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.
Heading into last Monday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Vi Lyles had problems.
There was building anger over the council’s decision — which she supports — to pay a financial settlement to Police Chief Johnny Jennings, which is reportedly $300,000.
The interim city attorney, Anthony Fox, had to publicly walk back incorrect legal advice he gave at a news conference a few days earlier.
Adding to that was the lineup of council members attending the May 12 public meeting, which was the first since the settlement was approved in a closed-door session the week before. The majority of those present were either against the settlement, or at least skeptical of how city staff counted the votes.
Victoria Watlington had blasted the city’s conduct, calling it corrupt and even hinting she thought it might be illegal. Tiawana Brown had posted on Facebook that she was against it. Renee Johnson had tried to change her vote on the settlement from yes to no, but was told she couldn’t. LaWana Mayfield was only counted as a yes vote because she left the prior meeting early without being officially excused. Dimple Ajmera initially voted no in closed session.
That’s five of nine.
At Monday’s meeting, the mayor did have two loyal members in attendance — Dante Anderson and Marjorie Molina — but neither have shown themselves to be aggressive in defending her in public.
And two council members who can go on the attack verbally to defend her — Malcolm Graham and Ed Driggs — weren’t there.
So Lyles opened the meeting with a message to Johnson, whom she tried to remove from council two years ago by unsuccessfully endorsing her opponent in the Democratic primary.
She talked about the council’s “tough week.”
Then she said, “This council has an opportunity to stop and think.” She asked Johnson to work with her to improve council relationships, saying the goal is “not necessarily agreeing all the time, but actually understanding each other better.”
Johnson said yes — though she alluded to her own difficulties with the mayor.
“You and I have some healing to do,” Johnson said about her relationship with Lyles. “And I look forward to that opportunity. I want to do something different. Dr. Watlington and I have both expressed frustration with how things have gone.”
Johnson did not ask the mayor any follow-up questions about the council member’s discontent.
The mayor’s outreach to Johnson won’t happen until after the budget is passed, by which point it may have vanished into the ether.
Meanwhile, the city attorney’s office said it will not release the actual financial settlement reached with Jennings over the threatening text messages he received last year from former council member Tariq Bokhari.
Fox, the interim attorney, told WFAE last week that the settlement — which he hinted could be a severance agreement — isn’t a public record.
Based on Fox’s interpretation of the state’s open records laws, it’s worth theorizing how a different scenario could play out under the same reasoning.
Hypothetically, let’s say the city of Charlotte had a supervisor who was harassing employees.
- The City Council could agree to pay 10 employees each $300,000 in severance, in exchange for not discussing what happened. That’s a total of $3 million in taxpayer money.
- Under Fox’s interpretation of open records laws and personnel file privacy protections, it would be a crime for any council member to talk about it.
- The payments could be divided into several installments — spread over many months — to make it all but impossible for the public to track down copies of the actual checks to determine how much was paid out.
- If the public did find a check from a public records request, the city would not be allowed to comment on what it was for.
In this case, no one would ever be told how the city spent millions, or why. Hardly a model of transparency and accountability.
