The Charlotte City Council on Monday deferred a District 4 conventional rezoning petition after the application fell short of the majority needed for approval. The vote was 5-4. The four members in opposition were Council Member Renée Johnson (District 4), at-large Council Members LaWana Slack-Mayfield and Victoria Watlington, and Council Member J.D. Mazuera Arias (District 5). Johnson had pulled the item — petition 2025-136, filed by Larry Cooper — off the council's consent agenda before the vote, citing a concern she has raised in zoning meetings before: conventional rezonings come to council without a site plan attached.
"I just want to share my concern again with conventional petitions and not having the site plan," Johnson told the dais. "I don't think we're doing our residents any favor when we can't answer what's being built right next to them."
The property is approximately 2.02 acres at 1800 West Sugar Creek Road, east of West Sugar Creek Road, west of Burgandy Drive, and north of Kneighton Lane. Cooper had asked the council to rezone the parcel from Neighborhood 1-B to Neighborhood 1-C — both are Unified Development Ordinance residential districts — and to allow all uses permitted by-right under N1-C, with no conditional commitments. That last detail is what Johnson objected to. A conventional petition does not include a site plan or specify what the petitioner intends to build; it grants the petitioner the broader range of uses allowed under the new zoning and leaves the specific use decision for later.
Staff recommended approval. The Zoning Committee, at its May 5 work session, also recommended approval. The petition arrived on Monday's consent agenda — the list of items that pass without separate discussion because they meet four criteria: no public opposition at the public hearing, staff approval, zoning committee approval, and no changes since the committee's recommendation. The April 20 public hearing for 2025-136 drew no speakers. Two other council members had pulled items off the consent agenda Monday, but only Johnson's pulled item drew a contested vote.
Assistant City Attorney Supervisor Terrie Hagler-Gray, who advises council on zoning matters, explained the procedural posture after the show-of-hands count came in: "That means no action was taken, Mayor. You can now entertain a motion either to defer or to deny." The council moved to defer. That motion passed unanimously.
The deferral motion did not name a date. Other deferrals on Monday — petitions 2025-086, 2024-143, 2025-120, 2026-008, and 2026-027 — were specifically deferred to June 15. The Cooper petition was not. The next zoning meeting after Monday — Lyles's last as mayor — falls in July, after her June 30 resignation. Cooper can amend the request to a conditional petition with a site plan attached, which would address the specific objection Johnson named on the floor.