Mecklenburg County meets businesses in secret to discuss re-opening Charlotte economy

Mecklenburg County officials are plotting the reopening of the Charlotte area’s economy with leaders from some of the region’s biggest companies behind closed doors, testing the state’s open meetings law and limiting public visibility into the process.

Starting Friday, county officials led by manager Dena Diorio convened a meeting with a group of more than 40 executives and officials, known as the COVID-19 Business Leaders Roundtable. Diorio says they are not public meetings and are not subject to the state’s open meetings law.

Legal experts interviewed by the Observer question if that’s truly the case.

North Carolina statute defines a public body as “any elected or appointed authority, board, commission, committee, council,” made up “of two or more members and exercises or is authorized to exercise a legislative, policy-making, quasi-judicial, administrative, or advisory function.”

The roundtable, led by Diorio, was created by the county, which also selected its membership. The group was announced Wednesday.

Its members, including senior executives at Bank of America and Wells Fargo, were picked in consultation with local business groups Charlotte Center City Partners and the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, Diorio said at a Friday press conference shortly after the first meeting of the group.

“They’re not going to be able to dictate, they’re advisory,” Diorio said.

The group will advise the county on state guidance and have a “very significant” influence on the way Mecklenburg County re-opens its economy, she said. “Their input and their guidance is going to be critically important and will weigh heavily on the decisions that we make,” Diorio said.

At the first meeting, held Friday morning at 8:30, the group had a “very good discussion,” Diorio said, and will likely hold another meeting early next week. The group will likely continue to meet until there is a full re-opening of the economy, she said.

Legal uncertainty

According to Amanda Martin, a media lawyer at Stevens Martin Vaughn & Tadych, the roundtable is likely a public body and should be subject to state anti-secrecy laws. Any group deemed a ‘public body’ has to provide notice of its meetings, provide access to those meetings, and take minutes.

“It is a body that has two or more people that have been appointed in an advisory function,” Martin said. “It is almost a precise quote from the statute.”

Frayda Bluestein, professor of public law and government at UNC Chapel Hill, agreed with Martin.

“This seems to me that this is a public body, if they’re meeting regularly. It’s clear in the statue that one of the things that a public body can be doing is advisory work,” she said in an interview.

Bluestein said she trained Diorio and other Mecklenburg County officials in what constitutes a public body as a part of the regular educational programs Bluestein does for officials in North Carolina.

“I think that sometimes people think that if they don’t have any authority to actually do anything that it doesn’t count,” she said.

At issue may be what, precisely, “advisory” means, according to Brooks Fuller, executive director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, of which The Charlotte Observer is a member.

“Just getting advice from a group doesn’t make it advisory under the statute,” said Fuller.

The legality depends, in part, on what the county did in installing the board, he said. Ultimately, though, this isn’t an issue that the courts have ruled definitively on.

“This is an area of the open meetings law that doesn’t get a lot of treatment in the case law,” Fuller said. “I don’t know of a North Carolina appellate case where this issue has been addressed.”

Meeting agenda

The Friday meeting of the roundtable was broadly an introductory meeting, establishing ground rules and goals for the group, according to two participants. An agenda for the first meeting, obtained by the Observer, showed that the roundtable planned to start by discussing the purpose of the group, then moved to discussing the state’s reopening plan.

After that, the group planned to discuss Mecklenburg County data and communication strategies, before establishing what participants would discuss with their companies and groups ahead of the meeting next week.

“One of the mistakes that is being made across the country is that cities and counties are not meeting the people who are being affected,” said Chad Turner, president of the Charlotte LGBT Chamber of Commerce, who attended the meeting. He said he was unaware that the meetings weren’t open to the public or media.

Turner praised Diorio for effectively managing the call and ensuring a diverse selection of voices. “It’s probably one of the most substantive calls that I’ve been on in a while,” he said.

Jesse Cureton, chief consumer officer for Novant Health, said he emphasized at the meeting that he wanted to make sure that any recovery is gradual and based on data. Social distancing and ensuring everyone wears masks will be key to the reopening plan, he said.

“The good news is, although we’re watching these models very closely, the surge that we had anticipated, we’re not quite seeing,” he said. “But we’re still operating from a standpoint that we may very well see a surge. “

The group discussed what a reopening would look like for various businesses, Cureton said, assuming the number of cases declines for 14 days as Gov. Roy Cooper outlined Thursday.

They considered policies such as how to limit the number of people in restaurants, requiring masks to be worn in some businesses or opening up some retailers for drive-through customers.

Cureton said he supports making the decisions made in the meetings public. But said he would be concerned if having the discussions themselves public risked the leaders’ ability to have frank conversations.

“If opening it to the public prevents business or in some cases political leaders from being candid around the things that really should be put on the table, that’s where my reservation would come in,” he said.

Observer reporter Danielle Chemtob contributed to this report.

This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 1:02 PM.