Two months ago, Sean Stegall was the successful, seemingly uncontroversial town manager of Cary—a low-profile but influential position that gave him control of a 1300-person staff and a $500 million annual budget to work with. Stegall was nearing his 10-year work anniversary and had just published a book chronicling his accomplishments and leadership philosophy. By all accounts, he deserved as much credit as anyone for making Cary a prosperous, well-run town.
Then, on November 20, the Cary Town Council placed Stegall on administrative leave after learning he had engaged in excessive spending without council approval. In the following weeks, public records requests and reporting revealed that Stegall had unilaterally signed off on land purchases totaling over a million dollars, approved the town’s payment of a council member’s tuition, and violated the town’s fund balance policy, all without informing the full town council. A few weeks later, Stegall resigned.
In an emergency town council meeting, Mayor Harold Weinbrecht said Stegall had misled council members and created an “unhealthy work environment.” The town hired Womble Bond Dickinson, a law firm that specializes in employment investigations, to conduct a full probe of Stegall’s activities. The state auditor’s office announced its own investigation.
To Weinbrecht, the revelations were both painful and galvanizing. The INDY sat down with the mayor at Cary’s town hall this week to talk about the events leading up to Stegall’s resignation and how the town is responding in the aftermath. Here are some takeaways from that conversation.
The mayor says Stegall’s overreach felt like the “ultimate betrayal.”
Weinbrecht, who has served as mayor since 2007 and helped hire Stegall in 2016, says he felt blindsided when his former town manager’s misconduct came to light.
“When I first started hearing things, I remember going home and staring at the TV with it being off for hours, going, ‘What is going on? How did I get here? What happened? Why did he do that? He’s my friend. I thought he was my friend. How did I not see that?’” Weinbrecht says. “I don’t have answers to those questions. I just don’t know what happened.”
Weinbrecht says he first noticed changes in Stegall’s behavior a few months ago when the former manager began canceling their weekly one-on-one meetings. In hindsight those cancellations are glaring red flags, the mayor says, but “I didn’t question anything at the time because I believed in him and trusted him.”
Weinbrecht says he doesn’t know what made the former town manager act the way he did, and says he wishes him well; at his best, Weinbrecht says, Stegall was “brilliant” at his job. But “he was manipulating a lot of people and a lot of things at the same time, which would take a lot of brilliance to do that as well … including coming across as your best friend, or one of your best friends. It makes you feel like a fool.”
The town doesn’t know the full extent of Stegall’s overreach yet.
During his decade as town manager, Stegall changed a lot about Cary’s government structure: he dissolved and created departments, shuffled staff around them, and implemented new programs. He oversaw the rollout of the 311 service and the opening of Downtown Cary Park.
When INDY asked Weinbrecht how he weighs Stegall’s accomplishments against his spending and conduct issues, the mayor said it’s complicated.
But overall, the mayor says he still believes Cary “went in a great direction” for those years.
The dual Womble Bond Dickinson and state auditor’s investigations will reveal more details about Stegall’s spending and conduct in time, the mayor says. Right now, he says he wishes he hadn’t let Stegall brush off multiple requests by the town council to conduct a staff survey to assess employee satisfaction.
“Looking back, that’s one of the things we should have said, ‘No, no, no. We insist on it. We need it now.’ And it never happened,” Weinbrecht says. “That would have given us a clue of the energy, is it really going in a positive direction?”
The mayor also has questions about why taxes rose so much for Cary residents in 2024. Even though he knows inflation, flattening revenues and county-level revaluations played a role, he wonders if there was “a better way to get to that point” that would have been less jarring for residents.
“I do question the finances in the past,” he says. “I’m glad we’re having an internal investigation to [see] if anything was done inappropriately.”
Stegall’s workplace conduct was “unpredictable” and “inappropriate.”
When the town council announced Stegall’s resignation in December, Weinbrecht said the former town manager had created an “unhealthy work environment.”
This week, the mayor explained that he learned about the workplace issues from staff members who sent him anonymous tips. From there, the council interviewed some staff members about Stegall’s behavior.
From those interviews, Weinbrecht says he learned that Stegall “was unpredictable. He was doing things, saying things to certain staff members that were inappropriate, and they felt like he was not being the leader he once was.”
Weinbrecht says he cannot go into any more detail about Stegall’s inappropriate behavior except to say that “people weren’t treated professionally.”
Weinbrecht says the staff who reported on Stegall “were heroes, in my opinion, to risk their jobs, their careers, because they believed in the town and the organization enough to come to the council and tell us what they knew. And it was upsetting for us, upsetting for them. It was one of the lowest points I’ve seen in my 22-plus years as an elected official to sit through that.”
Weinbrecht says the town council isn’t in complete agreement about how to move forward.
Out of the seven Cary Town Council members, two—Bella Huang and Brittany Richards—were just sworn in last month. Two more, Sarika Bansal and Michelle Craig, have only served about two years. Most of the council, other than Weinbrecht and mayor pro tem Lori Bush, have only ever worked with Stegall as town manager. Weinbrecht says having “a new council with very little experience” creates “trust issues” between the council and town staff, the council and the public, and among the council members themselves.
“New council members are very influenced by what is around them, and they don’t have a lot of big picture information,” Weinbrecht says. “They might rely on other council members, which in itself poses a danger.
“We have to, as a council and a staff, make sure that [the newer members are] educated so they can make the decisions based on the big picture,” Weinbrecht says.
He adds that the council isn’t aligned about how to move forward.
“I talked with one [council member] at length [this weekend] … and it didn’t end well. That person thinks, ‘What’s wrong with meeting in private and coming up with solutions and then presenting it to the council?’ I’m like, ‘Well, information is power, and power can break trust.’ … They didn’t agree with that: ‘That’s not the way we’ve done it.’ Well, the way [we’ve] done the last two years isn’t correct. So we went back and forth on that. I didn’t get anywhere.”
Weinbrecht says the council members disagree about how quickly they should announce all the reforms Cary will implement. He’s in the camp that doesn’t want to “rush to solutions” that might be overcorrections in the heat of the moment. But he noted that the town recently moved to televise all council meetings and recently created a public portal to track all records requests—two measures that should increase transparency.
Here’s what to expect from Cary in the months to come:
Weinbrecht wants to make the annual budget process more transparent this year in order to reassure taxpayers that the town is spending their money wisely. That means slowing the process down and getting the public involved.
“Budgets are all about values,” he says. “And so if the public’s value is that we should be cutting things, then that’s probably a good direction.” Weinbrecht says he doesn’t want to make cuts to police, fire, or public works, which he says are “80% of what we do” and “the best of the best. … But that’s a discussion we want to have with the public.”
In addition to recording all public meetings of the town council, Cary has eliminated one-on-one meetings between the town manager (now Russ Overton, serving in an interim capacity) and individual council members. Instead, the town is holding “three by four” meetings between three council members and four staff members, including the manager and the mayor. This way, Weinbrecht says, everyone is getting the same information and meetings are being documented properly.
“Because of the strength of this organization, one bad player did not impact the organization as greatly as [they] could have, and that’s because of the incredible staff,” Weinbrecht says. “I think that we will come out stronger because of this, because we have stronger policies, stronger procedures, and we’ll know what we need to do as an organization to move forward.”
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