Make It Stop

Mayor Foxx, it's time to do whatever's needed to make an unruly City Council behave

If you locked Mecklenburg County’s elected Democrats in a room overnight, handed them a loaf of bread and a package of sliced ham and told them they had until morning to create a ham sandwich, I suspect by daybreak you’d have shreds of bread and ham scattered on the floor and walls, the bread bag pulled over someone’s head, and the group split into competing factions that respectively demand a sausage bagel, fajitas and a streetcar line down Wilkinson Boulevard.

Do these people — in this case an increasingly chaotic and unprofessional Charlotte City Council — realize the value of not embarrassing themselves? Did council members not realize a reporter was in the room at their retreat? Lively debate is fine, but it has to be conducted with a semblance of decorum, and a public yelling match between James Mitchell and Claire Fallon is just not acceptable — at any time, for any reason.

Which is why Mayor Anthony Foxx’s weak attempt at riot control — “We’re supposed to be big kids” — was so dismaying. No, actually, you’re supposed to be adults.

Foxx needs to shut this down now. You might have noticed that the Republican Party has seized control of the Governor’s Office and both houses of the General Assembly, and it appears they all would love nothing more than to see the governing body of the state’s largest city prove itself unfit to run a barbecue, much less an international airport. If council members want to scream at each other, let them do it on their own time. It can’t happen in public.

If Foxx can’t control these folks, maybe he shouldn’t be mayor — and this is coming from someone who (full disclosure) volunteered for his first mayoral campaign in 2009. Please, Anthony, for the love of God, don’t make me say this never would have happened under Pat McCrory.