Contact us at GreensboroAquarium@gmail.com

Sunday, January 20, 2013

No Smoke, No Mirrors

Here at the Downtown Greensboro Aquarium Project we don't have $20 Million in secret donations. We're not looking for $20 Million in City funding. And we're certainly not laying claim to Hotel-Motel Taxes or Sweepstakes Gambling taxes as a way to raise funding for our project. Want to know who's behind this project? You're looking at us.

Our hope is that the City of Greensboro will trade the project the abandoned property on the southeast corner of Elm and Lee as a location for the project in return for a significant number of shares of stock in the venture.

We're hoping that at least some of our off campus sites could be gotten from local developers/building owners in the same way.

You see, many corporations are started in just this way with the major stockholders pitching in property or inventory instead of money. One North Carolina example that I know of is the Golden Corral Corporation. http://www.goldencorral.com/ Golden Corral was started by a Greensboro construction contractor, a Raleigh floral wholesaler, a Sanford brick manufacturer, a Sanford electrical supplier, a Wilmington restaurant equipment wholesaler and a South Carolina lumber company. I know that because I drove the tractor-trailer that delivered all those items to their construction sites. There was not a chef or a cook in the bunch.

I'm assuming the Raleigh floral wholesaler put up a lot of the cash needed but who knows what else he might have had going on or what sort of inventory he might have had laying around.

I don't mind telling you that Ed Catalano and I don't have $Millions to invest in the project. At least I know I don't and it's a pretty good bet Ed's drywall and painting business hasn't made him that kind of money either. But we both believe the aquarium will be a major economic driver for Greensboro and that it won't be a long term drain on the taxpayers even if it does need a little help getting off the ground. So please, don't stop with this one blog post. Click on our home page then scroll back through the many posts I've written here. Then go check out what Ed is posting to our Greensboro Aquarium Facebook Page. Check out our FAQ and send your questions to GreensboroAquarium@gmail.com I promise we'll answer them to the best of our ability.

Ed and I believe that if the citizens of Greensboro want a downtown aquarium project as a major economic development project then the citizens of Greensboro will willingly pool together to make it happen. That is, if they know about it. The problem is getting the word out. I have personally asked the local media to cover this story and have been refused, the reason cited: Ed and I are not on City Council.

In other words: if you hold elected office in Greensboro the local media will gladly participate in any amount of smoke and mirrors you wish them to participate in but if you're an average citizen with a genuine cause the local media hasn't the time of day to live up to their responsibilities. Yeah, we know how it works. So please, help spread the word.

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