Julie Rose

Think about this for a moment - back in 1960, the entire city of Charlotte was just 35 square miles.  Today it's more than 300 square miles. That's a 700 percent expansion as one neighborhood after another got swallowed up through annexation.

But now, there's not much land left to annex and recent changes to state law will make future annexation much harder.  No big deal, right?  Many people think Charlotte's plenty big. What few realize is the role annexation has played in the city's budget and tax rates over the years. WFAE's Julie Rose explains.

Charlotte police and federal drug officials on Friday rounded up nine men and the matriarch of a family selling cocaine and marijuana in the Enderly Park neighborhood.  

Enderly Park is an old Charlotte neighborhood of small homes west of Uptown that's become rough over the years as original residents have passed away and their homes have gone up for rent. CMPD Lieutenant Blake Hollar says 70-year-old Mary Falls exploited that trend to move a bunch of relatives onto her block.

Last weekend, a report in the Raleigh News and Observer caught our attention.  State Senator Fletcher Hartsell of Concord had apparently spent nearly $100,000 of his campaign money to pay personal credit card bills over the last two years.

The Charlotte Knights baseball stadium now under construction Uptown nearly didn't happen because of Jerry Reese.  He's a local attorney who filed a series of lawsuits to block the stadium deal just as the recession hit and funding for the project became harder to find. Reese has now agreed stop fighting the stadium in court. 

Jerry Reese is not against having a baseball stadium Uptown – he just thinks it should be for a Major League team, rather than a Minor League one like the Charlotte Knights.

More homeowners in Charlotte have mortgage debt than in most other major metro areas around the country.  Are we just prone to big spending, or is something else at play in the housing market here?  

Almost 21 million Americans – nearly a third of the nation's homeowners – own their homes outright.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police officers are paying personal visits to all "sweepstakes parlors" in the area this week urging proprietors to make sure they're complying with a new ban on the electronic games. WFAE's Julie Rose reports:

CMPD Deputy Chief Vicki Foster estimates there are about 100 free-standing sweepstakes parlors in Mecklenburg County. Most shut down about a week ago when a state ban on the games went into effect, but Foster expects many to reopen in the coming days.

Since the NASCAR Hall of Fame opened in 2010 it has fallen far short of attendance projections and had annual deficits of more than a million dollars. But now, for the first time, CRVA CEO Tom Murray says the Hall of Fame is ahead in something.