Samuel Croom is new to his job as Bladen County manager, but his familiarity with the county runs deep.
While growing up in Lenoir County, Croom regularly visited Bladen County with his mother, who was raised in Bladenboro.
Croom has two bachelor’s degrees: one in political science from East Carolina University and the other in accounting from North Carolina Wesleyan College. He earned a master’s degree in accounting from Liberty University and a master’s in public administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Croom most recently worked in Pitt County, where started as a tax administrator and became deputy county manager in 2022. He previously worked as a tax administrator in Jones County and a collection manager for Wayne County.
The Bladen County Board of Commissioners hired Croom on Sept. 8, and he started work immediately. Commission Chairman Charles Ray Peterson had been serving as interim county manager since Greg Martin retired from the role last year.
The Border Belt Independent spoke to Croom about his ideas and goals in Bladen County.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Bladen County has tried to position itself as a tourist attraction, especially with the Browns Creek Nature Park and Bike Trail and White Lake. What role do you see tourism playing in the county’s future?
To me, it’s a large part of what Bladen County is. Bladen County is the third largest county in the state of North Carolina. It’s blessed with a lot of natural beauty, whether that’s lakes, trails or just green space that allows you to go out and actually enjoy nature. As people look to vacation or get away from their lives, whether that’s the city or even other rural parts that don’t have the lakes and the trails that we have here, that is one of the things that people look for.
I know back in Lenoir County, a lot of people that I grew up with came to White Lake during the summer months, just for the week’s vacation. So it’s one of the destination places.
When they come here and they eat at some of our local restaurants, or if they go visit one of our vineyards, then they will have another reason, another destination, another tourist place they can come to on the weekends or during the summer months.
Going back to the beauty that God has placed here in Bladen County, there’s the best stuff in both worlds. You’ve got great beauty, and you’ve got great people. And you don’t find that every day throughout other communities, especially when green space is so limited because of all the development that has happened in other counties throughout North Carolina.
Tensions between Bladen County and Elizabethtown have hindered progress of a mixed-use community at the Elizabethtown Industrial Park. What’s the status of the project?
I don’t know all the details of everything that’s happened before I got here, but one thing in life is you cannot focus on the past. The past is history. You cannot change that.
The whole thing that we can do is move forward to build a relationship. Hopefully, that’s what we can do over the next few weeks and months. Hopefully I can build relationships here and we actually promote Bladen County and Elizabethtown into the community and put a spotlight on all the good things that are happening.
Bladen County has a budget of $53.4 million this fiscal year, a 14% decrease from last year. What led to the drop?
Some of that is money that the county received from the American Rescue Plan [during the COVID-19 pandemic]. So that was one-time money that came from the federal government. And so now it’s back to strictly county dollars.
The county’s social services department will see an additional $596,000 this year, bringing its total budget to $10.9 million. Why the big increase, and what role does the foster care system play in the increase?
I would have to go back and look at the specifics of why it’s increased. But foster care has been getting more and more expensive each year, just with the inflation that you see that’s going on in the country. Our county budgets are not immune to that inflation.
I’m looking more at the process and how efficient we can run Bladen County to save as much of this money as possible. At the end of the day, a lot of the cost that we are absorbing is because of inflation. Things are just much more expensive now, which I’m sure is nothing new to readers because it’s the same thing that they’re seeing.
Bladen County is poised to grow its population in the coming years, according to forecasts by the N.C. Office of State Budget and Management. What does the county need to support more people, including more school-age children and young adults?
Part of our economic growth in Bladen County is to look at housing. What is the housing market doing inside Bladen County? We’ve also seen some natural growth happening in the northwestern part of our county, going back up toward Cumberland County.
We’re also seeing some revitalization of our towns. You can look at Bladenboro, all the new things being built there. That is a result of people moving into Bladen County or wanting to see that atmosphere of community development like Bladenboro. You can see it in downtown Elizabethtown.
As people move into Bladen County, we’ll have to take a look each year at what the board’s priorities as far as educational budgets, library budgets, anything that we can do to help young citizens exceed and do better for themselves and also for their families.
More than 100 Marines were in Bladen County over the summer for the Kelly Dike Rehabilitation Project. What did they do and why? What else is the county doing to prevent future flooding?
The Marines came in and they roughly did about a mile of a 14-mile dike. That was a project that we worked with the federal government for, and so we’re working to see if we can get them to come back to do more of that 14-mile stretch. And roughly about 10 miles of that is in Bladen County, and then I think about four miles inside Pender County.
We’ll also look at anything that we can do with the Army Corps of Engineers, to see if there’s anything that they can do. But what the Marine Corps does is put a dike in such a way to put it in condition where the Army Corps of Engineers will actually accept their work and then maintain that dike.
