Full name: Dustin Ingalls
Party affiliation: Democrat
Campaign website: https://dustinforwendell.com
1) In 300 words or less, please give our readers your elevator pitch: Why are you running? Why should voters entrust you with this position? What prior experience will make you an effective member of the Wendell board of commissioners?
I’ve spent most of my career helping other candidates get elected and influencing policy from outside government, including the last seven and a half years as an environmental advocate. I have served for over three years on Wendell’s Downtown Development citizens advisory committee and the last several months on the Wake County Energy Advisory Commission. But I can’t shake the feeling that, in this critical moment for our country, our state, and our town, I could be doing more to help people. So I’m stepping up to offer my vision, my skills, and my relationships with elected officials and policy experts across the state and country to serve Wendell and shape the next several years of its future for the better. I want those who live here now and those who will live here later to live out their dreams in a hometown they brag about to everyone they know.
2) What would your priorities be as a member of the board of commissioners? Please identify three of the most pressing issues Wendell currently faces and how you believe the town should address them.
Growth is the most pertinent issue. Our population has more than doubled since the last census and is projected to nearly triple again by the next one. In order to accommodate that growth, we need more houses, restaurants, and employers.
I want us to be a model town for zoning and connectivity, providing the housing supply, amenities, and multimodal transit options that people desire, including sidewalks and our growing multiuse path, so people can get where they need to go by car, foot, bike, and golf cart in as little time as possible.
And I want us to be more than a bedroom community for Raleigh. That means attracting more major employers and dining and entertainment options so people can live, work, shop, and play in our town rather than driving somewhere else.
3) What’s the best or most important thing the board of commissioners has done in the past year? Additionally, name a decision you believe the town should have handled differently. Please explain your answers.
The town is beginning the process of creating a new unified development ordinance (UDO), which will be a collaborative effort to envision and plan for how our fast-growing town develops over the next several years. This is important so everyone can see where we’re going and can have a say in it, and so it’s easier to determine how new development proposals fit in a comprehensive plan rather than considering them piecemeal.
I also love the newly approved downtown streetscape plan. As we grow, I would like to see even more budget for sidewalk and greenway connectivity and other pedestrian safety improvements, as well as for historic downtown upfit grants (see below).
4) President Trump is working to ramp up deportations and curtail visas. At the same time, the state legislature has passed laws requiring agencies to cooperate with ICE. What do you think the board of commissioners can or should do to ensure safe, welcoming communities for immigrants in light of these policies?
If I’m in office, our town will be safe and hospitable to all, and our government will not tolerate discrimination, bullying, or abuse of power. Everyone’s presence will be welcome, including those who haven’t been here long, no matter where they came from. The town board hires the police chief, and I’ll make sure we use that leverage to ensure our police force cooperates with federal law enforcement only as far as the law requires, and does not conduct itself in a manner that harasses or intimidates anyone who lives or passes through here, including undocumented immigrants.
5) As climate change leads to more intense rainfall, communities are at greater risk of inland flooding, such as the historic floods in parts of the Triangle this summer. How would you like the board of commissioners to address climate resilience, particularly flooding?
I’m an environmentalist, and that’s why I support housing density. Taken to the logical extreme, if everyone on Earth lived in one tall tower, the rest of the planet would be largely untouched green space and water. In other words, the best way to protect trees and farmland is to build multifamily housing and dense single-family neighborhoods where there is demand (particularly near jobs and amenities and along major transit corridors), rather than suburban sprawl with large lots. The more people we can fit per acre, the more undeveloped land remains to absorb floodwaters and pollution, and the less time people spend on the roads spewing carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, the General Assembly places a lot of limits on what municipalities can do on most fronts, including environmental protection. But this is a very important issue to me, and I’m determined that as we plan for the future, safeguarding our town from the worst projected climate impacts is top of mind.
Wendell has long been recognized as a Tree City USA, and I’d like to take a look at what more we can do to mitigate runoff, prevent flooding, and preserve our tree canopy, within the strictures state law allows. I’d like to limit the size of surface parking lots and the surface area of rooftops, driveways, and other impervious surfaces, and limit how much road mileage and water piping we have to build in order to serve more housing.
I want to do waste management better. Right now each municipality contracts separately with waste management companies, but I think we can combine forces across the region to both reduce cost and incentivize proper recycling and composting in order to minimize how much food waste and recyclable material goes in our landfills, which are quickly reaching capacity. Shipping or incinerating our trash would not only be worse for the environment but more costly to taxpayers.
And I’ll always use my platform to advocate for state and federal policies that push us to a clean energy and clean transportation future instead of lurching backwards like we have been this year. We need a modern state building code that requires the latest international recommendations for storm hardening and energy efficiency, the opposite of what the General Assembly is doing. And we need to modernize how we assess flood risk instead of the outdated FEMA maps that give the impression people just outside a flood zone are at zero risk of ever flooding.
As in every area of life, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As we have seen in hurricane after hurricane in our state, cleaning up and rebuilding is way more expensive than if we prevented and mitigated disaster to begin with.
6) Federal funding cuts this year have hit the Triangle particularly hard, from cancelled grants to layoffs, and local government officials are having to make difficult decisions about what to fund and how. What are your ideas for how the board of commissioners can prioritize competing funding needs, close funding gaps, and balance the financial burden on residents.
The General Assembly has also been on a nearly 15-year project to devolve the funding responsibility for more and more services to the local level, including schools and transportation, and that has put tremendous pressure on property taxes and sales taxes, which are regressive. Meanwhile, they have been flattening and cutting income taxes, which are now also regressive. That means lower-income residents pay an increasingly larger share of their income on various forms of taxes than do the wealthy, and that’s not right.
But for the time being at least, that’s the situation we’re in. There’s no way we can make up for cuts to SNAP and Medicaid with the resources the town has, even with a growing tax base. That isn’t and shouldn’t be our responsibility. The best we can do is to keep in mind that our reason for being elected leaders is to help build a community everyone can call home. Government at its best is all of us collectively making decisions to solve problems we can’t on our own. We need more representative public engagement to help guide our priorities for the long term, not just for the unfortunate short-term situation the federal and state governments have left us with.
No matter the policy environment further up the food chain, it’s important that we continue keeping our tax rate as revenue-neutral as possible after county revaluations in order to minimize the burden on our lowest-income residents and to keep our town competitive for future residents and businesses.
7) Wendell is one of the fastest-growing towns in North Carolina. It’s outgrown its public library and will be getting a new one soon thanks to Wake County’s 2024 library bond. What other amenities, civic infrastructure, or services would you like to see the town add or expand next? How would you work towards those goals if elected?
Other than Level 2 chargers at the new Wake Tech East campus, there are no publicly available electric vehicle charging stations in town, and we have no DC fast chargers. That was one of my first challenges when I bought my EV two years ago, before I was able to install a charger at home. Installing fast chargers on town property creates revenue for the town budget, and working with both commercial and residential developers to install them on their properties attracts more customers and residents and builds the infrastructure we need for the future.
8) As with most places in the Triangle, Wendell is grappling with issues related to affordable housing. How would you like to see the town approach affordability issues over the next few years? Should it promote apartment living, townhomes, duplexes, and/or triplexes? Encourage density in single family housing? What do you believe the town is doing right? What could it do better?
Everyone deserves a quality place to live, and I want Wendell to be a welcoming community where everyone can afford to thrive, truly living up to our “Small Town, Big Charm” motto.
Much of this comes down to supply and demand. The more houses available, the less landlords and sellers can charge. Wendell is one of the few places in Wake County where there is still undeveloped land, and we don’t get a do-over on the land use choices we make now, so we have to get it right. I’m glad people want to settle in our still relatively affordable corner of the world. But many are doing that in part because they’re priced out elsewhere, including me. Part of the reason housing prices are so high in other places is there aren’t enough housing units to meet demand, and I don’t want that to happen here. If we build a wall around our town and pull up the ladder after ourselves, prices are only going to go up, just like they have everywhere else.
We’re doing a good job building more types of housing to provide options for people at more price points, particularly apartments and townhouses, instead of giving in to the suburban sprawl patterns that defined places like Raleigh and Cary in decades past. Unfortunately, builders currently have to seek a special use permit to build anything but a single-family home in most areas of town. I want the next UDO to allow more housing types, denser neighborhoods, ADUs, and multiuse development by right throughout town. Raleigh has done this in recent years, and it has led to the rent cost curve starting to bend down after years of a rapid rise.
The Wake County Housing Authority is facing some budget challenges at the moment, but I’d like to work with the county to redevelop their two public housing developments in town, which were built in the 1970s. This would both provide better quality housing for existing residents as well as more units on the same footprint to accommodate more residents in need.
9) As more people and businesses move to Wendell, how can town leaders ensure the town’s physical infrastructure keeps pace with its growth? Should preserving Wendell’s historic charm and green spaces be a priority, and if so, in what ways can the town balance those priorities with rapid growth?
In many ways, we need the growth to improve our infrastructure, preserve our historic downtown, and expand our parks and recreation facilities. A larger residential and commercial tax base will give us the budget we need to keep our town livable.
A big part of what attracted me to Wendell was its history and character. My house was built in 1941, and the day I toured it, I ate lunch a few blocks away in downtown Wendell. I was struck that there were no chains occupying any of the historic buildings – just local businesses. I knew then that this was a place I wanted to be. The year after moving to Wendell, I was appointed to the town’s Downtown Development citizens advisory committee, where I’ve been a part of recommending upfit grants for new and existing downtown businesses to preserve and renovate those buildings for higher and longer-term uses like coffee shops, entertainment venues, and restaurants, something our citizens consistently note we need more of. I want to grow the town’s budget for these grants so we can activate more of these historic structures and make downtown even more vibrant. A stagnant town means historic properties decay and go underutilized. I’ve seen that happen to too many small towns across America, and I don’t want it to happen here.
There will always be growing pains as our town gets bigger, including traffic. One of the persistent challenges is that the state Department of Transportation controls and maintains a lot of our roads, rather than the town. But the board is doing a good job of long-term planning and making developers pay for road widening and other transportation improvements when they approve development proposals. That includes making them pay for ongoing construction of our multiuse path connecting Wendell Falls to downtown. Town staff always does traffic impact analysis on all new proposals to ensure we aren’t getting too ahead of our skis.
10) If there are other issues you want to discuss, please do so here.
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