County Manager’s “Rock Star” Status Gives Her Power. Critics Question Its Use.
After 10 years on the job, County Manager Jaime Laughter has become known for her hard work and expertise. But too often, critics say, she uses these qualities to obscure county deficiencies.
BREVARD — The words from Transylvania County Manager Jamie Laughter have stuck with former Schools Finance Director Gabi Juba for nearly two years.
The scene was a County Commission meeting in March of 2023. Laughter had just finished a presentation pushing back on Juba’s assertion that the county had shortchanged the district on sales tax revenue legally required to pay for school upgrades.
Juba confronted Laughter during a break, saying she had incorrectly included money from another source to make up for the sales-tax funding gap.
“I said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” Juba recalled, which is when Laughter delivered her memorable response:
“ ‘I can do what I want.’ ”
No matter how that comment was intended, and Laughter declined to offer clarification, it can’t be true in the broadest sense. She, like every other county manager in the state, answers to commissioners, carrying out policies they set.
But it is true that after a decade on the job, Laughter has acquired a level of security and autonomy few other managers enjoy. If she’s not the most powerful person in Transylvania, she’s become so synonymous with its most powerful government body that her first name is often used interchangeably with “the county.”
She may also be Transylvania’s most polarizing figure.
To her many backers, there’s good reason to give her leeway.
She’s “off-the-scale smart,” they say, recognized across North Carolina as a “rock star” in her field, devoted to her job, her community and the mastery of a remarkably wide range of public policy. Commissioners, in lockstep on this matter as in so many others, routinely praise her as the “best county manager in the state.”
That was never clearer than in the weeks after the arrival of Tropical Storm Helene, when she worked backbreaking hours coordinating emergency services and corralling resources to set the county on the path to long-term recovery.
It impressed even her harshest detractors, all of whom acknowledge her smarts and energy. But too often, they say, these qualities are used to provide political cover for her Commission.
This takes the form of nonexistent or obscure personal communication, sometimes misleading and harshly critical presentations in Commission meetings and rosy accounts of the county’s activities during the last election season that seemed intended to boost the campaigns of the four incumbent commissioners.
Polarizing implies only two distinct views, however, and in Laughter’s case a third has emerged, that of a manager who has recently helped secure crucial agreements with long-time adversaries, the city of Brevard and Transylvania County Schools, who worked with and on behalf of a range of nonprofits after the storm and who has become more engaged in the Brevard-Transylvania Housing Coalition's community-wide push to boost affordable housing.
Shelly Webb, the executive director of the Sharing House ministry, was one of several Coalition members who criticized the county for neglecting this issue in August.
Since then, she said, Laughter has attended Coalition meetings and shared information.
“I'm very pleased at the new efforts to have the county manager at meetings with more transparency,” Webb said. “I feel like there's the start of a better trust with one another.”
The Pioneer
Newspaper story about Laughter’s hiring as a 26-year-old town manager of Mills River
A look back at Laughter’s career shows that other laudatory labels could apply. She’s definitely a pioneer in a field dominated by middle-aged men and maybe even a prodigy.
Though Laughter declined to be interviewed or answer emails for this story, extensive details about her background were included in published reports about her 2014 hiring in Transylvania.
She was raised in a family so well established in Henderson County that, in the words of Bill Moss, editor and publisher of the Hendersonville Lightning newspaper, “they came up the French Broad River on the Mayflower.”
Her father, one story noted, was a longtime county employee who retired as the head of code enforcement and building inspections.
These roots no doubt helped her adapt quickly after being hired in 2006 as town manager of Mills River, Moss said. But so did her education, including a masters degree in public administration from North Carolina State University, as well as her early experience working for the fast-growing town of Cary and the state Department of Transportation.
“I don’t think it would have felt like, ‘Oh, you threw me into the cold water in the deep end,’ ” said Moss, who remembers Laughter as a confident and widely respected manager when he began covering the town in 2012.
“She would have, I think — because she is very quick on the uptake — very soon become fairly expert.”
Certainly that was her regional reputation, said former Transylvania County Commissioner Page Lemel, who voted to hire Laughter in 2014, when she became the county’s youngest-ever manager at age 34, the first woman in that role and one of only eight female county managers in North Carolina, according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.
“I had elected officials in the region tell me, ‘This girl, she’s up and coming. This is who you want,’ ” Lemel said.
“She was very young at the time, but it was, ‘Hey, she’s highly intelligent, unbelievably organized and, you know, really diligent and thorough in her work ethic,’ ” Lemel said, and “she already had eight years experience as a manager, which is pretty incredible.”
Both Lemel and then-Commission Chair Mike Hawkins said their decision to hire her was quickly validated.
With Lemel’s encouragement, Laughter produced a 2015 study identifying the crucial need for expanded child care and became a statewide leader in advocating for that cause.
She also quickly got to work helping to create the Sylvan Valley Industrial Center, financed by grant money and proceeds from tenants’ lease payments.
“That was so creative,” Lemel said. “It was a model for how small communities could fund economic development activities.”
Another example of her farsightedness — in an especially complicated and heavily-regulated arena — was the creation of a long-term expansion plan for the county landfill, Hawkins said.
More recent advancements on her watch include the approval of the plan for bond sales to pay for $90 million in school upgrades over the next five years, the expansion of broadband internet and utility services and the receipt of nearly $50 million in local grant funding since 2020.
None of the current commissioners agreed to comment for this story, but Hawkins said Laughter should be judged not just on high-profile accomplishments but on her day-to-day management of an operation with a dozen disparate functions and an annual budget of $76 million.
“She came in and didn’t miss a beat,” he said. “She did it as a strong leader, but also a fair leader and a leader who had the respect of the people she was working with.”
Misrepresentation and Manipulation?
Former County Schools Finance Director Gabi Juba, who described her frustration with Laughter’s communications
But Laughter’s tenure has been defined both by challenges the county has met and the ones it hasn’t:
Addressing the dire shortage of affordable housing, replacing the decrepit county courthouse and, until recently, providing enough funds to prevent public school buildings from falling into what is routinely described as a “shameful” state of disrepair.
It is on this perennially fraught subject of school financing that critics have most directly challenged Laughter’s accuracy and transparency.
She has never fully explained what happened to the $3.3 million in state-mandated sales-tax revenue the Schools didn’t receive over a three-year period in the early 2020s, said Juba, who now works in the private sector as a certified public accountant.
Juba hasn’t been able to find this information in county budgets or audits, and Laughter hasn’t released an admittedly exhaustive list of public documents Juba requested in July to resolve her concerns.
When the county asked for a total of about $600,000 to expand its NC Pre-K classrooms last spring, Laughter responded with a presentation saying that such an expansion wasn’t economically feasible because of a mandate in the state constitution. If the program was made available to some preschool children in Transylvania, she said, it would have to be made available to all — at an additional annual cost of $13.5 million.
This interpretation was disputed not only by then-School Board Chair Kimsey Jackson, but by a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government, who said she knew of no such mandate.
“Counties are not required to fund Pre-K programs,” wrote the professor, Kara Millonzi, widely acknowledged as the state’s leading expert on government finance law. “It is up to the county commissioners to determine whether to fund and at what level.”
In May, Laughter accused Schools of “double dipping,” either seeking money from the county for the same project twice or for projects funded by outside sources.
Yes, the district mistakenly sent some duplicate invoices, Juba said, but she was able to produce documents addressing Laughter’s biggest concern, about a $1 million request for HVAC systems, and could have done so before the presentation with a quick email exchange.
Then there was the now-infamous dispute over the $1.2 million prefabricated wrestling gym at Brevard High School.
Laughter said at the July 8 Commission meeting that this and three other recreation projects were included in a School Board-approved list of work to be funded by initial sale of about $50 million worth of bonds.
Former School Board member Alice Wellborn, a vocal county critic, appeared at the next meeting to call Laughter’s presentation “the worst kind of misrepresentation and manipulation.”
The Board’s list included a note next to the line item for the gym saying “remove altogether.” And Laughter, Wellborn said, neglected to mention the district had placed the project on its list only because Laughter had asked for its inclusion so the county could seek more bond funds.
Though Wellborn’s statement was backed by emails from School Superintendent Lisa Fletcher, Commissioner Larry Chapman responded by calling it an example of residents who “throw bombs” in meetings based on “hearsay.”
“We have the best damn county manager in the state of North Carolina and the one with the most integrity,” he said to applause from some members of the audience.
Commissioner Teresa McCall went further, suggesting that such comments be censored.
“I will say that if someone, from this point forward, gets up and starts attacking specifically the county manager,” she said, “they need to be told to sit down.”
“Campaign Manager”
Slide from one of Laughter’s capital improvement updates that were delivered monthly during the recent election season
All of which gets to critics’ larger complaint about Laughter. Her messaging is highly orchestrated and often politically advantageous to commissioners, who seldom ask a challenging question or cast an opposing vote, who brook no dissent.
Former School Board member and Democratic County Commission candidate Bryan O’Neill has described her communications as “obscure, opaque (and) misleading.”
Providing monthly “capital updates” about school projects and explanatory presentations on topics such as affordable housing would seem to align with a manager’s duty to advise and inform elected leaders, said Carl Stenberg, a School of Government professor who has written extensively on the role of local government managers.
But they also happened to address commissioners’ biggest political vulnerabilities during a heated election, said Sam Edney, the chair of Transylvania County Democratic Party.
“My view is that she was the best campaign manager they could have possibly had,” he said, referring to the Republican incumbents. “I mean, she obviously spent hours and hours, if not days and days, preparing all those presentations that defended their positions on the hot topics.”
Then there’s the frustration encountered when seeking information outside of meetings.
County staffers sometimes ignored Juba’s emails, she said, and when Laughter responded, “I found a lot of her answers to be really long and convoluted, and most of the time they wouldn't even answer the questions that were being asked.”
Karen Gleasman, a member of the Housing Coalition, filed a public records request for the county’s application for the $2 million affordable housing grant the county received from Dogwood Health Trust in 2021.
After following up “two or three times, I was finally told they do not save the applications and therefore could not provide it,” Gleasman said.
Laughter has not directly responded to any informal request for comment or clarification from NewsBeat since June. A request sent last spring for recent emails between her and Fletcher remains unfilled. A county staffer didn’t provide easily available information about the annual salaries of three high-level employees, including Laughter’s $192,000, for nearly two weeks.
An email to Laughter asking about this pattern and her handling of other residents’ queries was answered by Commission Chair Jason Chappell.
The county responds to all public records requests, he wrote, some of which require time-consuming review to avoid the release of legally restricted content.
He also seconded a point Laughter has made publicly. The county displays vast amounts of public information on its website, including the minutes and videos of its meetings. Those documents, Chappell wrote, “do not have to be released again etc. and will not be.”
Pate McMichael, the director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University, reviewed both the county website and emailed requests from NewsBeat and other sources.
While he didn’t spot any obvious violations of the state’s public records laws, he said, “I’m seeing kind of an unclear system” that can “put people awash in information and not necessarily make them any wiser about what’s going on.”
What would be healthier, he said, is clear access and open dialogue, a point seconded by Hawkins, a longtime Republican commissioner defeated when running for re-election as an unaffiliated candidate in 2020.
Several residents who complained privately about Laughter’s messaging declined to go on the record for this story for fear of reprisal from the Commission.
Hawkins has noticed a similar reticence.
“I think there are community leaders who are very hesitant to challenge county actions, because they feel like in the long run, it would be counterproductive,” he said, “and that’s not good for anybody involved. It’s not good for those people. It’s not good for the county leadership.”
A New Spirit?
But it might have been good for the incumbents’ campaigns, judging by their decisive victories in this year’s election. And, because elected officials are the source of any manager’s job security, also good for Laughter.
Her time on the job already easily exceeds the average tenure of local government managers — about six years, according to the International City/County Management Association.
According to a 2023 statewide salary survey from the School of Government, the $150,000 she made at the time was less than half that paid to managers of North Carolina’s largest counties.
Laughter could probably work at one of them if she chose to, said Jeff Brewer, chair of the Transylvania County Republican Party.
“I’m a big fan,” he said. “I think we’re lucky to have her and I just worry that some bigger county could come along and steal her, because she obviously has the ability to do things at a high level.”
In other words, Laughter’s not going anywhere unless she wants to, meaning community leaders are left to hope for improved cooperation.
That has certainly happened with Schools.
She has notably avoided harsh criticism of the district in recent discussions of education funding. And last month, she announced a proposed agreement for overseeing bond-funded projects that could bring an end to the two sides’ long history of discord.
And if outsiders wonder what Laughter would do if she really did get to set policy, this might offer the clearest view yet.
Along with Fletcher, it was her doing.
The two of them were granted authority by their boards to negotiate the deal, which would grant the School Board’s wish to hire a full-time manager of bond projects and establish a joint committee of staff and elected leaders from both sides that will meet publicly.
The agreement also calls for the county to assume a previously disputed payment for a capital project and even to resolve questions about sales tax revenue raised by Juba.
There’s also some good news about the county’s compatibility with the city of Brevard, with which it has previously clashed over issues such as the construction of the multi-use Ecusta Trail.
Since the 2021 election of Mayor Maureen Copelof, top staffers and elected leaders from the city and county have met monthly to hash out issues.
They don’t always agree, Copelof said, but they did recently come to a crucial accord on one of the biggest economic development projects in recent local history, the ongoing $55 million expansion of Pisgah Labs.
The city made an exception to its policy of requiring annexation for water and sewer customers, which will mean forgoing property tax revenue from the project for 15 years.
The county will contribute nearly $600,000 to match the grant that will pay to extend city utility lines to BPisgah Labs and agreed to assume responsibility for as much of $800,000 worth of unanticipated charges.
“I do think that we work together well personally,” City Manager Wilson Hooper said of Laughter. “There are still some things that we would like for (county leaders) to come along on that aren't super important to them . . . but by and large I think that the relationship has improved and is on track to improve some more.”
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STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BREVARD NEWSBEAT
