Episode 101: Tour of Takeaways '25
The League's Municipal Equation podcast closes out 2025 with a through-line on the year, with takeaways from monthly episodes and their common feature of people working as one to advance all. Since its inception, Municipal Equation has been about idea-sharing and exploration of local government's many interesting stories. We'd like to thank all of our expert guests and you for being such a supportive and responsive audience with great feedback and ideas for future content. Together, we released our 100th episode this year! Municipal Equation is available through your preferred podcast service.
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Transcript
From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns. Welcome to Municipal Equation. I'm Ben Brown with the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and we're closing out quite a year, 2025. You know, our last episode in November sort of landed us in holiday spirit territory with a look at how local governments do the, the shop with a cop program to make sure everybody in the community feels included in holiday activity. And I like the takeaway about the ripple effects from initiatives like that, how it's not just a one and done type of thing. These initiatives we pursue to improve bonds within our community. The ripple effects or you might even say lasting impressions when, for example, you have a program that pairs up police officers with kids from financially disadvantaged families to go shopping together, to get to know one another, you know, creating occasions for officers and the public to interact under good vibes. And that memory, that impression is created. That's really what the takeaway was for me. And I thought we'd look back at some other takeaway highlights from the year on the podcast and the conversations we've had to make it about those useful moments here to see what we've accumulated. We We start off the year looking at what was obviously the biggest and most urgent issue at the time for North Carolina, and that was the recovery from hurricane Helene, the storm that devastated Western North Carolina unprecedented. It happened in late September of twenty twenty four. And And in the early part of 2025, we were still very much pulling together for relief. And really at the end of 2025, we still are in a lot of ways. Going back to the start of this year, here's Don Campbell. He's the chief of staff for NC Emergency Management. It's a state agency. The first time I had the opportunity to be in front of this group was in November, and we still very much were in the response phase in many of your communities.
We were still working through water shortages and water challenges and power challenges and being able to receive and get access into all of the parts of the community. We still have a long ways to go, but we have made significant
progress since that time we first met in November. And here's Matt Calabria from Grow NC. That's the governor's recovery office for Western North Carolina. Obviously,
most importantly, we lost 105, North Carolinians to the storm. But in addition to that, we've seen 74,000 homes damaged, 5,000 miles of state maintained roads, impacted, and so on. You all know because you all see the tremendous, damage and destruction wrought by the storm. And our office of state budget management has estimated that the total damages, have, added up to about $60,000,000,000
in damage. And from the same event, Zeb Smathers, he's the mayor of Canton, North Carolina out west. We get lost in the political back and forth. We get lost in the numbers and the ups and downs. But how great is it to still live in a region and a state? And what we have seen time and time again, east to west, is the people in our emergency management services across the board run into danger. And as long as we have the character and tenacity and grit of people in this state like that time and time again, the days are long. The challenges are great,
but we're going to make it. We'd like to thank everybody endlessly who worked in this recovery effort and all the different agencies and people we saw come together to work toward the best outcomes. On that note of teamwork and collaboration, in March, we did an episode that put municipal leadership in a global context, working together globally. Talking with Leonardo Williams, he's the mayor of Durham, who at the time had recently been selected for the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. You know, it's amazing how borders can easily disappear with resources.
I sat at the table, with Oleg Polivinski. He was on my left. Michael Bloomberg was on my right. And Oleg created a two way technology using cell phones and Apple watches. Oleg lives in Ukraine. Well, Michael Bloomberg flew him to Mexico City to have dinner with us. So who also was at that table was the mayor of Lusaka, Zambia, the mayor of Acura, Acura Ghana, you know, Oleg himself, Michael Bloomberg himself, the mayor of Birmingham, Montgomery, yeah, Montgomery, Alabama, Steven Reed, who's the president of the African American mayor's association. And there are some other business folks, but we're just sitting there and we're looking at each other and we're all talking and we are sharing culture. We're sharing ideas, how we are addressing different issues in our communities and you realize that we aren't so different after all. Really being able to collaborate around the world, you'll see some parts of the world are much further ahead than you are, and some are not. You know? And and being together, we get to share those ideas of where we are.
In April of this year, we looked at another angle on awareness and togetherness and collaboration and putting your resources together when we talked about the concept of continuity of operations. What happens if something unexpected happens and slams your resources and your abilities to communicate, for example, as a government? What happens to a local government from something like, say, Hurricane Helene? How do you ensure continuity of operations? We talked with Bill Hollingshead. He's the executive director of the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. He's the former police chief for Waynesville, North Carolina, one of those hard hit areas in late twenty twenty four.
What we did is come back and look at our coupes, our contingency of operations plans, and say, okay. You know, we can't plan for just what we've experienced in the past. We've got to look and say, worst case scenario, we've got to have a contingency of operation plan that identifies things that we may not have thought of before, like lack of communications, lack of running water, clean water, lack of fuel. It was a long time. You think, well, we've got generators, but if you don't have fuel for those generators, how are you gonna sustain your operations? So it kinda taught us that, not only plan for what we had seen before, but we've got a plan for things that, you know, we've never experienced before. And, again, your Continuance of Operation plan, you've got to plan for the absolute worst and pray for the best.
So developing a plan but how do departments ensure that mission critical functions continue during hurricanes and wildfires and floods and other times we get hit in the mouth?
We depend on each other. There's not an agency in the state of North Carolina that, given a critical incident or a disaster like happened during the lean, is totally self sufficient. We've got to rely on each other. So part of your contingency of operations plans have got to include resources outside your agency or your city as well.
Let's shift a little bit. We're gonna keep this theme of working together, but we're gonna shift a little bit. Really love this episode we did in May with two separate municipalities who found a cool way to pair up and work together to support one another's business scene. These ideas to do something cool and inventive and effective. I'm talking about the city of Sanford, North Carolina, working with the city of Marion, North Carolina. In Marion, NC, they have the GEM program. That's GEM, Growing Entrepreneurs Marion. That's a program they have there. Here's Freddie Kellow, the economic development chief at Marion. She helped to develop the GEM program.
We knew that we needed to grow our own entrepreneurs. If people who love this community wanted to be here, thus came up with growing entrepreneurs, Marion, Jim. And, we developed this program in partnership with the city of Marion, the small business center, the Chamber of Commerce, and Marion Business Association. We had a program that we were doing, but we needed a little hook to get them to come and participate in. We put our heads together and came up with, if they go through the program, they do a business plan, they open a business in the city of Marion that we would offer them a small grant of $5,000. But there were there there were and still are conditions to those grants. They have to, fulfill their part. There has to be commitment. And we also looked at those sectors that appealed to visitors. Number one, food and beverage, retail, and then the third one is entertainment. We didn't have entertainment to start with any kind of, there was a lot of interest in it, so we added that because it is an appeal both to locals and to visitors. And I'm a strong believer if your locals don't love it too, then your visitors won't. So we've gotta have that love, that the community is excited about, and then that excites the visitors. So that's what brought us to this.
And, it's been transformational for Marion. And so Sanford is about a three hour drive from Marion in the central part of the state, but they took note of the GEM program, and they knew it could work in Sanford. And they made the moves to make it happen there and saw success from it with business energy boosting in Sanford. Here's Susan Gomez, Sanford's Chamber of Commerce director. Just from
speaking to Freddie and, Mayor Little, like, they just opened their doors, said, this is what we do. And if you wanna replicate it, please do. And thankfully Sanford and its partners said, yes, we need this to revitalize downtown. And it has been an amazing program. It's flourished downtown. I mean, we and it started too. If you think about when it started, it started in 2020. So we all know 2020 was a really tough year. Things weren't opening. If anything, we were shut down and closing. But out of that first class, the initiative to still, you know, push it through and four businesses opened up that are still open till this day. And that says a lot about the program. It says a lot about our community and its resiliency and its and how it supports small small businesses. So since 2020, we just graduated our ninth cohort that just, finished in March. And out of that, without counting the two that'll open up within hopefully a year, if not sooner,
we've had 21 businesses open up. And so Sanford did it in a way that ended up being pretty cool for Marion too. Remember, Marion is in the Western part of the state. They were impacted by hurricane Helene.
Well, to say thanks, Sanford gave back. So we all know about hurricane Helene and how, obviously, the devastation and everything that they've, suffered up there. And we really always, you know, talk about how Ryze really came from GEM. If it weren't for, Marion opened up their arms to those previous directors and saying, yes. This is what we do, and please feel free to expand on it, then we wouldn't have the success stories that we have here. So when everything happened in Western Carolina and we were talking about our RISE program starting again in February, our board, made the motion to donate for the grant that they do up there because, you know, money over there right now is being used to revitalize everything from getting businesses open to having people go back into their homes. So funds, you know, have to go in so many different different directions, And this is one way to help them and one less thing, I guess, to worry about. And then, of course, revitalizing the businesses again in those areas. And so the board voted, and they made the donation to fund their GEM program for this year. So it was wonderful to be able to do that and to really thank them, for what they've done for us because we've definitely, you know, have gained from their expertise. And for them, you know, they did the work. They put this program together. We just kind of renamed it and, you know, did it.
In June, we spoke with Matt Lerman. He's a civic facilitator. He's done some work in the past with the league. Actually, he was a a keynote speaker at a past city vision conference that we did. Part of what he does is help different parties find ways to communicate constructively and use the power of listening instead of rigid disagreement. Lehman has a concept called the idea structure, and I asked him what it was all about and how it applies to municipalities.
I I spent a lot of my time as a facilitator. So I spend more of my time listening than I do speaking. And when I go out and work with cities and towns, one of the questions that I frequently ask is, what's the what are the most important core responsibilities of a city or a town? And the typical first two answers have to do with, public safety and infrastructure. That is, we are responsible for taking care of people, protecting them, and delivering them the services that they rely on. But there's a third one that doesn't get mentioned often enough that I think belongs just up there as part of the top three responsibilities. And it is keeping people engaged in the process, keeping them informed, keeping them connected to what's going on, giving them a voice in the future of their community. So I coined this phrase idea structure. I was looking for something that would match up to infrastructure. So if infrastructure is the durable roadways and sewer lines and perhaps power lines, the things that we build that are gonna serve our community for twenty, fifty years or longer. Well then we also need idea structure. An idea structure is we need to have equally durable ways to involve people in, getting information and participating and contributing to the future of their communities. And those pathways, those avenues have to be just as well planned, just as deeply invested in, and just as perfectly executed as you would expect your trash pickup, your road repairs, and all the maintenance that's required to keep all of those systems going. And in this case, idea structure means that we need to have a process of visioning and of strategic planning, and of outreach, and of inclusion, and of making sure that we're actually hearing voices from throughout the community, and we're not, and here's the worst part, that that people aren't just showing up at a council meeting after months and months or years of of research and review only to show up at the last council meeting where it's going to be voted on and feel like they missed the opportunity, that somehow because the the final vote happened so expeditiously that somehow they thought the the the skids were greased, that the decisions were made in a backroom. They weren't. They were made in public if they were made over a long period of time. And our residents don't often understand that their opportunity for influence and for meaningful input happens at a much earlier stage, And we as as leaders in local government, we have to create the avenues, the idea structure that lets people plug in at a point where it can actually be meaningful for them.
Speaking of structure, in July, we interviewed a town that historically hasn't had a downtown or what you picture in your mind when you think of the word downtown. Morrisville just didn't grow or develop in that specific kind of way. A bona fide city for sure, but didn't grow out of that tight urban core of mixed use and so on, at least not in the way we think of the classic downtown. And so they broke ground to build one, to make a downtown, which I thought deserved a conversation on this podcast. And we talked with TJ Cawley, the mayor of Morrisville. You know, why is this a good project for the the sake of community?
This is, really important to us to have a place, a central gathering space. So the motto of our town is live connected, live well. So this is really gonna help people become connected. We just had our Somoresville event. It was National Somores Day, so we changed the name of the town to S'moresville. Nice. One day, we've been doing that for a number of years. And we actually use a proclamation to actually change the town's name. So whenever we do things like that, we create shared experiences which create shared memories and that strengthens our community. Because when people have things in common, things that they can look back towards and look for up forward to, they look forward to coming together. So my vision for the town center and the town green has always been that on a Saturday morning, you can walk or take your bike on the greenways. We'll have one greenway going up each side of our town center district. So it's gonna be really easy to connect without cars. You go there. You maybe go to the library, get some books, go to a story time with your children and things like that. Then you go over to the green, you hang out. We have multiple play areas around the town green. We'll have some hammocks to hang out in. Then you go ahead and maybe get a coffee in the coffee shop, get a pastry, then go out and play some more, meet some friends, then later on you can have some lunch. There's gonna be lots of different things. We're looking to really program this town green so that there's lots of things going on all the time. It's gonna be right near our new parks and rec department. We're relocating that closer to the downtown. So it's just gonna be a really active space. We've been really lucky. A few years ago, the Western Wake Farmers Market was not able to stay in their space over on further in Cary and Marshall Carpenter Road, more in West Cary. So we were able to work with them, and now they've been the Western Wake Farmers Market in Morrisville for a number of years now. And we've moved them temporarily away from the town center because we have to build the town center. But that is a place that people come every Saturday from eight till twelve for fresh local produce. And then when this town center is ready, we're gonna move them back into the town center. So that's gonna bring even more people every day. Oh, every Saturday. But we want this town center to be something that people go to seven days a week. If you go down any afternoon, Town Hall Drive has lots of people just walking up and down. We have a greenway right there. So it's a very active space already, and we are very fortunate that Wake County gave us a Morrisville community library also, which is a big draw. Hundreds of people go through our library every day, and they'll be able to take their books right over to the green and hang out, meet friends, have some coffee.
Municipal equation this year moved through additional topics that you can find online on whatever podcast service you use. We covered points about electric vehicles and municipal fleets and tried to answer some of the questions that I had heard from municipal officials about the merits of EVs for certain applications in government, episode 95. We also talked more about hurricane Helene as we hit the one year anniversary and looking back on everything we've done to recover and keeping our eyes on what's still needed. We also covered modern city hall dynamics and the meaning of local leadership and its connection to the concept of community in today's times. Then we got to one of the year's most popular episodes, as I hoped it would be, about well, if we're talking about community and government, we're talking about one of the most public facing community facing roles in all of government, and that's the role of clerk, municipal clerk, A job required by law to exist in local government, sometimes the clerk is the only town hall employee and handles virtually everything official there. Thanks to my colleagues here at the League of Municipalities for assuring me this would be a great topic to cover, to interview different municipal clerks to get a better picture of how expansive and how vital their job is to their communities.
The city clerk's position or role is pretty much what anyone will tell you is is more or less mandatory. So you can run a city or or a town with, just a city clerk. That's the major position that you must have as a municipality. So yes, I am the face of city hall sometimes. I do handle and oversee all the official records and I think last check, last year we closed out, we had almost 900 public records requests. 900 public records requests. Yes. All kinds of things. All kinds of things. So record requests, the council has a policy only comes to me, and I review, process, and disperse to the department heads that are affected by the request.
You have to be organized. It's a must. That was Penny Spicer Sidbury, the longtime clerk from the city of Wilmington. And here's Robbie Wagner. He's the clerk from Stokesdale, North Carolina.
It it's it's very rewarding. I mean, it's good to know that you're you're kind of that liaison between the people and council. Although they're they're there for the people too. They can't be everywhere all at once, so they can't be at town hall at all times. And so you're there. So it's good to to be the face of the town hall. Folks come in. They look for you. They ask questions. They know that if they talk to you, you'll get the job done or you at least get it to council. But it's it's super rewarding, especially in a small town. I know that, it can be different larger towns. You feel like a smaller piece of a much larger picture, but even there, it's still you're you're making a difference. And, at a small town like Stokesdale, you know, it's, it's you just you make a difference every day.
And so talking about making a difference and working together, obviously, a running theme throughout these episodes in Municipal Equation. We can bring this episode full circle on the real sincere products of working together, grouping different minds and resources together to see what new ideas and new bonds we can create. Here's David Andress from the Davidson Police Department from our last episode. I just think what he says here kinda sums it up. This is him talking about Shop with a Cop, the event happening right now in Davidson.
Since Shop with a Cop is a non crisis related event, it's a great way for the police to get to know the community, to understand them, to start to build that trust because the next time that police officer could see that child or that adult, it could be on their the worst day of their life. So it's really good to get this relationship started in a non crisis situation. So that level of trust is always the is already there, that they're not fearful to call 911 and ask for our assistance. And that they really it's a two way street of understanding one another, that I think makes it a valuable opportunity in a a way that policing can truly be valued and used in public, for their intended purpose.
Thanks for being with us this year on the podcast. We actually put out our one hundredth episode of Municipal Equation this year. We're grateful for everything you've contributed to it over the years, and we look forward to a great twenty twenty six episodes ahead on public records law and open meetings and other, I think, factually interesting pieces of government conversation that edify us and hopefully help our perspective and sense of confidence in the work that we do for our communities. Visit nclm.org to contact me, nclm.org. That's the website of the North Carolina League of Municipalities. You can find my contact info there in the people directory. My name is Ben Brown. Reach out with feedback, please, or episode topics you wanna suggest. If something's happening in your community that you think would make for a cool episode or if there's an interesting government job, for example, that you think would be an interesting or rewarding focal point for us, I'd love to do more of that kind of thing. Looking at individual jobs within city hall or out in the field. Get up with me. Again, Ben Brown. I'm with the North Carolina League of Municipalities based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Working as one, advancing all. That's our tagline. We will see you in the new year. Have a great and safe holiday break.