It would have been easy to confuse Monday night’s meeting of the Bladen County Board of Commissioners with a church service.
Board Chair Cameron McGill was up out of his seat, walking around the front of the packed courtroom in Elizabethtown, much like he does as pastor of his church in White Lake. However, instead of a sermon, he explained why he proposed to shrink the board from nine members to five last month.
It was made purely as a means to cut the county’s budget, McGill told the crowd that overflowed into the courthouse’s second-floor hallway. Bladen is one of only four counties in North Carolina governed by nine commissioners. The others—Mecklenburg, Pitt, and Guilford—boast populations significantly larger than Bladen’s over 29,600 residents.
The proposal drew criticism from the North Carolina NAACP, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and Ophelia Munn-Goins, one of three Black commissioners, over concerns it would limit the power of Black voters.
After telling Monday’s crowd of mostly Black residents “that there’s not a racist bone” in his body, McGill asked the board to drop the proposal and for residents to forget it was ever made. It’s now a “dead issue,” McGill told the Border Belt Independent on Tuesday.
McGill said he “never considered the racial implications or dynamics” of his proposal. He said he understands why people were hurt, but was disappointed that people jumped to assume the proposal had racist intentions.
“I’ll do what God leads me to do the best I can,” McGill told the crowd. “Half of y’all are going to walk out of here tonight saying, ‘You know, that white boy ain’t all bad.’”
The Proposal
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s concern stemmed in part from Commissioner Charles Ray Peterson’s suggestion that the county governing board be reduced to five county-wide seats during the board’s May discussion of the proposal.
It’s a board structure Bladen County had until a settlement in a 1987 lawsuit led it to its current mix of nine district and at-large seats. The lawsuit was brought by six Black county voters who alleged that the at-large seats and staggered terms diluted the minority voters’ strength and prevented Black voters from electing representatives of their choice.
McGill never suggested a specific board makeup during his proposal, instead stating it would be determined by lawyers and state legislators. If it had gone through, he told the Border Belt Independent that it likely would have resulted in only two of the proposed five seats being at-large.
Commissioner Ray Britt emphasized in the Monday meeting that McGill took full blame for the proposal. His comments came after several commissioners, including Vice Chair David R. Gooden, Danny Ellis, and Ray Peterson, indicated they approved of the proposal when it was made.
McGill told the Border Belt Independent he regrets bringing up the measure. He said it jeopardized the over two and a half decades of trust he’s built in Bladen County. He said he’s fielding calls and emails branding him, his wife, and his church as racists for purposefully trying to suppress Black voters.
“I wish they could see me out in the community,” McGill said, recalling stories of fixing up and driving old cars with his African American friends, and African American children at his church, jumping into his arms after service.
“I get it, they’re hurt, and there’s generations of pain, and all of that,” he said. “I get that, and I’m sympathetic to that, but anything that I had intended was in no way, shape, or form racially motivated or party motivated.”
Timing
In comments to the board, Hilary Klein, senior counsel for voting rights with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said the timing of McGill’s proposal was “concerning.”
It came three weeks and a day after the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. The 6-3 ruling struck down the state’s voting map, saying lawmakers improperly considered race when they created a majority Black district. Critics argue the ruling weakens the federal Voting Rights Act and limits the power of nonwhite voters.
“It was highly unusual for the county to make a change without any apparent need at this time,” Klein said. “It really did look like some members of the board perhaps wanted to weaponize the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais to hurt the voters in this county, and specifically to hurt its Black and African American voters.”
Local governments taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s decision was a major concern of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Klein told the Border Belt Independent. If the board had implemented the proposal, she said, it would have likely been tied up in lawsuits. That’s because of a decision made last week by an Alabama district court that blocked the state from using a congressional map that was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”
Michael Cogdell, a former two-term Bladen County Commissioner, said after the meeting that he believes McGill, one of six Republicans on the board, was “following along with what he’s seen with redistricting.”
Last year, Republicans in the N.C. General Assembly redrew federal maps to give the party an additional seat in the 1st Congressional District. It was among eight state legislatures that have recommended and made changes to district maps after President Donald Trump called to fast-track what is normally a once-a-decade process to hold his party’s razor-thin majority in Congress after the midterm elections.
McGill told the Border Belt Independent he “doesn’t think of things from a political standpoint of what is beneficial” and has a “naive grasp of the political machine.”
Cogdell said McGill was unprepared for how residents would mobilize against the proposal. He said he was the one who alerted the North Carolina NAACP and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice to McGill’s measure to help drum up opposition against it.
“We declared war, and that’s what they just ran into,” Cogdell said of the crowd, many of whom attended a board meeting for the first time. “He backed out of the war.”
However, McGill said in his remarks that “the timing was purely, wholly, 100% budget.” The board is in the final stages of determining its financial spending plan, and took public comments on it during the meeting. No public comments were made.
Last year, the county cut its budget by 14%, froze hiring, and still had to use $1.1 million from its capital reserves to balance it. This year, the Bladen County school board asked for an additional $2.1 million to cover increased costs and gaps in federal and state funding.
McGill told the crowd the county could have saved $75,000 per year in commissioner salaries if the board had shrunk to five members.
“I don’t know where we go from here, as far as trying to find someplace else in the budget to cut money,” McGill told the Border Belt Independent on Tuesday. “We have cut, and we have cut, and we have cut, and we have cut. There’s just no more fat, unfortunately.”