Adam Searing, candidate for Chapel Hill mayor
Chapel Hill voters will elect a new mayor and four Town Council members this year, potentially charting a different course for the town’s future growth.
Adam Searing and Jessica Anderson, two council members with a history of quarreling over town issues and decisions, are running to replace Mayor Pam Hemminger, who declined to seek a fifth term leading the town.
Anderson’s council seat, along with three other council seats, is on the November ballot.
Council member Amy Ryan is the only incumbent council member seeking re-election. Council members Michael Parker and Tai Huynh declined another run and will leave their seats in December.
Ryan is running alongside nine others: Melissa McCullough, Renuka Soll, David Adams, Elizabeth Sharp, Breckany Eckhardt, Jeffrey Hoagland, Erik Valera, Theodore Nollert and Jon Mitchell.
Adams, Soll, Sharp and Eckhardt are running as a bloc that backs Searing’s vision for the town. Searing would remain on the council until December 2025 if he loses the mayoral race.
Early voting in the nonpartisan Nov. 7 election starts Oct. 19 and runs through Nov. 4..
To find polling places and full details on early voting, visit co.orange.nc.us/1720/Elections or contact the Board of Elections at 919-245-2350 or vote@orangecountync.gov.
Name: Adam Searing
Age: 56
Occupation: Public interest attorney, professor
Education: Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz; JD, UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law, Master of Public Health, UNC-Chapel Hill School of Public Health
Political or civic experience: I’ve been a public interest attorney and health advocate for over 30 years. My work has meant millions of people in our country have finally gotten decent, affordable health care. I helped pass both the N.C. Children’s Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act. After my election to the Chapel Hill Town Council two years ago, I have worked with residents on issues from bringing Duke Energy to the table to fix a neighborhood’s power problems to being a strong voice for parks and green space.
Campaign website: adam4chapelhill.com
What do you think the town’s top three priorities should be? Choose one and describe how you will work to address it.
▪ Listen to the residents of Chapel Hill
▪ Clean up the budget
▪ Focus on building a modern college town
Let’s not become another generic urban municipality of luxury apartments and office buildings. We can balance healthy growth with other needs — fostering local character, ensuring quality parks/green spaces, and tackling housing affordability in innovative ways like turbocharging our partnership with UNC to build real affordable housing options for staff, faculty and students. We can join with other UNC System towns like Boone, Asheville and Greensboro and combine forces in Raleigh for a group funding proposal to create a new UNC System housing construction commitment across the state.
What do you think the town is doing right to create more affordable housing? What would you do if elected?
I voted for our new comprehensive affordable housing plan just a few weeks ago. Over the last year, I also voted for $9 million in new taxpayer funding for multiple affordable projects with hundreds of new units across town, from Habitat for Humanity’s Weaver’s Grove to our new development at Trinity Court near Umstead Park and downtown. I also voted to streamline our affordable housing development process to make projects easier to build. Going forward we need to encourage more partners to help our efforts like the St Paul’s AME plan for a large senior and affordable housing project, getting more state and federal funding, and turbocharging our housing partnerships with UNC.
Do you support keeping Orange County’s rural buffer, where the lack of water and sewer limits growth? How do you see the town growing with or without the buffer?
Yes. The rural buffer has been a successful part of our land-use planning and discouraged sprawl. Much of the rural buffer is, by design, not public land and has become home not to farms or parks, but has been turned into residential use. While this does prevent sprawl, it also presents challenges to us in Chapel Hill as some people point to the rural buffer as a sort of public green space and park. The vast majority of the rural buffer is, of course, not a park or public green space — and so the existence of the buffer should not be used as a reason to eliminate the need for residents of Chapel Hill to create their own new parks and open spaces, especially to redress historic inequities.
Would you consider a tax increase to pay for rising costs and delayed public projects? If not, what specific changes to the town’s budget would you support?
This year we passed a 10% increase in our property taxes. This is on top of Chapel Hill residents — as part of Orange County — paying the highest average county property taxes in NC and the Southeastern U.S. Despite this, Chapel Hill cannot afford to even build a new police station to replace our substandard, deteriorating facility. Let’s stop our current practice of paying $2 million to $5 million a year for expensive consulting firms to create plans that sit on a shelf and shift that money to finally building things like the splash pad and more in our 2013 parks plan, while also laying the groundwork for critical new infrastructure, like our police and fire stations.
How can the town bring people together who have different viewpoints to find workable solutions?
▪ Listen respectfully, consider other views, and then respond. Currently we often discount, belittle and ignore those who disagree with us. I believe all residents deserve to be listened to with respect and equal treatment.
▪ Recognize “Do as I say, not as I do” is a terrible practice for elected officials. When a controversial rezoning proposal is passed where the majority of the council members themselves are exempt, this creates distrust.
▪ Give residents faith the town won’t spend millions of dollars creating unworkable plans, but will actually start building the infrastructure we need. Tangible results create more faith that a future process will work to produce good outcomes.
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