Can the Raleigh City Council and its critics get past ‘the need to get even’?
For the past year, a small, persistent group has criticized the Raleigh City Council for its secretive decision to disband the city’s long-time citizen advisory committees.
In some cases, the group has gotten personal — criticizing a council member’s husband’s business, condemning the mayor for working for a developer. The critics accuse the city of not engaging the community in its decisions.
It’s an expected outcome but one the council must overcome to create a new engagement system, said Mickey Fearn, the consultant hired to help involve some of Raleigh’s most active residents, and many others, in the life of their city.
“They’ve lost their political power,” Fearn said in an interview with The News & Observer. “And I think that is playing out all over the country. And I think that is having an impact here. You sort of have to destroy people’s character to disenfranchise their opinion.”
‘Denial of basic democracy’
The Raleigh City Council voted in February 2020 to disband and defund the city’s 18 Citizen Advisory Councils (CACs) and their leadership board, the Raleigh Citizen Advisory Council,
The vote came at the end of a meeting. It wasn’t on the agenda and one council member, David Cox, said he was intentionally kept in the dark about it.
The vote had to happen without notice because the council didn’t have time to get dragged into a political quagmire, Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said in an interview with The N&O. Previous efforts to revamp community engagement, to hear from more of the city’s residents, faced too much pushback from CACs, she said.
Now for over a year, a dedicated group including former Council member Stef Mendell and her husband, Richard Johnson, has spoken at council meetings, often returning to that CACs vote.
At a March 2021 meeting, Johnson denounced the “slimy way (the council) plotted” against the CACs.
“You’re all complicit in this denial of basic democracy to the people of Raleigh,” he said. “No wonder so many big money builders and developers and their gray-money PACs supported you. They’re certainly getting their money’s worth from you while the people of Raleigh are short-changed by your entitled arrogance.”
After he finished, Baldwin called on the next speaker, Mendell, introducing her as Johnson’s wife.
“No, (it’s) not anybody’s business and it doesn’t really matter whose wife I am,” Mendell said.
It was an “innocent” comment, Baldwin later told The N&O.
But it struck a nerve.
‘Mayor Baldwin, Mrs. Jim Baldwin’
At the next meeting, some speakers introduced themselves as their spouse’s wife or husband and called some council members by their spouses’ name.
“Mayor Baldwin, Mrs. Jim Baldwin, has made it clear on several occasions that spouses are fair game at council meetings,” Johnson said, before talking about the mayor’s husband’s past employment history at a real estate agency.
Johnson also spoke about Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Stewart’s husband who is “in business downtown running a beer joint and restaurant with a prominent local developer.”
“It’s widely known that if it’s not about downtown, Nicole Stewart just doesn’t care,” he said.
Anyone may speak, usually for three minutes, during the public comments portion of council meetings. The topics don’t usually elicit a response from the council.
In an interview, Mendell said it was at least the second time Baldwin had referenced her marriage.
“I think a lot of people are intimidated about speaking in front of city council to start with and her manner, including making personal comments like that, is intimidating to other people and could very well deter other people from speaking,” Mendell said. “Maybe because they don’t want personal comments made about their personal life.”
Donna Bailey referenced her husband in her comments and asked Baldwin if she was following her own advice of “being kind” before city meetings.
“That’s a put down when you say this is so and so, the wife of Richard Johnson,” Bailey said. “What does that have to do with anything? That is to me another snub (by) Mary-Ann. So I was like I am going to give it right back at her.”
While personal, Baldwin said the public comments are not interfering with city business.
“We know what we need to do, and we are moving forward,” she said. “We know what we were elected to do.”
Still, the COVID-19 pandemic has put people especially on edge, Baldwin said.
“I am just going to make the best decision I can with the information I have at the time, and that is how I am going to govern,” she said. “That is how I have been governing.”
‘Reciprocating victimization’
Citizen Advisory Councils were created in 1974 in response to a mandate from the federal government seeking more citizen participation for grants and funding. Raleigh’s CACs would meet once or twice a month to get updates from city staff on policing, transportation and parks.
Most would also make a recommendation on rezoning cases after hearing from developers and city staff. The nonbinding votes would be included in materials sent to the City Council and Planning Commission. After the council officially disbanded them, some CACs continued to meet without city resources.
Fearn presented his final community engagement report during the same meeting in which council members’ spouses were referenced.
He outlined the challenges a new community engagement system would need to resolve, including “Reciprocating victimization: The need to get even for past actions, decisions, and disappointment.”
“It gets complicated when it gets personal,” Fearn said. “The cathartic reaction is to resent the people who victimized you, to get even with the people who victimized you. You then expect some type of apology because you’re a victim. That is what you want.”
There are people who believe the current council is made up of “bad people” just like there were people who believed the last council was made of “bad people,” Fearn said.
“To reiterate this was, for me, not about CACs at all,” he said. “I believe the history that created CACs was great history. The city evolved. The demographics evolved in ways that required something different. I think this was a call to change the system — not to disfranchise CACs. Not to take power away from people but to recognize that the city of Raleigh that exists in 2021 is not the city of Raleigh that existed in 1970.”
There were people hurt by the council’s decision, but Mendell said, “This is not about hurt feelings.”
“This is about how a city is run. How a professional organization is run. How neighborhood advocacy group is run,” she said. “It has nothing to do with hurt feelings. Granted, there are bad feelings now because the populace doesn’t trust this council now because of the underhanded way they pulled the support of the CACs.”
More perspectives wanted
In disbanding the CACs, the council said it wanted to hear from people typically left out of the community conversation.
“I think that the way this council abolished CACs was horrible and I also think it was also based on a lot of false narratives that weren’t true,” said Bailey, who is chair of the Hillsborough-Wade CAC, which continues to meet virtually. “There were some minor problems with the CACs, but generally, I think the CACs brought a lot of value to the residents of Raleigh.”
Fearn agreed, saying there were some CACs doing meaningful community engagement work.
But there were others that “made no particular” effort to reach outside their core membership, he said.
“When we are hearing from some CACs you realize you are getting the perspective of white adult homeowners and not necessarily the perspective of others in the community,” Fearn said.
It’s part of the reason why he pulled together “critics and allies” of the CACs into one of two new groups that will help shape engagement moving forward. The other group will be made up of city staff.
All of the community group members were picked “based on their care for the city as opposed to some self-interest,” Fearn said.
The city will never be able to successfully engage everyone, he said.
“I have no interest in getting into the battle about whether the City Council is in pockets of developers or whether the people in CACs were just going after the City Council and it’s become personal,” Fern said. “I don’t have any interest in that. I simply believe we need to create something in this new system that did what those CACs did but that wasn’t all (the) CACs needed to be doing.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
