Mayor Vi Lyles leaves office June 30. The council has not yet scheduled the vote that decides who fills her seat.
Council convened in special session at 4 p.m. Monday in Room 267 of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center to take up three of the city's biggest active fights at once — a $4.5 billion budget hearing, a resolution on the I-77 South toll lane expansion, and the council's first formal floor discussion of data centers.
Council Member Malcolm Graham — who chairs the budget committee and has publicly opposed the I-77 expansion since October — was asked twice on Live Impact News Sunday whether he is a candidate to fill Lyles's seat. Both times the District 2 council member answered with the budget hearing.
CLT Mercury reported Thursday that Lyles will resign at the end of June, four months into the fifth term she won in November, and that under North Carolina law the council appoints a Democrat to serve the remainder of her term through December 2027. Per the same reporting, Graham is one of five sitting council members WBTV's David Hodges has identified as actively interested in the seat — along with At-Large members Dimple Ajmera and Victoria Watlington, District 1's Danté Anderson, and Mayor Pro Tem James Mitchell Jr.
Asked Sunday by host Siobhan Riley whether he is considering the seat, Graham said: "I'm considering getting past the public hearing for the budget on Monday night, right? And so my goal right now is to keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is the agenda that we have to process for Monday."
Riley followed up: "So is that a yes or a no?"
Graham: "It means that we have a public hearing on Monday for the budget."
The Budget Public Hearing
City Manager Marcus Jones presented his proposed fiscal year 2027 budget to council on May 4. It totals $4.5 billion. It includes a 1.89-cent property tax increase — the first in Charlotte since 2024 — and routes the entire $85 million from that increase to public safety: a 10 percent raise for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers through the rank of sergeant, a 7 percent raise for Charlotte Fire Department firefighters through the rank of captain, 35 additional take-home vehicles for CMPD, $1.1 million for in-car dash cameras, $4 million to replace firefighters' personal protective equipment, and six new fire engines plus three ladder trucks. The owner of a $360,000 home would pay about $70 more a year.
Graham serves as council's Budget, Governance, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee chair, which makes him the dais lead on this part of the night. Monday's public hearing is the citizens' first formal opportunity to weigh in on the manager's recommended budget. From there, Graham said in the interview, the schedule runs to amendments on May 18, a first straw vote on June 1, and final adoption on June 8.
The recommended budget also carries a $125 million housing bond — a $100 million Housing Trust Fund allocation plus a $25 million one-time anti-displacement increase — and a separate Transportation and Neighborhood bond package whose largest line items are $60 million for Strategic Investment Areas, $50 million for sidewalks, $24 million for street resurfacing, and $22 million for Vision Zero traffic and pedestrian-safety projects. Near the end of the May 4 presentation, Jones told council the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority will not be ready to take operational control of CATS on July 1 as originally planned. He proposed pushing that handoff to January 1, 2027.
The I-77 South Resolution
The same agenda carries a resolution on the I-77 South toll lane expansion. Lyles placed it on the May 11 agenda on April 27 after pressure from the Black Political Caucus, which opposes the project as currently designed.
Graham has been on record on the project since October. In the Live Impact News interview, he restated his position: "I've been on record since October of last year regarding 77 South that I thought both proposals were dead on arrival from my perspective." The first proposal had too much impact on neighborhoods and communities, he said; the elevated proposal that replaced it "leaves a lot of questions and impact to our community."
His critique came in two specific places. The first, on community engagement: the North Carolina Department of Transportation, in his telling, has been "talking at people, not with them." The second, on history: Graham said he invited Tom Hanchett, a local historian, to brief residents at a town hall on how Charlotte's original highway construction "divided and impacted the African-American community" — and that NCDOT did not engage with that context. "They didn't listen," Graham said.
He acknowledged that NCDOT has corrected some of its initial outreach failures, beginning in March: a citizen advisory committee, a community engagement center. He called those steps "appropriate." But the first impression, he said, persists. "It's kind of hard to put water back in the bottle. You only get one chance to make a good first impression."
"Two things can be true at the same time," he said. "I-77 South, I drive it every day, is congested." The highway needs to be addressed as long-term infrastructure, he continued. The community has to be at the table when the design is chosen. Residents who are impacted have to be appropriately compensated. None of those, in Graham's framing, contradicts the others.
The resolution before council asks NCDOT to pause and reconsider a range of design and engagement assumptions, Graham said. Anthony Foxx, the former Charlotte mayor and — as Riley noted in the interview — a former U.S. Transportation Secretary in the Obama administration, made similar criticisms publicly the same week. Asked about Foxx's intervention, Graham said: "I think the transportation secretary is right."
The Data Centers Discussion
Last month, council deadlocked 5-5 on whether to even schedule a public hearing on a temporary moratorium for new data center approvals. Lyles broke the tie by voting no. Monday's agenda item is a discussion, not a hearing — city staff briefing the council on what regulations would require and where the by-right zoning currently sits.
Ajmera, who pushed the April public-hearing motion, is now asking for a 90-day pause on data center construction. "It's the wild, wild west," she told Axios Charlotte. "There are no guardrails." Other North Carolina cities have already passed pauses — Durham for 60 days, Apex for one year.
The substantive question is the one that produced the April tie: in multiple Charlotte zoning districts, data centers can be built by right, with no rezoning hearing, no council vote, no community-input mechanism. Construction on the first phase of a multi-building data center campus is already underway off University City Boulevard.
"One of the things that continues to trip this council up is how we process our work," Graham said. He supports a public hearing that may lead to a moratorium. The first step is the briefing Monday.
What Graham Did Not Say
Graham did not say he wants to be mayor. He also did not say he doesn't. The closest he came to a substantive position on the seat — and this was on the record Friday, via WBTV before the Live Impact News interview — was that the council's appointee should be someone who will not run for mayor in 2027, "so there will be no unfair advantages." That was a procedural position about a future election, not a personal one about this seat.
He confirmed Sunday that he and Mitchell — the Mayor Pro Tem elected by council in December — have "talked some" about the appointment process, and that the Budget, Governance, and Intergovernmental Relations Committee he chairs "may" be where the process is formally handled. He emphasized that nothing has been decided. Asked about possible names for Lyles's replacement, he said: "I was literally doing my homework in preparation for Monday and the agenda items that we have in front of us."
He repeated, instead, that he was preparing for the public hearing.
More is coming. Graham named the airport lease — Charlotte Douglas International's long-term governance arrangement — as the council's next major lift, due "in months." Whether he intends to be the mayor who handles that vote is the question he did not answer Sunday. The answer he gave was that there is a public hearing on Monday.