smith, self-appointed commissioner over the Internet, took it upon himself to file a trademark application for the town of Ramseur. Smith’s action was illegitimate, and possibly illegal, and should have resulted in his immediate censure if not removal from the board because he filed the application and was reimbursed the nearly $1,000 fee before at least some board members ever even heard about it. Continue reading ““If we don’t do it and they do it, then we can’t do it.””