Candidate Profile: LaWana Slack-Mayfield
We built this profile for readers who want context without the fog machine. The Charlotte Mercury exists to help you see how power actually moves in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, so you can decide what should happen next. For our full 2025 hub, see Poll Dance 2025: Join the Dance.
The Snapshot
LaWana Slack-Mayfield is an at-large member of the Charlotte City Council running in the 2025 cycle. Voters citywide will decide whether her approach to growth, transparency, housing, public safety, and mobility merits another term. Our job here is not to sell you a narrative. It is to surface the tradeoffs, the timeline, and the files that matter to your life in this city.
What Matters In This Race
- Housing and Displacement
Charlotte’s affordability crisis is not a talking point. It is a policy plumbing problem. Watch what candidates demand on production, preservation, anti-displacement tools, and accountability for outcomes, not inputs. We will cover deliverables in our Housing feed. - Public Safety and Public Trust
Violent crime, quality-of-life enforcement, and the line between policing and prevention are policy choices. Voters should see where Slack-Mayfield stands on data transparency, co-response, youth programs, and oversight. - Mobility and the 1-cent question
Transit is not free and congestion does not fix itself. If the transportation tax appears on your ballot, what projects are guaranteed in what sequence, with what guardrails and reporting? Follow the policy file in Politics and News. - Process and Sunshine
Closed sessions are sometimes lawful. Secrecy by habit is not. Where does the candidate land on proactive disclosure, public dashboards, open contracting data, and after-action memos when Council stumbles. Our newsroom standard is the same one we expect from City Hall: put the receipts on the table. Learn how we operate in The Fine Print.
Where We Look First
We approach candidate files the same way every time: budget line items, meeting tapes, procurement footprints, rezoning votes, and community deliverables. You can follow our slow-journalism cadence in the election hub: Poll Dance 2025: Join the Dance.
Questions Slack-Mayfield Should Answer, Clearly
- Housing math
What specific production and preservation targets should be hit by the end of 2026, and what is the plan to fund them without hiding the ball in alphabet-soup financing? - Public safety mix
What percentage of new public-safety dollars should go to sworn roles, civilian specialists, and upstream prevention, and how will results be reported to the public each quarter? - Transportation guarantees
If you support new revenue for mobility, which corridors get built first, how is sequencing decided, and what happens if state or federal money comes in below projections? - Transparency policy
Should Charlotte adopt a default open-records release calendar, publish council vote data in a machine-readable feed, and post closed-session summaries when legal risk ends? - Contracts and equity
How should the city measure whether contracting actually diversifies beyond a small circle of prime vendors and whether corridor programs produce durable private investment?
We will publish every answer we receive and tag them in Politics.
Timeline To Watch
- Primary and early-vote windows live on our hub: Poll Dance 2025: Join the Dance.
- Our weekly digest lands in your inbox without trackers. Subscribe at The Charlotte Mercury.
How We Will Cover Slack-Mayfield From Here
- Follow the money and the metrics in budgets, bond proposals, and corridor programs.
- Trace the votes on rezonings, mobility, the budget, and sunshine policies.
- Add neighborhood reporting on who benefits and who pays.
- Update this profile with new documents, interviews, and verified outcomes. You can always ping us with documents or tips in our Contact Us form. We do not share your data. See our Privacy Policy.
How To Use The Mercury While You Decide
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- Big-picture reporting: Pillar Content
- Economy on the ground: Business
- Homes, land, and policy: Housing
- Council, campaigns, and governance: Politics
- Full election index: Poll Dance 2025; Join the Dance
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About the Author
Jack Beckett drinks too much coffee, argues with spreadsheets, and files on deadline. If this profile helped you make sense of the race, tell a neighbor. If it didn’t, tell me, and I will buy the next pot.
What you can find across our site
Start at our clean homepage, The Charlotte Mercury. Browse deeply reported work, track real-world effects in Business, and follow the housing file in Housing. For the sausage-making and all the votes, head to Politics. Our election hub, Poll Dance 2025; Join the Dance, bundles candidate files, timelines, and explainers. Curious how we operate and protect your data? See The Fine Print, our About Us, Terms of Service, Media, and Contact Us. You can always message us on X.com, or Twitter, or as we call it Twix, at x.com/queencityexp.
Creative Commons License
© 2025 The Charlotte Mercury / Strolling Ballantyne
This article, “LaWana Slack-Mayfield: A Voter-First Profile For Charlotte’s 2025 At-Large Race,” by Jack Beckett is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
“LaWana Slack-Mayfield: A Voter-First Profile For Charlotte’s 2025 At-Large Race”
by Jack Beckett, The Charlotte Mercury (CC BY-ND 4.0)