“People have to know what you stand for. I have been consistent in my campaign…My goal is not to increase the rate of property taxes, and I promise to never vote for a property tax increase.”
– county commissioner-elect Ed Priola
There are many paths to public office. But when it comes to sheer distance, few routes have run up the odometer quite like the one that has led Ed Priola to a seat on Alamance County’s board of commissioners.
A five-year resident of Mebane, Priola had put a fair bit of wear on his treads long before he embarked on his successful bid for the county’s governing board nearly a year ago.
During his life’s journeys, the 70-year-old Republican has visited more than three dozen countries and passed through innumerable locales within the U.S. Along the way, he has obtained two post-graduate degrees, taken part in a successful Presidential campaign, and even rooted around in the innards of a giant inflatable pig.
But more on that later.
To give Priola’s story its due, it’s best to start, not at the beginning, but even earlier – with a nod to the progenitors who gave rise to this quintessentially American personage.
Being largely of Italian and Irish extraction, Priola’s forbearers included a grandfather who sailed over from Sicily as well as a German-Jewish grandmother, who remained sufficiently Jewish despite her later conversion to Catholicism that arguments arose after her death about whether to bury her within 24 hours in keeping with Talmudic tradition.
All this taken together has gone into shaping Priola’s ethnic identity as a “proud Heinz 57 American.” But perhaps the biggest influence on the future commissioner-elect was his father – a Korean War vet whose subsequent career in the Air Force paved the way for his son’s own peripatetic existence.
“I was a military brat. My father was in the Air Force for 27 years, and I was actually born in Topeka, Kansas on Forbes Air Force Base. . . I went to 10 elementary schools and three high schools – all of them public. . . [During time in Italy] I would see Mt. Vesuvius on my way to school.”
– County commissioner-elect Ed Priola
“I was a military brat,” Priola recalled in a recent conversation. “My father was in the Air Force for 27 years, and I was actually born in Topeka, Kansas on Forbes Air Force Base…I went to 10 elementary schools and three high schools – all of them public.”
As the son of an airman, Priola would spend his formative years in some rather far-flung locations. One of the more exotic was an American redoubt deep in the heart of Naples, Italy – from where the adolescent Priola could visit sights that others knew only from textbooks.
“Every morning, I would go through a town called Pozzuoli,” he explained, “and I would see Mt. Vesuvius on my way to school.”
Priola went on to graduate from an American high school in Munich, Germany. Yet, his attainment of adulthood didn’t put an end to his wanderlust.
During the 1970s, Priola got a gig as a roadie for Pink Floyd – whose legendary live performances are famed for their pioneering use of lasers and other visual effects. As fortune would have it, Priola joined the tour just after the band put out its Animals album, which featured an enormous, inflatable pig as an emblematic part of the associated live show. Of course, someone had to be there to make sure that this porcine dirigible was in a fit state to be released over the audience at each stop on the tour.
“And it was my job to crawl through the pig as they filled it with air and patch it with duct tape,” Priola recounted.
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From the band that had planted its flag on “the Dark side of the Moon,” Priola threw his lot in with a political figure who would famously proclaim that it was “morning again in America.”
In 1979, the future commissioner-elect went to work as a field representative for Ronald Reagan’s first successful Presidential campaign. This experience paved the way for a life-long association with the Republican Party as well as various conservative causes, which included stints as a grassroots organizer for the National Taxpayers Union and a group that advocated in favor of term limits.
In 1982, Priola obtained a B.A. in political science from SUNY’s New Paltz campus. He went on to do a brief turn as a legislative clerk in Ulster County, New York. But it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that Priola took his interest in government in an entirely different direction, which ultimately extended his horizons farther than ever before.
In the early 2000s, Priola embarked on a three-month assignment to Romania that evolved into a four-and-a-half year mission to bring American-style democracy to the former Soviet satellite. Priola admits that the language barrier was the least of the challenges he faced in this endeavor.
“My job was to talk to the business people and teach them how to interact with the government, and to teach government people how to interact with businesses,” he said. “Their previous experiences had taught them to view corruption very differently [than Americans]…One question I was repeatedly asked is ‘are we allowed to do that?’”
During his time in Romania, Priola became acquainted with his future wife Larisa, whose command of a half dozen languages has helped ease her now-husband’s subsequent international adventures. These jaunts have included trips to Albania as well as Afghanistan – where Priola has attempted to disseminate democratic and free market values much has he previously did in Romania.
In the midst of his globetrotting, Priola managed to obtain two post graduate degrees. In 2007, he secured his masters in organizational communication from Bowie State University in Maryland. Nine years later, he earned his doctorate in management from Maryland University College – a subsidiary of the University of Maryland. In the meantime, Priola has taught courses of his own, either online or in person, at the University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Purdue University, and Campbell University in North Carolina.
While he was still living in Maryland, Priola embarked on his first electoral campaign for a seat in Maryland’s state legislature. The legislative hopeful acknowledged this bid didn’t end in champagne and streamers.
“I ran in a deep dark blue district in a deep dark blue state,” he conceded. “But I did far better than any of the other Republicans.”
In 2019, Priola left Maryland for good when his wife was accepted into a doctoral program at Duke University. The couple eventually chose to settle in Mebane after six months of research into the various communities within commuting distance of Duke. Within two years of their move, Priola was back on the campaign trail – this time as a candidate in the Republican primary for North Carolina’s state house.
Priola went on to distinguish himself in the GOP’s preliminary for the state’s 63rd house district, where Mebane had been located before its subsequent incorporation into the 64th district. Although he was ultimately edged out by Steve Ross, a former state legislator and one-time Burlington’s mayor, Priola finished a mere 155 votes behind this well-known local politico.
Ross went on to defeat Ricky Hurtado, the 63rd’s Democratic incumbent, when he carried the Republican Party’s banner during the 2022 general election. Yet, Priola was far from discouraged by his loss to the 63rd’s newly-restored state representative.
In fact, the runner up from the GOP’s primary saw two factors that underpinned his impressively strong showing among the rank and file of the Republican party.
“Number one, was getting the message to the right people through the right means,” he recalled. “I had two to three hundred people who had never been asked to volunteer before…and I made 3,000 phone calls myself [during the campaign].
“The other thing,” he added, “is that you need to give people something to vote for.”
Barely a year later, Priola put his strategy to work yet again – this time as a candidate for Alamance County’s board of commissioners. His persistence ultimately paid off in March, when voters in the GOP’s primary gave him top billing among the party’s six contenders, who included two current members of the county’s governing board.
Priola slipped a bit in the rankings during this month’s general election. Yet, he still managed to walk away with one of the board’s three available seats – an outcome he ultimately attributes to his clear anti-tax message throughout the campaign.
“People have to know what you stand for,” he stressed. “I have been consistent in my campaign…My goal is not to increase the rate of property taxes, and I promise to never vote for a property tax increase.”
Now that the campaign is over, Priola is bracing himself for the challenge of living up to the pledges he made as a candidate. The incoming county commissioner believes he can stick to his promise by identifying cost cutting opportunities that will enable the county to function without increasing the existing levy on property.
“The [county’s] administrative costs have gone up 132 percent in 10 years,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense when the growth rate of the population has been 17 to 19 percent in that same period.”
In the meantime, Priola insists that he’ll work for a more open and accountable county government that will operate for the general good of its residents.
“Anybody from any party should be able to agree on good governance,” he added, “and transparency is a big part of that.”
