The Board of Orange County Commissioners is looking to fill a vacancy on its board for the second time in three years. After the election of its chair to the state legislature, the county took applications from District 2 residents to get a pool of candidates.
Among the five people aiming to replace Renée Price are some familiar faces to those involved with local politics.
Former Orange County School Board member Brenda Stephens entered herself for consideration as “another avenue of service” after leaving the school board last summer. She described herself as “unapologetically a champion for diversity and equity” and said she would approach the role as something “more than a fiduciary gatekeeper.”
Phyllis Portie-Ascott is the current First Vice Chair of the Orange County Democratic Party and part of the Northern Orange NAACP leadership team. A real estate investor, Portie-Ascott said she’s spurred to serve in elected office after seeing how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the community’s “most vulnerable residents.”
The name Horace Johnson II may sound familiar to some Hillsborough residents. He is the son of the former mayor of the town and says he assisted his father’s political career. Johnson applied for the commissioner seat to be a voice for the communities he serves on the Board of Preservation Foundation of Historical Hillsborough.
The two other applicants, Gail Corrado and Natalie Ziemba, each have connections to UNC. Corrado said she helped start the university’s public policy clinic and is a retired lecturer there. Ziemba, meanwhile, was a research assistant at UNC before her current job as an analyst at Duke’s Clinical Research Institute. Among the issues listed, Carrado mentioned wanting to better analyze county logistics and improve capital needs, while Ziemba wrote about her desire for improving funding to re-entry programs and broadband initiatives.
Chair of the Orange County Commissioners Jamezetta Bedford says the group will all have a chance to make a case for themselves over the next few weeks before the board’s next meeting.
“The Orange County Democratic Party has a meeting scheduled at 7 p.m. on January 30,” she said. “They have a program, and I think they’ll be asking developing questions of the applicants so they can recommend any – one to five, however many they want – of the applicants and forward it to the county commissioners. It’s a non-binding recommendation.”
From there, the applicants and the party’s suggestions will be reviewed by the commissioners at their February 7 meeting, which is when the elected officials will hold a vote among themselves for who to select.
“Our plan then,” said Bedford, “[as] we actually discussed at an agenda review, would be to swear in the new commissioner at the February 16 meeting so they can fully participate in the work session.”
In 2022, Price was elected to District 50 of the North Carolina House of Representatives, representing part of Orange County and Caswell County. Because she was re-elected to the Orange County Board of Commissioners in 2020, her seat will have two years left for whoever is appointed in February. The Board of Orange County Commissioners went through a similar appointment process in 2021, replacing Mark Dorosin’s seat after he departed for a new job in Florida.
You can read each of the five full applications to the Orange County Board of Commissioners on the county government’s website.
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