Overview:
• Dinner meetings started in 2008 to brief unprepared city council members about upcoming council meeting topics
• Critics say the dinner meetings have become a place for council members to discuss public matters largely outside of public view
• Every council member campaigned on transparency. Will they keep their promises?
Before the cameras roll, before the microphones click on, and before the public meetings begin, the Fayetteville City Council gathers in a cramped room on the third floor of City Hall.
These sessions are the council’s little-known dinner meetings. For nearly two decades, the gatherings have quietly shaped city policy—all without livestreams, video or audio archives, or easy public access.
The dinner meetings are where council members ask questions, rehearse talking points, and sometimes strategize what they’ll say later in the first-floor city council chamber where the public is watching.
Critics say the practice reflects a broader culture of avoiding accountability, where key decisions can unfold with little public oversight. Supporters call the meetings essential for candid conversation and practical preparation.
In the November election, the city council candidates campaigned on promises of transparency. As the winners prepare to take office on December 1, the private nature of these dinner meetings puts that promise to a test.
Former mayors said the dinner meeting was created to help unprepared council members get up to speed.
But over time, it’s morphed into something more opaque, former and current council members said, where votes are sometimes taken, discussions veer off agenda, and the public is left guessing what happened.
“The city’s preference is always going to be to obfuscate,” said City Council Member Mario Benavente, who will leave office on December 1.
Limited access, limited space
The dinner meetings start at 5:30 p.m. and end by 6:30 p.m., when the regular council meetings are scheduled to begin. If the dinner meetings run long, as happened at a recent gathering in October, the council meetings start late.
Access to the dinner meetings is limited. The stairwell to the third floor requires a staff badge. If members of the public want to attend, as allowed by law, a city employee has to be summoned to let them in and take them up to the meeting room.
Once there, attendees will find limited space. The room seats maybe eight members of the public, shoulder to shoulder against the wall, next to the long table that the city council and staff sit around.
The city clerk makes an audio recording of each meeting, but the file is destroyed once the council approves the minutes at the following session, as permitted under state law, city spokesperson Loren Bymer told CityView.
Major city business has unfolded in these dinner sessions.
In the last two months, council members used dinner meetings to discuss a new contract with developers to build a hotel and apartment tower atop the downtown Hay Street Parking Garage, and whether the city should re-file a lawsuit against the previous developers who never finished the project.
They also had a polarizing vote on October 27 to postpone a council meeting until after the November 4 election. Some members believed it was designed to avoid discussion of an audit of controversial and failed construction projects on the day before the election.
“I think they should be moved down to the first floor so they are more accessible,” Benavente told CityView. “It’s not truly public.”
Last week, Benavente put forth a proposal to make the dinner meetings more transparent. It failed in a 5-4 vote.
The dinner meetings have not had written agendas. Benavente’s proposal would have required a formal agenda, set by the city manager. He said this would be a small step toward greater transparency and accessibility.
Benavente and Council Members Courtney Banks-McLaughlin, Kathy Jensen and Deno Hondros voted yes.
Mayor Mitch Colvin and Council Members Lynne Greene, Brenda McNair, Malik Davis, and D.J. Haire voted no.
More free exchange in private
Council members said dinner meetings foster more candid conversations.
Greene, who voted against Benavente’s motion to have more formal agendas, acknowledged that dynamic to CityView.
“Do I think that sometimes with the public present, we are limited and we are more cautious in the way that we speak to each other? Yes,” she said.
Greene said it was her understanding that the meetings are intentionally structured to limit public access. “Not to prohibit the public, to just make it not as easy,” she said.
Critics say that’s exactly why the meeting should be more accessible.
“It’s important for us to gain the public’s trust by doing our business in public,” Hondros told CityView.
Started because members were unprepared
The dinner meetings weren’t always controversial. Former Mayor Tony Chavonne, who led the city from 2005 to 2013, said he started them in 2008 to address a basic problem: Council members weren’t reading their agenda packets.
“It was embarrassing,” Chavonne told CityView. “We had to get it together for the public.”
(Chavonne is the former owner of CityView and is the chair of the board of the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville, a nonprofit organization that provides grants to CityView.)
Chavonne’s successor, former Mayor Nat Robertson, had similar thoughts.
The dinner meetings, Robertson said, were meant to help council members prepare, especially those who hadn’t done their homework before the cameras turned on. Robertson left office in 2017.
Former Council Member Kirk deViere described the dinner meeting as informal. It was never a place for votes, just a space to ask questions and get clarity.
deViere was on the city council from 2015 to 2017. He is now the chair of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.
Do other cities have dinner meetings?
Other cities don’t operate this way. CityView reached out to nearby towns and the 15 largest municipalities in North Carolina. None reported a similar setup.
Hope Mills is considering a dinner-style meeting, but hasn’t adopted one yet, said Hope Mills Deputy Town Clerk Coronado Regan.
Charlotte used to hold an official meeting-before-the-meeting, Charlotte spokesperson Jack VanderToll told CityView. The council voted only on consent agenda items (which generally are noncontroversial matters that need no discussion) and received presentations for upcoming items, he said.
It took place in a large second-floor conference room and was open to the public, livestreamed and video recorded. The pre-meeting has now merged into its regular meeting this year in its council chamber, VanderToll said.
The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners holds a dinner meeting at 5:30 p.m. before its regular sessions, deViere, the chair said. He asserted that the gathering is purely social. “No county business is conducted,” he said.
Government reporter Rachel Heimann Mercader can be reached at rheimann@cityviewnc.com.
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