The Ella B. Scarborough Community Resource Center opened in northeast Charlotte in August 2023. It is 106,000 square feet, designed by Gensler, built to net-zero-ready standards with on-site solar and a geothermal well field. Mecklenburg County spent $64.5 million on it.

In its first eight months, fewer than 150 people per day walked through the door, according to county records reported by WCNC. That was roughly half the foot traffic of its older companion facility, the Valerie C. Woodard Center on Freedom Drive in west Charlotte, which opened in 2018.

On Monday, three county commissioners said some version of the same thing: the CRC model may not be worth what it costs.

What CRCs Are

The concept is simple. Instead of sending residents to five different county offices for Medicaid, food assistance, child support, workforce training, WIC, and behavioral health counseling, you put everything in one building. The county calls it "integrated service delivery." The goal is to bring health and human services to the neighborhoods where people need them most.

Mecklenburg's capital improvement plan calls for five CRCs total. Two are open: the Valerie C. Woodard Center in west Charlotte and the Ella B. Scarborough Center in the northeast. Two more — in east Charlotte and southwest Charlotte — were planned to open in 2026 and 2027. Those timelines are now uncertain, part of the broader CIP pause the county announced Monday.

Commissioner Elaine Powell pegged the full CRC program at roughly half a billion dollars during Monday's work session. Nobody in the room corrected her.

What Commissioners Said

Commissioner Laura Meyer, who represents District 5, said she supports reevaluating the CRC model entirely. "I don't think we need them like we thought," Meyer said. "People really want to see rec centers." She suggested exploring combined facilities or alternative service delivery models.

Commissioner Lee Altman, the vice chair, was more direct: "I don't hear people generally asking for another CRC, but I do hear them asking for a rec center in Steel Creek."

Commissioner Arthur Griffin, who chairs Health and Human Services, went further. Griffin suggested that underperforming CRCs could be sold. He said the decision should be driven by foot traffic and service utilization data — numbers the board has not yet seen in detail.

County Manager Mike Bryan acknowledged that the county launched an effort to increase foot traffic at the Scarborough Center and that the results need examination. "If the data suggests that the utility is there, then we need to look at something else," Bryan said. "That's why we're not coming today definitively saying we're going to cut this out."

Worth noting: no commissioner called for closing the two existing CRCs. The debate is about whether to build the remaining three — and at what cost.

Where It Fits in the Budget

The CRC debate is part of a larger capital plan restructuring that will reduce annual capital revenue by $30 million and force the county to rebuild its five-year project list with less money.

The CRC program is the most expensive discretionary line item in that plan. If the county decides two more centers are not worth building, it frees up hundreds of millions in capital capacity for other priorities — greenways, rec centers, land acquisition, library branches.

What the board does not yet have — and what several commissioners asked for Monday — is a clear accounting of what the existing CRCs actually deliver. The Woodard Center has been open for seven years. It draws more visitors than the Scarborough Center. Beyond that, the public record is thin. No detailed service utilization data, no cost-per-visit figures, no comparison of outcomes between CRC clients and residents who access the same services through traditional county offices. The Scarborough Center's early foot traffic — fewer than 150 per day at a $64.5 million facility — is the only public metric, and it is the number that keeps coming up.

What Happens Next

The county manager said the CRC assessment will be part of the comprehensive capital plan review running through December. Staff will present foot traffic, service delivery metrics, and operating cost projections before making any recommendation to keep, modify, or eliminate the remaining planned centers.

The county spent $64.5 million on a building that draws fewer than 150 visitors a day. The question now is whether it wants to do that three more times.