Last week’s Charlotte City Council meeting repeated a troubling grandstand: For several months, now, representatives of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) turned out in force at the Charlotte City Council meeting advocating for the so-called Charlotte Airport Safety and Efficiency (CASE) ordinance.
During the evening the SEIU mobilized speakers, attendees, and their own consultant (including former Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Braxton Winston), to intentionally dominate a public Council meeting by posing as legal advocates for a collection of airport workers.
At 9:35 pm, the recently-in-the-news Councilmember Tiawana Brown made a motion to refer the SEIU’s CASE ordinance to Committee. This comes after several attempts to do the same in prior meetings. The Council’s debate on the motion lasted over an hour. Councilmembers Brown, Johnson, and Watlington openly questioned whether the Interim City Attorney was correctly interpreting wage and hour pre-emption and procurement statutes. Councilmembers Ajmera and Mayfield were silent but supportive. The debate among councilmembers was heated and personal with many complaints of disrespect across the dais.
Here is what’s important to understand about the issue. Councilmembers Driggs, Graham, and Molina represented their legitimate concerns that the consideration and adoption of a living wage mandate is:
1) beyond the authority of Charlotte City Council under state law;
2) in open defiance of the state legislature during a week in which mobility legislation was being debated;
3) a risk to airport governance; and
4) a poor stewardship of the economic engine of the CLT hub.
Furthermore, City Council has ways, other than CASE, to impact the economic mobility of its residents and workers at the airport through workforce development (job training, upskilling, apprenticeships) and policies on affordable housing, mobility, safety, etc.
When the Council called the question on whether to place SEIU’s CASE ordinance on the agenda for Committee referral (which has been discussed numerous times before), the following occurred:
It should be noted that the same motion cannot be reintroduced unless Council suspends its rules with a 2/3 vote, so it’s unlikely CASE will come up again this year.
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Interested in how intelligent responses are being handled? See this article from Charlotte Ledger after reading this snippet below.
You’ll recall that last week, developer Johnny Harris wrote a column for us in which he expressed concern that the Charlotte City Council was becoming “increasingly driven by performative activism” after a close vote that would have supported a union-backed measure to increase contractor pay at Charlotte’s airport.
My Take: Proponents of the proposed ordinance know City Council does not have the authority to implement the measure. Instead of seeking legal ways to provide relief for workers, they manipulate and use them for their own political means. What this was is the latest example of several councilmembers banding together to manipulate facts to create the belief that they are the only elected officials that actually “care” about workers. The reality is this is part of a greater effort by some, leading into the election season, to boost name identification and to organize volunteers.
You have a chance to weigh in on the discussion in a couple of months by voting in the Primary Election on September 9th. We have so many things going for us as a community, like quality of life, jobs and opportunity, strong economic development, and great amenities. If we allow ourselves to get bogged down by the few who regularly attempt to grind the gears of prosperity to a halt due to their own personal grievances and outsized attention to their own pet projects, we end up hurting everyone.
Get active. Get serious. Get out and educate who you can about what we need to focus on for the Primary Election on September 9!
Now, in response, council member Victoria Watlington — who was one of the five council members implicitly criticized by Harris — has written a column we have published in which she makes the case that the old way of settling disagreements behind closed doors is outdated and dangerous.
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Late last week the House and Senate put the final touches on House Bill 948, The P.A.V.E. Act – Projects for Advancing Vehicle-Infrastructure Enhancements. This comes after more than five years of negotiations between community leaders, elected officials, and members of the business community. Governor Josh Stein signed the bill into law earlier today. Here’s what the measure does:
In closing, you should know that Mecklenburg County Commission Chair Mark Jerrell is likely to set a vote for September 3rd. The General Election is scheduled for November 4th where the measure will be on the ballot for voter approval if the Mecklenburg County Commission refers the matter to the voters, as is anticipated.
My Take: This anticipated and overdue measure has been a long time coming and there are still two crucial steps to take before it becomes a reality: (1) Mecklenburg County Commissioners need to place the measure on the ballot, and (2) Voters need to approve the measure by a majority vote. Having said that, I’m proud that several leaders in our industry really stepped up and invested time and resources into this successful effort. Let’s thank REBIC members Peter A. Pappas, Tim Sittema, Sagar Rathie our 2025 NAIOP President and REBIC member, and 2025 Charlotte Regional Business Alliance Board Chair, David Longo. Next up is a potential vote of the Mecklenburg County Commission on September 3rd, followed by a vote on the referred measure during the General Election on November 4th.
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