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The articles from Inside Politics With Steve Harrison appear first in his weekly newsletter, which takes a deeper look at local politics, including the latest news on the Charlotte City Council, what's happening with Mecklenburg County's Board of Commissioners, the North Carolina General Assembly and much more.

Charlotte’s City Council: Higher performance or better choreography?

City of Charlotte
Charlotte City Council chamber.

A version of this news analysis originally appeared in the Inside Politics newsletter, out Fridays. Sign up here to get it first to your inbox.

The Charlotte City Council last week held a discussion at its annual retreat about becoming a “high-performing council.”

It’s unclear exactly what metric they’re measuring, because the City Council is arguably already high-performing — at least in terms of getting things done.

Over the past six years, Mayor Vi Lyles and City Manager Marcus Jones have created an efficient conveyor belt for getting programs and public-private partnerships passed. The votes are rarely unanimous, but their initiatives are almost always approved by a council committee, and then by the full City Council.

If there is ever sizable resistance from council members — as there was during the debate over spending $650 million to renovate Bank of America Stadium — city staff often say council members must take a final vote quickly. That prevents one or two council member’s doubts from metastasizing to others.

The City Council is, in a way, like pro wrestling: The result of most votes is preordained before the meeting starts. Even the council members voting no have the luxury of knowing they are making a protest vote, with minimal chance of their dissent actually torpedoing something. (Of course, this isn’t that different from many votes in the N.C. General Assembly, U.S. Congress or other legislative bodies.)

But the tenor of last week’s conversation was about how to make an already streamlined process more streamlined.

Or, to some skeptical council members, even more stage-managed.

During the discussion, many council members lamented that they don’t talk to each other as much as they used to during the week in between meetings and that they aren’t collaborating to make initiatives and policies better.

And some council members were concerned the discussions they have during formal meetings before votes veer off topic, wasting people’s time.

Council member Ed Driggs likened council meetings to a bad orchestra.

“The instruments aren’t playing from the same sheet or the same time,” he said.

Driggs also complained that council members bring up ideas during meetings that have no chance of passing.

“You can’t just go into a meeting and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we do this?’” Driggs said. “Getting something done requires groundwork and interaction with council. It requires whipping votes.”

The moderator of the discussion, DeAlva Arnold, a leadership and executive coach, said council members need to trust each other more.

She also said they need to talk about their differences before the formal meeting.

“Those things should absolutely happen outside of Monday night (when City Council meetings happen),” she said.

Not everyone on board

The idea that council discussions should absolutely happen before Monday night bothered some.

“It can be perceived the council was rubber-stamping issues,” council member Renee Johnson said. “It’s appropriate for people to hear the discussions. It’s OK to disagree. We don’t want groupthink.”

Johnson is often a “no” vote.

Lyles, two years ago, unsuccessfully tried to remove Johnson from City Council by endorsing her opponent in the Democratic primary.

Victoria Watlington is often another “no” vote. If the meeting discussions run too long, she said that's because of grandstanding.

“‘I’ll be honest — I don't think a solution is for me to come in early to listen to you say everything you will say at the dais,” Watlington said.

She said council members are talking to the audience and not to each other.

“There are platforms like social media to talk directly to our constituents,” she said.

Other thoughts

It’s understandable that City Council members would want better-run meetings. The discussions are often hours long. (Though they’ve already capped some — midnight meetings that were somewhat common in the prior decade, especially on rezoning nights, are rare now). The conversations meander. And people do grandstand.

But the bigger problem arguably isn’t trust or long-winded speeches. It’s that council members often act like they don’t understand that they are in charge and that the city manager works for them.

An example: The Charlotte Area Transit System’s plans over the last two years to rebuild the main bus station underground to clear the way for a new mixed-use tower.

CATS said it supported the idea, even though transit supporters questioned whether it was a good idea to spend millions to move bus passengers underground, away from natural light and the relatively high visibility today’s street-level design offers.

City Council followed city staff’s advice and backed the plan.

Now, two years later, the deal to build the tower is facing financial headwinds. And CATS interim Chief Executive Brent Cagle recently said in an interview that a below-ground bus station is “absolutely not” the transit system’s preference.

The tea leaves were clearly there that perhaps moving the bus station underground was not the best idea. But it passed anyway, with the manager’s staff leading the charge.

It’s also arguably beneficial for the community for council members to bring up ideas at the dais, even if they haven’t already lined up a majority of votes.

The community might like the idea. The media might write stories about it. Other council members might come around and back it.

Is Charlotte redefining public safety?

In local government, the term “public safety” almost always refers to keeping people safe from crime, as well as the fire department’s efforts to protect lives and property.

But the city of Charlotte appears to be redefining the term to boost its chances of passing a one-cent sales tax for transportation.

Earlier this year City Manager Marcus Jones said the sales tax would help improve public safety. It was a stretch: The tax would help pay for new streetlights, which could arguably deter crime.

Mayor Pro Tem Dante Anderson took another leap at the retreat.

During a presentation about transportation projects, she posted on social media a photo of “27 Strategic Investment Areas in D1 that will improve public safety.”

They were all transportation-related. None was about police and fire.

They included proposals like “expanding the bike network” and “expanding connections to greenways.”

A new bike lane arguably improves the safety of bicyclists. But it’s an extremely difficult leap to say that it does anything to prevent robberies, homicides, rapes and assaults.

Saying that improving connections to greenways impacts crime is an even bigger leap.

Steve Harrison is WFAE's politics and government reporter. Prior to joining WFAE, Steve worked at the Charlotte Observer, where he started on the business desk, then covered politics extensively as the Observer’s lead city government reporter. Steve also spent 10 years with the Miami Herald. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Sporting News and Sports Illustrated.