During their term in office, Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin and City Councilors have raised your taxes by nearly 22% and Council's pay by 82%.First, some background facts: Mayor Baldwin and City Council took office in Dec 2019. Each spring the council approves a budget for...
With your help, we are expanding our outreach and partnerships to engage voters and candidates about the most important city issues and highlighting the better answers Raleigh residents want and deserve.
INDY Week's "Best of" winners were announced June 15, 2022 and the results show INDY Readers have the same concerns about Raleigh as the voters who told Public Policy Polling they want change. Livable Raleigh commissioned a poll of Likely Voters and found four...
Local media reports say Raleigh's City Council passed their 2023 Budget and it includes increases to the salaries of the Mayor and Councilors. But, the reports don't tell the whole story. What has been reported as increases of 42% for the Mayor, 50% for the Mayor Pro...
"Rotten to the Core"Our system of paying for political campaigns is "rotten to the core", says Bob Phillips of Common Cause NC, a leading clean government watchdog. In a recent Indyweek article, Phillips said "We need a better way ... to eliminate the influence of big...
72% of Raleigh voters say city government is too beholden to developers. City Council has tried to hide the corrupting influence of big money in a growing list of backroom decisions, but three out of four Raleigh voters see it and feel it every day – as rapid growth drives up their cost of living, drives down their quality of life and drives modest income families out of town.
There has not been a municipal election in Raleigh in over two and a half years. But as you know, this week there was a NC State Senate race involving Patrick Buffkin, a member of the Raleigh City Council. I view the outcome of this race as a proxy for the opinion that the people in Senate District 13, and more broadly across the city, have regarding the Raleigh City Council and its performance over the last two and a half years. Just as elections have consequences in the direction of the next council, so the actions of the council have consequences in the direction of the next election.
Raleigh City Councilor Patrick Buffkin asked the voters who know him best to promote him to a seat in the NC Senate. Their answer was a resounding NO! The Tuesday, May 17th primary was the first electoral test for a sitting member of Raleigh's City Council and the...
This is a follow-up to a recent Letter to the Editor published in the N&O. Here we are able to provide more details than can fit in a LTE. There is a copy of that letter at the end of this piece. City Councilor Stewart is quoted in the N&O saying "This...
First, I would like to address a statement Councilor Stewart made at a recent meeting. She said that it’s the same people who participate in public comment time after time, but this simply is not true. I collected data from City Council minutes for September 4, 2018 to September 7, 2022 for a total of 64 meetings: 32 meetings before Council began meeting virtually and 32 meetings after. You can see this data displayed in the bar graph. During the virtual meetings, participation in public comments increased 17%, and the number of individuals that spoke only once before council increased 23%.