Sal Leone is sitting in front of Tate Street Coffee studying a white three-ring binder when I ride up on my bike. The contents include Greensboro’s 2025 Connections Comprehensive Plan, newspaper article printouts and information about his opponents in the at-large race for city council.
He carries the three-ring binder in and periodically thumbs through it to reference something, but speaks about policy issues, principles of representation extemporaneously and personal experiences with passion and conviction. With a police investigator’s knack for detail, he periodically references details such as the reporter’s work on a college newspaper in the Bronx to demonstrate that he’s done his homework all the way around.
Recent events animate him the most.
“That landfill is becoming a stinky issue,” he says. “I think it’s tearing people up. One thing I can’t stand is out-of-control council meetings. When the human relations commission came before the council, it looked like a battle royale instead of a place where intelligent people discuss things in an adult manner.”
Like Jim Kee and Dan Fischer, respectively the incumbent and a challenger in the District 2 race, Leone believes the council ignored a third alternative to burying household waste at White Street and trucking it out of the county -- that being using advanced technology.
“It’s wrong to put a dump in someone’s backyard,” he says. “Have you ever rode behind a garbage truck and smelled someone’s household waste? It’s smelly. It’s really not that hard. A city’s always going to lose money. Quality of life is most important.”
Leone appears to have no personal associations with any of the existing political factions in the city.
His parents came to New York City as immigrants from Sicily in the late 1960s. He says his father died in 1978, and his mother worked at McDonald’s to support the family. Con Edison turned off the power at one time. And Sal sold lemonade at the age of 8 at the corner of Astoria Boulevard and 80th Street in Queens to motorists lined up to buy gas during the shortage of 1979.
He met his future wife online. She wasn’t interested in moving to New York City, so he came to North Carolina.
“I took a chance,” he says. “I dumped everything I knew. I gave up a $80,000-$90,000 job. You know what I did? It’s humbling. I stocked groceries. I was 30 years old. I had no job. That caused a lot of friction at home. I said, ‘Give it time.’”
Leone works for the city of Thomasville as a police officer. They call him “Sal” or “New Yorker” there.
“I’m open to everybody: out-of-staters, in-staters. I know what it’s like to come from someplace else. It’s hard. That’s why I’m so open to people. I know what it’s like to work for minimum wage. I know what it's like to work a shitty job.”
He flips in the three-ring binder to candidate pages and points to several who have not returned questionnaires or who answered questions equivocally. He points out that he returned his questionnaire in one day.
“If you don’t know the answers now, you’re hiding something,” he says. “I’ve been in law enforcement too long. If you don’t know the answer right now, you’re hiding something. It’s yes or no. There’s no ‘I’m not sure’ or ‘I’ll have to get back to you on that.’”
He chides fellow at-large candidate Cyndy Hayworth responding for to a question about the city’s Rental Unit Certificate of Occupancy program by saying, “Because RUCO has already been eliminated, what is the point of looking backwards to determine if it was effective or no? We need to spend our time looking forward.”
“I believe in always looking back because if you don’t you won’t be able to find out where you need to go,” Leone says. “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re going.”
He also says it’s unfortunate that two members of the current council, Mayor Pro Tem Nancy Vaughan and District 3 Councilman Zack Matheny, are disqualified from voting on the landfill because of conflicts of interest.
“Those two are enough to tip the balance,” Leone says. “We’ll never know. The four votes to reopen the White Street landfill are less than 50 percent of the council.
“I don’t need everybody to like me,” he adds. “I’m not going to sell out. I’m not one of these suit-and-tie business people that have all these connections.”
On the issues, his views are hard to pigeonhole as either conservative or progressive.
On the downtown greenway, Leone says, “That’s one I really like. When people start seeing nice stuff and taking pride, it will develop further.”
He advocates privatizing the Greensboro Coliseum.
“You’ve got something hemorrhaging so bad it doesn’t make any sense to keep pouring money into it,” he says. “The poor people who fund it through their taxes can’t afford to go.”
He’s no fan of the aquatic center, which was financed with bonds approved by voters in 2008 and then fast-tracked by council the following year.
“You’re not going to sell me on paying for a pool instead of putting food in a poor kid’s mouth,” Leone says. “I’m sorry, that’s a want, not a need. We need beds for the homeless.”
Philosophically, he’s wary of leaving too much decision-making up to the city manager and staff.
“I want to know what’s going on,” Leone says. “I don’t need to know day to day. But when it affects the masses, I want to know. Then, when the house of cards comes down, ‘I didn’t know?’ No…. We all go down together. Or we all succeed together.”
Leone says as a council member he would reach out to a number of groups he believes have not had an adequate voice in municipal politics. Starting with police officers.
“I want to do ride-alongs,” Leone says. "I want to know what they’re thinking. A lot of council members get their information from the top. I think that’s a mistake. The top person is always going to tell you what he thinks you want to hear. Patton supported his men, and look what they did for him. I want to know what equipment they need. A happy cop is a productive cop. A productive cop goes out there and looks for crime. An unhappy cop is a lazy, complacent cop.”
Council has also not listened closely enough to the African-American community, he says.
“I think they’ve been ignore,” Leone says. “I think they’ve been hurt. It looks bad. It may not be deliberate. I want to talk to them. I want to ask them what the problem is.”
Leone says he is sponsoring a friend to obtain citizenship. He wants to give the international community in Greensboro a greater political voice, specifically mentioning Arabs and Asians. As with other groups, he says he would start by going out of his way to talk to people in the international community and find out what their concerns are.
He favors increasing funding for programs to help the homeless.
“If you get people in treatment programs, you solve a secondary problem – crime,” he says. “If crime goes down, then you save money on police. Otherwise, you end up helping the haves and you end up with a lot of have-nots – the masses. If you fix the social issues, the rest will fall into place.”
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