We are seriously using maps that are 50+ years old? Are you kidding me?
See, this is the problem with not only the CACs, but the council districts as well. The west side of downtown is in District D and the east side of downtown is in District C, further diluting the voices of downtown residents and businesses. The voices that get elevated are those outside of downtown in the single family homes.
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Yes, those meetings are District D “neighborhood alliance” meetings held once per month on a Saturday morning at the Crowder Woodland Center. If you visit Councilor Harrison’s website and sign up for her newsletter you’ll get announcements about the meetings. I think she also posts announcements on her social media accounts.
Can you please provide me a link? I have been trying to find her site to no avail.
If we’re bringing back the CAC systems with strict guidelines according to that map, I’m afraid we’re repeating past mistakes and the RCAC leaders haven’t learned anything. These maps are a different dynamic to downtown as downtowners don’t feel chopped up like that but part of a whole. At this time, I’m not finding the Central CAC to be on the right path because of that.
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Thank you! I appreciate it.
After opening the link and perusing it, I didn’t find anything about tomorrow’s neighborhood alliance meeting, or any sort of calendar at all. I signed up for her newsletter because that seems to be the only path of actually getting this information from what I can tell. If you know the time of this meeting, can you please share that with me so that I can make plans to attend? thank you!
Our next District D Neighborhood Alliance meeting will be on Saturday, May 16 at 9:30 am at the Crowder Center (5611 Jaguar Park Dr). Have any topics on your mind? Want a deep dive on an issue in an upcoming meeting? Let me know!
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Thank you so, so much!
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Very odd boundaries as someone unfamiliar with the CAC. Looks oddly specific and leaves out, as others have said, a large portion of those that SHOULD have a voice.
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I attended Jane Harrison’s community meeting this morning. I will say that she runs it well and makes sure that she gives everyone a chance to speak and bring forth an issue. FWIW, two of us (15 attendees) were from Glenwood South, and two others were from Forest Park.
As you might imagine, the issues were all over the place but included concerns about water supply due to this drought and growth, property tax rates, waste/landfill capacity, community library at Athens Drive high school that might get moved to Cary, the affordable housing tax loophole, etc.
While I am NOT young (go ahead @GucciLittlePig and make a snarky comment about that 
), I was probably the second youngest person in attendance. There’s a lot of opportunity for this community who lives on the west side of downtown in her district to show your faces and express your voice! In any case, by the time she got to me, I made a case for continued density downtown and tied it back to several of the issues that her other constituents were voicing: tax revenue, water (no lawns to water), waste creation, etc.
I think these meetings are a terrific opportunity to help steer the ship a little if we just showed up.
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I was going to make a joke about the lines being redrawn (too soon?) but given they’re just “reactivating” leveraging the original boundaries, I’d say that should be one of the first items to address is the boundary lines, and perhaps that’s a Council or just Raleigh CAC thing.
I also really hope they don’t give rezoning “voting power” perception back to the CAC meetings. There was SO much wrong with that system, also antiquated. Should the public have a voice, OF COURSE! Should it only be on one evening once a month and in one physical place? Of course not. This is 2026, not 1970.
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Well, a lot of our laws are being pushed back to 1970 or before, so why not? 
Hi again. Reminder – the first reactivation meeting for the Central CAC will be held this Saturday, June 6, at 2:00 pm at the Top Greene African American Cultural Center (401 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). A member of the RCAC will facilitate the meeting and will explain the reactivation process.
Central CAC needs officers! Please consider whether you can volunteer a few hours per month to serve as chair, vice chair, secretary, or multi-media coordinator.
I’d like to say a word about CAC boundaries since that became a topic of discussion when the reactivation was announced. First, no one now recalls why the CACs that cover different parts of downtown were drawn as they were in the 1970s. Was there some nefarious intent behind this? Perhaps. But I tend to assume they were drawn this way for practical reasons, like limiting the number of residents in each CAC to a number that would be manageable for a couple volunteer officers.
I read the questions here about why today’s RCAC hasn’t redrawn CACs to give downtown a unified voice as a single CAC. Let me explain something about the RCAC. Since I’m one of the community organizers for the Central CAC reactivation, I was invited to sit in on a half-day RCAC retreat a few weeks ago. I’ve also attended meetings of a few different CACs. I can tell you emphatically that the RCAC are not sitting around plotting ways to limit the influence of downtown residents. What’s more, lack of attention to the question of a potential re-draw isn’t due to any political agenda. It’s simply a matter of bandwidth.
RCAC is made up of the officers of the individual CACs. These are everyday people like the rest of us who choose to volunteer whatever time they can spare to keep their respective CACs running. In some CACs there’s only a single person running the show, with no one on deck to take over should they step down. These officers need to spend their time pulling together agendas, arranging guest speakers, procuring signage, managing communications, and so on. That leaves no time for initiatives like the study of a potential CAC re-org.
Redrawing CACs would require a few people to study the current borders and come up with a workable proposal for new ones, and then conduct outreach to get residents in affected neighborhoods on board. They’d need to ensure that there would be no adverse side-effects of their plan, like killing a CAC by re-organizing its only existing officer(s) out of its borders. And so on.
This can be done. It will just take a few motivated individuals to commit some time to the effort. I’ve spoken with several RCAC members about the current borders and they’ve all indicated openness to changing them. City council has no say in this matter, but nonetheless a couple councilors I asked about it said they’d be vocally supportive of a redraw.
What we need is for people like you good readers to get out and volunteer to serve as an officer in your CACs. I can assure you that your current CAC leadership would be more than happy to have your help. And by becoming a CAC officer you become a member of the RCAC. That means you can serve on a RCAC committee…like a committee formed to come up with a proposal to redraw CAC boundaries.
With that, I’ll say again: come out on Saturday and get involved with Central CAC. And remember, even if you don’t live within the current Central CAC boundaries, you’re more than welcome to attend all meetings and make your voice heard.
See you all there!
Brian
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Where is the map for this CAC’s boundaries?
It’s shown above:
To view CAC boundaries on a map on which you can zoom in and out, go to Raleigh’s iMaps site. On the far right edge of the page, hit the “Layers” icon to open the Layers menu. Then in that menu select “Other Boundaries”, and under that select “Citizen Advisory Council”.
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Good to meet you at the meeting. What was your impression of how the meeting went?
I was there, and the main thought that I came away with was that more people should attend the meetings if we want this to be a productive and representative effort. In keeping with my prejudices, there were mostly older people living in single family homes in the Boylan Heights and South Park neighborhoods.
(Also in keeping with my prejudices, one attendee approached me after the meeting and told me that it was amiable that I, as an apartment dweller, was so civically minded and asked me if I thought that other apartment dwellers who are “usually pretty itinerant” would be as civically minded as me. I told him that we may seem itinerant but it’s mainly to escape landlords jacking prices up on us but we’re usually still staying within the same community and would like to see it grow and change for the better, etc.)
This was supposed to be a meeting where people were nominated for leadership positions but, seeing as there were not many attendees, nominations were postponed to the next meeting (July 18th) so more recruiting could be done.
There was discussion about the bylaws of the group. The way it seems Raleigh CAC expected it would work was that the CACs would operate under their bylaws until amendments were approved on an individual CAC basis, but there were issues with the fact that the Central CAC already had bylaws before the CAC system was defunded, and members of the Central CAC felt it was sleazy of the Raleigh CAC to impose new, different bylaws on them without their consent.
There was some discussion on how “gerrymandered” the Central CAC appeared on the map, but there wasn’t much discussion on how or if that would change. The map hasn’t been changed in about 50 years, by my understanding, and that feels unacceptable and like it should be one of the first points of order in this new iteration of CACs.
The people at the meeting seemed to agree that one of the main purposes of the CACs was to safeguard against “meddling developers” and the person heading this event, representing RCAC and the Hillsborough-Wade CAC, touted their efforts to get organized and oppose developments in their neighborhood.
I would personally like to know what the point of RCAC is if it’s more than just an administrative body to coordinate individual CACs. Seems to me like it’s an additional, maybe unnecessary level of meetings for the chairs and vice chairs to have to attend, and an additional hurdle to jump over to get CAC commentary to city council. (I’m also annoyed by the naming? Like, RCAC seems like it would another individual CAC but it’s the organization of all the CACs? Maybe call it the Citizen’s Representative Council since it’s the chairs and vice chairs who are the main ones attending? Idk, I’m probably just thinking about it too much.)
Anyway, if any of y’all have been looking for a relatively low effort way of getting in at the ground floor of civic engagement, this seems like a good way to do it, especially if we want the CACs to be more encouraging of positive change in the city.
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Yeah, as suspected. These groups need to just be ignored. Pointless, “old man yells at cloud” type shit. You say “this is a good way to” get in at the ground floor of civic engagement, and I only agree if by “ground floor” you mean “below the basement” because this shit is just such a waste of time and energy, IMO.
The head of the Midtown CAC (which covers the area where I live) is a vocal NIMBY who opposes every new development proposed. He often gets quoted by the local news sources as the voice of neighborhood opposition for whichever rezoning is being discussed.
I am on the e-mail list for meeting minutes. I had thought about attending in the past, but the meetings are always on some random Tuesday night, and we always seem to have something going on with the family, kid activities.
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I think it’s worth it to consider joining if anything to have diversity of opinions being represented whenever they get quoted in WRAL or send representatives to speak to city council. I think the current council is pretty good at smelling some of the BS coming from Certain Groups, but what about when we get another council of No like back in the belligerent CACs heyday, before they got defunded?
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Incredible share. Thanks for taking the time to debrief us here on how that meeting went. You raise some good points that I feel I’ve faced in the past with my experiences with CACs. Should I get involved with them and try to voice my support for things and my takes in that system or try to get my voice heard in other ways?
I could probably write a thesis on this but the short of it, to me anyway, is that the most important thing is communication and awareness of what’s going on. People will engage how and when they can and the city needs to listen to CACs as well as the dozens of other inputs so they can make decisions.
The people who can do the “CAC format”, by all means, go ahead, but it doesn’t work for me so I’ll choose to volunteer on a commission, write my councilors over email, and speak at meetings when I can. That works for me. The CACs cant be the ONE way to engage citizens and can’t be the ONE way that council gets citizen feedback. I don’t think that’s case in 2026 so CACs should do their thing but shouldn’t pretend to be the single source of citizen engagement in Raleigh.
Selfish plug: I also hope that my platforms, like this one here, helps with the mission of informing people, whether you post or just lurk, and people can make up their own minds and choose their own way to engage.
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