Team Goldsboro founder answers council meeting criticism of PAC

Several city residents and a member of the Goldsboro City Council took aim at a local political action committee during the council’s Monday meeting — alleging the group is “racist,” reflects poorly on the city and is run, in part, by at least one city employee.

They also called on the board — and Mayor Chuck Allen — to take action to ensure the PAC’s Facebook page is removed, a measure Allen noted he had no authority to do.

The group that drew the ire of the handful who spoke out against it Monday is “Team Goldsboro,” a PAC formed in 2019 ahead of a series of contentious municipal elections. Team Goldsboro boasts more than 1,500 followers on social media and has been critical of former City Councilman Bevan Foster, current Councilman Antonio Williams and Constance Coram, the winner of the March Democratic Primary for the county Register of Deeds post.

Its Facebook posts largely involve the publication of public records, most recently documents related to a protest of Foster’s Democratic Primary victory for the Wayne County Board of Commissioners’ District 3 seat and emails from Councilwoman Brandi Matthews calling for Allen to take action against the PAC.

City resident Donna Stevenson said she found it “offensive” that the PAC published emails exchanged between Allen and Matthews — a sentiment echoed on the Team Goldsboro page by several people who believed those communications to be confidential.

“There were actually emails that transpired between the mayor and a council person on social media,” Stevenson said. “I was totally offended that these emails were posted on a public Facebook page between two representatives of the city and I want to know, did they have your permission to post them?”

In reality, the emails are, by North Carolina law, public record — and Team Goldsboro obtained them legally via a Freedom of Information Act request.

But Stevenson said the publication of the emails was not the only thing that disturbed her about the PAC’s activities on Facebook.

“My offense comes largely with Team Goldsboro because they use the name ‘team,’ which means we’re together, and ‘Goldsboro,’ which is the city I grew up in,” she told the board. “I’m offended by the stuff I see posted on there. My suggestion to the city … (is) that the page be asked to be taken down because it cannot reflect the city and it’s not certainly reflective of my views of the city, as well as other people I know.”

Allen responded that he and the council “don’t have anything to do with Team Goldsboro — what they put up or don’t put up.”

“And I don’t think we can ask them to take the page down,” he said. “We don’t have any authority.”

“I would strongly suggest that maybe somebody contact them, because they are under the disguise of saying, ‘We’re not racist. These certain people we’re going after are racist,’” Stevenson replied. “It’s making our city look bad.”

Sharon Matthews, Ms. Matthews’ mother, raised a different concern — that Williams had requested records from the city and his request has not yet been filled, but that Team Goldsboro was given what they asked for.

Allen responded.

“Councilmember Williams, what he has requested is volumes of emails, not one email. He has requested a ton of emails,” he said. “Whoever requested the email between Brandi and I requested one email.”

Williams, in fact, requested some 344,000 emails — enough to prompt the city to begin charging for “excessive” records requests, which it defined as a request that required more than four hours of work.

As City Manager Tim Salmon put it, if every email Williams requested took one minute to be reviewed, and a single staff member was in charge of the request, that person — earning a salary paid for by taxpayers — would spend more than two years going through each of the documents.

“In this case, if it takes an estimated one minute per email, that is over 5,700 hours of work — or two years and nine months of work for one person,” Salmon told the board in March. “That is what I would call excessive.”

So, Allen said Monday, comparing the two requests didn’t make sense.

Williams wasn’t convinced.

“It was lengthy, but it was legal,” he said to Salmon. “Who are you covering up for?”

Councilwoman Matthews shared additional concerns about Team Goldsboro’s activities — and urged Allen to use what she characterized as his influence over the group to get the page taken down.

“I have begged you, begged you, to ask your friends to pull the plug on Team Goldsboro. I shared with you the damage it is causing, and you have seen the many citizens requests and concerns. I told you that city employees participate and how much bad representation it is on the city,” she said. “We agreed, you and I both agreed, that this group was created in support of you. Surely, they can dismantle in support of you as well. I simply asked you to do the right thing. Our residents are being affected. They are being verbally attacked and threatened online.”

She also alleged that she was “verbally attacked inside a shopping store by a page supporter and contributor.”

“What more has to happen?” she said. “Considering the climate we are in right now, this has to stop.”

So who is Team Goldsboro?

The PAC’s founder, Mark Metzler, is a registered Independent who has “voted in every Democratic election for the past 10 years.”

He told the New Old North he strongly disagrees with the characterization of Team Goldsboro as racist and said that, in fact, the PAC was created, in part, as a reaction to “race-baiting” he and other members of the group witnessed from Williams, Foster and Coram.

“A group of us had been following the City Council meetings and we had seen stuff going on — the bickering, the fighting, the accusations of racism any time anybody disagreed with you,” he said. “Nobody else was speaking up, and as much as I hate to say this, I think the council kind of cowered down to the accusations of racism. When somebody was acting like a jerk and they wanted to oppose their actions, as soon as they were called a racist, they backed down. It became less about the issues and more about race.”

So, he and other concerned citizens started Team Goldsboro in the traditional spirit of a political action committee — to support candidates they believed were best-suited to represent the city he was born and raised in.

Metzler was quick to point out that the PAC supported black candidates before local residents took to the polls in November.

“We supported Hiawatha Jones and Sadie Simmons. Those were two African American candidates,” he said. “They were great candidates. And if they had been running against white counterparts that we didn’t think were right for the job, we still would have supported Sadie and Hiawatha.”

And members of the PAC have been outspoken supporters during the protest of Foster’s primary victory of Greg Batts, one of three black candidates who ran against Foster in March.

“If we were truly racist, why wouldn’t we have run somebody as an opposition candidate who was white? Why did we go out and support Greg (Batts)? We had four African American candidates running … and one of them we supported and two of them we could’ve lived with. One of them we felt like would have been bad for the county,” Metzler said. “We truly believe Greg was a great candidate. I went to church with Hiawatha when I was a little kid for 10 years. My family has known her our entire time in Goldsboro. Sadie is the sweetest lady alive. So, I don’t know. Accusations like (we’re racist), we try to ignore, because there’s no good response to them.”

Still, Metzler says he understands that some, like Foster, argue that showing support for some members of a given race doesn’t mean you can’t still be racist. He thinks the argument is flawed, but he acknowledges it, nonetheless.

“They’ll try to pick you apart and say, ‘You think just because you have some black friends, you’re aware of the situation.’ That’s not what we’re saying at all. What we’re saying is, ‘These are some good people we felt could do the job and we felt like you couldn’t, so we supported them over you,’” he said. “But it’s so hard to defend against accusations of racism. It’s impossible to prove that you’re not something.”

But he insists Team Goldsboro is motivated not by race, but issues — a fact, he says, that distinguishes the PAC from its opposition.

“They are divisive. They’re race-baiters. They want to make it about race and it’s not. It’s about their actions. It’s about their politics,” Metzler said. “It’s 100 percent not about race, but they’re making it that way. They’re making you choose sides. You’re either on the white side or the black side and we saw through that and we’re going to do something about it.

“Whether you call us racist or not, we feel like we stand on pretty firm moral ground. Show me an example of where we’ve been racist. One. Don’t say it’s because we’re picking on three people who happen to be African American. They could be (any race) and we’re going to pick on them for their actions.”

Metzler says he has no intention of removing the Team Goldsboro page from Facebook — or hitting pause on lawful public records requests and supporting the candidates his PAC feels would best represent the city and county.

And he fully expects to continue to hear criticism from those he says have a problem now that he has been identified for what he is not — but what they have long claimed he was.

“Again, I’m a registered Independent who has voted in every Democratic election for the last 10 years. It doesn’t fit their narrative and it kind of goes back to why we started this thing. The narrative that we’re hearing is, ‘White Republicans, far to the right, good old boy network.’ Those are lies,” Metzler said. “They know they’re lies, but they’re putting them in place to divide the community and make you pick sides. And you’re either part of the good old boy network or you’re not.

“If they came out and said, ‘This is just a regular guy. We know his name, but we don’t know who he is. He’s just a citizen. He’s voted in all the Democratic elections for the past 10 years and contributes to Democratic campaigns,’ they wouldn’t get as much play out of it. But saying, ‘It’s the boogie man,’ you know, it gets more play.”