Independent investigators have scolded Charlotte City Councilman Tariq Bokhari for his actions trying to steer municipal COVID relief money to a program to be run by a non-profit he oversees, but they failed entirely to engage a broader ethics complaint that documented Bokhari’s years-long entanglement of his public duties with his private financial interests in […]
Category: City Council
The injection of Black lives into white, wealthy space proved too much. So Charlotte City Council voted last week to allow cars and trucks to grind our Black Lives Matter mural into oblivion. On South Tryon Street between 3rd and 4th Streets, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, we had made a promise to […]
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Voter Suppression Comes to Charlotte
City Council silenced the voices of nearly 63,000 Charlotteans this week. The setting was a day-long meeting at which the city’s elected officials and top administrators discussed a wide range of issues, including the city budget, COVID relief, potential changes to the city’s form of government, and reform of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. As a […]
Charlotte’s city attorney has referred an ethics complaint against Councilman Tariq Bokhari to outside investigators. The complaint alleges that Bokhari has engaged in a years-long pattern and practice of using his public office to further his private financial and business interests. This violates the city’s policy prohibiting elected officials from “us[ing] their official position for […]
Tariq Bokhari’s corruption will go on — with an assist from the city’s attorney. Charlotte City Attorney Patrick Baker informed City Council this weekend that a 17-page, 5,000-word complaint detailing Councilman Bokhari’s long-standing merger of his public office with his private financial interests fails to meet the “minimum technical requirements” necessary to warrant an independent […]
What’s most remarkable about Tariq Bokhari’s corruption is how long it went unnoticed. While the media and other elected officials only recently began to scrutinize the Charlotte city councilman’s merger of his private-sector work with his public duties, Bokhari’s entire time in office has been one, long advertisement for himself, his industry in general, and […]
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Hey, City Council, Gas Yourselves!
To Our Honorable Mayor and City Council, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department recently trapped and gassed citizen-protesters on the streets of uptown. To try to appease critics of this brutality, you took the practically meaningless, symbolically meager step of temporarily halting CMPD’s purchase of new chemical weapons — even as you now seem prepared to fight in […]
