Editor’s note: This article was reported and written before Tropical Storm Helene.
Buncombe County’s top elected official — the chair of the Board of County Commissioners — is unknown to many residents, while other officeholders like Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer and Sheriff Quentin Miller achieve status closer to becoming a household name.
But the position, for the last eight years held by longtime public servant Brownie Newman, wields power over a larger cache of public funds — $626 million — than both mayor and sheriff. And as one of the few countywide elected positions, winning control of the gavel at 200 College St. takes a broad coalition of support.
This year, the race is shaping up to be hotly contested after Newman — who ran unopposed in 2020 — announced last fall that he was retiring from his 20-year career as an elected official. He previously served on Asheville City Council and as commissioner before becoming chair. Newman has thrown his support behind current commissioner, Democrat Amanda Edwards.
Edwards says she seeks to maintain the commission’s focus on issues ranging from affordable housing to education.
Meanwhile, three-term former Sheriff and Democrat-turned-unaffiliated candidate Van Duncan looks to bring a different perspective to the all-Democratic board, pledging a “commonsense” approach to county budgeting. He said he joined this race at the request of residents and business owners concerned about unchecked spending and a perception that crime was increasing.
There is plenty of support for Duncan, who gathered 8,200 signatures this spring to get on the general ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. As of June 30, he raised about $128,000. He says that number has climbed to about $170,000 as of Sept. 20. By comparison, Edwards had about $28,000 in her campaign coffers at the end of June, a number that she says has grown to more than $65,000 as of Sept. 16. (Third-quarter reports will be available Oct. 29 at avl.mx/azd, according to county spokesperson Kassi Day.
But Edwards is calling out Duncan for taking a $125,000 early retirement incentive from the corruption-riddled ex-County Manager Wanda Greene in 2016. Edwards says the payment brings Duncan’s ethics into question. Duncan insists the payment he took was legal and that he knew nothing of Greene’s improper dealings during his tenure.
The controversy
During Greene’s tenure as county manager, millions in taxpayer money was shuffled into the bank accounts of her family and friends within the county government using insurance or retirement tricks to shield the transactions. (Greene pleaded guilty to several federal charges and served two years in prison.) Duncan insists, and an FBI investigation found, that he knew nothing of her criminal dealings and had a less-than-friendly relationship with the top county government official during much of their overlap at the county.
“For most of my career … we had a very contentious relationship,” he says.
Nonetheless, his acceptance from Greene of an “early retirement incentive” also called a “retention incentive” on the 2016 agreement document with his signature, looks fishy, Edwards contends. The incentive program was designed to retain employees who were otherwise eligible to retire, according to a county explainer on the program from 2017. Before serving as sheriff, Duncan worked as a patrol officer in the Weaverville and Asheville police departments, then as a patrol deputy for the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office in 1998, then rose through the ranks.
Of 10 recipients of the bonus, according to reporting by the Citizen Times in 2017, Duncan is the only elected official who took the payment, which is the bit Edwards points to as most suspect.
“I certainly am not going to speak for anyone’s personal ethics in how they make decisions. What I will tell you is I believe an elected official should not take a retention retirement bonus to complete a term. Elected officials are accountable to the voters, not to the county manager,” she says.
Duncan insists that several lawyers, including County Attorney Michael Frue, say he’s on solid legal ground collecting the bonus. Frue retired in September, says county spokesperson Lillian Govus, and wasn’t available to speak about the incentive program.
Duncan’s term was set to end at the end of 2018, and the incentive, initially designed to be paid out over about three years upon retirement, required that Duncan not retire until at least Nov. 1 of that year. He says he announced he wouldn’t seek reelection and would serve until the end of his term shortly after signing the early retirement incentive paperwork and never viewed the payout as a retention bonus.
Duncan says he supported Edwards and even endorsed her initial run for county commissioner in 2018. Her insinuation that he is “corrupt” has been a “hard pill to swallow,” he admits.
“I think anybody that looks at my time span as sheriff, I would hope to think they saw me as a truthful, honest leader,” he says.
As for the issues
As in most elections, the economy is a top issue for voters. In Buncombe, where the cost of living is high for North Carolina, Edwards says she is focused on attracting high-paying jobs and increasing the supply of affordable housing.
She points to county incentives given to local companies like Poppy’s Popcorn looking to grow and add well-paying jobs in the area.
As for affordable housing, Edwards is buoyant about the county’s recent success leveraging general obligation bond funds passed by voters in 2022 to increase housing stock. The county has allocated $30 million of the $40 million in bond funds, including mixed-use projects on Ferry Road and Coxe Avenue on county-owned land.
“That’s the kind of investment that it will take to make sure that we are doing our part on housing,” she says.
While Newman has offered full-throated support for another round of bonds for affordable housing, neither candidate running to replace him has done so.
“Right now I am in favor of monitoring and ensuring the effective oversight of those bonds, [ensuring] they are creating the promised housing before we start conversations about the next housing bond,” Edwards says.
Duncan, meanwhile, is adamantly opposed to the idea.
“Absolutely not. Absolutely not another [general obligation] bond for affordable housing.”
He argues that asking taxpayers to shoulder another $40 million bond a couple years after taxes have gone up would be too much to ask.
“I think people are struggling right now. I couldn’t understand how they wouldn’t be. I think it’s been way harder on everybody, even for those of us that I would consider middle class,” he says.
Education funding
Part of the reason taxes have gone up in each of the last two budget cycles is because of dire funding requests from the county’s two public school districts.
Edwards, who is executive director of the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College Foundation, doesn’t hold back in pointing directly to the N.C. General Assembly in Raleigh when asked about education funding.
“County commissions are having to step up to fill gaps for what the General Assembly refuses to fund, so taxpayers are paying taxes in North Carolina that are supposed to fund public education, and yet our local property tax is also having to fund public education,” she says.
Duncan, like Edwards, supports ensuring teachers are making a living wage but suggested that the school districts could make better use of their funds.
“You can’t tell me, with a $440 million [general fund] budget that we can’t make some cuts, and when the commission kind of tightens down, I think we have to ask the schools without hurting our teachers and hurting teachers salaries,” he says.
Edwards says working with districts earlier in the budget cycle may ease the pain of their requests late in the fiscal year and said the county has taken the lead in hosting those talks, pointing to a joint meeting in August.
“We’re working much more closely with our school boards … so that our two school districts have a [better] understanding of how our funding and our budgeting process works,” she says.
Public safety
For Duncan, issues surrounding public safety were a big reason he jumped in the race.
After some businesses complained in 2023 about increased vagrancy and break-ins to their businesses in downtown Asheville, a citizens group known as the Asheville Coalition for Public Safety asked Duncan to run for commission chair, he says.
He says there are better ways to address the increased presence of homelessness in some areas of Asheville, including using the Buncombe County Jail’s Annex building to temporarily house those with nowhere else to go.
He also supports current Sheriff Miller’s co-responder program, which includes mental health professionals when responding to crimes, but Duncan argues that sometimes jail is the best answer.
“I think the commissioners working to identify and support mental health partners in doing what they do is an excellent answer, but there is a certain part of the population that commits crime; they can be dangerous. Mental health is not the driving issue,” he says.
Edwards says she has supported the co-responder program from its inception and thinks it’s vital to “send the right trained professional to the call.”
Political backing
While Duncan ran for chair on public safety issues, Edwards became commissioner in 2018 because of the county’s corruption issues during the Wanda Greene era.
“I ran for County Commission in 2018 to restore trust and accountability to Buncombe County government. It was the corruption, the fraud, the scandal involving county staff and elected officials that propelled me to run for office,” she says.
Duncan represents a different segment of Buncombe County. He has received donations from many local Republicans, including former U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor and Mathew Burril, a former congressional candidate for North Carolina’s 11th District.
He insists that he has not tacked to the right, as some recent media reports have portrayed, but rather the world has changed around him. Edwards doesn’t buy that argument.
“I’m not surprised that my opponent is receiving donations, particularly from members of our local Republican Party. And I think it says he is an unaffiliated independent in name only,” she says.
Duncan, meanwhile, would prefer to make the race about taxes and people’s tightening pocketbooks. He seeks to represent those scared of getting priced out of Buncombe County by rising property values.
“I think people are scared. I think they’re worried about the upcoming tax revaluation,” he says.
Editor’s note: At its Oct. 15 regular meeting, the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted 7-0 to delay the 2025 tax reappraisal deadline by a year to Jan. 1, 2026, to give the county more time to assess property damage from Tropical Storm Helene.
“Unaffiliated” Duncan… he can even be honest about his political affiliation. Just plain pathetic.