At its meeting on March 19, the Raleigh City Council adopted two resolutions that could go before voters in a referendum this fall for implementation in the 2026 election cycle.
The first resolution proposes switching council terms from two-year terms for all members to four-year staggered terms with nonpartisan primaries. The second proposes adding three district seats to the current eight-member city council, taking it to an 11-member body, the maximum number of members that the council is allowed to have under state law.
While the switch to four-year staggered terms was extensively studied and recommended by a council-appointed 10-member study group in 2021, adding three new district seats to the council was not.
That’s a problem, some residents say.
Eric Braun, the chair of the study group on the election changes, says that, to his knowledge, the proposal to add three district seats was first mentioned publicly this year at a March 5 city council meeting. District B council member Megan Patton asked city staff to add the second resolution expanding the council from eight seats to 11. The council debated whether to add three district seats or a mix of district and at-large seats, but ultimately voted to pass the resolution to add three district seats 6–1 that day with only Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin voting in opposition.
“When it was discussed [on March 5], the only justification for adding three district seats was an assumption that it would reduce the workload of individual Councilors,” Braun wrote in a letter to the city council asking members to defer action on the resolution to add three more district seats. “However, no one produced any data, research or empirical analysis supporting the assumption that adding district seats will make the City Council job more manageable. Assumptions and intuition cannot be the sole basis for Council’s decision to fundamentally change the size of City Council.”
Braun added that there is “substantial data and research addressing the importance of maintaining balance between district representation and at-large representation” on municipal governing bodies like the council.
A 2020 study from the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that district representatives often have “disproportionate influence” over approval of new development that could end up suppressing housing supply. A 2024 study from the European Journal of Political Economy found that district voting results in worse policy for minorities by, among other means, diluting their vote. Other recent studies show district seats impacting votes and representation of historically marginalized communities and eroding housing affordability (see studies linked below).
Additionally, most of Raleigh’s peer cities—including Durham, Greensboro, and Charlotte—have an equal or roughly equal balance of at-large and district members.
District C council member Corey Branch, who is running for mayor this fall, says he does not support adding three new districts to the council before seeing any options of what the new districts would look like. (Branch was absent from the meeting on the day the council voted to add the three-district resolution.) Branch says he also favors the current method of electing council members where voters get to choose half of the council: their district member, the mayor, and the two at-large council members.
“That’s my biggest thing,” Branch says. “I would love for us to help people keep that option, where they can vote for at least half, or close to half, and have a voice. But if you have eight districts, you take that [option] away.”
But there is some indication that the public—in addition to some district council members who have said they feel their districts are too large to govern effectively (adding three districts would reduce the size of each from 90,000 residents to 57,000)—may be in favor of adding more district seats. A city-sponsored survey, conducted by the ETC Institute, found that, of 1,013 respondents, more than 50 percent supported adding district seats. Thirty percent of respondents said they were very supportive, and 24 percent said they were somewhat supportive of adding “multiple” district seats. The proposal had similar levels of support across the city’s five districts and various age groups.
The neighborhood activist group Livable Raleigh has been clear that it, too, supports adding more district seats to the council as opposed to at-large seats, which were, in Raleigh’s history, used to prohibit minority residents from holding public office.
“At-Large seats may no longer be used in a blatantly racist manner,” the group wrote in an editorial this month. “But, we argue that has simply been replaced by the preferences of big dollar donors (because it costs a lot more to run At-Large, city-wide, than in a smaller district).”
City council member Jonathan Melton says that if he had to decide on adding seats tomorrow, he would choose to add just one district seat rather than three, a recommendation the election study group made to the council in 2021.
“But I can also understand the concerns of one district seat may not move the needle very much for rightsizing the size of our districts,” Melton says. “There are persuasive arguments on both sides of the benefits of having too many district council members.”
Although the resolution to add three district seats to the council can’t be altered at this point, the city council can decide not to move forward with putting it on the ballot for a referendum this fall. Residents have an opportunity to weigh in on this resolution and other election changes at a community engagement workshop on election reform on Wednesday, May 1, at Chavis Park Community Center. They can also email the council with their thoughts.
Melton says he is confident that the council will have enough time to discuss the proposal further because none of the election changes take place until 2026 and the city could bring forth a new resolution if needed.
Braun says the council should defer action on increasing the size of the council until there has been “adequate and thorough public engagement and more consideration given to the applicable evidence and research.”
“These are complex issues, and [some council members] seem to be operating on intuition or instinct,” Braun says. “That to me is not a justification to make changes to a policy that will affect every resident in the community.”
1. Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs
2. The Trade-Offs between At-Large and Single Member Districts
3. District Versus At-Large Voting: Why District Voting Results in Worse Policy for Minorities
6. The Supply-Equity Trade-Off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply
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