A look at the candidates running for the Buncombe Soil & Water Conservation District board and why it matters

Buncombe County residents will see a number of high-profile elected positions on their ballots when they head to the voting booth this fall, from president to governor to Congress. But one race may leave folks scratching their heads.

Voters will be asked to select Stu Rohrbaugh of Asheville or Blair Thompson of Swannanoa for the position of Buncombe Soil & Water Conservation District supervisor. If you don’t know what a Soil & Water Conservation District is or what a supervisor does, you are not alone.

“Every election cycle we have people voting for our board, and most people tell us they have no idea what they’re voting for,” says Jennifer Harrison, director of the county’s Soil and Water Conservation District.

So here’s a quick primer before you head to the polls.

Why the position matters

Soil and water conservation districts are governmental subdivisions of the state, established and organized under a law passed in 1937. District boundaries follow county lines. North Carolina has 95 single-county districts, including Buncombe, and one multicounty district.

The Buncombe district has a full-time staff, including Harrison, and is overseen by a board of five unpaid supervisors. Two of the supervisors are appointed by the state Soil & Water Conservation Commission, and three are elected by county voters. Of the elected positions, one will be voted to a four-year term this year. That’s the seat Rohrbaugh and Thompson are competing for. The winner will take office in December.

The majority of the work done by the board involves overseeing state funding programs, including the N.C. Agricultural Cost Share Program and the Agricultural Water Resource Assistance Program.

“In overly simplistic terms, the soil and water board of supervisors approves state tax dollars that are being used locally to implement best management practices that are protective of water quality and soil health,” Harrison explains. “Most of our programs are for agriculture: farmers, growers, producers.”

For example, she says, a farmer who wants to build a fence to keep his cows from wading in a stream on his property could apply to the district for funding. “We want cows out of the stream because we’re worried about the water quality impacts from fecal coliform and pathogens,” Harrison says. “That makes it unsafe to drink, unsafe to swim and can kill our aquatic insects fauna and flora.”

Such a project also could involve drilling a well to create a drinking source for the cows and making sure the well isn’t creating erosion problems. If the board approves the project, the farmer will pay for the work and then be compensated for 75% of the costs once the job is complete.

“These projects often have many layers to them, and so our Soil & Water Board of Supervisors looks at all of them and makes sure that we’re thinking about the project holistically and that they are realistic,” Harrison says.  “Once they vote to approve them, the project can move forward, and then the project will come back to the supervisors, and they will make sure it was implemented as designed before they agree to sign off on the payment to the landowner.”

Supervisors also:

• Oversee educational programs, including Envirothon, an annual competition in which middle and high school teams compete by demonstrating their knowledge of environmental science and natural resource management.
• Manage the William Hamilton Memorial Scholarship, which awards $1,000 annually to a Buncombe County student attending or planning to attend an accredited college or university in a conservation, agriculture or other natural resource-related program.
• Hold conservation easements for property under the county’s Farmland Preservation Program, which encourages the voluntary preservation of farms and forestland from development.

“We want to make sure that we have people in these positions that are making good decisions so that we all have the best chance at protecting our natural resources,” Harrison says. “Often people think, ‘I don’t care anything about agriculture, I’m an investment banker.’ But you don’t have to know anything about agriculture to know that you want clean water, you want clean air, you want to try to combat climate change. Water doesn’t just stay on that farm, and air quality doesn’t just hover over that farm. It migrates into all of our lives.”

Meet the candidates

Rohrbaugh, 54, and Thompson, 42, are both running for elected office for the first time.

A Hendersonville native, Rohrbaugh recently retired after spending 30 years as a planner for local governments, including the City of Asheville. He thinks his familiarity and experience with land-use planning efforts throughout Buncombe County make him a good fit for the nonpartisan supervisor position.

“All my career, I’ve heard that people want to conserve the land, keep clean water and preserve all the farmland,” he says. “This board is going to be looking for people that want to voluntarily dedicate their land to conservation measures and see that they’re improving their farming practices and how they take care of the soil on their land. I want to work  with individual property owners that are willing to participate in these conservation efforts.”

Thompson is a native of Kansas who has been farm manager at Warren Wilson College since 2020. The Swannanoa school operates a 300-acre working farm on its campus.

“What I’m hoping I bring is an agricultural voice who cares about good land stewardship and farm preservation,” says Thompson, who worked in various agricultural jobs for 15 years before arriving at Warren Wilson. “I have the experience of working with the Soil & Water District in the past and an understanding of what they’re trying to do. Having somebody that has seen how these programs work and why they work or don’t work is pretty useful, especially if we do care about making inroads with farmers seeing that local agriculture we do still have in our region continues and thrives into the future.”