Charlotte’s last interim mayor has some advice for the next one
Dan Clodfelter didn’t learn about Charlotte’s next mayor until Wednesday, two days after the Charlotte City Council picked Robert Harrington to succeed Vi Lyles. It’s one of the perks of retirement — Clodfelter was unplugged in the mountains and heard about the appointment on the radio driving back to Charlotte.
The news has brought some memories, of course. Clodfelter was Charlotte’s last interim mayor, picked by the City Council in 2014 after Mayor Patrick Cannon resigned. It was a much different time, Clodfelter says, and the circumstances were dramatically different. Cannon resigned on the same March day he was arrested for accepting bribes from undercover FBI agents. The Council didn’t use a formal selection process — they went to Clodfelter, a familiar and sturdy officeholder in Charlotte and the North Carolina Senate.
“My job was very, very different then,” Clodfelter says. “My job was to calm things down and reassure everybody that things were going to be OK.”
Another difference: Harrington will have Lyles to lean on and explain how things work and what relationships need to be tended to. Clodfelter’s predecessor was … unavailable. Still, Clodfelter was a successful interim. He calmed and reassured, as he was supposed to. He dug into public policy — always his comfort zone — and he had the gravitas to command respect from Council members and Charlotte leaders. The only negative for some: Clodfelter ran for a full term despite initially saying he had no plans to do so. He lost in the Democratic primary to Jennifer Roberts.
His tenure was, he says, “a hell of a lot of fun.” Does he have advice for Harrington? Sure.
“I didn’t know what to expect in the job,” he says. “What I learned was that the best part was not attending meetings but getting around town and connecting with folks.
“The other thing I enjoyed is that you were constantly bombarded with people who want to talk to you about this interesting thing they’re doing or interesting idea they have. It was tremendous fun.”
That’s the advice: “I hope he focuses on that part of the job. That’s where the value of the job really is. The Council is going to do what the Council wants to do.”
And if Harrington, too, decides that he likes the gig enough to pursue it full-time?
“He has a more explicit restriction on him about not running — I didn’t have that,” Clodfelter says.
But, he says: “If he changes his mind, well, he changes his mind.”
This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Charlotte’s last interim mayor has some advice for the next one."
