“Are we going to put up a fence around our city and say people can’t move into it?” said Jeff Thigpen, Assistant Director of Admissions and an elected member of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners. “This is a complicated issue full of contradictions.”
The issue is whether or not the conservation of water should take precedence over continued development in the Greensboro area.
Thigpen, like many at Guilford, understands the need to conserve limited resources, particularly water, in the face of increased commercial development and urban sprawl.
He also understands that development plays a vital role in the health of Greensboro’s economy.
“With housing development comes new service industries to serve those communities,” said Thigpen, “and that creates jobs.”
In the wake of a recession these jobs are needed more than ever.
“Many working class people are still under the gun and looking for jobs,” said Thigpen. “We are losing many, of the traditional jobs in the community, in textiles and apparel for example.”
Thigpen is not alone in his concern over unemployment.
Tom Martin, Greensboro’s Planning Director, in an interview with The Greensboro News and Record said, “We’ve got two problems. One is water, but the other is the economy.” Slowing development in an effort to save water could be more harmful to Greensboro’s economy than helpful to its reservoirs.
These concerns over the health of the economy are what have led Thigpen and Martin to believe it is vital for Greensboro to find ways to conserve while still developing.
Such actions are already underway.
The effects of water restrictions, and more importantly, efforts to educate individuals and corporations about conservation are already having an effect on Greensboro’s water usage.
“We are using less water than we were five years ago,” said Martin.
In fact, The Rhinoceros Times reported that the Greensboro Water Resources Director, Allan Williams, said the city is “in better shape than some of the other large cities” in North Carolina.
This is fortunate for the working class residents of Guilford County, many of whom simply cannot bare the burden of sacrificing jobs in the construction and service sectors in exchange for increased conservation measures.
“Someone once told me how you see the world depends 100 percent on where you stand when you see it,” said Thigpen.
From where many people stand, actions that would stunt economic growth simply are not options.