A company invited Cary staff to dinner. The offer came from the mayor.
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- Mayor Weinbrecht consulted for WithersRavenel and earned about $60,000.
- He invited Cary staff to two WithersRavenel dinners during a conference.
- Town records don't show who attended the dinners in Austin.
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Cary under scrutiny
The town of Cary has been in the spotlight since late November, when Town Manager Sean Stegall was put on administrative leave without any explanation from the town. Stegall resigned Dec. 13, 2025, amid reports of questionable spending. Here is ongoing coverage from The News & Observer.
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The engineering and land development firm WithersRavenel has a prominent presence in its hometown of Cary. In recent years it’s helped develop the town’s acclaimed downtown park, relocate a 7.1-mile greenway and design a new fire station on East Chatham Street.
One of the people helping the firm win projects beyond the town is Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht, who began consulting for WithersRavenel in 2023. Since then, Weinbrecht has earned roughly $60,000 in fees, he said in a blog post Dec. 21.
Weinbrecht wrote the post, and another a week earlier, after The News & Observer reported Dec. 11 that he had taken an action in 2023 that is now raising questions about how much separation exists between his public work as mayor and his private work as a consultant. As a contingent of top Cary town staffers were getting ready to travel to the International City/County Managers Conference in Austin, Texas, Weinbrecht invited them via email to two dinners WithersRavenel held to woo clients.
One was at a moderately priced Asian fusion restaurant; the other was at an upscale steakhouse. Weinbrecht said in one of the emails that he was attending the conference as a consultant “to interact with as many attendees as possible.”
“Part of the WR (WithersRavenel) activities during our time at ICMA is to invite attendees to dinner to further our relationships,” he wrote in inviting two assistant town managers on Sept. 26, 2023, four days before the conference began. Later that day, he extended the dinner invitations to five other Cary staff members going to the conference, including then-Town Manager Sean Stegall.
Town records related to the Austin trip, obtained by The N&O, don’t make clear who among the Cary staffers, if any, attended the dinners. Attempts to interview those employees about the trip were unsuccessful. The trip has drawn recent controversy because of Stegall’s expenses, which included $3,400 for a four-night hotel stay. He has since resigned.
‘Sticky questions’
On his blog, Weinbrecht said he does not do any work for the Town of Cary with WithersRavenel. But inviting top town management to company-paid dinners “obviously gets into sticky questions,” said Sherri Zann Rosenthal, a former Durham deputy city attorney.
State law forbids businesses from giving gifts to elected and hired municipal officials while in the pursuit of business; nor can municipal officials accept those gifts. It’s a misdemeanor offense for both. Dinners are considered gifts under the law, though there is an exception for events such as banquets, where many are invited.
In this case, Weinbrecht invited the Cary officials to dinners that seated no more than 20 people, his emails show.
“Part of that stickiness is that the town manager knows his or her job depends on keeping the good favor of the mayor,” Rosenthal said.
It would take a “very fact-intensive analysis” to determine if the dinner invitations amounted to a misdemeanor, she said.
“But that’s not the real importance,” she added. “The real importance is how comfortable or uncomfortable the voters are with this.”
Mayor sees no issue
When an N&O reporter sought to interview Weinbrecht last week about how he avoids conflicts of interest with his public and private roles, he responded in a text that such a question was “insulting.”
“Talk to any municipal lawyer,” he wrote. “Don’t imply I am doing something wrong without getting your facts and legalities.”
Since then, he wrote the second blog post that reported how much he has made consulting for WithersRavenel — roughly $24,000 in each of the past two years, while anticipating making less than $20,000 this year, mostly for helping staff communicate “asset management needs to elected officials.”
He also wrote that he travels across the country giving presentations for the firm, and occasionally helps with its booth at conferences.
“The purpose of the booth is to gather sales leads,” he wrote. “In the evenings, the marketing team typically hosts those leads at dinner.”
He worked the booth at the ICMA conference, he wrote. “On the day in question, there were not enough prospective clients available to fill a dinner table that had been reserved. The marketing team asked me to reach out to Cary representatives to see if they would be interested in attending, which I did. That was the extent of my involvement.”
However, the email invitations he sent to Cary staff were dated Sept. 26, four days before the conference started. He invited them to attend “one or both” of the dinners. One was held Sept. 30, the other Oct. 2. His email made no mention of difficulties finding prospective clients to attend.
He also wrote about the conference on his blog on Oct. 8, 2023, the week after the conference. Weinbrecht reported that he attended as a consultant for WithersRavenel and said he had a “great time seeing representatives from Cary at the event.” He didn’t mention the dinners.
Uneven disclosure from mayor and WithersRavenel
While Weinbrecht has published blog posts identifying himself as a WithersRavenel consultant, his biography on the town’s website identifies him only as a consultant without naming any clients. He’s been the town’s mayor since 2007 and is a Democrat.
It’s also a mixed bag with WithersRavenel’s website. He’s identified as a consultant on several posts on the site, but not in some others.
The company appears to have first identified Weinbrecht as a “local government asset management specialist” in a webinar hosted by the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality on May 17, 2023. But three months later, an instructional video featuring Weinbrecht that WithersRavenel posted on its YouTube channel about communicating technical information to elected officials identifies him only as the mayor.
Chan Bryant, WithersRavenel’s chief risk officer, referred a reporter’s questions about Weinbrecht’s consulting work back to the mayor.
The company also represents private clients seeking approvals from the town, such as the renovation of The Umstead Hotel and Spa’s pool area.
Voting requirements
As mayor, Weinbrecht casts votes on a variety of issues in the town. State law requires elected municipal officials to abstain from voting only when they could receive a direct benefit. That direct benefit means the council member has to own more than 10% of the company, or would directly receive money or property.
In other words, town officials can vote on actions that benefit their employers, so long as the officials do not directly benefit, said Crista Cuccaro, a professor with UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government.
That abstention has to be approved by the council, because state law gives council members little wiggle room to get out of casting votes.
State law does not require municipal officials to file economic interest statements that would identify potential conflicts of interest. Cary does have an ethics policy, adopted 15 years ago, that states council members cannot use their office for personal gain, but it does not require economic interest statements.
Weinbrecht, however, as an appointee to the N.C. Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, is required to file an annual statement with the State Ethics Commission. In 2023, he disclosed his consulting work for WithersRavenel and has filed subsequent reports that attest to no changes in his employment.
Staff writers Nathan Collins and Anna Roman contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
