Richard Beard has his eye on the ball, in more ways than one.
Long an influential name in real estate and economic development circles, Beard is now president and CEO of the Greensboro Sports Foundation. This fall, he wants a new role—one of the three at-large representatives on the nine-member Greensboro City Council. If elected, he told The Thread, he intends to keep his position with the Sports Foundation, which receives city funding.
Having changed his registration from Republican to unaffiliated, Beard still votes in Republican primaries. He said he’d like to see less political division, particularly on a council that is technically non-partisan.
“We need to collaborate more as a community and bring the groups together and find some common ground,” Beard said, “Let’s get to the middle. I’m unaffiliated because I’m tired of partisan politics. Local politics is nonpartisan. It’s driving a lot of people crazy to try to figure out, are you a Republican or a Democrat? I’m unaffiliated, I’m all defense. And that’s where I think we need to come to make our community better.”
Raised in Greensboro, Beard attended Greensboro College for his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Management. He’s worked with local government leaders at the city and county levels to implement a controversial one-percent prepared food tax in Guilford County, which would have allocated one cent from every dollar spent on restaurant food toward sports-related spending, at one point hiring lobbyists to try to get the General Assembly’s approval.
“Sports brings a whole lot more than a contract with the NBA, NFL, or MLB,” Beard said. “It brings teamwork, discipline, self-control, and time management.”
“I want to use sports and my desire to see changes with our Parks and Recreation [department],” he said. “Investing more into it, to get kids an outlet that’s safe and maybe direct their energies in a more positive way than what I’m seeing in the community.”
Parks and Recreation is facing $280 million in deferred maintenance, Beard said, an illustration of how the city is failing its children.
”I want to make Parks and Recreation a priority in this community instead of an afterthought,” he said. “We’re great about building nice new facilities, and then we don’t maintain them.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you want a seat on the city council?
Because of my background. I’m a native of Greensboro. I went to Irving Park Elementary, Aycock Junior High, and Page High School. I moved away for 10 years to Roanoke, Virginia, and got into economic development, trying to recruit businesses and industries to the Roanoke Valley of Virginia. But my sense of community, what I loved when I got into economic development, is what it does for the community is creating a tax base and creating jobs. I wasn’t getting paid a whole lot of money to do it, but it was the happiest I’ve been in my working career.
And fast forward to today, I’m back in economic development, and I couldn’t be happier because of what it does for the community. [Greensboro is] in the best position that I think in my lifetime when it comes to future job growth and in these industries, especially in aviation, and even Toyota with electric vehicle technology. I really think what we’re experiencing today is very similar to when the Cones came here and brought textiles to Greensboro. That’s what made Greensboro was textiles. And that went away, and now aviation is going to make Greensboro. So I want to help us get prepared for that. I want to get in there and find out how we’re spending our money, and are we spending it wisely? Could it be better allocated?
The at-large race is pretty full with 10 candidates and only three seats available. Many of you are pretty similar in ideology. What sets you apart from the other candidates?
I’m focused on the entire community. We’ve got to make sure that the prosperity that’s going to come with this growth, that it’s spread throughout the whole city. We need to expand our infrastructure. I want these people living in Greensboro instead of Rockingham County and Randolph County, and other areas. Because they’re gonna come in and they’re going to use our Coliseum, and they’re going to use our parks, and they’re going to use our libraries that us, as city taxpayers, are only the ones paying for. So we know these people are going to use these amenities. Let’s make this community the place that they want to live. And then I want to make sure that we’re a vibrant community that is going to attract young people.
What do you believe the issues are in this race?
Our budget’s gonna be an issue. How are we gonna continue paying for things unless we really get in there and assess it and make sure that we’re spending our money wisely? And we need a better strategy. We don’t have a plan for our city. We’re too reactive. We need to be proactive, and that’s gonna require a vision and a plan to take us to the future.
Public safety. I’m hearing it from everybody. We can’t have a visible homeless issue downtown. It doesn’t make people feel safe coming downtown; people don’t want to be approached by people that are looking for some help. A lot of our friends and a lot of people I talk to in the community do not go downtown because they don’t feel safe. That needs to change. Downtown not being safe, it’s not just homelessness. There’s a lot of traffic at 10 p.m., and with music blaring. I think we need to close Elm Street on Friday and Saturday night and make it pedestrian. I think what’s holding us back is it just doesn’t feel warm, welcoming. And I hear that a lot. Downtown is for everybody in this community. Our parks and recreation is for everybody in this community. So I’m focused on issues that benefit the entire community, not just pockets.
You just said downtown is for everybody. Are homeless people welcome?
Homeless people are welcome if they’re not blocking doorways and urinating in public places, and all the issues that we see with homelessness. I mean, that’s got to be dealt with in other parts, but not downtown. They can’t live in the park. They can’t take over Center City Park.
The city is a benefactor of the Greensboro Sports Foundation and has partnered with you on the one-percent prepared food tax project. If elected, how would you manage potential conflicts of interest with those two roles?
I will recuse myself [on voting] for any funding that comes to the Sports Foundation. I left a very successful real estate career. I didn’t take this role because I was looking for a job. It was because of my passion. I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it for what it does for our community, and our track record with the Sports Foundation is remarkable.
We were not involved in all of them, but we certainly played a part in 141 events in 2024 that created 280,000 hotel room nights. And think about not only the occupancy tax that these visitors leave in Greensboro, but also the sales tax, all the restaurants. We have these big sports events—this past weekend was a soccer tour of soccer kids all over the place, all the restaurants. It’s unbelievable how much it brings to this community. That’s why I’m doing this.
And that doesn’t even talk about some of the things that I’m involved in, like helping raise money for Learn to Swim, to teach every second grader water skills. So there are a lot of things that we’re doing in the community. It’s not just hosting these events. Over at Lindley Center, they have an incredible boxing program through Parks and Rec, and they have 200-300 kids in there. Some of these kids are developing to where they qualify for a tournament. They have no money for travel, and the Sports Foundation has been involved in helping raise funds to give these kids an opportunity to go and see something that they would never normally have, and give them a little hope. You know, they’d go and win a belt in a boxing match. It might turn their life around. I mean, that’s what the Sports Foundation is all about. I’m not gonna walk away from that. It’s too important. But I want to always go on the counsel of the city attorney.
If I need to recuse myself, I want to do it. It’s too important for the community for me to walk away just because I’m on city council, they can work together.
Why do you believe a one-percent prepared food tax is so important for Greensboro?
There are five jurisdictions in North Carolina that have prepared food taxes: Mecklenburg County, Wake County, Cumberland County, Dare County, and the town of Hillsborough. Down in Charlotte, raising $650 million of taxpayer dollars to improve Bank of America Stadium.
That’s paid for through hospitality taxes, the hotel/motel tax. And the prepared food tax is a large bucket of revenue that has to be spent on tourism-related facilities, like the Coliseum, like Bryan Park, or Spencer Love Tennis that our community gets to enjoy 365 days out of the year. They might have to give it up a few times when a big tournament comes, but having help from the outside paying for all this is huge. Our Coliseum needs $200 million worth of improvements. Right now, we have one source to pay for that, and that’s the city taxpayer. Nothing’s coming from the county, nothing’s coming from the region, nothing’s coming from the state yet.
We’re on pause right now [with the food tax] because there is no strategy. We need to hear from the community. So it’s not a dead conversation, it’s just not a public conversation right now.
There’s an argument out there that it’s an unfair tax to a lot of people in underserved areas because they’re in food deserts and they’re eating at fast food. I’ve heard an elected official say that, you know, their constituents eat fast food twice a day. And my first reaction was, “Boy, that bothers me more than a one-percent prepared food tax.” They’re not eating healthy, and we’ve got to find ways to get healthy foods into these food deserts for sure.
I am very concerned about our deferred maintenance and our parks and recreation and our entertainment facilities, and our quality of life places that we don’t have any plan on how we’re going to keep them up. So I’m always going to look for alternative revenue sources, private partnerships. I’m also convinced there are a lot of very philanthropic people in this community that have the means to support some things.
Recently, the city of Durham passed a resolution making Durham a “Fourth Amendment Workplace,” increasing protections for city workers against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests. It directs city staff to “uphold the 4th amendment at their workplace and city agencies and report back to Council any barriers to effective training on the 4th Amendment for any departments.” What’s your position on how the council handles things related to ICE and deportation?
I’ve got some learning to do on what the council’s responsibility is on those issues. What’s going on with deportations and ICE and everything, that’s federal coming down to the localities. I also know that we’re a manufacturing community, and there’s a lot of labor out there that we desperately need. I know people out there that have been here for 20 years and are law-abiding, good people. I’d give them the keys to my house, but they’re illegal.
What can we do to expedite the process to keep them here? We’ve had a lot of local issues that we need to deal with. I want to support the elected officials on a state and federal level to work, you know, let’s all collaborate. There were a lot of city council meetings that I went to where a lot of people were coming and talking about what was going on in Gaza and the Palestinians and the Israelis, and they wanted the city council to pass a resolution to end the war in Gaza. You know, that’s a terrible thing that’s going on there, but the city council is not changing that. You know, we can support it, but I’ve sat in a city council meeting for an hour and a half of speakers from the floor asking for a resolution to end the war in Gaza. We’ve got our business in Greensboro that we need to focus on.
We need to listen to that, but, you know, we’ve got other business that we need to take care of. We’ve got to reprioritize. One of my taglines is I have a vision for Greensboro, and I’m focused on the future. I’m 64 years old, but this is one last push that maybe we can give some confidence to some young people in this community that you can run for city council and you can make a difference, and you can work as a group. And hopefully, as a group of five, six, or seven, rather than groups of one or two.