Wake race turns caustic
RALEIGH — Editor’s note: This is the final story on candidates vying for the four seats on the Wake County Board of Commissioners up for election in November.
Call it the Valley of the Pols – Wake County’s District 7 is where the campaign pros are battling it out.
Of the four Board of Commissioners races on the Nov. 2 ballot, only District 7, which covers parts of north and west Raleigh, pits a former commissioner against an incumbent board member. Incumbent Republican Paul Coble and Democratic challenger Jack Nichols both know their way around the maze of old alliances, ad hoc buddy-ships and lurking minefields that make up Wake and state politics.
Having spent nearly 40 years working in politics in different roles, Nichols, a lawyer, served as a Democratic commissioner from 1990 to 1994 and as county Democratic party chairman until recently.Coble, an insurance broker, has worked on the GOP side for decades, serving as a three-term City Council member and as Raleigh’s mayor during a Republican upswing beginning in the 1990s.
Dueling charges of partisanship cast a glare over District 7′s landscape. Each candidate claims the other is behind the party-driven atmosphere. Exchanges betweenCoble and Nichols mirror the sharp partisan divide on the Wake school board before Debra Goldman broke from the Republican majority Oct. 5, when she voted with Democrats to kill a zone-based student assignment plan under development.
“Paul Coble has been the most divisive person in Wake County for the past 25 years,” Nichols said. “You can compare that to my history of consensus-building.”
But wait, Coble says, wasn’t the unseen hand of then-party chairman Nichols behind a failed Democratic ploy in December, when Republican Tony Gurley emerged as chairman of the Board of Commissioners? Coble alleges that Nichols was making mid-meeting cell-phone calls advising Democratic board members to pull parliamentary high jinks such as Betty Lou Ward’s unexcused trip to the bathroom.
No way, Nichols says. Ward has also denied the charge.
“Sometime that afternoon Stan Norwalk called me on one of the breaks, and I advised him to get Harold Webb on the phone,” Nichols said of the ailing commissioner whose absence had created a stalemate on the seven-member board. “It’s a red herring.”
Coble portrays himself as less caught up in partisan politics than Nichols.
“People don’t like insiders, people who play political games,” he said. “Jack has been the chair of the Democratic party. He’s been in the background of things that are very partisan.”
Masters of the school budget
The four commissioner races are voted on countywide. That is, all Wake voters can cast ballots in each of the races no matter where they live.
In a local political climate where most roads seem to lead to the Wake board of education and its string of recent controversies, the election will be examined for any signs that voters expect the commission to encourage or rein in the school board as it strives to remake the 143,000-student system.
“I think the county [commissioner] races are going to be seen as a sort of mandate,” Nichols said. “If the Democrats win big, they will have a mandate. And if the Republicans win big, they will have the mandate.”
Both Coble and Nichols note that commissioners don’t decide school policy, but act as bankers for the school board. But Coble says he is convinced that Wake schools have produced a record of failure and need a significant overhaul.
“It’s time to make changes,” he said. “The frustration I’m hearing is that outside forces are trying to tell us what to do with our schools.”
Nichols says he’s gaining hope that the school board can reach a mutually acceptable “third way” forward for two reasons: the action of two nonprofit groups to bring in a Massachusetts consultant and Republican board member Debra Goldman’s decision to put the brakes on the zone-based assignment plan that was moving toward adoption.
Economic policy views
Coble, a nephew of the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, prides himself on fiscal conservatism, going back to his early membership in the Wake County Taxpayers Association, founded in 1994 to support limited government and lower taxes.
“The Taxpayers Association grew out of a frustration with local government, high taxes and a lack of responsiveness,” Coble said. “You ask anybody about me – I’m a hawk when it comes to spending.”
“You do what’s right for the taxpayers,” he said.
Noting high unemployment in Wake, Nichols argued that he has a stronger record than Coble – whom he called “outspoken, critical and somewhat divisive” – of cooperating with public and private entities to bring about change.
“You need to decide which of those leadership styles suits you best,” Nichols said. “This isn’t anti-Paul Coble, but I think it’d be hard to have a more clear choice than between me and Paul.”
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