Big news today and a great win for the City of Greenville. I believe this is the first big one for Sam Konduros, CEO of the Greenville City Economic Development Corp (GCEDC) who recently took on this position and will no doubt do some great things!
300 East McBee is one very large building for downtown Greenville. The fact that Prisma is going to keep its HQ’s here is a very big deal indead. The deal includes the City of Greenville investing $650,000 in public improvements at Falls Street and East McBee Avenue. Private investors have $38MM in the building and other investments there. There will be new tenants and other very nice improvements to the space. The outside street scape will see some very notable improvements according to this post by the City of Greenville on LinkedIn.
There have been many times that I will park in the public parking garage behind this building and this is the view I see on the 3rd level of the parking garage. I think this is such a cool looking building. It reminds me of a spaceship. I can’t wait to see the improvements they are doing on the back side of this as well.
Companies continue to press ahead with the vaccine mandates. There are three big medical systems here in the Upstate…Prisma, Bon Secours and Spartanburg Regional. I’ve been hearing different things about what each is requiring of their employees when it comes to vaccine mandates. From what I’ve heard Spartanburg Regional has been giving exemptions. I believe Prisma’s mandate is temporarily on hold for now. However, “Catholic” Bon Secours is pressing on despite the judicial injunctions temporarily halting Biden’s vaccine mandate. How liberal they will be with exemptions is still to be seen. As I talk with people who work at big companies in general, they are not stopping despite recent court injuctions.
This e-mail that was purportedly sent to Bon Secours employees today. Note the elusive and mysterious “ministry” leadership. It seems to be a nice way to deflect from any one particular person being held responsible for this decision. Maybe all the employees know who the “ministry” leadership is but that would be great to know and see a public link to remind them who made this judgement call on the vaccine mandate. Does Bon Secours consider their multi-billion business a ministry? 🙂 I suppose. Seems like a stretch to me. But whatever…they are pushing ahead with the vaccine…maybe it’s what Jesus would want them to do. I don’t know.
People are not happy about this. I realize some of you reading this might be cheering this news on that health care companies are forcing all their employees to get vaccinated. This is not going over well here in South Carolina where there still runs a spirit of freedom and independence. My hope is that the stories about vaccine injuries and deaths are exaggerated and don’t continue to happen. If problems continue, apparently Pfizer, JNJ and Moderna cannot be held liable, but what about these companies pushing their employees to be vaccinated? Might they be held liable? The executives? The boards of directors? Only time will tell.
This morning there was large rally / protest at Prisma’s Greenville Memorial Hospital. There are concerns that Prisma is going to mandate Covid vaccines for its employees. Prisma is the largest healthcare provider in the state of South Carolina serving as many as 25% of the state. If Prisma mandates the vaccine then it will be easier for many other health networks to do the same. It also will likely encourage many corporations to also require a vaccine mandate for employment.
It was a peaceful event. I was there from about 7:30 – 9am. The event continued on until 9:30am or so. I’m not a professional at sizing up crowd sizes. I did try to take my own guesstimates but it was definitely more than 500 people but probably less than 1,000 from my vantage point. The organizers of the event were SC4Freedom and Laurens County Republican Party SC. Here’s the Medical Freedom Rally Prisma Health Greenville Facebook Event Page.
There were all kinds of concerned citizens who showed up with homemade signs. This was not a crowd of professional protesters nor did it appear that the group had big sponsors in the background who could crank out tons of signs. Young and old…moms and dads, kids, grandkids…all showed up to make a statement that we will not stand for vaccine mandates and that we need to have medical freedom of choice.
The only people I saw masked were the media personnel who were there filming and broadcasting stories about the rally 🙂
