County Manager Michael Bryant's recommended budget for the next fiscal year does not raise the property tax rate, and it fully funds Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' request. On Thursday night, for roughly three and a half hours, the people who live with the rest of the budget came to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center to tell the Board of County Commissioners what they made of it.
About sixty of them spoke — arts directors, shelter operators, crisis counselors, teachers, retired teachers, lawyers, a pastor, a man who said he had spent ten years in federal prison, and a woman whose son was killed in an act of gun violence. A few came to defend the budget and urge the board to pass it as written. Most came to thank the board first and then ask for something more — a restored grant, a larger line item, a program spared. A handful came to say the priorities were wrong.
The hearing was a public comment session on Bryant's $2.6 billion recommended budget for fiscal year 2027, his first budget cycle as manager. It was not a vote. Chairman Mark Jerrell, who represents District 4 and chairs the board, said so at the top: "The board is here to listen to your comments, but we will not engage in any discussion." The board's deliberations are scheduled for Thursday, May 28, at the Valerie C. Woodard Conference Center, with adoption set for June 2. Until then, the testimony is the input.
The budget they came to talk about
Bryant's budget holds the property tax rate flat at 49.27 cents per $100 of assessed value. As The Charlotte Mercury reported from the board's May 20 budget overview, the county's budget director put the gap between what the state should pay for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and what it actually pays at more than $400 million — about 16 cents of the tax rate that the county covers because Raleigh does not. Commissioner George Dunlap, who represents District 3, said at that meeting that if the state paid its share, the county could cut its tax rate by 16 cents.
That is the math the speakers were arguing inside. The budget raises the county's lowest full-time wage from $20 to $25.53 an hour, a change Robyn Hamilton, president and CEO of the Urban League of Central Carolinas, called "a masterclass." The city of Charlotte held its own budget hearing a week earlier, where more than thirty speakers also came to ask for more.
Not all of the testimony was a request. The Rev. Dr. Ricky Woods, senior minister of First Baptist Church-West, who had opened the meeting with the invocation, urged the board to adopt Bryant's plan as written. The easy path, he said, would have been a tax increase given what the legislature is proposing; instead the manager and staff "did the hard work to create a budget that works for all citizens." His church serves meals to about 150 seniors a day, four days a week — work he said the county's prior support had helped sustain.
The arts came in numbers
A large share of the speakers came for the Arts and Science Council. Queen City Performing Arts, which is home to the Gay Men's Chorus of Charlotte and the Women's Chorus of Charlotte, asked for $25,000 to fund a 2027 county-wide choral residency with the composer and educator Rollo Dilworth. Jordan Green, a board member, put the request on the record against a total project cost of $26,000.
The Harvey B. Gantt Center asked for the same figure — $25,000, for its education programs. Cheryl Janvier, the center's vice president of institutional advancement, described a semester-long filmmaking and photography course run in Title I schools. The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's Aram Kim Bryan said Arts and Science Council money supports a program that brings 11,000 fifth-graders to a live concert each year. Charlotte Soulfest's executive director, Kaymarie Walters, asked for $15,000 toward a Labor Day weekend festival at First Ward Park. Individual artists came too — a dance teacher who runs a class for seniors with limited mobility, a children's author, an improv instructor, a music educator — each crediting Arts and Science Council grants for work in classrooms and senior centers across the county.
Housing, and the people without it
The housing testimony was blunter. Carol Hardison of Crisis Assistance Ministry told the board there were 52,000 eviction filings in Mecklenburg County last year, and that her organization had absorbed the loss of seven full-time employees in the last budget. Liz Clayson-Kelly of Roof Above said the hourly wage needed to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the county is now $31.67, and that unsheltered homelessness has nearly doubled in three years by the point-in-time count. Affordable housing has topped the county's own budget survey two years running.
Roof Above's central ask was narrow: one year of funding to keep the Giles night-by-night emergency shelter open. Kay Don Grinnell, on the organization's executive team, said that between November and March the shelter expanded capacity on 52 days of dangerous weather, providing about 1,700 overflow bed-nights to 530 people who would not otherwise have had somewhere to go. A Roof Above housing navigator told the board he had been living on the bridge on Brevard Street fifteen years ago and now works for the organization that took him in, with a master's degree in progress.
The case for the safety net
Sante, which described itself as Mecklenburg County's sole mobile crisis provider for the last twenty years, brought a detailed set of numbers. CEO Michelle Grigsby-Hackett said that in fiscal year 2025 the organization fielded more than 9,735 phone support sessions, served 1,765 individuals, and diverted 558 people from involuntary commitment, 524 from emergency departments, and 130 from the criminal justice system. She put the total savings to public systems at $2.75 million in a single year, and said Medicaid covers only 78 percent of the cost, leaving a gap of more than $300,000.
The African American Male Wellness Agency invited the board to its seventh annual Black Men's Wellness Day on August 22 at the Park Expo and Conference Center, and asked the county to raise its support from a prior $10,000 to $20,000. Two speakers asked for $500,000 for the county's public health department and its violence-prevention work, both citing the threat of lost federal dollars. One of them was Sylvia Stitt, whose son was killed in an act of gun violence. She pointed to the county's own mission statement — to help improve residents' lives — and told the board: "Keep your word. Fund public health."
The opposition in the room
Not everyone came to ask for a line item. A cluster of speakers used their three minutes to oppose a Central Piedmont Community College public-safety training facility — a project the speakers called "Cop City" and said the county is helping to fund. Sophia Lutt, who said she lives in District 5 and works in immigration law, told the board the budget reduces more than $38 million in nonprofit and community-service funding across more than 150 programs while directing money toward policing infrastructure. "If Charlotte's crime is decreasing, why are we continuing to expand policing infrastructure while cutting the very services that prevent violence in the first place?" she said. She closed: "Stop funding the $116 million cop city."
Mina Zipay, a criminal defense attorney and District 4 homeowner, said she had been a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the community college seeking records about the project, and that the settlement produced emails between the college and federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Bound by its no-discussion rule, the board did not respond. None of these claims about the facility's cost, scope, or correspondence were independently verified at the hearing, and the county offered no answer in the room.
The grant that came back
Several speakers were there because of a specific change in this year's budget. Tracy Libertino, who identified herself as president and CEO of Metrolina Association for the Blind, said the county's Community Service Grant had been paused last year, and credited Bryant with adding a $4.7 million line in the FY27 budget for former recipients of that grant. Her organization, founded in 1934, runs eighteen programs for residents with vision loss; she asked the board to fund enough of it to clear a waitlist.
The grant's return reached past its usual recipients. A man who told the board he had spent ten years in federal prison — and who now runs a nonprofit serving formerly incarcerated residents — said the manager had recommended funding that would let the group expand into housing for senior citizens and homeless youth, populations outside its original mission. He cited a partnership with the Housing Collaborative that had identified hundreds of older residents at risk of homelessness, most of them with no rental subsidy at all.
The Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy wanted more than the budget proposes. CEO Larissa Mañón Mervin said the recommended budget includes $150,000 for the organization and asked the board to restore it to a prior level of roughly $408,000 — money she tied to eviction prevention and public benefits. Julian Wright, a board member and a lawyer at Robinson Bradshaw, asked for about $258,000 more on top of that, for the organization's domestic-violence and veterans' legal work.
Education, and the state
Smart Start of Mecklenburg County, which administers the county's Meck Pre-K program, made its case in dollars. Mary-Margaret Kantor, the organization's chief early education officer, said Meck Pre-K filled 2,022 slots for four-year-olds this school year, and that the county spent $26.2 million on it against an estimated $209.6 million in avoided future costs — special education, juvenile justice, welfare, and homelessness. Mike Blackwelder, Smart Start's CEO, called early education "the piece that's most often missing" from school-funding debates.
The League of Women Voters of Charlotte-Mecklenburg and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators closed much of the education testimony where the budget overview had started — with the state. Laura Cooper said North Carolina ranked 27th in per-pupil funding in 2011 and ranks 50th now. Amanda Thompson, the educators' association president, thanked the board for fully funding the schools' request a third consecutive year, and noted the county supplies 34 percent of the district's operating budget because, she said, the state does not. North Carolina's legislature reached a budget framework only this month, after ten months without one.
The board listened to all of it without comment, as promised. The decisions come later — a straw vote on May 28, adoption on June 2.