Charlotte’s mayor wants to ‘improve’ city council. She’s focused on the wrong problem | Opinion
After reports of a six-figure settlement made in closed session exposed divisions among Charlotte City Council members, Mayor Vi Lyles announced change would be coming to the council.
The announcement was made at Monday’s council meeting, during which Lyles acknowledged a “tough week” that gives the council “an opportunity to stop and think.” Lyles said she and Council member Renee Perkins Johnson will partner to seek ways to improve the council’s working relationships.
That’s a necessary and welcome move. But the council can’t expect to “improve” until it first acknowledges the true problem: its own lack of transparency when it comes to governing. Last week’s news of a settlement between Charlotte’s police chief and the city is just the latest example. The settlement will use public dollars, but it was made in private. That’s a problem.
Whether the chief had legitimate grounds for a lawsuit — which was not even filed before the settlement was made — remains an open question. But more than a week later, details about the settlement remain scarce. City officials have even gone so far as to suggest that the lack of transparency is a legal obligation rather than an intentional choice. Fox has claimed that state law prohibits elected officials from talking about what happens during a closed session, and that there are criminal penalties for doing so. According to reporting from WFAE, that interpretation is different from how past city attorneys have interpreted the law, and legal experts say it’s also incorrect. Fox has since attempted to revise his statement, but it remains troubling.
Rather than being more forthcoming with the public about the settlement, city officials and council members seem more concerned with how the public found out at all. Many have been critical of the fact that the settlement was leaked in the first place, given that it occurred in closed session and out of the public eye. Council member Malcolm Graham even called for an investigation into the leak to “build trust internally in the building.”
But the council would not have to worry about a leak, or its consequences, had it not operated in secret in the first place. As much as at-large council member Victoria Watlington stirred the pot last week with her irresponsible accusations of corruption, her concerns about the decision aren’t misplaced. Krista Bokhari, the wife of former council member Tariq Bokhari, whose texts to the chief are the subject of the settlement, raised additional concerns in a Facebook post last week. Her post alleged that city officials may have even withheld information from council members themselves ahead of the settlement. It invites questions that the city has yet to answer.
Repairing relationships between council members is important, but true change won’t happen unless the city takes steps to build trust with the public as well. As much as Lyles and others may want to change city council, that doesn’t matter unless they’re willing to stop governing behind the scenes and leaving the public in the dark.
It’s too often that the public is blindsided by big decisions that aren’t made public until after they’ve happened — messy decisions that might have been less messy had they been handled correctly from the start. The city has a disturbing habit of conducting public business in private, especially on big decisions like the Carolina Panthers stadium renovations and the multibillion dollar transit plan.
Rarely is that good for Charlotte, and it’s certainly not good for the trust the city has in its government. It doesn’t matter if some of those decisions are the right ones when the processes by which they occur are not. That secrecy raises suspicion, and it harms the relationship between elected officials and the public.
In a way, Lyles’ announcement was an example of the problem: a promise to get better without talking about what better actually means. It was vague and opaque as usual. That’s not good leadership, and Charlotte deserves better.
