Eleven Theories of a Highway

The agenda did not say I-77. It said opening remarks, a moment of silence, a public forum, and then the regular business of a Monday-night Charlotte City Council meeting in late February. The forum portion ran 90 minutes. The chamber filled past capacity. Speakers came on housing displacement, on airport workers, and on the I-77 South Express Lanes — a state-led project, recently re-priced by NCDOT at more than $4 billion, that would add roughly eleven miles of tolled lanes south from uptown to the South Carolina line. The corridor crosses Wilmore, Wesley Heights, McCrorey Heights, Reid Park, Revolution Park, and Brookhill, west- and south-side neighborhoods historically Black and already cut through once before by I-77 itself in the 1960s, on the back of uptown’s razed Brooklyn neighborhood.

Charlotte’s formal power over this project is small. NCDOT owns the road and signs the procurement. The city’s only seat at the table is on the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization (CRTPO), where Charlotte holds 46 percent of the weighted board vote. That seat was filled, on October 16, 2024, by Council Member Ed Driggs — the lone Republican on the dais on Feb 23 — who cast Charlotte’s full bloc in favor of NCDOT’s plan. WFAE characterized the eighteen-month sequence between that vote and the February meeting as “a masterful, bureaucratic bait and switch,” building on Mecklenburg County Commissioner Leigh Altman’s complaint that the project’s impact maps were withheld until after CRTPO’s authority over the matter had lapsed.

The unspoken reference point was 2019, when the I-77 North Express Lanes opened — operated by the Spanish toll firm Cintra under a fifty-year contract whose Q2 2025 toll revenue alone hit $35.1 million, up roughly thirty percent year over year. By any commercial measure, Cintra is winning. Every council member who spoke on Feb 23 was arguing about Cintra without saying so.

Charlotte runs on a council-manager charter. There are eleven council members — four at-large, seven district. Mayor Vi Lyles presides and votes only to break ties. City Manager Marcus Jones runs the day-to-day. That arrangement is the reason the council’s reasoning, on a night like this, matters more than its formal authority. Of the eleven council members, eight took the floor on I-77. LaWana Mayfield was absent. Joi Mayo, sworn in two months earlier, and Victoria Watlington, the at-large representative on housing, did not speak on the project that night. Each member who did speak reached for a different lever.

Council Member Renee Johnson opened the council’s deliberation by attacking the meeting’s own structure. Charlotte’s rules require unanimous consent — all eleven council members — to put a new item on the agenda same-night. Driggs declined. The three-hour discussion that followed was, technically, off-agenda. Outside the chamber, the organized opposition had names: Sustain Charlotte (Shannon Binns), Action NC, and the Black Political Caucus of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, whose transportation chair Raki McGregor would, weeks later, announce a TRO suit to stop the project.