Charlotte’s one of the nation’s biggest cities. So why does it have a part-time mayor?

Like the city she’s about to lead, the job that Charlotte Mayor-elect Vi Lyles will inherit next month has steadily expanded, bursting the limits that defined it for decades.

It was intended as a part-time job to help oversee a professional city manager but for recent mayors, it’s been anything but.

▪ Incumbent Jennifer Roberts, who lost to Lyles in September’s Democratic primary, often worked six days, putting in more than 60 hours crammed with breakfast meetings, ribbon cuttings and constituent events.

▪ Former Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, once said it was time to recognize the reality of what it takes to lead a growing city, and said successors should have the option of a full-time salary.

▪ And former Republican Mayor Pat McCrory was the first to make it a virtual full-time job, even though he drew a salary from his long-time day job at Duke Energy.

Lyles, who has fielded more than 4,000 messages since her election this month, plans to maintain her leadership consulting business but expects to essentially be a full-time mayor.

“It might be considered part-time, but it’s really a full-time commitment,” she says.

As mayor, Lyles will preside over city council meetings and help set the council’s agenda. She’ll be one of the state’s only mayors with the power to veto council decisions (Kinston’s mayor also has a veto). City Manager Marcus Jones runs the city on a day-to-day basis and makes virtually all hiring decisions.

Nobody is actually suggesting that the city – the nation’s 18th largest – change its form of government to give the mayor power commensurate with her time commitment. Most cities in America have a council-manager system, according to the National League of Cities. That includes some of the largest such as Phoenix, Dallas and San Jose.

About a third of U.S. cities surveyed by the International City/County Management Association have mayor-council forms of government, including 12 of the 20 largest including New York, Chicago and Detroit.

In North Carolina, all of the 82 towns and cities with populations over 10,000 have a city manager.

Modest salary

Charlotte’s system goes back to 1929, when reformers sought what they saw as an antidote to the corruption of cities run by so-called strong mayors.

“Strong” mayors in cities such as Chicago and New York act as chief executives, with extensive power apart from city council. Some have the ability to hire department heads and even draft city budgets. They’ve also been vulnerable to scandal. In the last decade a dozen mayors have been indicted for offenses including bribery in New Orleans, embezzlement in Baltimore and racketeering in Detroit.

Even part-time mayors are vulnerable to corruption.

Former Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon was arrested in 2014, four months into his term. Cannon, a Democrat, pleaded guilty to taking about $50,000 in bribes from federal undercover officers and served half of his 44-month sentence in federal prison. He was released in January and began two years of supervised probation.

Advocates of a strong mayor system say it lends itself to more efficient decision-making, allowing cities to be more competitive for business. That was the argument four years ago in Columbia when voters faced a referendum on abandoning their decades-old city manager form of government. Despite arguments from then-Gov. Nikki Haley and others, voters overwhelming rejected the strong mayor option.

North Carolina doesn’t have the “strong” mayor system and it would require an act of the General Assembly to adopt it, according to Bob Joyce of UNC’s School of Government.

Local officials have periodically talked about a change. In 1989, both Mayor Sue Myrick and her Democratic opponent called for a switch to a full-time, though not a “strong,” mayor. The issue came up again in 2000 when there was talk about merging the city government with Mecklenburg County’s. Neither idea gained traction.

Charlotte’s population in 2000 was 540,000. Today it’s 842,000, a jump of 300,000. That’s like adding the city of Greensboro.

Charlotte’s mayor earns $25,635, with another $18,000 in allowances for expenses, a car and technology.

A report this year in American City Business Journals found that Roberts and other N.C. mayors ranked in the bottom 10 in pay for the country’s 60 largest cities. Topping the list was the mayor of San Francisco, a city with a mayor-council form of government. His annual salary was $289,000.

In 2014, the Washington Post found that among the nation’s 25 largest cities, Charlotte was one of only three where the mayor’s salary was less than the city’s median household income.

“I kind of feel like when you sign up, you know what the salary is,” says Lyles. “And it was a commitment I was willing to make.”

‘Served well’

Roberts says she knew what she was getting into when she ran for the job. She doesn’t support making the job full time with the city’s current budget challenges. She would favor giving cities more autonomy, though that’s something the General Assembly would likely resist.

“I would focus first on giving cities more autonomy and flexibility in confronting their challenges,” Roberts says, “as opposed to the individual mayor having more power.”

It’s been a quarter-century since Charlotte had a mayor who worked in the elected office part-time: Republican Richard Vinroot. And he says the job description shouldn’t change.

“I think we’ve been served well by our system,” says Vinroot, a lawyer. “I can’t look out at any other city with full-time mayors and say it works better there.… Why stop something that’s worked pretty well?”

This story was originally published November 21, 2017 at 11:57 AM with the headline "Charlotte’s one of the nation’s biggest cities. So why does it have a part-time mayor?."