Charlotte's new transit authority voted Wednesday to give its interim chief executive broad authority to sign technology-transition contracts without the board's usual case-by-case approval, a step its leaders called necessary to separate the Charlotte Area Transit System from the city's computer systems by January. Two trustees voted no, and the debate that preceded the vote exposed a tension the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority will live with for the next six months: a hard deadline on one side, and a board still working out how closely it intends to govern on the other.
The measure, Item 10C on the authority's July 8 agenda, waives the MPTA's own procurement policy for a single purpose. Cagle described it as "a waiver of the MPTA's procurement policy," one that lets interim CEO Brent Cagle and the transition co-directors sign the contracts needed to stand up independent technology systems above the $500,000 limit that would normally require a separate board vote each time.
The reason is the calendar. When the MPTA took over governance of CATS on July 1, it inherited an agency still running on the City of Charlotte's technology and human-resources systems. Those have to be replaced before the transit system's employees formally move over on Jan. 1, 2027. Cagle did not soften the timeline. "Setting up a software system for HR and finance to make a January 1st, 2027 deadline is aggressive," he said. "We're already behind. It is very, very aggressive."
What the money covers
The contracts fund the systems the MPTA needs to run itself: Workday for human resources and finance, a Granicus product to move the board to paperless meeting materials by September, and a managed-services provider to handle the cloud infrastructure, help-desk and cybersecurity work CATS has never done on its own. The total technology budget for the year is roughly $35 million, all of it already approved in the budget the board adopted earlier this year. About $11 million of that is recurring operating cost; the rest is one-time.
That "already budgeted" point became the board's answer to its own discomfort about writing a near-blank check. Trustee Wyatt T. Dixon III suggested a not-to-exceed figure might make members more comfortable. Chair David Howard said the budget already was the ceiling. "The not-to-exceed number is the budgeted number," he said.
The chart that didn't add up
The unease was not abstract. The cost chart in the board's packet contained a totaling error: a column of managed-services costs was listed at about $1.6 million but left out two line items. Trustee Lucia Zapata Griffith caught it. "I don't think the numbers add up," she said. Cagle acknowledged the mistake and corrected the figure on the record to $2,405,350.
For at least one trustee, the error was the whole problem in miniature. "I don't know what I'm voting on," said Trustee Katrina Young, pressing on whether the board was approving amounts that were themselves wrong.
Reverend Corine Mack moved to table the item and send it back to the Finance Committee for a recommendation. The motion died for lack of a second, and the board returned to the original motion, which passed with two members opposed.
Rubber stamp or oversight
The sharpest words were about the board's role, not the dollar figures. Trustee T. Anthony Lindsey, of Huntersville, supported moving the transition forward but warned against the pattern he saw forming. "It is concerning to me that we might have situations where we are simply rubber-stamping things because we are on this timeline," he said. "And that's kind of what it feels like." He asked that committees do enough vetting before recommendations reach the full board that trustees can vote with confidence rather than on trust.
Mack put it in starker terms. The whole point of creating the authority, she said, was to build something new, and she did not want the board deferring reflexively to the staff it inherited. "If every time we bring something to the table, we're talking about what the staff thinks, then this is not the MPTA, this is still CATS, the old CATS," she said. "We have a great new opportunity with a blank slate."
Howard, who has run the authority since its inaugural meeting in December, did not dispute the principle. He said he had asked the same questions himself, and that Cagle would report monthly on where the technology spending actually landed. But he kept returning to the deadline. The order of operations was not ideal, he acknowledged: the board approved the budget before it had settled its own compensation philosophy and other policies, because there was no time to do it the other way. The systems have to be built now, or Jan. 1 does not happen.
What the board wants next
The technology vote was one item, but the governance questions around it are becoming a recurring theme. In the same meeting, Lindsey asked the authority to build a system for tracking board follow-up items with due dates and owners, to set a protocol for directing the MPTA's representative on the regional transportation planning organization, and to deliver meeting materials at least two days ahead, as the bylaws call for. Each request points the same direction: a board trying to catch up to the pace of its own decisions.
The employees transfer on Jan. 1. The deadline is not moving.