Thank you first to all our veterans on this Veterans Day week.
This week’s edition: Tomorrow night, city council is scheduled to vote on the airport lease, maybe the city’s most important contract over the next decade. We sat down with the man in the mayor’s chair, Rob Harrington, and somehow came back with a story about handkerchiefs.
Also in this issue: What Tuesday’s results say about young people in North Carolina, the Hornets buy the old Epicentre, Discovery Place might be rescued, and a tribute to Steve Crump.
Remember to support our work by becoming a Charlotte Optimist member. And check out the audio versions of our recent stories, including the long ones on Jim Noble and Raki McGregor, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The Gentleman Mayor
Photo by Logan Cyrus
I’ve found one way being the mayor of Charlotte has changed Rob Harrington. You ready?
He’s started ironing his handkerchiefs!
Look, if you read this newsletter, you know I usually ease into scandals. But I thought you should know this up front.
Here in the 14th-largest city in the country, this once-trifling hornets’ nest that became a gold rush town that became a Banktown, a city that made the dab go viral and did whatever this is, has a mayor who wipes his brow with a cloth that’s been pressed.
His wife barely recognizes him.
“What are you doing?” Sharon Harrington, who’s been married to this absolute wild man for 37 years, asked him the first time she saw it happening.
On the last Thursday in October, we’re in Harrington’s office at the government center, 17 days after he used a rare veto to prevent city council from delaying a vote on the all-important airport lease, and 11 days before the November 9 vote on that lease. If the lease gets done, Harrington will have navigated three generational issues he inherited over the summer — I-77, data centers, and the airport — and he will have steered a sometimes chaotic council toward something like order.
He’s decorated the office walls with old images from Charlotte’s mill-town days, and artwork from Arts+. Before we sit, he tilts his head toward one piece behind the couch and says, “That seems slightly crooked. I’ll fix that.”
I ask him where that streak comes from. He warns me the answer will be “truly, truly mundane,” then tells me about the handkerchiefs, which leads to him talking about his father.
James Harrington was born in 1915 and served in the Navy. He ran the Harrington house in Florence, South Carolina, like a captain runs a ship. He had a ledger sheet for finances, which he filled out meticulously. He ironed everything.
“He had that streak in him,” the mayor tells me.
On a Thursday in early May, Rob and Sharon saw the news like everybody else: Mayor Vi Lyles announced she planned to retire on June 30, just seven months into her fifth term.
Lyles’ final year was difficult. She received death threats after the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the light rail, and by spring she seemed to have decided that the new fights, from data centers to the toll road, were for the next generation to figure out.
The Harringtons consider Lyles a family friend; Sharon worked for the city when she arrived in Charlotte in 1999, when Lyles was the deputy city manager, and calls her a mentor.
People started calling Rob, who’d chaired the Levine Museum and the library boards, and been president of both the county and state bar associations.
“He started to look in the mirror and said, well, maybe I can do that,” Sharon told me.
A crowd filled the chamber on June 22 to watch the city council do two important things: Honor Lyles’ lifetime of service to the city, and select a new mayor from a field of five finalists. About 30 speakers voiced support for their preferred candidates. Council members cast ballots in envelopes, and in a runoff with Carrie Cook, Harrington won the job with six votes.
I met him in the hallway afterward. He told me his phone was lighting up, and that he was going home to his grandkids. They’re 4 and 8 and were visiting for the week. Sharon considered bringing them to the meeting but decided against it because, as she told her husband, “If you lose, they’ll be upset.”
When she saw he’d won, she got a cake ready for him.
Mayor Harrington poses for a photo with his wife, Sharon, along with outgoing mayor Vi Lyles and members of city council. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Rob and Sharon are well-known figures in Charlotte’s civic circles. He’s better known in some areas; she’s the star of others. But often, at least until he became mayor, they were known as a pair.
“I think people seeing you through your spouse does a lot to humanize you,” Rob told me. “And gosh, it provides a lot of company.”
They met in law school at Duke. He finished in 1987 and clerked for a federal judge in New Orleans, a conservative whose politics ran opposite his. His sisters lived there, so he felt at home. The judge gave him a tie from Ben Silver, and Harrington still buys his ties there today.
After Sharon finished law school two years later, she got a job in Washington, D.C., and Rob moved there. They married in 1989, had their son in 1990, and moved back to New Orleans for the next decade. They came to Charlotte in 1999, and Rob’s been at Robinson Bradshaw ever since.
New Orleans was once the biggest city in the South. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Miami had passed it by the time the Harringtons arrived. The oil companies had moved offices to Houston. Harrington still calls New Orleans his second-favorite city, and it shapes how he views Charlotte.
“For all the challenges that come with growth, being in a place where the infrastructure in the city is receding is so much tougher,” he said. “We can always open parks. We can open pools in the summertime. We can pave streets. We can build highways. In some cities, that’s much more of a challenge.”
“I'm definitely marked by having been places where you couldn't take it for granted,” he added. “You’ve got to hold this thing together and enjoy the benefits of it. Make sure the benefits get shared equitably, but also just realize that we have a whole lot of advantages, and cities don’t run on their own.”
He doesn’t think Charlotte is in danger of falling, but, “if you’re not careful, you don’t catch it in time.” That’s why leaders “need to lead with some form of optimism. Not telling a story that’s not true. Not avoiding the difficult parts. But I think we are a part of making people feel confident.”
Harrington smiles during a recent interview in the mayor's office. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Harrington was the youngest of five in that house in Florence. Born in 1962, he went to multiple elementary and middle schools while the community struggled to integrate. His oldest two sisters spent their entire schooling in segregated schools. All the Harrington siblings went to college. Four became professors; Rob became a lawyer.
Their father was a mail clerk on the railroad. In the smaller towns, the train would slow to a roll, and Rob’s dad would drop one bag of mail at one end of the platform, then pick up the outgoing mail at the other end.
Around 1970, airplanes took over long-haul mail. The postal service offered to keep James on, but he’d have to move to Columbia. He stayed put for his family. For several years, Rob’s dad had three jobs: selling vacuum cleaners, driving the activity bus for schools, and teaching night school. “Kind of holding it together,” Harrington remembers.
James got a job with the state’s vocational rehabilitation office, training people for jobs. Rob spent a couple of summers riding with him. “You just learn little things about people,” he said.
The Harringtons’ neighborhood included principals, teachers, ministers. Rob’s parents were both college graduates; his dad went to Claflin and his mom went to Bennett. Their next door neighbors, Charlie and Janie Rainey, didn’t have much education and couldn’t read well. Every so often, Charlie would come over with a stack of bills, and Rob’s dad would sit and work through them. On Saturday mornings, Charlie would pay him back with a plastic bowl of fruit and a glass bottle of Coke.
“It’s one of the things that happened in the neighborhood,” Rob recalls. “We didn’t have any money. They certainly didn’t have any money. But how could you help?”
Mayor Harrington counts raised hands after city council votes to restart the I-77 toll lane project in September. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Sometimes during Monday council meetings, members will breeze through motions and seconds without explanation. Harrington believes his job is to slow them down, to read the motion and get a second, and have the discussion. Council members laugh at him, in the way that you’d laugh at the rule-following captain of a basketball team. During the public forum before the I-77 vote on September 21, Harrington kept each speaker to two minutes. He’d remind them that he’d given the same two minutes to everyone. People who shouted from the crowd were removed from the chamber.
He knows it sounds boring, to be known for running a decent meeting. But it’s what the council told him they wanted.
“If you’ve got a city of a million people, and you’ve got a four-and-a-half-billion-dollar budget, and you just tune in to watch it, I don’t want you watching something that you don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve got a decent amount of leeway to be pedantic.”
The part people don’t see, Sharon told me, is what happens in the days before a meeting. Sharon calls his city phone his “bat phone,” and he keeps it on 24 hours a day. Before any big vote, he’s usually working it, listening to concerns from council or community or staff. She said he wants them to have the data and all of their questions answered before they get to the dais.
“There are no surprises,” Sharon said. “He has done his level best to make sure that his fellow colleagues are ready to make a decision.”
Which brings us to October 12, and to the airport lease discussion. After airport leaders presented the highlights of the lease to city council, a few council members wanted to delay a vote. They went back and forth over whether the delay would be six weeks, or 45 days, or end on November 23. By the time they voted on when to have a vote, the rest of us in the room were confused. Still, the delay passed, 6-5.
That’s when Harrington did something no mayor’s done in more than a decade. “With some trepidation,” he said, “I’m going to veto that motion.”
After the veto, Harrington “connected in one way or another with everybody on council” and talked it through.
I asked him how the veto made him feel. He started by replaying the reasons — the motion was hasty, that they hadn’t discussed it enough — but I stopped him and said, “Yes, but how did it make you feel?”
“At the time, I felt like it was the right thing,” he said. “Afterwards, I felt like it was the right thing.”
He’s since used the word “trepidation” in other meetings with colleagues, and they’ve said, “I see that’s your word.”
Lots of folks are going into Monday night’s airport lease vote with trepidation.
This past week, outgoing U.S. Senator Thom Tillis said on the R&D in the NC podcast that he would “move heaven and Earth” to create an airport authority if anyone from Charlotte’s government “steps out of line.” Action NC sent an email blast over the weekend urging the city to pause the lease and look for ways to lower fares.
Harrington is, as ever, more diplomatic, telling me that “a healthy airport is vital to what we do here,” and that American Airlines has been a good partner. But he understands why airport workers want more than what the city can do for them under state laws, which keep local governments from setting wages or working conditions for private employers. He wants to help ensure that airport workers see a career path to move up and into different roles.
He compared it to the 77 debate, when people kept asking him: “What’s a year in the life of a city?”
“Well, that’s a great statement,” Harrington told me. “It is not tied to the facts or the situation. We weren’t able to bump it for a year. … That’s what we need to ask for: Just make a sound decision that’s not based on some things that aren’t really there.”
If the lease passes Monday, Harrington can turn to the rest of his list. He wants to work on housing and affordability, and find ways to help make construction easier. He spent the fall campaigning on behalf of the $125 million affordable housing bond, which passed with 62 percent of the vote.
He has assured people, time and again, that he will not run for mayor in the 2027 election.
I suggested to Sharon that, the way things are going, some community members are already whispering that he should stay on. She laughed. “I do think he's been very successful, and the beauty of his decision-making is because he is present,” she said. “He's not thinking about the campaign down the road or positioning himself for a campaign.”
I asked her how he’s different now than he was in June.
“I don’t think he is,” she said. “Just different hours.”
A photo of Harrington and his wife Sharon sits near his Bible in the mayor's office.
On Friday, I asked Sharon about the handkerchiefs. Rob had joked about them with me. Sharon didn’t.
The first time she saw him ironing them, she suggested he could save himself time by sending them to the cleaners.
“And he gave the most heartfelt, meaningful response,” she told me. “Doing that little simple chore reminds him and reinforces and channels his dad, and the values that were instilled as he was growing up in their household: this discipline and organization and what a gentleman always has.”
James Harrington died in 1987, during Rob’s third year of law school, the same year he and Sharon met.
A gentleman, Rob told Sharon, always carries a handkerchief. Not for his own sweat, but so he has something to give to a person who’s having a hard day.
“It's the ability to pull out that handkerchief to show empathy,” Sharon told me.
And if he’s giving it out, I suppose, it had better be pressed.
Jeff Jackson speaks to a potential voter at a polling place uptown in 2016. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Ten years ago, just after sunrise on Election Day, a Ford Fusion swerved into a paid parking lot across the street from a polling place in uptown, and out hopped the young state senator Jeff Jackson.
“I’m parked illegally!” Jackson, who’s now North Carolina’s attorney general, said as he jogged across the street. “That’s something we millennials are comfortable with. I tell people that I’m going to write my version of Obama’s book and call it The Audacity of Illegal Parking.”
My editor at POLITICO had assigned me to find young and interesting Charlotte characters who could help tell the story of the 2016 election in America. They had writers in other key states, following bellwether characters, like a Black pastor in Philadelphia or a factory worker in Indiana. The North Carolina angle was youth, a snapshot of life in the city that was consistently ranked among the top places for millennials, who were between 20 and 35 at the time.
Jackson was about the Most Millennial Charlotte Guy you could get at the time. He was very online — mostly Twitter then, long before his TikTok fame. He was a dad of a newborn. A National Guardsman. Privately, his fellow Democrats, most all of them older, whispered about him as “Baby Jesus.” The old Charlotte Agenda and Charlotte Five newsletters, built to reach younger readers, seemed to mention him every day.
I spent nearly the whole day with him, bouncing from precinct to precinct. He wolfed down McDonald’s. He talked about memes. He took pictures with school children and quizzed them with questions like, “How many bones are in the human body?”
But mostly, he talked about the coming demographic wave.
“We’re about to make obsolete a whole category of politicians,” Jackson told me that morning. “The Ted Cruzes of the world have an expiration date on them. My generation is simply going to suck all the oxygen out of the room for politicians who are incapable of authenticity.”
“All I have to do is eat my vegetables,” he added. “I’m 34, so I’m basically the oldest millennial. For my entire life, all we’ve seen from politicians, in general, is total garbage. Politicians have done a great job of erecting a sea wall between themselves and the electorate. But millennials are the rising tide and that wall’s going to come down fast.”
That night, just after 11 p.m., the networks called North Carolina for Trump.
This week, the state House, the U.S. House delegation, and a U.S. Senate seat all went from red to blue in North Carolina. Jackson is now 44 and, in 2024, became the state’s attorney general. It would be easy to say that his wave finally arrived, a decade later.
But I don’t know if that’s what happened.
Jackson’s prediction was that his generation would eventually turn out in higher numbers, replacing the old guard. Census figures show millennial participation has held pretty steady — 61% in 2020 and 61% again in 2024. Turnout almost always rises as a generation ages; theirs didn’t.
What changed Tuesday, though, was how they voted.
Consider this: From 2016 to 2024, almost every cohort of voters under 50 shifted to the right. This year, North Carolina as a whole shifted about 23 points to the left, when comparing the 2024 presidential results and the 2026 Senate-race results. Most striking is the youth vote. A New York Times analysis shows that North Carolina’s millennials (people ages 30 to 44) shifted 35 points to the left. Gen Z is even more dramatic, moving 44 points.
Rather than this being a story of the largest generation in America taking over, I think it’s the story of frustration moving their needle. Now in their 30s and 40s, millennials are the first modern American generation that hasn’t exceeded their parents’ standard of living. About 90% of people born in the 1940s earned more than their parents did at age 30; only about 50% of people born in the 1980s can say the same, according to a Raj Chetty report. They’re parents now, paying daycare bills larger than their mortgages. Add in inflation, the unpopular Iran War, and immigration raids, and the story is simpler: Young people, from both Gen Z and Y, are unhappy.
That much is confirmed in recent research from UNC Charlotte, which shows lower life satisfaction scores for people 40 and younger in our region than older generations.
Governor Josh Stein described Tuesday by saying that voters “want us to work for them and not be focused on reflecting pools or ballrooms or triumphal arches. They want a government that is worrying about them.”
You could read that as a concession to the new reality of politics, going forward. Our younger generations are not loyal to institutions or parties, because they’ve been given every reason to not be. They want the authenticity Jackson talked about. They want a government that works for them, and it really doesn’t matter what color hat you wear.
North Carolina’s Democrats were a mess three years ago, after a 2022 midterm in which Republicans won a Senate seat, gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, a supermajority in the state Senate and a near-supermajority in the state House.
NC Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton holds up her clipboards next to NC State AFL-CIO president Braxton Winston at an event in 2023. Photo by Logan Cyrus
In February 2023, though, they elected 25-year-old Anderson Clayton from rural Person County as the youngest state party chair in the country. On Wednesday, the now 28-year-old Clayton was being praised for helping Democrats flip at least five U.S. House seats, with two more too close to call, despite the fact that Republicans had redrawn the state’s 14 districts to create at least 10 “safe” seats for themselves. Heck, Clayton’s home county elected its first Black sheriff, a Democrat.
Clayton told The Assembly that now that the party has some power, it will work to “boost the $7.25 hourly minimum wage and make Republicans defend their economic positions and increase support for public schools.”
Clayton is from a generation that knows, very well, that political promises are just promises. The future of our state’s politics will be determined by whether Democrats deliver.
Want to know more about Richard Ojeda, the veteran who defeated Richard Hudson in the 9th Congressional District? Here’s the great writer Michael Kruse’s profile of him from 2018.
The Times’ deep look inside the president’s administration in the final days before the election. Gift link.
One organization worth your support is the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. I’ve written for EHRP in the past, and their editorial director, Alissa Quart, is a wonderful soul who pairs human stories with data to highlight inequality. She wrote an op-ed in late October, building on a staggering new stat: about one-third of America’s middle class can’t afford essentials.
Notes …
The Hornets, along with Lincoln Property Co. and Vision Ventures, purchased the former Epicentre development for $27.5 million, which is less than one-third of the property’s assessed value, in hopes of reimagining and reviving the once-thriving property, CBJ reported. Rick Schnall and Gabe Plotkin, who lead the Hornets’ ownership group, have already invested $160 million to build a team headquarters and training center next to the Spectrum Center.
A new Levine Museum of the New South exhibit asks what the South becomes next. "This Is Our New South" is a free traveling exhibition on food, faith, migration, housing, and civil rights across the region. More details.
Advocate Health will raise its minimum starting wage to $20 an hour in 2027, up from $18.85 this year, as part of what it calls its largest-ever investment in employees — $1.24 billion more in pay and benefits, with about $846 million going to compensation and $390 million to benefits. The package also adds four weeks of fully paid parental leave and keeps GLP-1 coverage. Read more in the Charlotte Post.
Photo of our times: Bye, trees. Hello, highway.
What’s left after Adams Outdoor Advertising hacked down dozens of trees in Plaza Midwood to allow drivers on Independence Boulevard a better view of a billboard. Neighborhood residents, business owners, and naturalists have all shared their frustrations with losing the natural buffer. But a state law, passed in May, allows for 500 feet of clearance. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Donors do it again …
The otters will play. The pollinators will work. And most important, kids will have a place to be curious. At last, it seems the Discovery Place Nature Museum will open, thanks once again to the Charlotte community’s generosity.
A month of turmoil over Discovery Place’s inability to repay a $14 million loan to Mecklenburg County seems to be resolved, after private and corporate donors rallied to present an option to fill the financial gap over the next five years. Their first $2.7 million payment is due November 20, and the final one would be that same day in 2030.
County commissioners still have to vote to approve the deal, which they saw in a presentation on Thursday night. They’ll likely vote on it November 17.
It’s a remarkable turn of events, and one that repeats history. In spring 1981, cost overruns and delays left Discovery Place short by about $1.1 million of completing its uptown Science Museum. Private donors and city leaders rallied then, too, and the museum opened that October.
“The reason I am able to report to you an option that addresses your valid concerns is primarily because of the philanthropic and corporate communities answering the call,” county manager Michael Bryant told commissioners at Thursday’s meeting. “They are answering the call in response to a financial deficit that they did not create. However, they generously provided a solution that is beneficial to Discovery Place, Mecklenburg County and all of our residents.”
Watching grass grow …
Greenkeepers work to prepare the course at Quail Hollow before a day of play at the PGA Championship in 2017. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Lots of people like to play golf. Very few know how to maintain a golf course.
Central Piedmont Community College recently announced a new partnership with the U.S. Golf Association to create a Greenkeeper Apprenticeship Program in Charlotte. It’s the third location for the USGA’s apprenticeship model, which it developed a few years ago to fill a growing need for skilled workers.
Golf course superintendents, to me, have always been the most interesting people around any club or course. They’re the blue-collar workers, the agriculture nerds, who work year-round to make courses shine.
Apprentices from the Charlotte program will work at clubs like Charlotte Country Club, Quail Hollow Club, Carmel Country Club, and Pine Lake Country Club, according to a release.
One thing I’m holding onto …
Photo by Michael Graff
My wife, Laura, and I spent Saturday morning at the Embassy Suites, at the Charlotte Area Association of Black Journalists’ brunch honoring Steve Crump, the WBTV reporter who died in August 2023 after nearly 40 years at the station. Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes gave the keynote, and joked about how many times he lost NABJ awards to Crump.
About halfway through, Whitaker thanked a few folks who’d given him a chance when he was young. One of them was Laura’s mom, Sharon, who went on to run NBC NewsChannel. Made my heart jump a little to hear our kids’ grandmother being mentioned on a 60 Minutes correspondent’s short list.
That was the theme of the beautiful morning. CAABJ gave Legacy Awards to three local journalists — former anchor Bea Thompson, former Observer editor and writer Fannie Flono, and QCity Metro founder Glenn Burkins. And NC A&T student Maveah Griffith took home the inaugural Steve Crump Scholarship.
“Steve collected people,” Whitaker said. “Not contacts, not sources, not names in an address book, but people. He collected friendships and he kept them.”
