July 22, 2025

Equitable access to city services. Community-led planning. Better housing options. Vocational training. Transparency. Better programs to catapult youth into trades. Prepare future candidates for future service.

But amid the widely shared hopes for the city and its people, more specific things came up:

• Two sitting City Council members said they were not yet committed to a transit tax as proposed.
• “Youth are killing themselves because adults are not modeling” healthy decision-making.
• Ignore advice that your voice does not matter. Get involved. City Council members cannot do everything by themselves.

Participating in the Forum discussion were six of the 10 people who will be on the Sept. 9 Democratic primary for four at-large seats on Charlotte City Council. The six were incumbents Dimple Ajmera, LaWana Slack-Mayfield and Victoria Watlington; and hopefuls Will Holley, J.G. Lockhart and Namrata Yadav.

Perhaps the best advice for prospective voters about the discussion in the video below was from facilitator Mary Johnson. Candidates cannot fully answer detailed questions about city issues in the framework of a Forum discussion. But listening can teach voters much about who they want to learn more about, and talk to others about.

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A note from facilitator co-lead Jackie Edwards Walton:

“I’d like to thank those of you who stepped up to go above and beyond what you generally do at the Forum. With three of us missing,  you filled the gaps. Your efforts were noticed and appreciated with the seven candidates, nearly full audience and the many tough questions.”

Notes about the video:

• Tuesday’s livestream played on two Facebook sites but not on the Forum website or on YouTube. The edited video below will be posted to all sites.
• Network overloads during the Forum mar the video below in two ways: Sometimes the video and audio feeds freeze, then pick back up where they were, with no loss of words. In other cases, the feeds skip forward and continue, with a loss of the skipped content. In the name of transparency because some content has been lost, the freezes have not been edited out of the edited video.
• My thanks to Ché Abdullah for running two video feeds from Belmont Center while I was in Maryland. Comments are welcome, but the normal use of Webex and its better quality cameras will likely return next week on July 29./steve johnston