Lawhon again speaks out for more diversity on boards

Published 9:26 pm Tuesday, June 18, 2019

For the second time in a little over a week, County Commissioner Bill Lawhon made a point to other commissioners to express the need for different people to serve on county boards.

This time, he spoke up at the end of another budget workshop Tuesday evening.

Lawhon said he thought the consensus among the commissioners during a March meeting was that “we needed to put as many citizens on boards as we could.”

“We need to use as many citizens as possible,” Lawhon added, and “not appoint multiple people to multiple boards.”

Lawhon said it “came as a shock” to him that during last Monday’s commissioner’s meeting, the commissioners approved former commissioners as members of the Stanly Community College Board of Trustees.

“You all made ‘good old boy’ appointments tonight,” he told his fellow commissioners during the Monday meeting after they passed a 4-3 vote to add former commissioners Joseph Burleson and Gerald Efird as members of the Stanly Community College Board of Trustees.

“We need to involve as many different people as possible, and not just be nominating our friends and buddies,” Lawhon said during the meeting.

“Evidently I was dreaming,” he said during Tuesday’s workshop, “because I thought that was the consensus from the commissioners.”

Other commissioners said that while they didn’t remember the specific March meeting, they remembered conversations on the topic with individual commissioners.

Though Commissioner Tommy Jordan brought up the idea of creating a rule limiting people to being able to serve on only one board, it gained little traction and the commissioners ultimately moved on to another topic.

About Chris Miller

Chris Miller has been with the SNAP since January 2019. He is a graduate of NC State and received his Master's in Journalism from the University of Maryland. He previously wrote for the Capital News Service in Annapolis, where many of his stories on immigration and culture were published in national papers via the AP wire.

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