Printed nearby [https://alamancenews.com/a-shift-away-from-facts-to-narratives/] is a transcript of Graham council member Bonnie Whitaker’s statement during Tuesday night’s Graham city council meeting. We want to give full vent to her version of events, while here we’ll attempt to correct many of her exaggerations, misunderstandings, and misstatements of what she frequently terms “facts.”
Among her other failings, Whitaker evidences very thin skin in her screed; for one thing, she seems to have difficulty distinguishing this newspaper’s editorial page and our very strong opinions expressed here from our news columns where we strive for the very “fair and consistent” coverage she claims to want.
What she really craves, however, is lavish praise, and that’s not something we can give her, based on her recent actions.
Instead, it is apparently the very comprehensive coverage that is the trademark of this newspaper – with lots of factual information, quotes from the public, city officials, and city council members – that she really finds objectionable. Even more offensive is apparently our investigative reporting.
She sometimes complains as though this newspaper has singled her out for criticism. For the most part, our critique of late has been on the three council members, pretty equally it seems to us – Whitaker, together with councilman Bobby Chin and mayor pro tem Ricky Hall.
All have banded together to vote, three times now, to demolish the Sesquicentennial Park on the northwest corner of Court Square in favor of building a new park (fully neutered of any Sesquicentennial lineage) along West Elm Street. There are three separate versions that have been approved in three consecutive months – January, February, and March.
All three ignored the massive turnout of residents (two dozen of whom spoke during public comments) in February, asking that the current park be preserved.
Then, apparently irritated by such an outpouring of disagreement with their views, the three initially set about to limit public participation in future council meetings by restricting the amount of time anyone could speak.
In the end, they cut the time limit from four minutes to three (rather than two, as Whitaker originally proposed), but the disdain they’ve shown toward those who disagree with their actions is palpable.
One reason Whitaker may feel targeted by this newspaper is that she frequently makes misleading statements or misrepresents supposed “facts,” which the newspaper is compelled to correct.
Here are the most obvious exaggerations, misrepresentations, or revisionist interpretations in this week’s diatribe:
- She claims former long-time mayor Jerry Peterman told her “he supported relocating the park and even had ideas to expand the original vision. But now he opposes it.”
Reached in Arizona, where he moved five years ago, Peterman denied ever having made any such statement. “I have never supported moving that park and never will,” Peterman told the newspaper emphatically on Wednesday.
In a choice between believing Whitaker, or a 16-year mayor who we’ve always found to be honest, even when we disagreed with his positions, our money is on Peterman.
- Similarly, she claims that downtown businesswoman Jane Albright told resident Russell Compton that she supported his idea of moving the park. Apparently omitted in the translation from Compton to Whitaker or Whitaker’s retelling of it is that the question posed to Albright, as she readily recalled this week when asked about Whitaker’s description, was Compton had asked if there were no longer a Sesquicentennial Park, would she support having a park behind the historical museum, as Compton had proposed to the city council. That missing caveat makes all the difference in the world.
- She also blatantly misrepresents the statements by former councilman and downtown businessman Griffin McClure. He “stood in these chambers and asked us to just keep the park downtown,” she said Tuesday, “and now he criticizes us for doing exactly that.”
We believe this newspaper has been present for each of McClure’s several appearances before the council over the past 18 months. He has repeatedly and consistently called for saving the current location of Sesquicentennial Park where it is now located, at the northwest corner of Court Square.
Asked about Whitaker’s portrayal of his views on the appropriate park location, McClure said he was “confused” by her statements. “She’s equating having a park where it is with having one where they want to build [a new] one. Those two things are not equal,” he said, emphasizing, once again, his ongoing preference to preserve the current park location.
McClure was also insistent that he has not and does not support the new proposed location.
- But McClure gets a double dose of Whitaker’s venon, while she simultaneously takes a swipe at the city’s new mayor, Chelsea Dickey.
Ominously portraying McClure as some sort of Oz behind the curtain, she claimed Tuesday that “our current mayor is not acting independently but is relying heavily on input from Griffin McClure.”
We’ve reviewed the same emails Whitaker cites to claim Dickey’s “reliance” on McClure, and we haven’t found one iota of nefarious influence that Whitaker claims. McClure says he’s helped her with “maybe three things” since she became mayor in December. Some of McClure’s correspondence, by the way, is addressed to all five council members, not just Dickey.
But he summarized Whitaker’s allegation of having undue or improper influence over Dickey as “bizarre.”
Dickey’s consultation with any of the three – but particularly McClure and Albright, who are current, successful downtown business owners – shouldn’t be surprising, since they are, like most Graham residents, strenuously opposed to the plans supported by Whitaker and two of her colleagues to move the park.
- Another typical drumbeat of Whitaker’s version of Sesquicentennial Park history is the repeated assertion that “the park issue” – i.e., the sinking floor of the current park – “has been discussed since 2016.”
If so, we can’t find it. And frankly, we don’t remember it, and this newspaper covered most council meetings. Perhaps she could point us to some council minutes or other documents to verify her timeline.
Neither McClure nor Peterman, both of whom served in 2016, recall events the way Whitaker portrays them. Peterman recalls that the first he heard of problems was around 2020, when the park was a central gathering point for Black Lives Matter protesters. At that point he recalls the focus was on one corner planter that was viewed as sinking.
McClure, who served between 2015 to 2019 and didn’t seek reelection after his single term, didn’t remember the precise year that he first heard of any park problems, but stressed that there was “never a sense of urgency. It wasn’t condemned. It wasn’t viewed as a danger.”
Both remembered the $50,000 downtown grant that park opponents, like Whitaker, frequently claim the council squandered on other projects instead of addressing the park floor.
“It was put in front of us as perhaps one of eight or so options,” McClure remembered, and the council, by consensus, determined to spend the money elsewhere – at least partially because no one (neither city staff nor council members) considered the park floor to be a serious enough problem.
Another apparent irritation to Whitaker and perhaps other council members is a recent story (from the March 19, 2026 edition), in which we examined email correspondence to, from, and among city council members. (We had to send a rather stern warning, citing the Public Records statute on their obligation to provide their correspondence, which it appears they resented.)
While Whitaker and Chin had repeatedly claimed that “lots” of people had approached them supporting moving the park, that’s not what the emails showed. Instead, there was almost no correspondence reflecting such a position.
We included in an earlier editorial this acknowledgement which Whitaker apparently overlooked in her desire to castigate the newspaper both for its news coverage and editorial page opinions: “Granted,” we said, “It’s possible that the councilmen heard – but only verbally – from complaining constituents, but we have to confess we’re suspicious about whether such dissidents actually exist, as well.” [emphasis added]
As we noted in that same editorial, “We. . .have grown increasingly concerned that Graham’s city council members are conducting far too much of the people’s business through these secretive, non-public back channels.”
That concern remains.
It’s also difficult for the newspaper to provide the most balanced coverage of Whitaker’s comments or positions at council meetings when she refuses to answer the newspaper’s questions. For the second month in a row, she walked away from the publisher after the council meeting, saying she wasn’t going to respond to publisher Tom Boney, Jr.’s question.
Such petulant behavior is not becoming of any public official, especially an elected one.
The one Whitaker statement with which we find ourselves agreeing, is not one we find Whitaker herself to be living up to: “We don’t all have to agree,” she said this week, “but we have to be honest, and we do have to be fair with one another.”
