In fall 2024, the Charlotte City Council debated whether to back the N.C. Department of Transportation’s controversial plan to partner with a private developer to build new express toll lanes on Interstate 77 from uptown to South Carolina.
The toll lanes on I-77 in north Mecklenburg were – and still are – politically toxic. Council members were worried that the sequel would be even worse than the original, with drivers upset at sky-high charges.
But Charlotte’s point person on transportation, City Council member Ed Driggs, reassured them that an upcoming vote would only be one small step. There would still be time to reverse course and back out.
Here is what he said in an Oct. 14, 2024, meeting:
“If there’s a moment … when we feel that all of the parties are aligned, and then I would come to the Council and say, ‘Here is where we are. Now is the time when we can decide whether or not we want this to move ahead.’ We won't be under any obligation.”
Driggs, a 13-year council veteran, continued:
“Bear in mind, sometimes you get these early votes and then later on you don't feel like you have a choice. There's nothing to stop us in nine months from looking at whatever comes out of this process and just saying no, not going to do it.”
But the fine print of the I-77 proposal showed that Charlotte City Council wouldn’t actually have that much — or any — flexibility to say “nope” after the vote.
Here’s why:
With the approval of the full council, Driggs would then cast the deciding vote on Oct. 16, 2024, for the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization to back the DOT’s plan for the toll lanes. The resolution included a section that said CRTPO could change course and pull its support for the project only until the DOT issued a Request for Qualifications from contractors.
An RFQ isn’t a full contract bid, with hundreds or thousands of hours of work invested in creating detailed plans. It’s essentially road builders sending the DOT their resumes.
But that RFQ deadline is being portrayed as critical, a point of no return.
For months after that October 2024 vote on I-77, there was no public movement with the toll lane project. There was no reason for City Council members to be concerned, or even check back in.
In August 2025, the DOT issued that RFQ.
Two months later, the DOT released for the first time detailed maps of the project.
West Charlotte residents were livid. One proposal called for some of their homes to be demolished. Part of Frazier Park and Pinewood Cemetery would be consumed. Another proposal called for elevated toll lanes, which they said would be ugly and increase noise pollution.
Advocates and residents said the state was repeating past mistakes, when highways were often built through Black neighborhoods.
The DOT released the maps shortly before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. But that still didn’t temper the anger when 2026 began.
In January, residents spoke out against the project at the CRTPO meeting.
Driggs told them: Sorry, you are too late. You missed your chance because the RFQ had been released in August.
“It was pretty clear that we took that vote and we took ourselves out of the conversation,” Driggs said at the time.
Driggs, the only Republican on City Council, has been given significant power as transportation committee chair by Democratic Mayor Vi Lyles. The I-77 widening project is important to the business community and many commuters, and the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance has urged the DOT to move forward.
Inside Politics asked Driggs this week why he told his colleagues on City Council they would have opportunities to stop the project when, in fact, they had few.
He said there was no reason to discuss the project with them again because there was nothing controversial.
“There was nothing to go back and talk to the council about,” he said.
A lack of transparency from the DOT
There was nothing to talk about because the DOT waited to release the maps until after it released the RFQ.
But there are signs that the state already had an idea of what the expanded highway would look like, back in October 2024.
At an Oct. 7, 2024, City Council meeting, Brett Canipe with the DOT told council members:
“We have preliminary design concepts and we've shared those with local staff to develop those concepts. Before we took anything outward facing to the public, without a project that had a clear path forward, I think you might be giving mixed messages to folks.”
To sum up, the DOT had “preliminary design concepts” but declined to share them until after a deadline had passed and officials could claim residents no longer had any recourse.
Sean Langley, the president of the McCrorey Heights neighborhood association, said he met with DOT several times in 2025 about getting a noise wall along the Brookshire Freeway, and those designs weren’t shared.
“They never told us about how we would be impacted,” Langley said. He said he believes the state deliberately waited until after the RFQ was released before telling the public about the impact.
In a statement to Inside Politics, the DOT said it “has been transparent about this project from the beginning. The designs referenced in the October 2024 meeting were preliminary then and far from final now. As is referenced in the meeting minutes, it would have been premature to share designs with the public, because there was no clear path forward at that time.”
It added: “NCDOT will continue listening and engaging with communities, implementing additional feedback and private sector ideas into the project design. This effort will be ongoing through 2027.”
Atlman now angry
While City Council was on board with the state plans, the Mecklenburg County Commissioners went the other way. In October 2024, a majority voted against the state’s vision for I-77. They instructed their CRTPO member, Commissioner Leigh Altman, to vote no.
Altman did vote to oppose the toll lanes, but at the time, she said publicly she supported the DOT’s plans for a public-private partnership.
But at Wednesday’s CRTPO meeting, Altman was furious.
She asked: Why had the DOT not released the maps sooner?
“It really feels like a bait and switch because … (the maps) that had the greatest impact and the most important impact to my community were not revealed until two months after this body arguably lost authority,” she said.
Altman then said the CRTPO attorney needs to give the voting members a detailed explanation whether the board can now take a new vote and stop or pause the project.
There is precedent for CRTPO yanking a project.
CRTPO in 2024 removed a previously approved road widening project in Matthews from the state’s Transportation Improvement Program because the town didn’t like the design.
Many CRTPO officials are now pleading ignorance, however.
Driggs said he “did not know” if CRTPO could vote to stop the project. CRTPO staff member Bob Cook, who has worked for the organization for at least a decade, also said he didn’t know.
CRTPO member and Davidson Mayor Rusty Knox — an opponent of the I-77 toll lanes in north Mecklenburg — went further, saying CRTPO no longer has any power and that it’s all in the state’s hands.
CRTPO’s board chair, Brad Richardson of Stallings, bucked the consensus and acknowledged the officials can change their minds. He said the deadline to act on I-77 before the RFQ probably isn’t legally binding and that CRTPO could still vote to stop the project.
But if they did so, would the DOT actually listen?
“I don’t know,” he said.
Richardson’s doubt as to whether the DOT would even listen is indicative of a challenge faced by many local governmental bodies: They may seem important, but when they try to do something besides what they’ve been instructed to do, they find they can’t.
For instance, the Metropolitan Transit Commission once demanded that the Charlotte Area Transit System conduct an audit in the wake of a Lynx Blue Line derailment in 2023.
Driggs, who was Charlotte’s voting member, told them they didn’t have the authority to do that.
Running out of time
Toll lane opponents like Langley have worked to expand their coalition. They’ve convinced a majority of Charlotte City Council members to say on the record they support pausing the project. Driggs’s transportation committee will discuss the toll lanes on March 5.
But the resident’s efforts may be snuffed out in an alphabet-soup bureaucracy of CRTPO-DOT-City Council debating who has the authority to do what.
By the time that’s settled, the DOT may have awarded a contract — which arguably represents a much more concrete point of no return than the RFQ.
Political experts argue that former Gov. Pat McCrory’s support for toll lanes on I-77 in north Mecklenburg cost him reelection in 2016, along with HB2.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember who ultimately controls the N.C. DOT: Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.
He’s probably the only person to settle the debate.
