Rachel Heimann Mercader has done an excellent job of reporting in her recent CityView article, shining a light on Fayetteville’s little-known City Council dinner meetings. Her thorough coverage captures both the history and the controversy surrounding these gatherings. Yet the point that truly stunned me was learning why these meetings actually began in 2008: former Mayor Tony Chavonne revealed they were created because council members were failing to read their packets and come prepared for official sessions.
Both Mayor Chavonne and his successor, Nat Robertson, admitted the practice was meant to bring council members up-to-date and avoid embarrassment once the TV cameras rolled. That revelation raises a troubling question—why are we electing leaders who are too lazy or incompetent to understand the business of governing our city? These closed-door dinners either need to end or be made fully accessible to the public.
Transparency is not difficult, and Cumberland County Commissioners under Chairman Kirk deViere have shown how to effectively keep citizens informed with openness and accountability. Yet when Councilman Mario Benavente’s motion to make these meetings more transparent failed in a 5–4 vote, the message was clear: Mayor Mitch Colvin intends to preside over a rubber-stamp council beginning Dec. 1, with business as usual and little interest in bringing Fayetteville citizens into the sunlight. Not good. Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly.
—Bill Bowman, Publisher

Before the cameras roll, before the microphones click on, and before the public meetings begin, the Fayetteville City Council gathers in a cramped room on the third floor of City Hall.
These sessions are the council’s little-known dinner meetings. For nearly two decades, the gatherings have quietly shaped city policy—all without livestreams, video or audio archives, or easy public access.
The dinner meetings are where council members ask questions, rehearse talking points, and sometimes strategize what they’ll say later in the first-floor city council chamber, where the public is watching.
Critics say the practice reflects a broader culture of avoiding accountability, where key decisions can unfold with little public oversight. Supporters call the meetings essential for candid conversation and practical preparation.
In the November election, the city council candidates campaigned on promises of transparency. As the winners prepare to take office on Dec. 1, the private nature of these dinner meetings puts that promise to a test.
Former mayors said the dinner meeting was created to help unprepared council members get up to speed. But over time, it’s morphed into something more opaque, former and current council members said, where votes are sometimes taken, discussions veer off agenda, and the public is left guessing what happened.
“The city’s preference is always going to be to obfuscate,” said City Council Member Mario Benavente, who will leave office on Dec. 1.
The dinner meetings start at 5:30 p.m. and end by 6:30 p.m., when the regular council meetings are scheduled to begin. If the dinner meetings run long, as happened at a recent gathering in October, the council meetings start late.
Access to the dinner meetings is limited. The stairwell to the third floor requires a staff badge. If members of the public want to attend, as allowed by law, a city employee has to be summoned to let them in and take them up to the meeting room.
Once there, attendees will find limited space. The room seats maybe eight members of the public, shoulder to shoulder against the wall, next to the long table that the city council and staff sit around.
The city clerk makes an audio recording of each meeting, but the file is destroyed once the council approves the minutes at the following session, as permitted under state law, city spokesperson Loren Bymer told CityView.
In the last two months, council members used dinner meetings to discuss a new contract with developers to build a hotel and apartment tower atop the downtown Hay Street Parking Garage, and whether the city should re-file a lawsuit against the previous developers who never finished the project.
They also had a polarizing vote on Oct. 27 to postpone a council meeting until after the Nov. 4 election. Some members believed it was designed to avoid discussion of an audit of controversial and failed construction projects on the day before the election.
“I think they should be moved down to the first floor so they are more accessible,” Benavente told CityView. “It’s not truly public.”
Last week, Benavente put forth a proposal to make the dinner meetings more transparent. It failed in a 5-4 vote.
The dinner meetings have not had written agendas. Benavente’s proposal would have required a formal agenda set by the city manager. He said this would be a small step toward greater transparency and accessibility.
Benavente and Council Members Courtney Banks-McLaughlin, Kathy Jensen and Deno Hondros voted yes. Mayor Mitch Colvin and Council Members Lynne Greene, Brenda McNair, Malik Davis, and D.J. Haire voted no.
Council members said dinner meetings foster more candid conversations.
Greene, who voted against Benavente’s motion to have more formal agendas, acknowledged that dynamic to CityView.
“Do I think that sometimes with the public present, we are limited and we are more cautious in the way that we speak to each other? Yes,” she said.
Greene said it was her understanding that the meetings are intentionally structured to limit public access. “Not to prohibit the public, to just make it not as easy,” she said.
Critics say that’s exactly why the meeting should be more accessible.
“It’s important for us to gain the public’s trust by doing our business in public,” Hondros told CityView.
The dinner meetings weren’t always controversial. Former Mayor Tony Chavonne, who led the city from 2005 to 2013, said he started them in 2008 to address a basic problem: Council members weren’t reading their agenda packets.
“It was embarrassing,” Chavonne told CityView. “We had to get it together for the public.”
Chavonne’s successor, former Mayor Nat Robertson, had similar thoughts.
The dinner meetings, Robertson said, were meant to help council members prepare, especially those who hadn’t done their homework before the cameras turned on. Robertson left office in 2017.
Former Council Member Kirk deViere described the dinner meeting as informal. It was never a place for votes, just a space to ask questions and get clarity.
deViere was on the city council from 2015 to 2017. He is now the chair of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.

UCW Editor's note: This article has been edited due to space. To read the article in full, visit https://bit.ly/3XIPjFk