Alamance Community College trustees appeared to hit an unexpected snag in the customary annual election of their chairman and vice chairman Monday night.
ACC trustee Steve Carter – who also serves as the vice chairman of Alamance County’s board of commissioners – told his fellow trustees Monday night that the trustees’ nominating committee, for which he currently serves as chairman, had recently met to discuss the selection of the board’s chairman and vice chairman.
Carter said Monday night that the nominating committee, which includes him along with trustees Jim Butler and Ken Walker, was recommending that the board reelect both their current chairman, Blake Williams, and vice chairman, Julie Scott Emmons, to a third one-year term in the current positions.
The trustees’ nominating committee met for five minutes on June 26 via the online teleconference platform, Zoom, to discuss a slate of officers and agreed to nominate Williams and Emmons to serve an additional one-year term as chairman and vice chairman, according to meeting minutes that the ACC president’s office furnished Tuesday to The Alamance News.
The trustees elected Williams and Emmons as their chairman and vice chairman, respectively, in August 2022, in keeping with a change in state law that took effect in 2018 and requires the trustee boards of North Carolina’s 58 community colleges to elect a chairman and vice chairman at the first meeting of each fiscal year.
Officers’ terms run for one year. ACC’s chairman and vice chairman have generally served two terms, while the college president customarily serves as the secretary to the board.
However, the nominating committee’s recommendation to reelect Williams to a third term garnered an unusual amount of pushback from a board that rarely wavers from full agreement, and unanimous votes, on most issues – such as millions in construction and repair contracts awarded each year based on recommendations from ACC’s president and vice presidents.
There was no discussion Monday night about the nominating committee’s recommendation to reelect Emmons to a third term, though ACC’s trustees have frequently opted to elevate their vice chairman to the chairman’s post after two years.
“Steve, this is a departure from our long history of chairs serving [two terms and then electing a new chairman],” trustee Bill Gomory said in response to the recommendation to reelect Williams as chairman, asking Carter to explain the committee’s reasoning.
“We didn’t know,” Carter conceded. “Nobody on the nominating committee knew there was a tradition of two [one-year] terms.”
Gomory told his fellow trustees that, while he doesn’t support maintaining tradition simply because it’s the way things have always been done, he said, “I believe the board is stronger the more people we are able to have take on that experience.”
“I want to say this has nothing to do with my opinion of whether Gen. Williams has served admirably as chair – he has,” Gomory pointed out, alluding to the fact that Williams retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general.
Gomory, however, said Monday night that he’d researched the board’s officers over the past 20 years and found only two instances in which the trustees had elected their chairman to a third term. “One was a year in which the chair had business entanglements, and I served that term,” he said. “The other was when [former ACC president Dr. Algie Gatewood was hired in 2013.]”
The latest change in leadership – ACC president Dr. Ken Ingle was hired earlier this year to succeed Gatewood, who retired in June 2023 – is “a lot smoother than the last one,” Gomory added.
“I do think it is inappropriate for this tradition [of having chairman serve two terms before a new chairman is elected] to be changed and sprung on the board with [a recommendation],” Gomory admonished.
For his part, Carter countered that committee simply felt it was best to preserve continuity in leadership, referring to the hiring of Ingle, and hiring new people for key positions in ACC’s administration, such as the new vice president of business and finance/chief finance officer, Elizabeth (“Libba”) Thomas, who was hired to replace former CFO Andrea Rollins, who retired last month.
Gomory acknowledged that the trustees’ bylaws include no limits on the number of terms (consecutive or otherwise) that the chairman and vice chairman may serve.
Williams told his fellow trustees that the number of terms chairmen serve varies widely among the state’s 58 community colleges. “Some schools are two, some are five years; some have been 10 years – it all depends on the school,” he said.
ACC trustee Pete Glidewell responded, “When you establish a practice that becomes a precedent, I would also vote negatively on it in order to trigger some sort of discussion [about amending the trustees’ bylaws].”
ACC board attorney, Frank Longest, Jr., advised that the trustees could continue their discussion until their next meeting.
“Somebody would have to make a motion to discuss it,” Longest told the board Monday night. The trustees would need to vote “up or down” to approve a motion to resume their discussion about the election of a chairman and vice chairman and then open the floor for nominations, he explained.
“Anytime you don’t have an election of a replacement, the person who is in office continues to be in office,” Longest told the board.
The trustees’ subsequently voted 11-0 to continue their discussion until their next meeting on Monday, September 9.
Butler (who also serves as Burlington’s mayor) was absent from the trustees’ meeting Monday night.
