This newspaper has covered local governments for the at least the past 69 years.
We’ve seen all sorts of combinations of mayors and council members, county commissioners and their chairmen, and school board members and their chairmen. In many cases, internal divisions on various boards were palpable – sometimes (primarily among commissioners) based on partisan differences, and other times simply because of different approaches to or positions on specific issues, or, quite frankly, prickly or otherwise unique personalities.
But never, ever, have we seen the kind of disrespect and blatant rudeness – not just bordering on hostility but far exceeding it – as we’ve witnessed monthly at Graham city council meetings since December when the new mayor, Chelsea Dickey, was sworn in.
It’s hard to know which is worse: the condescending, dismissive attitude that some council members evidence toward the public they ostensibly serve. [See separate editorial in this edition.]
Or the condescending, dismissive attitude they display toward their own colleague, the city’s duly-elected mayor.
There is absolutely no excuse for the combustible, erratic, even abusive tenor of council member Bonnie Whitaker’s harangues against the city’s mayor, which have become an almost monthly spectacle.
At this week’s meeting, Whitaker’s behavior amounted to little more than, literally, yelling at, and over, the mayor – on two separate occasions. (Anyone who doubts our characterization of Whitaker’s performance should view a video of the meeting; for Whitaker’s most explosive outbursts, go to about the 48- and 72-minute portions of the video of Tuesday’s city council meeting.)
Dickey tried gaveling down Whitaker for her outbursts and interruptions, but to little avail. In response, Whitaker demanded Dickey gavel down the crowd, whose groans of protests against Whitaker’s comments were audible.
Whitaker now even wants to strip voting from mayor
And then, to top it off, later in the meeting Whitaker raised the prospect of eliminating the mayor’s right to cast votes at all – on most issues.
Whitaker apparently is unaware of the different structures for municipal governments across the state. She pointed to nearby Mebane, Elon, and Gibsonville, as well as Charlotte as examples where the mayor only votes to break a tie and suggested that Graham should explore that approach.
In each of the local examples, the elected board is comprised of five members (councilmen in Mebane and Elon, aldermen in Gibsonville), with a mayor who is elected separately and votes only in cases of ties.
But in Graham, Burlington, and Haw River, for instance, there are five board members, including a separately elected mayor, each of whom is allowed – actually by state law, required – to cast votes on each issue.
Whitaker said Tuesday she wants to explore changing Graham’s charter to eliminate the right of the mayor to vote.
Fortunately, we don’t think Whitaker’s attempt for recriminations will go far. Most provisions of Graham’s charter, adopted in 1979, require legislative approval, and we hardly think the General Assembly is going to want to get mired in such petty retaliations as Whitaker’s vendetta against Dickey and trying to strip the mayor of her right to vote on council agenda items.
Whitaker’s idea is not only a violation of Dickey’s rights as a duly-elected mayor, but even more so an insult to the voters of Graham who elected her.
And there’s the real underlying problem for most of the Graham council’s underlying antipathy toward the mayor.
Dickey faces colleagues loyal to the mayor she defeated
In 2023, council members Whitaker and mayor pro tem Ricky Hall ran as a team – or slate, of sorts – with then-mayor Jennifer Talley.
All three won: Talley and Hall were re-elected; Whitaker, who had been appointed, won her first election.
In the 2025 election, council member Bobby Chin sought re-election with newcomer Jim Young who formed that year’s de facto slate with Talley.
The council part of the slate was elected (Young, by 17 votes) or re-elected (Chin). But the “head” of the slate, Talley, was defeated.
And, we might add, soundly defeated, losing to Dickey by 338 votes, or about 14 percentage points.
So the current city council is comprised of four Talley allies and the woman who beat their leader. And though the election was eight months ago, they’re apparently still mad about it – and even vindictive in some cases.
But what they all seem to forget is that a majority of the citizens of Graham who voted in 2023 and 2025 elected each of them.
At one event recently – the Buc-ee’s groundbreaking – the pettiness and disrespect extended to Ricky Hall refusing even to offer polite applause when Graham’s mayor was introduced at the event.
We overheard one municipal veteran official, now retired, recently tell one or two Graham council members that they needed to “get over” their dislike for the new mayor and learn to work with her – for the good of the city and on behalf of good government for Graham.
Partisan undertones
Dickey’s election was part of a local pattern in which the Democratic Party organization worked diligently to get its candidates elected. Hence, in Burlington, Democrat Beth Kennett beat Ronnie Wall, an unaffiliated councilman (and former mayor) who heretofore had been, in our judgment, the most popular elected official in that city. And she did so convincingly, as well, beating Wall by 530 votes, or about 7 percentage points. Similarly, incumbent Harold Owen, another unaffiliated office-holder, also lost his reelection bid. Democrats, meanwhile, turned out in droves to elect Kennett and former mayor Ian Baltutis; also elected was former police chief Jeff Smythe, an unaffiliated candidate. So Burlington’s council has four Democrats and one unaffiliated member.
There’s also an underlying partisan split among the ostensibly nonpartisan Graham city council. Dickey is a Democrat, Talley was a Republican. Among council members, Chin is registered as a Republican.
Hall, Whitaker, and Young are registered as unaffiliated, but each aligns with the Republican Party, with all of each of their primary ballots having been cast in the Republican primary over their years in North Carolina.
Dickey’s relative youth
Then there’s the age difference. Dickey, at 35, is 24 to 43 years younger than her council colleagues: Chin is 78; Hall is 67; Whitaker is 63; and Young is 59.
Now Dickey’s relative youth and inexperience have been pretty readily observable at most meetings.
But rather than provide any sort of guidance or assistance to facilitate her tenure, her senior colleagues have taken every opportunity to belittle and demean her, strip her of discretionary powers (even extending to her inability to set the outline of an agenda for each meeting), and criticize her position on various issues or even for trying to ask questions.
Because we’ve defended her on occasion, some of Talley’s forces now contend we supported her election over Talley. We did not. We generally ceased endorsing candidates about 20 years ago.
We’ve also heard – and wondered ourselves – how much Talley is coaching or guiding her council allies in their insurrectionist response toward Dickey.
But we think the collective council animosity toward a duly-elected mayor is very much misplaced, inappropriate, and, quite frankly, embarrassing. They’re making Graham a laughingstock.
Mayor by no means perfect
To her credit, Dickey has remained courteous and professional and seemingly above the sniping frequently aimed at her.
And Dickey is by no means infallible. For instance, during a budget workshop a few months ago, she wondered aloud about giving city-funded health insurance not only for municipal workers, but also for their spouses and/or family members. She was apparently unaware that counties, cities, and towns across the state have consistently been eliminating that expensive benefit over the past 20 years. And Graham should certainly not go back to it.
Last month, Dickey tried to use her time during “council comments” at the end of the meeting – a period when council members, including the mayor, make miscellaneous comments, suggest items for future consideration, or otherwise raise concerns about various city policies or other issues – to issue a gay pride resolution.
Whitaker – in this case, to her credit, in our judgment – insisted that Dickey did not have authority to unilaterally make such a proclamation on behalf of the city. Whitaker’s tactics were rather heavy-handed, but they were (slightly) more civil than at this month’s meeting.
The stridency, mockery, and occasional rage that surfaces toward Graham’s mayor is inexplicable. Simple etiquette and decorum is frequently cast aside in order to challenge, bully, or simply yell at the mayor.
This week, the council spent about 20 minutes dealing with an issue of whether Dickey owed the city $260 for a conference she attended. Dickey had signed up for it, and the city paid her registration fee, but the council subsequently vetoed a budget amendment to finance her trip and rejected a subsequent citizen donation to the city intended to cover her expense for the trip.
(Just by the way, we cannot recall any other council member having to get the full council’s permission to attend equally useless conferences.)
Never seen a forced recusal, locally
For the first time that we can recall in at least the past 36 years, a member of a public body (Whitaker, again) made a motion to force a colleague (in this case, Dickey) to be recused from the consideration of the issue on the council’s agenda.
The normal rule of thumb, practiced by all elected officials on all local boards, is that a member who thinks he or she might have a conflict of interest – or at least the perception of a potential conflict of interest – can ask his or her colleagues to be recused. Most times, the board will acquiesce to the request. But never have we witnessed someone else instituting a recusal for anyone other than himself/herself.
Instead, as the council turned to the agenda item, Whitaker made a motion to force Dickey’s recusal. Despite her best efforts to ask questions about the city’s underlying policy on reimbursements, Dickey was unable to do so.
Whitaker, frequently talking (or even yelling) over Dickey, forced a vote on the mandatory recusal, which passsed 4-1.
State law suggests that the city attorney should have been consulted about whether a recusal was necessary. But for some reason, the city’s main attorney, Bob Ward, was not present (for the second month in a row). The secondary attorney, Bryan Coleman, whose specialty is real estate law, didn’t offer any comments.
Frankly, with the level of dissension and procedural quagmires that have been going on at council meetings, the main attorney needs to be present. Graham’s previous mayor, Talley, even got the council to change its meeting day each month several years ago so as to ensure that Ward (who also serves on the Burlington city council) wouldn’t have a scheduling conflict that would prevent him from being at Graham’s meetings.
Dickey would have had the higher ground to have avoided the agenda item altogether by simply paying the city’s bill, but once it was on the agenda, we believe she was entitled to comment on it – and certainly to ask questions that generally amounted to whether everyone on the council is being treated the same, and under what specific city policies or practices.
But the council members’ pettiness, the vituperative tone, and underlying disrespect toward Graham’s mayor simply must stop.
