When government officials in North Carolina get together to talk about their work, they generally have to do so in public. The state’s open meetings law requires that city councils, county boards of commissioners, and other elected or appointed bodies give notice of official meetings and let anyone attend.
Yet some local governments have set up systems that allow leaders to talk through official business in private while creating little to no public record of what transpired. At these “check-in” or “3-on-3” meetings, different small groups meet back-to-back about the same topics.
During the week of March 16, for example, groups of Asheville City Council members gathered with staff to hold conversations about the city’s budget. A presentation from those check-ins includes weighty matters of public interest such as cost-cutting strategies, staff wages, and Asheville’s property tax rate.
By itself, one check-in doesn’t trigger the requirements of the open meetings law. But when taken together, these conversations let elected officials seek information, guide staff, and reach shared understanding behind closed doors.
“They’re doing all the discussion and research that leads up to a vote that’s in a public meeting, but nobody knows what’s behind that vote, the rationale or the horse-trading,” Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation, said of the practice.
This practice has drawn intense criticism from North Carolina’s open government advocates, who believe check-ins weaken public trust and may be illegal. They point out that the state forbids any “informal assembly or gathering together of the members of a public body” that is called “to evade the spirit and purposes” of the open meetings law.
Local governments, however, say check-ins help officials govern more effectively and discuss complicated issues without public pressure.
Who does check-ins?
By definition, public bodies don’t give any notice of check-in meetings, so it’s hard to determine where and when they are held. But prior reporting has identified examples across North Carolina, in governments ranging from large cities to small towns.
In Charlotte, for example, The Charlotte Observer reported in 2025 that city council members met in small groups to discuss potentially controversial issues, such as public funding for the Carolina Panthers football stadium and a transportation sales tax. Charlotte spokesperson Jack VanderToll did not answer specific questions about the ongoing schedule or prevalence for check-ins.
In 2023, Asheville Watchdog noted that Raleigh holds private “manager’s briefings” with small groups of Council members. More than a month after NC Local asked for comment about the current status of those briefings, city spokesperson Julia Milstead wrote that “On an as-needed basis the City Manager communicates information to the City Council. That occasionally includes small group meetings.
A 2019 story in the Port City Daily noted that the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners regularly holds “serial meetings” with groups of two, with then-Commissioner Pat Kusek saying “We are briefed all of the time on all kinds of issues.”
Asked for comment about the board’s current practice, New Hanover spokesperson Alex Riley said commissioners occasionally “may receive staff updates individually or in groups of fewer than a quorum.” He said officials did not take any action during those meetings and complied with state law.
According to the Watchdog’s prior reporting, Asheville has held check-ins since at least 2018, continuing the practice for sensitive issues such as the city budget even after moving many discussions to public work sessions in 2023.
And according to Eric Rowell, who received the NC Open Government Coalition’s 2021 Sunshine Award for his efforts to bring transparency to local government, the town of Huntersville has organized what it calls “3-on-3” meetings of town commissioners since at least 2015.
“Everybody can do basic math: They’ve always done 3-on-3s so that they have less than a quorum,” Rowell, who ran unsuccessfully for the commission in 2021 and 2023, said. “They’re meeting to discuss and deliberate related to town business.”
Huntersville spokesperson Ethan Smith said the town’s 3-by-3 meetings “are informational and comply with [state law].
What are the concerns?
Because check-in meetings place deliberations outside of the public eye, they can make it difficult for residents to understand how their leaders reach decisions. Jackson with the John Locke Foundation argued that a lack of transparency is corrosive to good governance.
“When citizens see their local governments vote on matters with little or no public discussion or debate, because those discussions have already occurred behind closed doors, it undermines public trust in those institutions,” Jackson said.
Check-ins also tend to leave less of a paper trail for accountability than do more formal meetings. In response to an NC Local request for “any agendas, presentations, notes, or other supporting documentation” tied to its last three months of 3-on-3s, Huntersville said it had no relevant records.
A spokesperson for the City of Asheville said it had no agendas for any check-ins conducted this year, although the city did provide three presentations shared with Council members about the municipal budget.
Some political hopefuls have made criticism of check-ins a key plank of their electoral platform. In last year’s Huntersville Town Board of Commissioners elections, three candidates flagged the 3-on-3s as detrimental to transparency and pledged to end them if elected. None won a seat on the board.
The issue also features in the ongoing Asheville mayoral race. Kim Roney, who currently serves on Asheville City Council, said during a May 27 candidate forum that she would end check-ins if elected and focus on “doing the people’s work in public.”
Her opponent, Mayor Esther Manheimer, told NC Local that she and all other Council members besides Roney supported check-ins. Manheimer added that she had also “advocated for increasing the number of public meetings conducted around challenging issues including the annual budget and major policy changes.”
“Council’s legal counsel advises us that the check-ins are permissible,” she said.
What does the law say?
North Carolina’s General Statutes cover open meetings in Chapter 143-318. The law applies to nearly all elected or appointed public bodies in the state, including local governments, school boards, and groups like tourism development authorities that oversee special taxes.
The legal requirements only cover “official meetings,” which must meet three criteria:
- simultaneous communication (whether in person or electronically),
- a majority of the public body present, and
- the purpose of “transacting the public business.”
Even when a meeting reaches that standard, the law allows for private “closed sessions” to discuss sensitive personnel, legal, or real estate matters. The law also explicitly exempts social gatherings — think city council members attending a baseball game together.
Because open meetings requirements only cover discussions by a majority of a public body, it’s permissible for officials to talk about business in smaller groups. But Pate McMichael, director of the NC Open Government Coalition, said the law is less clear when those discussions take place in a structured manner with the support of government staff, as is the case with check-ins.
As outlined in a 2023 blog post by the coalition, McMichael said, successive small group meetings “may amount to a fragmented, asynchronous meeting of the full body.” In other words, the pattern of check-ins may violate the open meetings law even when an individual check-in may not.
“[Elected officials] are dealing with very difficult decisions, and they’re trying to plan a course of action. I can certainly understand why they would want some leeway to have those conversations in private,” McMichael tells NC Local. “But at the end of the day, doing it over and over again starts to look like you don’t want the public to know and you want to go around the open meetings law. It is such a gray area.”
Why do governments keep holding check-ins?
Of the governments contacted by NC Local, Asheville gave the clearest rationale for its ongoing check-ins. City spokesperson Kim Miller said they “provide an opportunity for background information to be shared and clarifying questions to be asked before deliberations are had in public settings such as a worksession or a formal City Council meeting.”
City of Asheville attorney Brad Branham added that “they are not held to conduct votes or otherwise take action outside of the public eye, and do not contain any actions of the Council that should only take place in public.”
However, presentations shared by the city suggest that Council members do use check-ins to direct staff. Slides for the March budget check-ins, for example, included a “compensation discussion” that asked a number of questions about how the city should raise employee salaries and pay for them using property taxes. Spokesperson Miller declined to answer additional questions about the check-ins.
As in Asheville, Charlotte spokesperson VanderToll also emphasized that the meetings comply with legal requirements.
“Notably, the law authorizes Council to interact informally and socially without the construct of the Open Meetings law,” VanderToll wrote. “These meetings serve as an educational opportunity for council members to go more in depth on questions or discussion that may not always be applicable to public city council meetings.”
What’s next?
Local government compliance with open meetings law is enforced through civil lawsuits. North Carolina allows courts to hear complaints over meetings, declare actions invalid if taken illegally, and make officials pay a winning plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees.
In 2021, Asheville lost a court case over its attempt to close part of a City Council retreat. The city is also currently engaged in a lawsuit about its choice to close meetings of a committee appointed to review water system failures.
Open government advocates said they’re not aware of active litigation challenging check-ins specifically, either in Asheville or other local governments.
Jackson has advocated for the General Assembly to change the open meetings law to redefine what constitutes an official meeting. However, he said no members of the legislature have introduced relevant legislation, and no action is likely to take place until the next long session at the earliest.
Meanwhile, recent case law from the Court of Appeals suggests that the judicial branch is open to local governments continuing check-ins. A late 2024 ruling found that multiple members of Pinehurst’s Village Council could legally discuss public business with town officials via email “to ensure they were prepared for the next open Village Council meeting.”
This article first appeared on NCLocal and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.