Raleigh Is Running Charlotte, But Who's Writing the Script?

On September 1st, Mecklenburg County Commissioner Arthur Griffin did something unusual at a county commission meeting. He distributed a handout during closed session and named a specific organization from the dais.

"I met ALEC in the late 70s," he said, "when they were fighting school desegregation."

He is 80 years old. He was there. He knows what this organization was doing when it started and he knows what it is doing now.

"Just be conscious," he told his fellow commissioners, "that there's a whole movement out there to turn the clock back to the 30s and 40s. And these are the folks you should always take a look at. It's called the American Legislative Exchange Council."

Griffin is right. And the residents of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County deserve to understand what ALEC is, what it has already done to this county's ability to govern itself, and what it is trying to do permanently on November 3rd.

What ALEC Is

ALEC is not a lobbying firm or political party. It’s a membership organization that brings corporate executives and state legislators together in private to write model legislation a.k.a pre-drafted bills that legislators take home and introduce as their own.

It’s co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who also co-founded the Heritage Foundation. It receives funding from ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the Koch family foundations. Its North Carolina policy partner is the John Locke Foundation (a Raleigh think tank funded primarily by Art Pope, a discount- retail billionaire who sits on the Bradley Foundation's board alongside Charles Koch.)

The John Locke Foundation has ties to several ALEC task forces and its researchers have presented at ALEC annual meetings. Its research has been cited in North Carolina legislative debates on property taxes, school choice, and local government spending providing the intellectual ammunition for legislation that has directly affected Mecklenburg County's ability to fund its own government.

Griffin encountered this organization when it was opposing school desegregation in the late 1970s. Fifty years later it is opposing affordable housing requirements, local tax authority, and public school funding. The organization has changed its vocabulary. The direction has not changed.

What ALEC Has Already Done to Mecklenburg County

The preemption laws that have stripped Mecklenburg County of its governing tools did not appear from nowhere. Housing and tenant rights advocates have traced them directly to ALEC model legislation that has spread across Southern states.

Mandatory inclusionary zoning is banned. Charlotte cannot require developers to include affordable units in new developments. At a Huntersville Planning Board meeting this July, Commissioner Erica Rivers asked a developer to make one of three proposed $670,000 houses affordable. He said no. She had no legal mechanism to require it. The board approved the development. The neighbors got sidewalks and a coming tax bill.

Residential impact fees are banned. When a developer builds three luxury homes in a working- class neighborhood, the community absorbs the road, water, and school capacity costs. The developer does not. The state took the tool that would have changed that.

Rent stabilization is preempted. When the county reappraises property values and landlords raise rents, tenants have no protection. Cities cannot cap rent increases. Counties cannot require just cause for eviction. The state blocks all of it.

School vouchers. In June 2026, the North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Stein's veto of HB 87, expanding education freedom tax-credit scholarships. ALEC immediately named North Carolina a top-13 state for "education freedom" in its 2026 index and celebrated the legislators who carried the bill as "ALEC Policy Champions."

Those vouchers pull per-student funding from CMS… the same CMS absorbing $502 million in state obligations the state is not funding. The same CMS that ranks 10th out of 115 NC school districts for academic growth and still cannot pay teachers what Mississippi pays.

Toll roads. Griffin named this one too. ALEC has pushed legislators across the country toward public-private toll road partnerships since the mid-2000s. The I-77 North toll lanes (the ones Griffin said a DMV worker can't afford to use to get to her job in Mecklenburg on time) are the local result. The state is now trying to build the same model on I-77 South and billing municipalities for the cost of stopping it.

What's on Your Ballot November 3rd

North Carolina voters will decide three constitutional amendments on November 3, 2026; the same ballot as Charlotte's $425 million bond referendum. Two of the three amendments are ALEC's endgame in North Carolina.

Amendment 1 — Income Tax Cap (SB 1080): Would permanently cap the state income tax rate at 3.5%. The current rate is 3.99%. The current constitutional maximum is 7%. If this passes, the state legislature can never raise income taxes above 3.5% regardless of what economic crisis, natural disaster, or pandemic might require it. The amendment does not lower anyone's taxes today. It prevents future elected officials from ever having the option.

Amendment 2 — Property Tax Levy Limit (HB 1089): Would require the General Assembly to enact laws limiting how much Mecklenburg County (and every other local government in North Carolina) can increase its property tax levy. The amendment does not specify the limit. That comes later, in legislation the General Assembly would write after passage. The League of Women Voters of North Carolina opposed it specifically because it shifts authority over local funding from locally elected commissioners to state legislators.

Both amendments passed the legislature strictly along party lines on May 20, 2026 (with the help of two former Democratic representatives who changed their party affiliation to unaffiliated) and voted to override the supermajority requirement. The Senate voted 31-15 on HB 1089 and 30-18 on SB 1080. The House voted 71-46 on both.

Amendment 3 — Voter Photo ID expansion: Would extend the existing photo ID requirement from in-person voting to all methods of voting including absentee ballots.

Read this carefully. On the same day Mecklenburg County residents vote on a $125 million housing bond, a $280 million transportation bond, and a $20 million neighborhood improvement bond, they are being asked to give the state legislature permanent constitutional authority to cap the revenue those bonds depend on.

The Vise

The strategy is not complicated once you see it.

Step one: starve state revenue. Cut income taxes year over year (the rate is already down from 5.8% a decade ago to 3.99% today) then cap them constitutionally so they can never be restored. Less state revenue means less money available to fund the obligations the state pushes to counties. Mecklenburg County is already absorbing $502 million in state obligations the state is not paying for.

Step two: cap local property taxes. Counties absorbing unfunded state mandates currently have the ability to raise property taxes to cover the gap. The proposed amendment would give the General Assembly authority to limit that. When SNAP penalties hit and state reimbursement for social services shrinks, the county's only remaining lever gets capped by the same legislature that created the gap.

Step three: preempt local authority. Strip cities and counties of the tools (inclusionary zoning, impact fees, rent stabilization) that would allow them to address the housing crisis, displacement, and affordability gaps that underfunded public services produce. Families struggling because of those gaps have nowhere left to turn.

Step four: provide the intellectual cover. The John Locke Foundation calls it taxpayer protection. ALEC calls it fiscal responsibility. The Carolina Journal publishes the research that makes the arguments sound principled. The legislators who carry the bills call themselves taxpayer advocates.

What the strategy actually produces is a county that absorbs more state obligations every year with less and less authority to fund them, while the tools that would allow local government to address the consequences are stripped away one preemption law at a time.

What To Do About It

The people who wrote these amendments are not on your ballot. The legislators who carried them are in Raleigh. But the amendments themselves are in your hands on November 3rd.

Ask every candidate on your local ballot whether they know who wrote the legislation they are enforcing and what they intend to do about it.

Because Griffin is not the only one who remembers what this organization was doing when it started. The communities that absorbed school desegregation resistance, toll lane debt, housing preemption, and voucher legislation remember too.

The clock they want to turn back ran through here.