Defiant Mooresville mayor will not resign after no confidence vote by town board
A defiant Mooresville Mayor Chris Carney said Tuesday he sees no reason to resign after Monday night’s 4-2 no-confidence vote by the town board.
“There is nothing that came out last night that would make me believe that should be an option,” Carney said in an interview with The Charlotte Observer at Town Hall.
“We’ve never had more companies looking at Mooresville than right now,” he said. “We’ve never had more employees looking at Mooresville than right now. We’ve never had more road money. I’ll take that scorecard all day long.”
Public confidence “shattered”
The vote by the Mooresville Board of Commissioners also asked Carney to resign.
“Public confidence has been shattered,” commissioner Dana Tucker said before making the motion before a packed audience at Town Hall, which broke out in applause after the vote.
Faith in town leadership has continued to erode since Carney’s late-night visit into Town Hall with a woman on Oct. 10, 2024, and lawsuits by former town employees who said they were forced out for raising concerns about the mayor’s actions, commissioners who voted for the measures said.
The imbroglio involving the mayor began in June 2025 when WBTV filed a civil lawsuit against Mooresville after the town refused to release town hall video from Oct. 10, 2024.
The video reportedly shows Carney and a female town consultant in town hall late at night. Alarms were twice triggered in the building, requiring police response each time, Carney has acknowledged in an interview with The Charlotte Observer.
He didn’t have pants on “for an extended period,” according to the WBTV complaint in court.
“Public trust is not an option,” town commissioner and mayor pro tem Eddie Dingler told the audience Monday night. “It is the foundation of local government. The people of Mooresville deserve better.”
Carney apologized to the audience Monday and then left for a back room in Town Hall before the board discussed and voted on Tucker’s motion.
Tuesday, he elaborated in his Town Hall office and said politics was driving opposition to him.
A donor to Tucker in his upset win over incumbent Lisa Qualls for a town board seat last year was Frank Falzone, the former Mooresville assistant police chief who filed one of the lawsuits against the town in February, Carney said.
Falzone alleged he was forced to retire for raising concerns about two late-night incidents involving the mayor.
Falzone electronically donated $500 to Tucker’s campaign, Carney said, citing state campaign finance records.
And Falzone held a neighborhood meet-and-greet fundraiser for Tucker’s campaign – an in-kind donation to a political candidate that Tucker failed to report on his campaign reports with the state, Carney alleged in the interview.
Commissioner: Mayor trying to “distract and deflect”
Asked by the Observer to reply to Carney’s comments, Tucker said much cause existed for the board to ask that he resign. In an email, Tucker said, “Carney is ignoring:
• “The multiple citizen speakers requesting his resignation, the growing call from the public for his resignation.
• “The ethics violations articulated during the discussion and the comments of 4 different commissioners.
• “The resolution itself, where the Board expressed no confidence and requested his resignation.
• “The fact that we as a Board are respecting ongoing litigation and not fully articulating the details associated with those ethics violations. He seems to either be blind to those violations or willing to dismiss them as unimportant.”
Tucker said he does have a political agenda:
“It includes following the Code of Ethics and governing with transparency and acting in the best interest of the citizens of Ward 4 and the Town of Mooresville,” Tucker said. “I think that agenda is shared by others as reflected in the Resolution approved last night by the Board.”
Paid most campaign expenses “out of pocket”
Tucker said he held ‘meet and greets’ at locations across Ward 4 during his campaign, “but I never held any fundraisers and paid the vast majority of my campaign expenses (I estimate about 80%) out of my own pocket.”
“My campaign contributions are public record, as are his — referenced in my presentation to the Board last November about the $15M handout to developers,” Tucker said. ”He is simply trying to distract and deflect, rather than acknowledge the gravity of his actions leading to last night’s Resolution.”
The “handout” reference was to a road under construction two miles southwest of downtown Mooresville that the developer of 560 single-family homes and apartments originally agreed to pay for but ended up with taxpayers, a News & Observer investigation found.
Former IT employee Jeffrey Noble filed another of the lawsuits against the town, in January. Noble said he was fired in retaliation for reporting misconduct seen on the video, including the mayor being pantless.
Town commissioner Will Aven said Tuesday that Noble was suspended and later given the option to resign after he downloaded a file sharing program onto his town-issued computer, meaning “he could download anything from our town computer to his personal computer, and he did.”
Noble could not be reached by the Observer on Tuesday.
Aven, who attended the Observer’s interview with the mayor for support at the mayor’s request, said he believes those who sued the mayor were together in the effort. They and at least 20 of their family members sat together in the back rows at Monday’s board meeting, applauding commissioners who agreed to ask the mayor to resign, he said.
“There was a conspiracy, and there is,” Aven said.
Asked what political motivation there was by a third former town employee suing, Carney and Aven did not answer.
“This again is the unfortunate side of politics,” Carney said. “58,000 people elected me in November. I’ve gotten hundreds of texts today” with support.
This story was originally published April 7, 2026 at 4:26 PM.