County Commission Crips
Less than three days into his tenure as chairman of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners, Harold Cogdell is already neck deep in serious allegations of pay-to-play politics for his role in landing copious amounts of tax dollars for a local non-profit agency that subsequently hired him as its attorney.
Some of the more notorious street gangs pride themselves on the rule of blood in, blood out – the practice being that it’s shed whenever new members join or leave a gang. The same apparently holds true for our county commission, where the retention of money and power is the lifeblood of politics.
Mecklenburg Commissioner Jennifer Roberts was ousted as board chairman this week when Cogdell, a fellow Democrat, teamed with the board’s four Republican minority members to capture enough votes to get him elected as chairman.
Democrats howled with outrage, trashing Cogdell as a turncoat opportunist who was playing dirty politics for personal gain. Cogdell had stabbed Roberts in the back, critics claimed, by crafting a palace coup to wrest the chairmanship at the expense of long-standing tradition and protocol.
The top vote-getter in county commission at-large races usually gets appointed as board chairman by the party with majority control. In this case, that would be Roberts, who outpaced Cogdell by several thousand votes in the last commissioners’ race. Cogdell’s power-play for chairman, according to his critics, corrupted the system.
The charge should be considered ironic, considering how Roberts got her start in local politics.
Before the board voted this week on its chairman, Commissioner Dumont Clarke, a Democrat who supported Roberts, provided an account of her ascent: a largely unknown political newcomer in 2004 who worked tirelessly to build community support for her campaign and through gusty determination alone pulled off an upset victory.
“It was remarkable,” Clarke recalled.
Indeed, remarkable could be one adjective used to describe Roberts’ win in 2004. A few others could be conniving, crooked and cutthroat political. In other words, some of the same machinations that critics of Cogdell attribute to his ouster of Roberts as chairman.
In the 2004 election, Roberts edged out then-incumbent Republican Commissioner Ruth Samuelson for the third at-large seat on the board of commissioners. Less than 1,000 votes separated Roberts and Samuelson. But there was a hitch.
After some major legal wrangling, the N.C. Supreme Court at that time had ruled that out-of-precinct votes, so-called provisional ballots, should not count in the just completed election. The nearly 1,800 provisional ballots cast in Mecklenburg County, which historically favor Democrat candidates, were more than enough to potentially change the outcome of the tight race between Roberts and Samuelson.
It didn’t. In typical party fashion, Democrats that were in political control at the time refused to toss the provisional ballots, even though a newly passed law, upheld by the state Supreme Court, required voters to cast ballots in their home precincts. The move was bolstered by the state’s Democrat-controlled General Assembly, which argued the court had misinterpreted lawmakers’ intent on how provisional ballots should be handled.
So did Roberts really garner enough legitimate electoral support to win her seat on the board of commissioners, or did she steal it with suspect votes? It’s unlikely that the public will ever know. The elections board tallied the provisional ballots, but its Democrat majority refused to release vote totals from the contested ballots. Samuelson was out and the pivotal at-large seat, which swung majority control of the board of commissioners to Democrats, went to Roberts.
Democrats at the time used their political clout to amass more political power, something they’ve held ever since on the county board. But their grip slipped some this week, which is what really has them twisted in knots of hysteria.
Democrats still hold a 5-4 majority on the board, but Cogdell has the potential to be the swing vote on major budget and governance decisions. He has repeatedly said he made no promises to vote in lockstep with Republican commissioners, in exchange for their support of his chairman’s coup. But during his bid for the position, Cogdell lobbied commissioners with plans that carried a decidedly Republican appeal: making long-term debt management a top priority with an eye toward lowering taxes; pushing for management decisions that would produce more accountability and transparency from county staff; and a willingness to cross party lines as chairman when making commission committee and leadership appointments.
Those notes resonated with Commissioner Neil Cooksey, a Republican who voted for Cogdell for chairman and who said that no “backroom deals” had been made for Republican support.
“My biggest issue with Chairman Roberts has been that, from the time I’ve been on the commission and from what I saw before I was on the commission, she’s consistently worked to expand the size of government, more so than I think government deserves,” Cooksey said. “Whenever there’s an opportunity to raise spending, Jennifer is there to support that.”
The very notion that Democrats might come up short on key votes, that their spending spigot might be plugged, that their progressive political philosophy of ever-expanding government might have a chink in its armor, has them yowling with discontent.
“You want a person you can trust, where there’s loyalty to the party you were elected to,” Commissioner Vilma Leake said in lobbying for Roberts as chair.
“We made a choice when we offered ourselves to the public when we were running on the stance of the philosophy of the party we were representing,” Leake said. “And to take an opportunity now to negate and not stand up to those policies worries me.”
Commissioner George Dunlap, a Democrat who supported Roberts for chairman, took up where Leake left off, blasting Cogdell’s tenure on the board. He charged that Cogdell had repeatedly joined with Republicans in voting to cut funding for social service programs that benefitted residents from the very communities that had supported Cogdell at the polls.
Dunlap also said Cogdell earlier this year had lobbied to get an additional $100,000 in county funding for “a particular non-profit agency” that subsequently hired Cogdell as its attorney. The uptown paper reports that agency is the C.W. Williams Community Health Center, which received $390,000 in county funding. Cogdell was hired as its attorney about two months after the county set its budget, which included the additional $100,000 in funding that Cogdell had suggested for the non-profit.
“I’m not saying that there was quid pro quo,” Dunlap said, “but it doesn’t look good.”
Neither does the fact that Dunlap kept his mouth shut about the situation for five months, until he used it to slap down Cogdell for crossing the established Democrat power structure by reaching out to GOP commissioners to support his bid for chairman.
Cogdell has said there is no connection between his support of additional funding for the C.W. Williams Community Health Center and his subsequent hire as its attorney.
“We have a responsibility of accountability,” Cogdell told his fellow commissioner this week before being elected chairman.
“I am a Democrat. I have not abandoned the political party that I’m registered with,” Cogdell said. “However, I would never place party allegiance over people and what I believe is in the best interest of the community. I do what I think is right. I’ll sleep well tonight.”
How well he’ll sleep after the facts come out about his relationship with the C.W. Williams Community Health Center remains to be seen.
In his claw to become board chairman, Cogdell called for a change from politics as usual. It now entirely unsurprisingly appears to have remained very much the same: blood in, blood out.
UPDATE: Cogdell reiterates that everything was above-board in his dealings with C.W. Williams and he’s compiling documentation to prove it. WSOC reports:
Cogdell’s spokesperson said he’s getting all of his documents together to prove there was no back door deal and that he’s talking to county staff about how to do the investigation because it can get expensive.
In the meantime, he emailed Eyewitness News a statement, saying, “I was never even approached about the possibility of working with the organization until at least a month after the final budget adoption.”
The only other people who would know for sure work at C.W. Williams. Its board chairman, Skip Haygood, confirms what Cogdell said, emailing Eyewitness News, “There was absolutely no discussion of a possible opportunity to provide legal services for Mr. Cogdell with our organization before the close of budget negotiations.”
Haygood said Cogdell had done legal work for his church and did a good job.
So now Cogdell has a spokesperson? Geez.
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