Charlotte’s SouthPark neighborhood is poised to get a new tax district after City Council approved the move this week in a preliminary vote. It would amount to an additional 4 cents per $100 of property valuation. A final vote on the move is expected next month.
“The business leaders in SouthPark said, 'Listen, we need to get more attention to SouthPark, we need more marketing, we need somebody dedicated to promoting SouthPark,’” the Charlotte Ledger business newsletter’s Tony Mecia told WFAE’s Marshall Terry on this week’s BizWorthy. “And so they came together, they started lobbying the City Council, and now the City Council has given preliminary approval to this tax increase. The money would go for things like events, marketing, signs, branding, things to call attention to South Park, and there will be a full time staff dedicated to that.”
In other news, the owner of Charlotte restaurants La Belle Helene and Church and Union is suing a freelance writer and several employees for defamation. The lawsuit is based on posts to social media.
“A lot of people, Marshall, probably think, 'You put stuff on social media; you can kind of say whatever you want,’” Mecia said. “Well, defamation laws still apply, no matter what the medium is. The freelance writer, whose name is Dion Beary, he was writing an article for the alternative publication Queen City Nerve. He'd been in contact with some of the ex-employees, who had made some allegations about not being paid, that sort of thing, according to the lawsuit.
“And so the restaurant owner, 5th Street Group, denies those allegations and says that spreading false information has hurt the business. So, both sides have lawyered up. It'll be argued in court. It's fairly rare for journalists to get sued. Those cases can be hard to win, but they do take a long time, typically, and they require lawyers, which can be quite expensive.”
You can listen to the full BizWorthy conversation above. Here’s a quick look at what else Mecia and Terry covered this week.
- North Carolina is getting its first car-manufacturing plant. Vietnam-based VinFast is setting up shop near Raleigh.
- There’s a lot of hype about the Final Four showdown between Duke and North Carolina this coming weekend, but the two teams meet — in a sense — in a friendly way at a Gastonia industrial park that has intersecting streets named for both the Tar Heels and the Blue Devils.
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