Mia Burroughs announced at Tuesday night’s Board of County Commissioners meeting that she will not be seeking re-election in 2018.
Burroughs holds one of the three seats up for election next year after being elected to the board in 2014. Burroughs was a member of the Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools Board of Education before being elected as a commissioner.
Burroughs posted a message on Facebook saying that it was time to “share the riches” and that others are “as passionate as I am about the well being of Orange County residents, particularly our youth and those living with extra challenges, so I have chosen to leave the door open for others to serve.” In addition to her role as a commissioner, Burroughs works full-time as a senior advisor for Ipas – a global non-profit working to “ensure that women and girls have improved access to and use of safe abortion and contraceptive care,” according to its website.
“There came a time where I decided that having, essentially, two jobs was more jobs than I needed,” Burroughs said in an interview Wednesday morning. “I have loved serving the county. I have grown so much. I have learned so much. I feel like maybe I have made a little bit of a difference on some issues. But it’s time for other people to step up.”
Burroughs said this decision does not mean she will be working on issues any less over her final year on the board.
“As we go through this year, my focus will always be on, as they say, ‘the least of these,'” Burroughs said, “our residents that have extra challenges that we don’t all have. That will be where I will be keeping my focus over this last year.”
Burroughs said that she arrived at this decision before voting on the Durham-Orange Light Rail transit proposal, which came before the board for a major vote earlier this year.
“I did not want politics to influence what I felt would be the most important decision I would make as an elected official,” Burroughs said. “I felt like it actually might be the most important decision that commissioners would make for decades because of the very large financial commitment of our transit dollars.
“I had been leaning in this direction, but I thought, you know what, I’m going to remove politics completely from that decision making, even subconsciously.”
Burroughs said that making that decision before the light rail vote – which she ultimately voted to approve moving forward – allowed her to feel confident in her vote.
“It’s not so much that I was worried about it coming up in the [2018] election,” Burroughs said in Wednesday’s interview. “The human mind is amazing for rationalizing. And so I just felt like if I removed that, then I would trust that all my decision making was based on my best judgement of what was right for our community.”
The biggest issues that commissioners will tackle, Burroughs said, after she leaves the board include finding ways to fund major development needs in the county.
“There are more needs, primarily in the area actually of infrastructure in our much older schools and other county facilities that absolutely need to be upgraded, and we have limited dollars,” Burroughs said. “We need to keep promoting economic development so that we can increase the revenues into the county but not counting on residential property tax increases to do that, if at all possible.”
Burroughs represents District 1, southern Orange County, on the board. Other seats up for election next year are one at-large seat, currently held by Barry Jacobs, and one seat representing northern Orange County in District 2, currently held by Earl McKee. McKee said in a phone call with WCHL that it was his intention to seek re-election in 2018 and that a formal announcement would likely come after the holidays.
Jacobs has not announced intentions heading into next year’s election cycle.
“We have a lot of excellent people in this county who can do great things as public servants, elected or not elected,” Burroughs said. “And I’ll just encourage people to, when they look at candidates, look at people who are ethical, thoughtful and aren’t particularly political. That they’re people who can make decisions and not so much worry about the next election. So that’s what I’ll be looking for.”
Filing for commissioner seats up for election in 2018 is set for February. The board is currently made up entirely of Democrats and the 2016 primary was more competitive than the November general election.
Jamezetta Bedford announced on Wednesday morning that she would be running for election to Burroughs’ District 1 seat. Bedford, a former CHCCS board member, ran unsuccessfully attempting to unseat one of two district incumbents in 2016.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines