Donna Bailey has lived in Raleigh for over 25 years and has been a neighborhood advocate for much of that time. She served as President of the University Park Neighborhood Association and has also been Chair of the Hillsborough-Wade Citizens Advisory Council (CAC). Donna has been very active in educating the public on what is going on within the city and making sure that resident’s voices are heard. Donna is a former member of the city’s Community Engagement Board.
Donna spoke to City Council on February 10, 2026:
The Citizen Engagement department is nothing but a bureaucracy to separate the citizens from the council. I think that as council members you would WANT to hear from the public.
I’ll give you an example.
The city is having pop-up meetings and District specific meetings with information about the election changes for this year. How many people have attended those meetings? There was only one person at the District B meeting held at Abbotts Creek Community Center on January 21! And, that person was NOT the District B Councilor.
Further, there are 11 of these meetings scheduled. The 1st was held on January 10. The last 2 are scheduled for February 24 & 25.
Why is this important? For two reasons:
1. The period for candidates to file to run for office STARTED on December 1 and ENDED December 19. Nearly a month BEFORE the first engagement meeting to explain the new election process to the community. Maybe one reason so few candidates are running for City Council this cycle is because the city has done such a poor job of educating the public to the fact there is a new primary process and any candidate had to make a decision to run by December.
2. Early voting for the primary started February 12. The last four scheduled engagement meetings to explain the election processes did not happen before early voting started.
Livable Raleigh held a meeting explaining the election process changes and had over 90 people in attendance.
The Hillsborough-Wade CAC held a meeting, also with over 90 people in attendance, for an At-Large candidate forum.
Other than a once-a-year gathering, the Engage Raleigh Expo, what is the Community Engagement department doing to actually engage the public?
Is there any public accounting of the attendance at Community Engagement department events? If not, why not?
As has been said before, if it matters, it gets measured!
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