Federal cuts strain Charlotte’s food pantries

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Good morning! It’s Tony. Charlotte is a prosperous city, but not everyone here is prospering. Our Lindsey Banks spent time talking to nonprofit leaders, who tell her that rules limiting federal benefits are increasing demand for assistance – and more could be on the way. Lindsey takes a closer look in our lead story today. It’s one of several local articles in today’s newsletter that you won’t find elsewhere, as well as a touching profile of a Charlotte FC player, stepped-up election coverage and more.

by Lindsey Banks

Last month, a Mecklenburg County resident called Nourish Up, Charlotte’s largest food pantry, in a panic. Their food stamp benefits had been reduced to just $24 a month. That’s a stark difference from the $175 that the average Mecklenburg County SNAP recipient received each month last year, according to county data.

It’s a situation that Tina Postel, CEO of Nourish Up, says her organization is hearing more often as cuts and changes to federal assistance programs take effect.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, introduced stricter eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), locally called Food and Nutrition Services (FNS), and Medicaid. Among the most significant changes, local experts say, are expanded work requirements for adults ages 55 to 64 — a group previously exempt because of age — and a shift from annual to six-month recertifications.

As those changes rolled out this year, local officials and nonprofit leaders are preparing for potentially thousands of Charlotte-area residents to lose benefits, leaving those people to seek assistance elsewhere. 

Leaders at organizations like Nourish Up, which operates 41 food pantries throughout the Charlotte area, are concerned about whether they can accommodate an influx of people previously supported by government assistance. 

And if they can’t, some residents could find themselves without enough food, health insurance, or both. 

Mecklenburg County has already reported a noticeable decline in SNAP participation, although officials caution that not all of it can be attributed to the new federal law. 

According to Ellese Massey, assistant division director for Mecklenburg County's Department of Community Resources, the county averaged 151,606 SNAP participants during the fiscal year ending June 2025, before the law was enacted. 

That number declined to 138,101 during the following fiscal year, Massey said, and since July 2026, participation has averaged 128,596, a nearly 7% decrease from the previous year. 

Massey said the county can’t differentiate between how many residents lost benefits directly because of the legislation or because of economic conditions, unemployment and other factors that influence participation. However, the county did confirm anecdotally that a significant number of residents who previously qualified are no longer eligible under the new requirements. 

One of the biggest changes to SNAP and Medicaid expanded the work requirements to adults ages 55 to 64, a population previously exempt because of age. The new requirement took effect for SNAP participants on Dec. 1, 2025; the change for Medicaid will go into effect at the beginning of 2027. 

Certain exceptions remain, including for qualifying medical conditions and disabilities, caregiving responsibilities and pregnancy. However, participants must log at least 80 hours of work per month, which can include school, training or volunteering. 

The county hasn’t experienced a corresponding decline in SNAP applications, Massey said. Residents are still seeking assistance, but fewer are actively receiving benefits. 

The changes have also caused confusion among recipients trying to determine whether they are still eligible, and the process of recertification isn’t straightforward.  

For some residents, losing benefits might have less to do with whether they qualify and more to do with navigating a complicated application and recertification process. 

Karina Barnes, a benefits navigator with Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, which provides legal assistance for low-income people, said that additional document requirements and more frequent recertifications could cause eligible residents to lose assistance simply because they miss deadlines or submit incorrect paperwork. Residents now have to apply for recertification every six months, instead of one year. 

Proving employment can be particularly difficult for people who are self-employed or work informal jobs, Barnes said, such as housecleaning, landscaping or construction. The required documents can also differ from state to state, which adds another layer of confusion for people who have recently moved to the area. 

And the consequences don’t stop there, Barnes said. The additional paperwork and frequency of it will increase workloads, potentially “by double,” for already stretched social services departments and nonprofit navigators. 

CCLA previously had 12 benefits navigators but now has three, Barnes said, due to funding cuts last year. It’s reduced the number of healthcare enrollment appointments the nonprofit can take on by more than 80%. 

The center and Mecklenburg County officials, however, report that their workload has remained relatively steady so far. But because SNAP’s new six-month renewal requirement is coming due for the first time for many participants, and Medicaid’s requirements haven’t kicked in yet, Barnes worries that will change. 

In addition to the eligibility shake-up, some of the organizations that assist low-income people are facing funding constraints of their own. On Friday, CCLA said in a press release that it is joining two other North Carolina legal aid organizations in suing the state over legislation that redirected more than $15M annually from civil legal aid to criminal defense services.

“The organizations that provide civil legal services have had to take on fewer cases due to the funding diversion,” CCLA said in a statement.

The consequences are already showing up in Nourish Up’s call center. 

Postel said staff members regularly hear from residents whose FNS benefits have been reduced or terminated, including first-time clients who previously had enough assistance to avoid visiting food pantries. 

Although Nourish Up’s traditional pantry visits have remained relatively typical, demand for its food-sharing program has surged, especially as the cost of groceries and other living expenses rise. According to an analysis from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, beef prices were 5.9% higher in August 2026 compared to August 2025; fresh fruit was 3.8% higher for the same time period; and vegetables were 2.6% higher. 

In August 2025, the organization served approximately 21,000 people through its Food Shares program, which distributes surplus fresh food for anyone who shows up, no questions asked. This August, that number climbed to 38,718, an 83% increase. 

To accommodate the demand, Nourish Up expanded the program from approximately one distribution per week to three. 

Postel also said Nourish Up has experienced a 50% reduction in food received from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, a federal program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture that provides free food to low-income individuals through food pantries and banks, forcing the nonprofit to purchase more groceries. 

Even with strong community donations and volunteer support, nonprofits cannot replace government assistance on that scale. 

Mecklenburg County residents received approximately $24M in monthly SNAP benefits as of last November. Nourish Up, meanwhile, operates on an annual budget of about $7M, Postel said. 

Food insecurity challenges have already begun; health insurance could be next. 

More than 345,600 people are expected to fall off the Medicaid rolls in North Carolina next year when the new age eligibility restrictions take effect Jan. 1, NC Health News reported last month, due to either the new requirements or a complicated recertification process. 

Barnes said changes to Medicaid eligibility for non-citizens, which began last week, could leave previously eligible residents without health insurance. In order to qualify, non-residents must meet typical Medicaid requirements and either have a green card or qualify for an exemption, like women who are pregnant, recently had a baby or children 18 or under. More than 66,800 documented noncitizens were enrolled in Medicaid in August, NC Health News reported. 

The changes could also have implications for families receiving other government assistance, like WIC, which provides assistance to women, infants and children under age 5. 

A National WIC Association analysis estimated in June 2025, as the bill was about to be signed into law, that approximately 3 million out of 8 million WIC participants in the U.S. could lose their income eligibility if they lose Medicaid coverage. 

Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy offers nutrition and health insurance resource guides in multiple languages for residents who lose assistance, but those resources could become overwhelmed as more people turn to nonprofits for help. 

If those organizations can’t keep up, Barnes said, thousands of Mecklenburg County residents could be left without the food and medical care they need. 

Lindsey Banks is assistant editor for The Charlotte Ledger. Reach her at [email protected]. 

Related Ledger article: 

Today’s supporting sponsor is Arts+. Arts+ offers several packages with lessons ranging from 30-60 minutes.

by Ashley Fredde
N.C. Health News

The morning of Oct. 17, 2023, was dawning in Charlotte when George Marks rolled out of The Citadel at Myers Park in his electric wheelchair. First light was creeping into the sky when, just feet from the facility’s entrance, according to a police report, Marks rolled into Providence Road as a municipal garbage truck traveled west through the intersection.

There was no crosswalk. A witness later told police they saw a “shadow” roll into the street.

The garbage truck’s driver told police he attempted to stop but it was too late. The front bumper slammed into Marks, and the report details how Marks was catapulted five feet in the air. That account noted he smashed into the pavement, on his face.

While the immediate cause of Marks’ death eight days later was nearly 8 tons of steel striking his wheelchair in a dimly lit roadway, lawsuits filed on behalf of his family allege the outcome represented a failure of the system that was supposed to provide him with care and safety.

An account pieced together by state nursing home inspectors found that Marks had gotten up about 5:20 a.m. As he rolled past the front desk of the skilled nursing home facility where he lived, he said he was going to a family member’s house, staff told state inspectors. The facility’s record obtained by those inspectors does show that he had signed out on the morning he was struck, but no time was recorded.

For a day and a half, Marks lay in an intensive care unit alive, awake and mostly alone — aside from the doctors and nurses treating his many injuries. Outside the hospital, his family alleges, only a few people knew what had happened to him: the nursing home staff, residents in the surrounding neighborhood, and the garbage truck driver who struck him.

His family had no idea.

The Marks family are suing, horrified by what happened to George — and horrified by the chain of what they call failures leading to his death that they allege occurred at The Citadel at Myers Park. In the lawsuit, they also blame North Carolina regulators, who they allege allowed the facility to continue operating and “to engage in a sustained course of noncompliance: ignoring regulatory mandates, disregarding inspection findings, and failing to implement necessary reforms.”

Three years later, they are still pursuing justice, something that’s unusual. By this time, most families in this type of situation have settled, with lawsuit documents sealed, shielding defendants from public scrutiny.

A North Carolina Health News investigation found that the facility was one of multiple nursing homes owned by private equity company Portopiccolo Group that received a notice from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services of substantial failure “to comply with Medicare and Medicaid health and safety requirements.”

NC Health News reached out several times for comment from the facility, its managing operator and parent company but received no response. The managing operator and parent company phone lines lead to full inboxes with no opportunity to leave a message. Separate emails were sent to the attorney representing the facility and affiliated corporations in the lawsuit and to one of the parent company’s founders.

➡️ Read the full investigation at North Carolina Health News

A Cornelius man was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week after pleading guilty to a scheme in which he collected $8M in royalties from streaming music platforms by enlisting tens of thousands of bots to stream his AI-generated music.

Michael Smith, 54, pleaded guilty in New York to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In addition to time in federal prison, he was sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $8.1M.

Prosecutors said in a statement that Smith “exploited super intelligence to generate a fraud” by “flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots” to stream his “fake songs.” It said he “robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.”

They said that between 2017 and 2024, he created thousands of fraudulent accounts on platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music, and then used artificial intelligence to have the accounts stream songs that he created, which generated royalty payments. Prosecutors said he created “hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.”

In April 2023, Smith’s bot accounts streamed his AI music 80.9 million times – which is nearly nine times the number that Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue received that month.

The New York Times reported that Smith’s AI-generated artists had names such as “Callous Post” and “Calorie Screams” and that AI song titles included “Zygotic Washstands” and “Zymotechnical.”

The indictment said he earned as much as $110,000 a month in royalty payments by mid-2019. –Tony Mecia

Democratic congresswoman Alma Adams scolded her opponent, Republican Jack Codiga, at a candidate forum on Thursday evening, calling him “disrespectful” after he presented a photo of her and other representatives in Israel and asked for her autograph.

On stage, she told him to “get out of my face” and told him that he “ought to be ashamed.”

It was an unusually sharp exchange in what has otherwise been a low-profile campaign for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in a district that includes most of Charlotte. The race pits Adams, 80, who has represented North Carolina’s 12th congressional district since 2014, against Codiga, a 29-year-old political newcomer and unconventional Republican who has called for President Donald Trump’s impeachment and broken with his party on other issues. The district voted Democratic for president in 2024 by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.

On Thursday, the forum that included the two candidates — which was held at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in west Charlotte and organized by the church’s Social Justice Ministry — had gone smoothly until their closing remarks. Codiga walked to the edge of the stage and was handed a large photo of Adams and other members of Congress meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2023.

Codiga spoke about Adams’ vote in favor of a 2024 aid package that included $26B to Israel, and another vote this summer opposing an amendment to a bill that would have cut $3.3B in funding to Israel.

“This is an example of Congresswoman Adams saying one thing but her actions are doing something else for a foreign country. So for this act, I’m nominating her for an Oscar, and I have one question,” said Codiga, who then turned to the congresswoman. “Last time you saw this, you said, ‘Do you want an autograph?’ I did not have a pen. I have a pen now, will you please sign it?” 

“You need to be glad I’m in a church,” Adams responded. “... Get out of my face.”

Adams told the audience she went to Israel four times with colleagues from both parties “to learn about what I needed to know” as a member of Congress. She said Codiga was “full of it” and “ought to be ashamed of himself coming up in here and trying to humiliate this community.”

“What I have done is provide support for this community. You haven’t done anything,” she told Codiga.

At her request, someone from the forum took away Codiga’s microphone, as his time was up.

The election is Nov. 3. Early voting starts Thursday (Oct. 15). —Rachel Black, The Election Hub

A version of this article was originally published by The Election Hub, which provides a voter guide and information on local races on the ballot in Mecklenburg, Gaston and Cabarrus counties. It is a project of the Civic Knowledge Initiative, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Charlotte that makes it easy for every citizen to find, understand and act on reliable information about their local government and elected officials.

The Charlotte Ledger is partnering with The Election Hub this campaign season to produce original articles covering November’s election.

➡️ Visit The Election Hub for the full article and information on local candidates

A few facts and tidbits on the investigation into Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ finances, which seems to center on how the school board or school board members hired law firms and contractors and whether those expenditures were authorized.

Articles include:

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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16: “‘Emily: No Prisoner Be,’” 7:30-9 p.m., at The Sarah Belk Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement at Queens University, 2319 Wellesley Ave. Presented in collaboration with Charlotte Lyric Theatre, Queens University of Charlotte presents the multi-Grammy and Olivier Award winner Joyce DiDonato, who entrances audiences across the globe — proclaimed “perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation” by The New Yorker. Now she brings Kevin Puts’s luminous song-cycle on the life of Emily Dickinson to Charlotte, joined by the adventurous string trio Time For Three. $87.84-$162/ticket.

OCTOBER 20: “Coffee with the Chamber,” 8:30-9:30 a.m., at BNI, 3430 Toringdon Way, Suite 300. Join the Charlotte Area Chamber of Commerce for an invigorating morning event that brings together coffee lovers and business professionals from across the Charlotte area. Whether you're a startup founder, a seasoned executive or just a morning person, this event is the perfect opportunity to brew new connections and spark innovative conversations. Registration required. Free for members. $5 for non-members.

OCTOBER 24: “Bourbon for Booty,” 6:30-10 p.m., at Swinerton, 901 Berryhill Rd. Sip. Savor. Support. Raise a glass to help support our local cancer community. Join 24 Foundation for an exceptional evening of curated bourbons, whiskeys, wines and chef-prepared small bites. This unforgettable night of fine sips and flavorful bites directly benefits local cancer navigation and survivorship programs. Guests must be 21 or older. $150/ticket.

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