Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, managed to retain her seat Monday night as chairman of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners, sidestepping a brewing coup that could have stripped her of the title she’s held for the last four years and led, instead, to a bipartisan leadership-sharing role with a former sheriff and Democrat-turned-Republican, Jim Pendergraph, […]
With accusations that racism and financial discrimination were driving forces behind the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education’s decision to close predominately high poverty and minority schools on the city’s West side still stinging the community, flying under the radar has been the likely prospect that schools along the same educational corridor stand to reap millions of […]
The Charlotte City Council is diving headfirst into the microcredit lending pool, unanimously voting this week to shell out up to $230,000 in taxpayer money to help establish a Grameen America Bank in the Queen City. Mecklenburg County officials are also being tapped to contribute a matching $230,000, but have not yet voted on the […]
Faced with falling revenues and rising costs, the Metropolitan Transit Commission this week declared full steam ahead for its now self-professed, out-of-control rail transit building plan. Never mind that there’s no money to pay for it. The 11-mile, $1.2-billion Blue Line light-rail extension to UNCC is short some $200 million. The solution? Fast track the […]
Mecklenburg County commissioners this week approved acceptance of a $340,000 grant that will be used to help combat crime and juvenile delinquency by teaching gangbangers the fine art of professional culinary skills. In the process, a popular West side recreational facility that was closed this year because of budget cuts will receive a new lease […]
Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Board of Education meeting Tuesday night to consider closing nearly a dozen schools and bring wholesale upheaval to dozens more started and ended with heated protests, accusations of racism, and often exasperated board members struggling with weighty decisions that all agreed provided no pleasant options. When the dust had settled, after a meeting that […]
A new set of rules to determine where subsidized housing can be built in Charlotte got a cold shoulder Monday night from the city council, which fretted that a proposed locational policy doesn’t go far enough to help disperse affordable housing throughout the city and would still leave some of Charlotte’s most fragile neighborhoods vulnerable […]
The GOP simultaneously bucked and repeated history Tuesday night in an election that saw Republicans capture both chambers of the North Carolina General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, while again coming up painfully short in their attempt to wrest majority control of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners. And in […]
The same stone-broke board of education that insists it must close schools because the district simply has no money somehow found enough to award more than $1 million in contract extensions to top executives Tuesday night, hours before the board called in armed police to clear the government center’s meeting chamber of audience members protesting […]
Turns out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn’t quite delivered on the promise she made in 2007, when she vowed that under her fiscal watch there would be “no new deficit spending.” Of course, she only missed it by $5 trillion, or so. This from CNS News: Pelosi has served as speaker in the 110th and […]
