In a move that harkens back to 2020 when, without public input or notice, the Raleigh City Council voted to disband the city’s 50-year-old Citizen Advisory Council (CAC) structure, the council voted today to officially reinstate CACs. The vote was unanimous. 

Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said during the meeting that other members of the council did not make her privy to their plan to take a vote to restore CACs. Baldwin had led the 2020 vote to disband the CACs. 

The vote came in the final portion of the council’s regularly scheduled Tuesday afternoon meeting. It was not on the official agenda but, during the report from the mayor and council members, council member Christina Jones moved that the city council “officially recognize and restore support” for CACs and their larger overseeing body, Raleigh CAC (RCAC). 

“When the community spends years advocating to be brought back into the fold, we have an obligation to respond clearly and definitively,” Jones said. “I hope this motion will close a painful chapter in our history and open the door to building something that’s gonna outlive us all.” 

CACs are community forums that were originally designed for in-person engagement to give residents opportunities to vote on issues scheduled to come before the council in an advisory capacity, including rezoning cases. Raleigh Mayor Clarence Lightner created the CAC system in 1974 to bolster the city’s applications for federal block grants. The city never received those grants, but the CACs persisted as a feature of Raleigh’s political landscape. Before they were disbanded, they required about 12 city staff members to help run them and each CAC received a $1,000 allocation from the city. Since the 18 CACs were disbanded four years ago, nine have continued to operate informally. 

The vote came with several stipulations. Jones asked that the city provide space for the CACs to use at city community centers for free, with access to live meeting technology such as Zoom and funding if needed. Finally, Jones asked that the city provide outreach to Raleigh residents to educate them about ways to participate in civic life. 

At the council’s retreat in January, members discussed the possibility of restoring CACs with financial and city staff support. Council member Jonathan Melton said that Jones’s motion encompassed issues that “had consensus” at the retreat but added that the city should provide “a menu of options for [residents] to engage:” online, in person, and an option for residents who are newcomers to civic engagement. But he said the new CAC system won’t be the same as the old. 

“I’ve had folks contacting me saying we’re gonna go back to the old way. There’s no going back to the old way but what we’ve learned is that there are pieces of the old way that are valuable in our new system,” he said. “These neighborhood, face-to-face communications do not work for everyone, but for a lot of people, they do. I want to be as supportive as we can to everyone who wants to engage in the way they want to.”

Following the termination of the CACs, the City of Raleigh commissioned a year-long, $70,000 study to look at ways to get residents involved with city  government processes and initiatives. The city created an Office of Community Engagement as well as a 16-member Community Engagement Board charged with reviewing existing strategies for community engagement and recommending improvements.

In a statement, Raleigh CAC leaders said those efforts haven’t been enough and noted that RCAC’s board has been in discussion with all members of Raleigh’s city council to urge them to vote to restore CACs.

“Raleigh is not slowing down, it’s time for Raleigh’s community engagement to catch up,” the statement read. “Hopefully very soon every Raleigh resident will once again have an equal opportunity for community engagement no matter where they live in Raleigh.”

Baldwin and disgraced former council member Saige Martin orchestrated the 2020 vote to disband CACs according to the INDY’s reporting at the time. Because the council had tried unsuccessfully in 2004 and 2015 to reform the CAC system only to meet public backlash, they kept the planned vote to disband CACs a secret from the public as well from council member (and CAC proponent) David Cox, though other members of the council did inform media outlets, including the INDY, ahead of the vote under embargo. 

Before today’s vote, Baldwin and Jones shared a testy exchange. 

“I would just like to say going forward, I think it would be considerate to share a motion with the full council before just surprising people making it at the table,” Baldwin said. “I had no idea what was going to be proposed. Why did we bring this up in a formal motion?”

Jones responded that, with the vote, the community would understand that the council was going to take real action “because we sat here for four years and did nothing.”

“The reason that I’m okay with how this happened today is because this is what you did to us four years ago,” she said. 

Watch the video of the council meeting here. The discussion begins at around 1:47:00.

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Jane Porter is Wake County editor of the INDY, covering Raleigh and other communities across Wake County. She first joined the staff in 2013 and is a former INDY intern, staff writer, and editor-in-chief, first joining the staff in 2013.