The Question City Attorney Lora Cubbage Wouldn't Answer; Who Actually Ordered the Gutting of Tenant Protections in Greensboro?

Email to Greensboro City Council; Request to Rescind Ordinance Changes to the Minimum Housing Standards Commission (MHSC)

Dear Mayor and City Council Members,

We urge you to vote to rescind the recent ordinance changes to the Minimum Housing Standards Commission (MHSC). A thorough review of the public record, including email correspondence from City Attorney Lora Cubbage, reveals a deeply troubling process marked by contradictory explanations, a lack of legal basis and an apparent effort to obscure the origin and impact of these significant policy changes.

The evidence suggests these amendments were not a routine legal cleanup but a predetermined action that undermines tenant protections and aligns precisely with external lobbying interests. Key concerns include;

Shifting and Contradictory Justifications; The City Attorney provided three different reasons for the changes; legal harmonization (Oct. 21-22), part of a pre-election departmental update (Oct. 23), and a standard, rotational ordinance review (Oct. 27).

These cannot all be true.

No Identifiable Legal Requirement; Despite direct requests, the City Attorney failed to cite any state statute that conflicts with or requires the elimination of commissioner site visits or city-conducted rental market studies. The only law referenced (G.S. 42-14.1) pertains to landlord notices, not quasi-judicial board procedures.

Origin of Changes Deliberately Obscured; When asked who requested or initiated these amendments, the City Attorney refused to answer, stating only that it is “the lawyer’s responsibility.” This evasiveness is inappropriate for a change of this magnitude.

Perfect Alignment with TREBIC Lobbying; The two specific changes, ending commissioner inspections and halting city rental cost studies, mirror exactly the demands made by the Triad Real Estate and Building Industries Coalition (TREBIC) in a lobbying email. This suggests the ordinance was shaped by special interests, not legal necessity.

Substantive Changes Improperly Placed on Consent Agenda; These are major policy shifts that reduce commission oversight and independent data collection. Placing them on the consent agenda was an attempt to avoid public debate and council scrutiny.

A Coordinated Effort to Discredit the MHSC; Internal emails from late November reveal a premeditated effort by the City Attorney and Code Compliance to frame the MHSC Chair as hostile, creating a pretext to justify restricting the Commission’s authority and limiting staff presence at its meetings.

Given this pattern of inconsistent statements, lack of transparency and the significant negative impact on housing oversight, we strongly believe the ordinance changes were advanced under misleading premises.

Therefore, I respectfully request the City Council;

• Vote to rescind the MHSC ordinance changes.

• Initiate a transparent review of the process that led to these amendments.

• Commit to a full public work session on the role and powers of the MHSC before considering any future changes.

The integrity of our city’s processes and the protection of vulnerable tenants demand nothing less. Thank you for your attention to this critical matter.

If the City Council fails to rescind these ordinance changes, the harm to tenants will be direct and substantial; the elimination of independent commissioner inspections removes a critical layer of oversight and verification in housing standard disputes, potentially leaving tenants without a key advocate for health and safety repairs, while the cessation of city-run rental cost studies strips policymakers and the public of essential, unbiased data needed to understand affordability crises and hold landlords accountable.

The relative responsibility for this harm rests squarely with the City Council, as the governing body that ultimately approved these changes based on contradictory and legally unsupported justifications; by not acting to reverse this decision, the council becomes complicit in diminishing tenant protections and endorsing a process that appears to have been driven more by external lobbying than by factual analysis or public interest.

Mayor Marikay Abuzuaiter, and Council Members Hugh Holston and Tammi Thurm, must recuse themselves from any reconsideration of the MHSC ordinance due to their profound failure in their supervisory roles, which directly enabled this flawed process. As members of the council’s leadership and liaison structure, they bear ultimate responsibility for overseeing the City Attorney’s office and vetting agenda items. Their failure to adequately question the contradictory justifications, to demand the origin of the policy, and to challenge the improper placement of a substantive tenant-protection rollback onto the consent agenda represents a breakdown in governance. By allowing a vote to proceed on such a legally dubious and poorly vetted item, they compromised the integrity of the legislative process. To ensure a fair and objective review now, and to restore public trust, their recusal is necessary, as they can no longer be seen as impartial arbiters of a matter their own lack of oversight helped create.

City Attorney Lora Cubbage bears direct, professional responsibility for the deception and procedural abuse surrounding the MHSC ordinance changes. As the city’s chief legal officer, she provided the Council with shifting, contradictory, and factually inaccurate justifications; first claiming state law mandated changes she could not cite, then framing it as routine cleanup, and finally dismissing substantive concerns as “false narratives.” She deliberately evaded answering who initiated the changes, misrepresented the applicability of state statute, and facilitated the improper placement of a major policy rollback on the consent agenda. Her actions constitute a breach of her duty to provide candid, accurate legal counsel and to uphold the integrity of the legislative process. For compromising the public’s trust and the Council’s ability to govern based on truth, she must be removed from any further involvement in this matter. An independent review should determine her fitness to continue in her role, and any future legal counsel on this issue must come from an unbiased source unconnected to her office.

Respectfully,

g

Related;

A Backchannel Message and an 8–1 Vote; Inside TREBIC’s Email to Greensboro Officials Before the MHSC Decision

Disclaimer; The preceding analysis and statements are based on the author’s examination of publicly available documents, including email correspondence, city ordinances, meeting agendas, and publicly disclosed communications. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are presented for public discourse and accountability. They do not constitute legal advice or formal allegations of criminal conduct. All individuals and entities named are presumed innocent of any wrongdoing unless otherwise determined by a competent judicial or investigatory authority. Readers are strongly encouraged to review the source materials independently and draw their own conclusions. Any individual or organization referenced is invited to provide clarifying statements or corrections, which will be considered for inclusion to ensure fairness and accuracy. This content is protected as political speech and opinion.