Granville Co. hires longtime Durham official as county manager

Sep. 10—OXFORD — Granville County's present and potential has long been on the radar of its new county manager, Drew Cummings, who's taking the reins as of Oct. 17 after a long stint as a senior administrator for Durham County.

Cummings will replace former County Manager Mike Felts, who stepped down on July 31 after serving about nine years as manager.

The manager-designate, who's a Michigan native, came to North Carolina in the early 2000s and has worked for Durham County since 2008. He said his awareness of Granville County's potential dates from a trip up U.S. 15 soon after he arrived in the state.

Following the highway brought Cummings to Oxford, and he remembers "saying 'What is this place, this is cool.' " Friendships have brought him back many times since to socialize and for hunting trips, while work has fostered relationships with officials in communities like Butner.

Granville County is "in a pretty interesting spot, being on the northern, pushing edge of the Triangle with real estate and other opportunities," said Cummings, who added that the chance to replace Felts for him was "the right opportunity at the right time."

Elected officials moved quickly to fill the vacancy after Felts announced this spring that he was leaving to go to work for the N.C. Association of County Commissioners. Granville Commissioners Chairman Tony Cozart said he and his colleagues were unanimous in their selection of Cummings, who came "with outstanding references," training and experience.

The new manager's starting salary is $170,000, county spokesman Terry Hobgood said.

Cummings "has shown throughout his career that he is a person who has committed himself to getting results," Cozart said. "His longevity with Durham County shows that he is willing to ingrain himself in a community and weather a few storms while moving towards a long-range vision of success."

During his time in Durham, Cummings worked directly for three county managers, mostly under former managers Mike Ruffin and Wendell Davis. The third manager, Kimberly Sowell, took over this March.

Under Ruffin, who was in office until early 2014, Cummings served mainly as an assistant manager for special projects, a job that made him Ruffin's chief troubleshooter in areas that didn't fall neatly under the umbrella of a particular department.

In that role, he helped orchestrate an effort to secure public water service for homeowners and businesses in Rougemont, a crossroads community in the far north of Durham County that was having problems with contaminated well water. The solution required working with state and federal officials to secure grants for a system that draws from a pair of clean wells.

Another prominent initiative was the replacement of the Durham Convention Center's operator, a hotelier that Durham county and city administrators thought wasn't marketing the jointly owned facility aggressively enough, leaving taxpayers on the hook for large operating deficits.

The two governments, with Cummings leading the county's team, convinced elected officials to get behind a change and found a new contractor who improved the center's finances.

Davis replaced Ruffin in 2014, and in 2016 Cummings became the manager's chief of staff. But he retained the troubleshooter role, serving as the county's point man on issues like transit, affordable housing and homelessness.

Ruffin's senior staff has been something of a finishing school for government-management professionals. One of his former assistants, Heidi York, became county manager for Alamance County this summer after a 14-year stint as manager of Person County. Another, Lee Worsley, is executive director of the Triangle J Council of Governments. Davis was an assistant manager for Durham County before he was manager, in between serving as N.C. Central University's vice chancellor for finance.

Cummings said he thinks Granville commissioners considered it a plus that he has experience dealing with some of the issues they see arriving on their community's doorstep.

"The housing pressure in the Triangle is creeping northward," Cummings said. "Some of the commissioners spoke about seeing farmland regularly sold off for new housing developments. I didn't get the sense they thought that was good or bad, particularly. But it's a fast-moving change they want to understand better and perhaps shape if that proves possible."

The commissioners also "want to continue diversifying and expanding" the county's commercial and industrial base, Cummings said, adding that he hopes "I can help with that and bring some good connections and ideas to that work."

He acknowledged that education is likely another issue of concern, one with Granville-specific aspects "I need to learn a lot more about."

Because of continued enrollment losses to charter schools, county commissioners have urged the Granville County Public Schools to go beyond the downsizing it's implemented in the Oxford area and consolidate schools in the southern end of the county too.

But the school board late in 2021 abandoned a prospective merger of South Granville and Granville Central high schools, reversing course after community leaders in Creedmoor weighed in against the idea.

School finance has been a contentious issue in Durham, with Ruffin and Davis both reluctant to support insulating the Durham school system's budget from charter-caused revenue losses. Ruffin had his commissioners' support for that position, but Davis lost it after voters replaced a couple of incumbents. He was slow to adapt, and that ultimately became a major factor in his ouster.

A former middle-school teacher, Cummings said charter and now-subsidized private schools pose "a lot of challenges for traditional public schools," which have to "figure out how to navigate them and compete."

The educational system is "structured such that people can always vote with their feet," he said. "I can't think of a way to deal with that other than by making the local public schools the best and most compelling option" for families to choose.

Contact Ray Gronberg at rgronberg@hendersondispatch.com or by phone at 252-436-2850.

Contact Ray Gronberg at rgronberg@hendersondispatch.com or by phone at 252-436-2850.