Brownie Newman leaves office on the heels of Helene

When Buncombe County Commission Chair Brownie Newman first walked out of his house that Friday morning after the wind died down, he was hopeful the effects of Tropical Storm Helene wouldn’t be that bad. Sure, there were several trees down along Montford Avenue, but it didn’t seem catastrophic. Then he walked one block over to Pearson Drive.

“Your brain is just like,  ‘I can’t even process this. It doesn’t even look real.’ It was really wild,” Newman remembers about dozens of trees lying across roads and power lines and utility poles smashed to bits.

Despite the carnage in Montford’s tree canopy, it still wasn’t clear to Newman how badly Helene had damaged the community he’s served for 20 years, the last eight as its top local elected official. Like most of Buncombe County, Newman had no power or cell service, and no way to get in touch with other county and city leaders. So he went searching for them.

While atop a hill on the A-B Tech campus, which was identified as a potential emergency operations hub, he caught a glimpse of the French Broad River.

“Seeing the river at that point, which still had not crested … it was clear that this was one of the worst floods, if not the worst flood, that the region had ever experienced, at least in recorded history,” he says.

Next, Newman drove over to Mission Health, where he hoped he’d find enough internet signal to contact other community leaders. There, he managed to get a hold of County Manager Avril Pinder, who told him he was needed at the Emergency Services headquarters on Erwin Hills Road.

After what he describes as a “terrifying” commute across a city with no traffic lights, he was briefed on the status of the City of Asheville’s devastated water system and the damage to major roads in and out of Asheville.

“That’s when it started becoming more clear that we were going to have this major challenge with getting supplies into the region,” he says.

So he called state and local officials to plead for help. He knew WNC was going to need clean water both immediately and for an extended period.

This wasn’t the way Newman thought he’d end his 12 years on the County Commission. But the solar panel manufacturer is confident the county will bounce back. Over two interviews with Xpress recently — before and after Tropical Storm Helene — Newman reflected on his time in office and the legacy he leaves as he retreats from the public eye to focus on his renewable energy work and his family.

Environmental advocate

Long before Newman first ran for City Council in 2001, he was civically engaged as an environmental activist and political science major at Warren Wilson College.

“I really believe in the political process as a way to make social change happen. I just really find the process interesting and really meaningful,” he says.

His passion for renewable energy led him to a career in solar and spurred a second, successful run for City Council in 2003. Once elected to the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners in 2012, Newman extended his mission to improve local environmental policy. Newman helped form the Energy Innovation Task Force in 2016 and pushed for a resolution committing the county to use 100% renewable energy by 2030 for county operations and 2042 for the community at large.

“I believe Buncombe County has done more to make progress on the transition to renewable energy than any other local government in North Carolina, and at the same time, we’re not doing nearly enough,” he acknowledges.

More recently, Newman is proud of the county’s work on affordable housing, which he calls Buncombe’s No. 1 issue.

“We need to really support development of the pipeline of projects to really increase the scale of construction of affordable housing at a much higher level than what we’ve had traditionally. But the exciting thing is that we’re seeing that happen,” he says.

He credits the $40 million general obligation bonds passed by voters in 2022 for jump-starting a program that he says will be responsible for about 800 new deeply affordable units around the county. Newman is particularly proud of the county’s ability to leverage a federal tax credit program to get $3 or $4 of outside investment for every local dollar that is put toward affordable housing projects, greatly increasing the number of available units, he says.

“If we sustain the strategy that we’re now implementing over the next five to 10 years, we will see this issue play out in a much more favorable way than I think any of us would have thought.”

Newman hopes the county will ask the voters to approve another bond in 2026 and establish continued funding for an issue that has only gotten worse after Helene.

“We have ambitious goals and a really effective program in place to increase the construction of affordable housing, and so my hope is that the county will look at some strategies to just further accelerate and ramp those efforts up with a disaster like this hitting our region,” he notes.

Improvements

With a total budget of about $626 million this year, Buncombe County touches a wide range of services relevant to residents’ lives, from schools to courts.

Education represents the largest chunk of county spending — nearly 30% of the general fund budget — and the local supplement for public schools is often the most heated topic during budget season.

Commissioners raised the property tax rate in 2023 to help school districts pay all teachers and staff closer to a living wage, and they were still criticized for not doing enough, Newman notes.

“I hate this process we have for funding schools,” he says. Typically, the county is well into its own budgeting process, and then the school districts bring their budgets near the end of the process, often with “some big number, and everyone gets stressed out,” he notes.

The timing of those requests is often because school districts don’t have clarity from the state on how much funding they will have to work with and thus how much they will need in county funds.

Instead of going through that drama every year, Newman proposes that the county work with the two districts — Asheville City Schools and Buncombe County Schools — to establish a multiyear funding process. He helped get that conversation started last year, and in August, the county held a joint meeting to start that conversation.

Newman has also been vocal in recent years about property tax reform and was instrumental in establishing an ad hoc tax reappraisal committee in 2021 to review the equity of county tax assessments. There have been conflicting reports on that topic, and most recently, an independent consultant found no evidence of bias in the department.

Going forward, Newman suggests the county look into joining other counties to advocate for state-level property tax reform. He’s concerned the property tax burden is shifting too far away from commercial properties and onto residential ones.

Because of Helene, the county has now delayed what was sure to be a consequential revaluation until 2026, originally scheduled to go into effect in January.

Weathering the storm

Newman’s time on the County Commission began with a storm of controversy. Ex-County Manager Wanda Greene was found guilty of embezzling thousands of public dollars, accepting bribes and kickbacks and falsifying her federal tax return, leading to deep distrust of the county government.

It took years for leaders to earn back residents’ trust, and Newman counts the rebuilding of the county’s leadership team as one of the commission’s greatest successes during his tenure.

He credits Greene’s replacement, Pinder, for establishing a new senior leadership team that has worked to establish the community’s trust over the last seven years.

Now, as Newman returns to private life, he leaves a county dealing with another storm, this one literal. In a way, he says he’ll miss playing an active role in helping Buncombe County bounce back from one of the worst natural disasters in its history.

“The next year is going to be a very consequential one for the city and county, for sure. So I think the decisions made over the coming months will play a large role in what the community looks like five, 10, 20 years in the future. So part of me will probably miss being more involved in those in an elected official capacity,” he notes.

But he insists he’s confident city and county leaders will do everything necessary for short- and long-term recovery.

“We’re in this moment where the community has vast needs, and the county will want to do everything we can to support them,” despite facing what is sure to be major losses in revenue from property and sales taxes due to the storm.

From home repair to helping area businesses survive while they rebuild, the county, with the help of state and federal assistance, will be involved.

After 12 years helping guide Buncombe out of a corruption scandal, Newman says he’s leaving the county well positioned to lead its residents out of this crisis.