Brevard Finishes "Recruitment Marathon" with Hire of New City Manager

The city of Brevard, after an eight-month search to replace previous manager, Jim Fatland, hires the former town manager of North Wilkesboro

Newly hired Brevard City Manager Wilson Hooper

BREVARD — Over the past eight months, Brevard City Council members have endured a long string of closed-door meetings, brought in roughly a dozen candidates for interviews and hired two interim leaders.

No wonder they clapped loudly when Mayor Maureen Copelof said this at Monday night’s special meeting:

“It’s my pleasure to announce that we now have a permanent city manager.”

Wilson Hooper, 41, who most recently served three years as town manager of North Wilkesboro — about two and a half hours northeast of Brevard — will take over the job on Sept. 19 and earn $140,000, according to the terms of his contract unanimously approved by Council.

The job has been vacant since the Jan. 1 retirement of previous city manager, Jim Fatland. Hooper has a total of 16 years of municipal government service, including nine years as an assistant to the city manager in Charlotte.

And though he resigned from his job in North Wilkesboro in June when he faced a vote not to retain him, a town commissioner there praised him as hardworking, transparent and detail-oriented.

“I loved Wilson as town manager,” said Commissioner Angela Day. “I thought he did a great job.”

Brevard Council members said Hooper stood out in the interview process as thoughtful and articulate. Council member Mac Morrow said he was particularly impressed at Hooper’s experience working at both a big city and a small town. And, after her announcement, Copelof said, “I think he will be the perfect city manager for our wonderful city of Brevard.”

Hooper, in his comments to Council, returned the praise to the city, which, he said, “is already a gem for the state of North Carolina and the whole Appalachian region.”

He sees his job, he said, as helping to “polish some of the edges here and there.”

A Brevard press release announcing his hiring cited his work creating fiscal policy in North Wilkesboro, developing an ordinance to protect aging structures in town and updating its industrial incentives program.

Once the building ordinance was passed, Hooper said in a brief interview after the vote, “code enforcement officers could come in and say to that absentee property owner, ‘Your roof is falling in and it’s taking your wall with it, and if you don’t do anything were going to put a lien on your building.’ ”

“That’s a significant extension of police power in a small town where there’s a suspicion of government . . . the fact that we were able to build community buy-in and pass such an ordinance in that kind of environment is something I’m proud of,” he said.

Another project that Day mentioned, the town’s building of a new water tower, came out of his work to “resurrect (North Wilkesboro’s) moribund capital investment program,” Hooper said. The project, which was initiated shortly before his 2019 arrival in the city, he said, “was the first significant capital improvement they had made in years.”

Hooper also provided support for the NC Tech Paths program designed to train and attract computer workers, Day said. She said he was the kind of employee who would work through his lunch hour, eating at his desk, and the results included turning around the city’s finances.

“He increased our fund balance significantly,” Day said. “As a matter of fact, when our interim manager came on board he was amazed at how well he had done.”

If there was a valid criticism of Hooper, she said, it was that he spent too much time at his desk and not enough in downtown stores or talking to residents. But she also pointed out that he started his job there shortly before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made such face-to-face interactions difficult.

Hooper told Council he has already taken time to get to know Brevard, spending the weekend here with his wife and their two young children. He also took a “windshield tour” of the city with Copelof before Monday’s meeting, she said. She explained some of the challenges he faces here, she said, including the construction of the multi-use Estatoe and Ecusta trails, the updating and combination of Brevard’s planning rules and attracting badly needed affordable housing.

Several other Wilkesboro commissioners did not return messages seeking comment on Hooper, though one of them, Andrew Palmer, responded to a Facebook message by calling Hooper “a smart guy.”

“I enjoyed getting to know him while he was in North Wilkesboro,” wrote Palmer, who did not answer a follow-up question. “I wish him and his family the best.”

Most of the other candidates for the job the council interviewed had also resigned or been fired from previous positions, which is common among top public administrators, said Council member Geraldine Dinkins.

“I look at them kind of like college football coaches,” she said. “When politics change, people often want to get rid of the city manager. I understood that and didn’t hold it against any of the candidates.”

Hooper called the high turnover among municipal managers an “occupational hazard” and said he suspects some of the commissioners were adjusting to the town manager form of government, which is relatively new to North Wilkesboro.

Day wanted to offer him a new contract, and allowing him to leave was a mistake, she said. “The other three were the bad guys and to be honest I still hold ill will against them.”

Dinkins also repeated an earlier message about the search process — that Brevard should learn from the comments of the “very sophisticated” candidates who came to Brevard for interviews and spent time touring city facilities and talking to employees.

For example, she said, some of them raised the possibility of tougher stances with developers, including the ones behind the planned City Camper Hotel in downtown Brevard. They also asked questions such as “why is the wastewater treatment plant so antiquated and what do we plan to do about it? Some candidates had some concerns about some department heads and the organization as a whole,” she said.

“One thing I learned in this recruitment marathon are (issues) that will need to be addressed,” she said.

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com