David Guice's Lonely Pursuit of Support for "Easy" Issues

The moderate county commissioner says the ideology of his hard-right colleagues is blocking progress. They say they are staying true to their constituents and party.

County Commissioner David Guice at his home near Brevard

BREVARD — Transylvania County Commissioner Teresa McCall — as she routinely does after updates about the Covid-19 pandemic — got on her “soapbox” at Monday’s meeting, minimizing the risk of the virus and railing against mandates for masks and vaccines.

Not so routine: Commissioner David Guice pushed back.

He said that his church keeps a “prayer list” of members who are hospitalized with Covid, that the disease has taken the lives of nearly 50 county residents, and that numbers of cases have recently fallen “because we followed certain procedures.”

“I don’t want to argue with my fellow commissioners . . . ” he said, but Covid “is real, and I want folks to know there is a different perspective.”

Guice, 66 — who built a record of bipartisan action as a state representative and who dropped his Republican affiliation in 2019 — has done more of this lately: speaking up on issues that highlight his standing as the lone moderate on a hard-right Commission.

It’s partly happenstance, driven by matters that have recently come before the board — the proposed Ecusta Trail, the Cedar Mountain Small Area Plan, a resolution urging state lawmakers to accept federal funds to expand Medicaid.

But Guice has also pressed his case — by rebutting McCall, by bringing the Medicaid resolution before the Commission, by going to the mat to defend it at the Oct. 11 meeting, and elaborating on his positions in a two-hour interview last week at his spacious home near Brevard.

There’s support for Medicaid expansion in more conservative North Carolina counties, he said. Why not in Transylvania?

The all-Republican Henderson County Commission is firmly behind the Ecusta, which would run from Hendersonvillle to Brevard. Why not his Commission?

Henderson’s commissioners have also long supported land-use planning. Why, he asked, are his colleagues still relying on the outdated “talking point” that planning rules equal property-rights grabs?

“No-brainers,” he called these decisions.

“These are things that ought to come easy to us,” he said. “But we make it so hard.”

A Moderate History

That’s because true conservatives are holding the line, said Commissioner Larry Chapman and Commission Chair Jason Chappell, the two board members who responded to calls about the questions Guice raised.

They were elected as small-government advocates, they said. They make no apologies for, to name one example, their lack of enthusiasm for the Cedar Mountain Plan.

“I ran on personal property rights. And zoning and more regulations impede on peoples’ rights.” Chapman wrote in an email. “There was an old saying that the ‘government that governs least governs best,’ and I support that.”

Guice isn’t totally isolated, Chapman added. “No one is ostracizing him. Some just don’t agree with his positions on some issues.”

And if he does occasionally stand alone, it’s no surprise, given his history.

“Personally, the Guice issue is a non-issue,” Chapman wrote.

That past includes his departure from the party — along with then-commissioners Page Lemel and Mike Hawkins — to protest the direction it was heading under then-President Donald Trump; Lemel and Hawkins were soundly defeated in the 2020 election, leaving Guice, who was elected in 2018 and served two earlier terms as a Republican commissioner, as the board’s only unaffiliated member.

Given the the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol and the “big lie” about the results of the presidential election, he’s more convinced than ever that he made the right decision, he said. But he still sounds amazed that the party has no place for him — a Baptist gun-owner with trophy bucks lining the walls of his home.

“What in the world has happened to the Republican Party that it is not the party I was involved with for so many years?” he asked.

But it’s also true he’s never been a hard-liner — not during his time as a state representative from 2009 to 2012, and not during his 30-year career with the state Department of Corrections, where he rose to a position overseeing adult and juvenile corrections statewide and held high-ranking jobs under both Republican and Democratic governors.

Some of his beliefs were shaped by his earlier work as a probation and parole officer, which gave him a close-up view of offenders' struggles with poverty, substance abuse and/or mental illness.

“It’s difficult for them to get out of bed in the morning, much less make an appointment that’s been set up for them,” he said. “In my experience, most people are looking for a hand up, not a hand out.”

This in turn informed his signature legislation in Raleigh, the 2011 Justice Reinvestment Act. It called for locking up fewer offenders, especially those convicted of minor crimes, placing more of them in supervised release programs, and giving them access to counseling and help in finding jobs and housing.

“We wanted to make sure that person wasn’t leaving prison and sleeping under a bridge,” he said. “People ask, ‘Does that happen?’ Oh yes, brother, it absolutely happens.”

The act helped not just offenders but taxpayers, according to a 2017 state Department of Public Safety report on the law’s impact, which found it had dramatically cut the prison population and saved $277 million in the four years after its signing.

Hawkins said it also earned Guice a lasting reputation as an expert in this field, which he witnessed while serving on a statewide criminal justice task force “made up of judges and district attorneys and law-enforcement people.”

“They just have enormous respect for David,” he said.

Money “Down the Drain”

One of the law’s lessons — that policy can be both fair and cost-efficient — also applies to Medicaid expansion, said Guice and Casey Cooper, CEO of the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority, whom Guice invited to make a presentation to the Commission.

When large numbers of residents are uninsured — and the 20.5 percent rate of uncovered adults in Transylvania is the 13th highest in the state — medical costs are shifted to local institutions such as hospitals and the taxpayer-funded Transylvania County Detention Center.

The jail would save more than $200,000 per year if the state accepted the additional billions in additional Medicaid funding that state residents already pay for.

“Why are we flushing these dollars down the drain and sending them to . . . New York and California?” Lemel asked. “It’s insane.”

But the biggest beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion would be the estimated 2,000 county residents who fall into the so-called “coverage gap.” These are people who earn too little each year to afford plans offered under the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) but more than the rock-bottom income threshold required to qualify for Medicaid — $7,240, for example, for a single mother of one child.

“You know these people,” Cooper told commissioners. Most of them are workers, not freeloaders, he said; they are friends, family members and constituents.

They are the “single mothers out there raising babies,” he said. “They manage to get their babies covered by Medicaid but the mothers themselves are going without coverage.”

The arguments were so strong, Guice said, that he thought the resolution would pass, just as similar measures did in, for example, Graham County, where Trump claimed 80 percent of the vote.

“I thought by bringing the data and the information, it would lead to a civil discussion,” he said.

He was wrong. This issue, more than any other this Commission has considered, threatened to shatter its usual atmosphere of ritual politeness.

The only other commissioner who backed the resolution was Jake Dalton, who said he regularly sees evidence of the coverage gap while running his insurance agency.

The other commissioners were adamantly opposed. Chappell and Chapman both pointed out this is a state issue, not a local one, and said their votes were guided by lawmakers who represent Transylvania.

Chapman said the state is already poised to distribute $30 billion in Medicaid payments to 1.6 million recipients in the next five years, and brought up a report that six states that previously expanded coverage have since rolled it back because “the plan is unsustainable.”

Not true, Guice countered, producing evidence these states had merely passed trigger laws to cut benefits if the plans become too costly — which so far has not been the case. The other objections were based on decade-old talking points, he said, “and they’re wrong.”

Chapman and Chappell doubled down after Guice withdrew his motion, supporting Chapman’s motion that explicitly stated the Commission did not support expansion.

Guice, meanwhile, gave an emotional reading of the original resolution to emphasize all the benefits the majority was failing to support, including the sweeping boost to well-being promised in its opening clause:

“Whereas, the Transylvania County Board of County Commissioner desires to promote the health and general welfare of its citizens . . .”

Ecusta, Planning

The discussions on the Ecusta Trail and the Small Area Plan were less contentious. But that doesn’t mean Guice has any real backing for his positions.

He couldn’t get a second on a motion he made in July, to send a letter supporting the city of Brevard’s application for a federal grant that would pay most of the cost of the Ecusta Trail’s construction.

Other commissioners said they still had too many questions about the impact of the trail, and when representatives from Friends of Ecusta appeared the next month to address their concerns, most commissioners responded with indifference and McCall with hostile questioning.

Guice, on the other hand, thinks the trail is a great idea. It would promote health and economic development, he said last week, and further raise the region’s profile as a tourist destination.

“Look at the connectivity between Henderson County and Transylvania and how people from all over the country can read about the Ecusta and travel to this area and get out on this trail,” he said.

Guice did get a majority to back his motion to delay adoption on the Small Area Plan but commit to discussion at a future meeting.

But Chapman backed it only because the document demanded consideration of “spot zoning,” which the plan advocates, he said.

“We have to consider whether we are willing to spot zone six, eight or 10 communities” that might also want to draw up small area plans, he said.

Because the plan is just a recommendation, said Guice and county staffers, it would not create zoning, just provide a framework for future action if the county wants to pursue it.

And considering the broad support in Cedar Mountain for the document, and the countywide interest in planning that Chapman mentioned, maybe it’s time to do just that, Guice said.

“They call (zoning) the ‘z-word’ and it scares the hell out of people,” he said of other commissioners.

“But don’t call it the z-word, call it planning,” he said, “and we better be serious about planning, my friend, because if you fail to plan you’re going to get behind.”

What’s Next?

If the Commission can’t make progress on these “easy” issues, what can it accomplish?

That’s for all the commissioners to decide, said Chappell, who has the power to choose discussion items, but doesn’t, in the traditional sense, set the agenda.

“Any time any commissioner wants to bring something forward, it’s been placed on the agenda,” he said.

His own priority, he said, “continues to be economic development initiatives and everything that goes into that.” Along with current negotiations on specific proposals, which are not public, he intends to pursue the long-established but often-delayed goal of expanding or replacing the county’s historic courthouse.

In April he challenged commissioners to, “by the end of the calendar year, decide exactly where we want to build a new courthouse.” Though there has been little progress since, he said he plans to bring it up again in November.

Chapman doesn’t expect much to come of this, considering the 22-percent property tax increase, passed in 2019, to pay for the voter-approved $68 million school renovation project.

The “courthouse is not going to be a major issue now,” he wrote. “(We) cannot go back to the well for some time for the (tax increase) needed to build.”

Guice hopes the Commission will begin what he expects to be long and difficult talks about the courthouse. He’s confident that the Cedar Mountain Plan will receive consideration by the Commission — even if he has to force the issue. The Ecusta Trail, he said, has so much momentum that the county will eventually have to step in.

But he’s also frustrated his fellow commissioners haven’t done more, sooner, he said. “They are not willing to think outside the box and make the decisions that will positively impact the community for years to come.”

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