As the meeting commenced on December 4, Durham County attorney Alan Andrews sat at the head of the table and addressed the room.
“Welcome to the December 4, 2023 meeting of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners,” Andrews said.
Murmurs and snickers echoed through the audience. Commissioner Nimasheena Burns swiftly caught the gaff. She offered Andrews, the former chief deputy city attorney for the City of Greensboro, the seat of Guilford County, a mulligan.
“Take that back, brother,” Burns said.
Andrews repeated the date back to Burns, still unaware of his misstep.
“Durham. You said Guilford,” Burns said.
“Sorry. My apologies,” Andrews said with a chuckle.
The shared moment of levity at Andrews’s expense didn’t last long.
Andrews was there to preside over the vote for the next board chair, a position that the commissioners select annually. Over the years, the board has typically elected the chair and vice chair to serve in those roles for the duration of their four-year terms. Commissioners Brenda Howerton and Wendy Jacobs, the longest-tenured board members, have both served as chair and vice chair. With commissioner Heidi Carter declining to run for reelection, it seemed likely that the newest board members, Nida Allam and Burns, would take on the responsibility of board leadership.
Carter was first to make a motion, nominating Allam. Jacobs seconded. Each member was then asked to give an “aye” or “nay” verbal vote. Allam, Carter, and Jacobs confirmed with “ayes.”. Burns gave a begrudging “uh huh.” Howerton gave her “aye” without adjusting her microphone, her voice barely audible. The vote was unanimous, though an undercurrent of rancor that traces back to 2021 clearly still lingers. That year, a majority of the board—all of its non-Black members—voted to relieve then-county manager Wendell Davis of his job duties in May, weeks before his contract, which was not renewed, was to end in June.
This year, the races to be Durham’s next county commissioners might sound familiar to observers of Durham politics. Allegations of dysfunction and misconduct have plagued the board of commissioners recently, not unlike their colleagues on Durham’s city council. Last year, Davis received $790,000 from Durham County to settle a lawsuit
in which Davis made claims that racial discrimination played a role in his firing. While the controversy is ostensibly behind them, the residual animosity that stemmed from it still seems to loom over the board members.
“I do think it’s really important that elected officials can get along and work harmoniously together as a team,” says Carter, who, whether fairly or not, was at the center of the Davis controversy. “It feels more like a team now. But there have been times where it hasn’t felt like a team. It’s hard to get stuff done if you can’t work together.”
The Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, one of Durham’s more influential PACs, chose not to endorse Jacobs or Allam in either of the last two elections. As the INDY reported in 2021, some believe the choice is in retaliation for their role in ousting Davis.
“It seems like [Allam’s] votes are not aligned with the interests of the Black community,” Tia Wilson Hall, former chair of the Durham Committee’s PAC, told the INDY at the time.
Interpersonal drama aside, the county must confront the issues that need their immediate attention. Durham Public Schools have been ravaged by employee walkouts related to salary disputes, and dwindling funds for necessary renovations and new construction means the county will have to consider another school bond referendum. Affordable housing also remains a perpetual need. The upcoming rewrite of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) could help encourage housing construction in the areas of priority for both the city and county, but it won’t solve affordability on its own. Last year, the county teamed up with city officials and nonprofit partners to acquire property at Carver Creek to maintain and develop more supportive housing for Durham residents, but questions remain about whether the board will be able to replicate that success. The five commissioners selected after the primary election on March 5 will have to work together and with their community partners to address all of these challenges.
In January, DPS alerted classified staff members that their pay would be less than expected that month and going forward, and that the school district would only recognize public sector work experience in its salary schedule. The issue sparked ongoing protests and staff walkouts for weeks, led in-part by the Durham Association of Educators, the closest thing Durham has to a teachers’ union. The problem stemmed from budgeting errors and a lack of communication between former superintendent Pascal Mubenga, who resigned this month, former chief financial officer Paul LiSieur, who resigned in January, the school board, and HIL Consultants, the firm that the school board hired in 2022 to conduct a salary study for classified staff.
The dispute highlights the need to bring candidates who understand the public school system, and can work closely with the school board, to the board of county commissioners. Three candidates with strong ties to the school district are running. One will likely replace Carter, who served on the school board from 2008 to 2016 before joining the county commissioners, as the new liaison to the education community.
Mike Lee chaired the school board from 2016 to 2020 and oversaw the hiring of Mubenga. Jovonia Lewis currently serves on the school board, which has been under severe scrutiny from the education community for its handling of the budget dispute. And Michelle Burton, a longtime school librarian, has been a member of the North Carolina Association of Educators since 1995 and served as president of DAE for four years from 2019 to 2023.
Jacobs says the commissioners’ role in voting to supplement public education in Durham is significant, as the county uses a large portion of its budget to support DPS and is statutorily required to approve the district’s budget. In the 2023-2024 fiscal year, the county allocated $188 million to DPS, or 20 percent of its total $889.5 million budget. Without a significant increase in funding from the state on the horizon, the county may have to consider increasing its own budget to supplement the needs of the school system.
“What has happened in North Carolina since I was first elected [in 2012] has been a deliberate and progressive attack on public education,” Jacobs says. “There’s been defunding and underfunding not just of operational needs but also the capital needs of schools and then also lifting the cap on charter schools, putting a burden on our local funding.”
Because the school board doesn’t have taxing authority, it is at the mercy of the county to provide any additional gap funding. Jacobs says the county has done its best to fill those gaps.
“You see in a lot of counties school boards and county commissioners fighting each other because there are such limited resources,” Jacobs says. “But instead, what we have done is work together collaboratively. I’m really proud that, for the first time ever, we have a joint capital improvement plan.”
Jacobs became board chair in 2016 while Lee was the chair of the school board. She says they worked together to improve collaboration between both boards, DPS staff, and other elected officials.
“That’s when the dynamics between the school board and the board of county commissioners really started to shift,” Jacobs says. It was that close relationship between the two boards that saw the negotiation of a $423.5 million public education bond referendum to go before voters in 2022; the bond was approved overwhelmingly.
But due to rising construction costs, the bond funds will not cover as many projects as was originally projected. Current commissioners and candidates believe the county will consider another bond in the near future to finance maintenance and new school construction that the school district needs to meet rising demand due to population growth and outdated facilities.
“Because of the cost overruns of the new DSA,” Burton says, “many schools in Black communities that were slated for repair with the 2022 bond will not receive much-needed repairs. This is an equity issue. If elected to the county commission, I would support a bond being on the ballot in two or three years. Students deserve to go to school in functional, up-to-date buildings.”
As the county works with the school district to update existing school campuses, it has a unique opportunity to leverage outdated facilities that are currently unused, like at Northern High School, and campuses like Durham School of the Arts, which DPS plans to relocate in the coming years. Some candidates have proposed reusing the campuses as educational facilities, while others see potential for housing to support teachers and other public employees.
“As Durham continues to grow, we should request that DPS do a comprehensive land usage strategy plan with the city-county planning department,” Lewis said in her INDY candidate questionnaire. “We need to leverage all publicly owned land (city, county, DPS, DHA) to support the construction and renovation of existing school facilities and create affordable and workforce housing together.”
Contrary to the wishful thinking of Durham residents who attend city council and county commissioners meetings, both bodies are limited in how they can directly affect the housing market. But Jacobs says that a concerted effort between the county, city, DPS, and private partners could move the needle.
“We all have to come together and develop a plan,” Jacobs says. “Mecklenburg County has a plan. Wake County has a plan. We’re behind the eight ball on this. And we need a comprehensive plan that includes all of the available tools that lay out the strategies for how we’re going to meet certain targets each year.”
In 2019, Durham voters passed a $95 million affordable housing bond that was paired with $65 million in additional local and federal funding to create the Forever Home, Durham program. The initiative aims to support housing equity in Durham by partnering with for profit and nonprofit developers as well as other organizations to construct new housing, create pathways for folks to access housing that is available, and keep renters and homeowners stabilized.
One of the challenges for local officials is finding available land to build affordable housing. Like the school district, the county owns key plots of land throughout Durham, assets that it has started to leverage. Through a private-public partnership, 553 total units are under development between two projects at 300 and 500 East Main Street, plots that were previously county-owned surface parking lots. Of those, 305 will be affordable housing for households earning between 30 and 80 percent of the area median income. The projects at 500 Main Street will also include a childcare center and around 30,000 square feet of commercial space.
Last summer, the county scored another housing win with the acquisition of Carver Creek Apartments, a complex in North Durham. The 30-year restrictive covenant that locked in affordable rates for renters was set to expire at the end of 2023. The county worked with the city council and the nonprofit Housing for New Hope to purchase the property for $6 million. Housing for New Hope already manages a neighboring supportive housing community at William Square. Combining the two campuses makes it more likely that Housing for New Hope can recruit on-site supportive services to the community, says Russell Pierce, executive director at Housing for New Hope.
“When we looked across the county, what we saw was projects that housed 100 to 120 residents tended to be most likely to have a committed nurse, behavioral health, or other clinic services on-site,” Pierce says. “What we found out was there was land on the William Square property that had never been developed and land at Carver Creek that wasn’t big enough [to develop]. Neither property could do anything on its own, but you put it together and suddenly you’ve got your magic 100-120 range. So it just became this opportunity to do something extraordinary.”
Replicating the success of Carver Creek isn’t a guarantee. Funds for affordable housing have to be distributed across a multitude of projects, and purchasing new property in a competitive market like Durham is especially difficult for the county commissioners who are beholden to stricter budget constraints.
“None of us have enough money to fix this problem alone,” Jacobs says.
Still, both city and county leaders voted to pass the Simplifying Codes for Affordable Development (SCAD) amendments last fall in the hope of increasing Durham’s housing stock. SCAD makes significant changes to Durham’s development codes that developers say make building new units easier. The commissioners voted 3-1 to pass the SCAD text amendments in December after the city council approved the amendments the month before.
Howerton was absent from the meeting. Burns was the lone dissenting vote on SCAD.
“I don’t have a problem with us making it easier for folks to do what it is that we do in Durham and that’s make a good place to live,” she said at the meeting. “Durham is open for business but Durham is not open for piracy.”
The SCAD amendments come ahead of a full rewrite of the city’s and county’s UDO, which the planning department has already started. Any pieces of SCAD that don’t produce the desired outcomes for new construction or affordability can be reworked or eliminated when the new UDO is implemented but will need consensus from county leaders. Planning staff estimate the rewrite will take roughly two years to complete and provide clearer design standards for developers. The new code will likely offer more opportunities for housing diversity which could lead to more affordable housing choices—but there are no guarantees.
“I heard a lot of grievances about a lot of different things,” Jacobs said the night of the SCAD vote. “I don’t want to mislead people that what we’re being asked to vote on will necessarily address what people are upset about … to give you all the idea that we have the power to address things that we don’t have the power to address.”
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on Twitter or send an email to jlaidlaw@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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