The fallout over the Durham County manager’s election-season letter accusing Commissioner Heidi Carter of racism continues, with two candidates for the Board of Commissioners pushing back against the school board chairman’s allegation that they’re pawns in the manager’s political game.
After the INDY reported on Wendell Davis’s missive earlier on Tuesday, several city and county officials raised questions about the manager’s motives, noting that Davis had battled with Carter over school-funding decisions and that his contract renewal—worth more than $210,000 a year—will be decided next year by the commissioners who win the March 3 primary.
Among them was Mike Lee, who chairs the Durham Public Schools Board of Education. In a lengthy Facebook post, he accused Davis of trying to interfere in the upcoming election for his own benefit.
According to Lee, from 2014, when Davis became manager, through 2016, Davis had a “voting bloc” on the Board of Commissioners that approved his conservative school budgets. But in the 2016 election, two members of that bloc—Fred Foster Jr. and Michael Page—lost their reelection bids.
Davis secured a five-year contract that June, while those commissioners were lame ducks. In Lee’s thinking, Davis believes that Commissioners Carter and Wendy Jacobs are likely to oppose his renewal next year, since they’ve clashed over DPS budgets. So Davis recruited Foster and Page to run again for their old seats, Lee wrote. And when they failed to land any major endorsements, Lee continued, Davis fanned accusations of racism against both Jacobs and Carter—including the letter aimed at Carter.
“It seems very convenient for this to show up two weeks before the election in hopes of getting people to turn on both Wendy and Heidi,” Lee told the INDY. “Unfortunately, our community jumps behind accusations of racism very quickly.”
Foster and Page, however, say Davis had nothing to do with their decisions to run.
Foster, 71, a retired Division of Motor Vehicles Employee, scoffs at the notion.
“Mr. Davis and I haven’t been in touch with each other since I left the board,” he says.
Foster, a commissioner from 2012 to 2016, says he’s been spending time at the senior citizens’ center downtown. He’s running to advocate on behalf of peers who often have to choose between paying taxes or purchasing medicines they need to stay alive.
The center doesn’t receive local, state, or federal funding. Instead, it has to rely on donations and legacy funding by the seniors themselves. Foster wants to change that.
Foster laughs when asked about Lee’s other assertion: that he voted “in lockstep” with Davis’s funding recommendations. He says he read what was presented and made his decisions as a fiscal conservative. From his point of view, most of the money was going to DPS honchos on Cleveland Street.
“But the workers on the lower end—your teachers, janitors, groundskeepers, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers—they ain’t making no money,” Foster says. “Put the money in the hands of the people on the bottom, and you can get double.”
Page, meanwhile, has served for almost 19 years as the pastor of the Antioch Baptist Church in a hard-hit section of Holloway Street, a neighborhood that’s long been a hotbed of gang activity. Page emerged as a voice for his community after a drive-by shooting that killed a young white woman on the front steps of his church in the early 2000s.
A few hours before he spoke to the INDY on Thursday, the police reported a homicide in the neighborhood.
“I’m running for county commissioner, and I’m running a clean campaign,” he says. “I refuse to get into hearsay, and I refuse to get into conversations with politicians or anybody else who are trying to discredit people who are running a campaign. I will say this: I am about serving the community.”
Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected].
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It is about elected officials, Wendell, and NOT about the chip on your shoulder. The County Commissioners have elected JURISDICTION over YOU. Get a clue.