Raleigh city leaders take first step toward working with citizen groups once again

Anna Johnson
·2 min read

More than three years after the Raleigh City Council’s controversial vote to disband its longtime Citizen Advisory Councils, the groups won a small victory this week.

Without notice, the City Council voted on Feb. 4, 2020, to disband CACs and hire a consultant to create a city office of community engagement.

Three years later that office is up and running, and recommending ways to improve civic life in the city.

One idea is to create a “community engagement network” that would let CACs meet for free in city community centers. But that idea is still at least a year out and would require more money and more staff in the coming city budget.

An intermediate step would allow CACs that have continued to meet despite no city funding to use a set list of community centers as meeting space for free starting March 1. They would have to meet during regular community center hours. The opportunity would also be offered to the CACs that have not met in the last three years in case they want to start back up.

The City Council voted 6-0 in favor of the change on Tuesday. Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin and Council member Jonathan Melton were both absent and excused from the afternoon meeting. Both voted to disband the CACs in 2020.

New City Council members

This change likely would not have been possible without the election of four new council members in the 2022 election. The four newcomers, Mary Black, Jane Harrison, Christina Jones and Megan Patton, all said in a News & Observer questionnaire they would want to reinstate the CACs if they were elected.

Mayor Pro Tem Corey Branch, one of the two council members, who voted against disbanding the CACs in 2020, said it was ironic this was occurring almost exactly three years after the groups were disbanded.

“It’s taken us too long,” Branch said. “This is a step in that direction, But it is also a step I think for the community as a whole to see that we’re looking at everybody.”

Harrison called the decision “a great first step.”

“It helps us get where we are headed,” she said. “I am looking forward to opening up that engagement network but at least for the first step of CAC access, that’s important to me.”

Donna Bailey, a former CAC chair who now serves on the city’s new community engagement board, asked that the CACs be allowed to meet in the community centers they’d previously met in instead of the one selected center per City Council district.

“The City Council has said on numerous occasions that we need to meet people where they are,” she told council members Tuesday. “Meeting at a remote community center is not meeting people where they are at.”

The five community centers are Eastgate Neighborhood Center, Abbott’s Creek Community Center, Robert Neighborhood Center, Powell Drive Neighborhood Center and Glen Eden Neighborhood Center.

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