Bladen County is one of the just a handful of counties in North Carolina that doesn't have a five-member Board of Commissioners. Bladen's particular government setup, a nine-member board with a mix of at-large and districted seats, stems from a 1980s lawsuit over voter discrimination.
Last month, Bladen County's chairman suggested reducing the size of the board — catching other elected officials off guard and prompting concerned responses from civil rights groups.
Morgan Casey covered the issue for Border Belt Independent, a nonprofit, digital newsroom that focuses on issues and challenges that affect Bladen, Columbus, Robeson, and Scotland counties in southeastern North Carolina. BBI is part of The Assembly's reporting network.
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Benjamin Schachtman: All right, Morgan Casey, a Report for America corps member with the Border Belt Independent. Thanks for joining us.
Morgan Casey: Of course, thanks for having me.
BS: So, let's start with this. What is going on with the Bladen County Board of Commissioners?
MC: Yeah, so the story starts a few weeks ago, actually on May 18, during a regular board meeting of the Bladen County Board of Commissioners. The chair of the board, Cameron McGill, made a proposal to shrink the board from its current makeup of nine commissioners down to five. The proposal came as a surprise to the rest of the board, as it wasn't on the agenda, which McGill, during the meeting, said was to make sure there wasn't too much ‘campaigning’ behind it.
It was proposed as a means to cut the small rural southeastern county's budget. According to McGill, he said the county is one of only four in the entire state of North Board of Commissioners, the rest, Pitt, Guilford, and Mecklenburg, are obviously significantly larger than Bladen County’s about 29,600 residents.
The proposal was met with resistance during the May meeting. Dr. Ophelia Munn-Goins, one of three black county commissioners, said that it could reduce the minority population in Bladen County’s voting power. Bladen County is about 46% non-white, 32% black, specifically. And then after the board meeting, the North Carolina NAACP, as well as the Southern Coalition for Social Justice raised similar concerns during that May meeting. Commissioners agreed to do more research and push the proposal off to their June 1, Monday night meeting.
The proposal also came with a lot of concerns regarding the timing of it, so that May 18 meeting, when this was made by Chairman McGill, was actually three weeks and a day after the Supreme Court handed down its six three ruling in Louisiana versus Callais, which critics argue weakens the federal Voting Rights Act and limits the power of non-voters across the country.
BS: So we've been alluding to this, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about the history of how Bladen County ended up with a nine-member board of commissioners – this dates back to the 80s, as I understand it.
MC: Yes, so Bladen County actually did have a five-seat Board of Commissioners, with each member being elected at large until 1988. That year, the county settled a lawsuit, which was brought by six Black county voters who alleged that that five-member at-large structure, along with how they staggered their terms, diluted minority voting strength in the county and prevented Black voters from electing representatives of their choice. So the current county structure, the nine-member board with three commissioners elected at large and the rest elected through districts actually came out of that settlement and that's the structure that we've had, at least what the structure we had until this proposal was made.
BS: Okay, so flashing forward many, many decades, what happened this week on Monday?
MC: Yeah, so in front of packed courtroom in Elizabethtown, primarily a packed courtroom of Black Bladen County residents – really, so packed that residents were waiting out in the hallway to listen in on the meeting – McGill dropped the proposal. He told me it's a dead issue. He regrets bringing it up. Both during the meeting, and then in conversations with me, he described kind of a loss of decades of trust, literally within like 24 to 48 hours, is what he said, because of this proposal. He told me he's fielding, he and his wife are fielding calls and emails, calling him, his wife, and his church in White Lake racists because of the proposal and the implications that people brought up regarding the possibility that depending on how the board was ultimately shrunken and whether it was going to be at large seats, district seats, they were calling him racist because of those possible racial implications.
I want to emphasize that when McGill made the initial proposal, he never said that it was going to be at-large seats, that it was going to be a five-member at large board, that they were going to go back to that, you know, pre-1988 structure. He said that it would be up to experts and state lawmakers to kind of determine, but he wanted to bring it up, because again he really, really adamantly stated that this was a means to cut the county budget.
He specifically said that by shrinking the board size down to five, they, the county, could save annually about $75,000 in board salaries. And that comes as, last fiscal year, the board cut the county budget by 14%, froze hiring, and still had to use $1.1 million in reserves to balance the budget. This year the school board is asking for $2.1 million in additional funds that the county does need to find, because there's just increasing costs all around, less federal and state funding. You know that's an issue that counties across the board are having to deal with, and that all comes as you know our state legislator is debating capping property taxes for what counties can use, which is, you know, as we all know, a primary means of raising funds for things like education.
So, yeah, I mean, the proposal dropped; the Bladen County Board of Commissioners is not changing again. It's a dead issue, but it really, at least according to McGill, stemmed out of this need for more funding, he specifically said to trim the fat.
Something that really struck me in the conversations I've had with him, as well as the initial proposal he made, was the description that it was hypocritical for the Board of Commissioners every single fiscal year to ask other county departments to cut staff to have staff take on more responsibilities for equal pay, or at least not enough pay to warrant taking on those extra responsibilities – he said it was hypocritical for the board to be asking all of that, and yet not turn that question towards themselves.
All that to say it's a moot point. Now he said they're just going to have to find that 75,000 extra dollars somewhere else, they're going to have to find, you know, that money to fill the board of education's gap somewhere else, but he said that there's not really a whole lot other fat to trim from the county budget, and despite the fact that several commissioners initially back in May said that they would approve, or kind of hinted at some approval of shrinking the board, one commissioner in particular emphasized that this proposal was Chairman McGill's, you know, it was all him. He took the responsibility. He was the only one to defend it, or at least explain why he had initially made it. I don't know whether ‘defend’ it is necessarily the right word. It seemed like the board was eager to make sure that it was that the public knew that it was his Chairman McGill's idea, and not any of theirs.
BS: Well, I'm glad you were there to cover it. And even if it is a moot point or a dead issue, as you say, I still think it speaks to kind of some historical anxieties about our particular political moment right now.
MC: Yeah, it was something that the Southern Coalition for social justice emphasized was one of their fears coming out of the Louisiana v. Callais decision was that local governments were going to use it as an opportunity to redistrict or remake themselves in a way that doesn't fully represent their population again that was never Chairman McGill's thought process behind this, at least according to what he told the public and told me, but that remains a concern for that organization, as well as the North Carolina NAACP, and even some of the residents that I spoke with after the meeting.
BS: Well, again, thank you so much for your reporting, Morgan Casey, Report for America corps reporter with the Border Belt Independent. Thank you so much for your time.
MC: Thanks for having me.
