Not content with pulling a $9.5-million rabbit out of the hat to bolster county revenue projections, county commissioners on Tuesday night worked some more money magic when they trimmed County Manager Harry Jones’ total pay package and simultaneously tossed him a nearly $27,000 pay hike. Commissioners nixed Jones’ performance bonus from future total compensation packages, […]
When Commissioner Bill James, a white Republican, tried to cut $200,000 from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ budget and give it to the Veterans Service Office as part of last week’s straw votes, Commissioner George Dunlap, a black Democrat, went off the deep end, exploding with a race-baiting diatribe laced with egregious distortions and flat-out nonsense. “I was […]
One day after Mecklenburg commissioners ballooned the county manager’s recommended budget, gambling that an improved economy would produce stable sales tax collections next year, the stock market plunged to a new four-month low on the release of a lethargic and disappointing national jobs report, while local snackmaker Lance Inc. announced it had reduced its workforce […]
A Democrat majority of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners on Thursday night conjured millions of dollars from thin air to bolster funding for county programs and services without having to hike property taxes in an election year. Flush with a sack full of phantom money, the board then proceeded to embark on a dizzying […]
Rifling through the city’s budget, a couple numbers stick out like peacocks in a sparrow’s nest: Mecklenburg County’s $2.9 million contribution to the uptown cultural arts facilities and the $11 million the county is slated to fork over to provide an uptown park for a development planned in First Ward, along with leveraging about $8 […]
There’s an old cliche when it comes to tweaking government budgets: If you want to add something, you need to cut something. Mecklenburg Commissioner Bill James is taking it to heart. James wants to increase funding for the Veteran’s Service Office, which is targeted to lose half its $1 million budget and seven of 14 […]
Fat, lazy grasshoppers in Mecklenburg, by way of Aesop’s fable that teaches to, “prepare for want before it comes.” County Manager Jan Winters explains how Gaston was able to avoid a tax hike this year, even while selling off the first load of bonds voters approved three years ago to build a new high school, […]
Attorneys for accused cop killer Demeatrius Montgomery have been trying to use the so-called Racial Justice Act to further delay his trail, which has already been lingering for years. The law allows judges to consider statistical evidence and data that suggests race was a factor in prosecutors seeking the death penalty on a disproportionate number […]
Mecklenburg County employees – at least the ones who still have jobs – would go without pay hikes for the second year in a row, under the budget County Manager Harry Jones rolled out Tuesday night for the upcoming fiscal year. And while Jones cautioned that the pay freeze could put the county at risk […]
Mecklenburg County Manager Harry Jones quoted and referenced everybody and everything from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Teddy Roosevelt to the P.O.W. Stockdale Paradox, in unveiling a recommended budget that avoids a tax increase, cuts $81 million in programs and services, axes nearly 400 employees, and left Jones, in his words, standing on tippy toes, peering […]
