Jake Dalton: Not Vocal but Hard Right. Usually
Dalton, Vice Chair of the Transylvania County Commission, is running for re-election on his conservative record. Yes, he's very conservative, he said, but he's also open to listening to other views.
BREVARD — Vice Chair Jake Dalton is the quiet conservative on the Transylvania County Commission.
Fellow Republican Commissioners Teresa McCall and Larry Chapman have sometimes used their seats as soapboxes for broadcasting views on, for example, skepticism about Covid-19-prevention measures and the need to hold the line on taxes.
Dalton, 52, usually votes with his most conservative colleagues and, on one notable issue, even managed to find room to their right.
In June of 2021, County Manager Jaime Laughter told commissioners about the need to raise fees to fill a gap in the county’s solid-waste fund. Dalton — who is running an incumbent for one of two open seats against two challengers, Republican Emmett Casciato and Democrat Lauren Wise — was alone in advocating the closing the county’s three collection centers, reducing residents’ convenience rather than increasing their costs.
“I’m still living on that island,” he said after the vote.
He doesn’t object to the label “hard right” for the majority of the Commission — or for himself, he added: “You might even say ‘libertarian.’ ”
But he’s not likely to say as much at meetings. Sometimes he doesn’t speak at all before casting votes; other times it’s a sentence or two to clarify his position.
He’s also occasionally shown flexibility in his views, joining the growing consensus among commissioners and candidates that if a tax increase is the only option to pay for a desperately needed new courthouse, he’d have to support it.
And, last year, when unaffiliated Commissioner David Guice urged the Commission to send a letter to the state urging it to expand Medicaid coverage, Dalton was the only Republican to vote with him, saying that he had seen the gaps in healthcare coverage for working residents in his job as an insurance broker.
Wise, the chair of the Transylvania County Planning Board, also said that Dalton, unlike some of the other commissioners, is willing to talk with Wise about his concerns.
“That was when I thought Jake can be talked to,” Wise said of the Medicaid vote, “because he put the welfare of the people before his political agenda.”
Sales Rather than Property Tax?
Dalton, who has lived in the county since he was a child and graduated from Rosman High School and Brevard College, was appointed to the Commission in May of 2020 after the death of former commissioner, Will Cathey, and was elected later that year.
His work on the Commission, he said, is guided by his outside jobs owning and operating two local businesses, a gym in Rosman and an insurance brokerage that also offers financial services.
“I approach (work on the Commission) from a small-business perspective, and that’s why I voted the way I did on the landfill,” he said. “We need to find ways we can cut before we go back and say, ‘John Q. Public, we need some more money.’ ”
There are, however, no options for cutting when it comes to the courthouse, he said.
Peter Knight, the senior resident Superior Court Judge for the district that includes Transylvania, sent an 11-page letter to the Commission last month outlining the long delay in the county’s replacement of the courthouse, as well as the building’s many deficiencies, including leaks, mold and cramped conditions that, for example, offer no space to separate victims of domestic violence from their alleged abusers.
Court facilities are legally required to be “adequate,” Knight also wrote, and the current downtown courthouse is not.
The ominous subtext of the letter, Dalton said, is that the courthouse could be shut down, possibly forcing the county to ship its services outside Transylvania while still facing the costs of replacing the building.
Like his opponents, he does not favor a proposal to build the courthouse in phases to reduce the near-term financial impact, and accepts that a property tax increase of between two to three cents may be necessary to build a new structure, the cost of which is estimated to range between $44 and $57 million.
“We got to,” Dalton said of paying for the courthouse. “We don’t have a choice.”
But he also said the construction may not need to be funded solely by property tax.
He’d like to explore a .25 percent increase in sales taxes allowed by state law. It would require a referendum, he said, and sales taxes are considered regressive by the federal Internal Revenue Service because poor and working families tend to spend higher percentages of their income than wealthier residents, who can devote more to investment.
But Dalton said, in Transylvania’s case, it could shift some of the burden away from residents and place it on free-spending tourists.
“I’m just trying to think outside the box,” he said.
Starting over on School Upgrades
That is also his approach to the most consuming issue the Commission has faced in recent months — funding $68 million in improvements to Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools.
Dalton did, in June, provide the swing vote to support contract amendments needed to move forward with a plan — dramatically scaled back from the original due to rising construction costs — that the School Board had approved months earlier.
But this came with provisions that increased the Commission’s control over the project and capped the cost at the voter-approved amount. And the Commission has not responded to the Board’s vote in August to allow the project’s architect to make further cuts to accommodate continued cost increases.
The Board sent a letter last month to the Commission urging it to take this action, but also provided an alternative path, forming an advisory committee to identify all funding sources for school renovations as well as work that needs to be done throughout the district.
Like Casciato, that’s the approach Dalton favors, he said this week.
“Let’s work together, not just for the two schools but the nine schools” in the district, Dalton said.
He also agrees with Casciato in opposing the multi-use Ecusta Trail, which would connect Hendersonville to Brevard on the path of a former rail bed, and which — advocates say — would promote millions of dollars worth of economic development.
Though Dalton voted with the majority of commissioners earlier this year to send a letter of support for the city of Brevard’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to secure a federal grant to pay for trail construction in Transylvania, he thinks the project could impinge on the property rights of residents whose land is crossed by the trail’s path.
“My wife has family on that corridor, and that 100-foot right-of-way — it’s in their living room,” he said.
A subsidiary of Conserving Carolina now owns the right-of-way, which is indeed about 100 feet wide for most of its length, said Chris Burns, a founding board member of Friends of the Ecusta Trail.
But the path is the same width as it was in its previous life as a railroad bed and Conserving Carolina has sent landowners a letter assuring them that no structures or driveways built in the corridor will be disturbed, Burns said.
And the St. Louis-based Lewis Rice law firm has recently reached an agreement with the federal government to compensate about 200 landowners with a a claim on this corridor, though the amounts have not yet been determined, said Lindsay Brinton, a lawyer with the firm.
“Conserving Carolina and Friends of the Ecusta are more than happy to sit down with any of these folks and have a conversation. Our doors are open; our phone lines are open,” Burns said. “If folks want to stop dealing in conjecture and start dealing in fact, we’re more than happy to have those conversations.”
Dalton is also determined to oppose spending money on either the construction or maintenance of the trail.
“I have maintained and continue to maintain that no county tax dollars will go to the Ecusta Trail. We have millions of acres in federal and state state forest lands within our county already,” he wrote in response to a NewsBeat candidate questionnaire.
Land Planning
Like Casciato — and Wise — Dalton sees the need for land planning on the Rosman Highway corridor now being furnished with water and sewer lines. He agrees this is necessary to ensure some of this land is used for attracting needed industry and affordable and workforce housing.
Wise said the designation of land for specific uses inescapably amounts to zoning. Dalton carefully avoids this term, preferring to call it “high-impact land use.”
Wise also said it is necessary to begin discussions on planning immediately because potential developers will start eyeing that land before the county imposes restrictions to secure land for desired uses.
That interest is there, Dalton acknowledges.
“We’ve already had a lot of contractor inquiries,” he said.
And though he expects discussions on land planning in the corridor to happen “sooner rather than later,” he also acknowledges he has considered few of its details.
“I don’t know what that would look like, to be honest with you,” he said.
One point of agreement among all the candidates: expanding infrastructure is the key to economic development. And this requires working relationships with, for example, the town of Rosman, which is providing utility service along Rosman Highway and will also be the recipient of outside funding the county received for future sewer and water expansions.
But the county’s lack of seamless communication with the School Board has been slammed by Wise, who pointed to the long delays in its action on the bond issue. And Casciato has made improving cooperation between Commission and both the School Board and the city of Brevard a crucial goal of his campaign.
The County, which has no utility system of its own, would likely need to enlist Brevard’s help if it ever wants to extend services along Asheville Highway, which Casciato favors.
Dalton agrees this is a worthy goal and said he also sees the need for increased communication. Yes, he said, he is a hard-line conservative, but he is willing to keep an open mind when talking to more progressive elected officials, such as Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof and Mayor Pro Tem Gary Daniel.
Communication with the city has “absolutely” improved, he said.
“Since Maureen got elected, I’d say over the past year,” he said, he, Laughter and Commission Chair Jason Chappell “have had a monthly meeting with her and (Daniel) and whoever the city manager was at the time.”
The Candidate:
Jake Dalton, 52
Online: none
Education: Associate’s degree, Brevard College. Bachelor’s degree, Lander University, in exercise physiology with minor in gerontology
Career: Owns and operates two businesses in Transylvania County — Dalton Insurance since 1998 and Next Level Fitness since 2016. Holder of four insurance licenses, personal trainer.
Public Service: County Commissioner since 2020. Transylvania Economic Alliance board member and longtime youth sports volunteer and sponsor. Previously served on the Juvenile Crime Prevention Council and is a longtime member of the North Toxaway Baptist Church
Personal: Married, four adult children and two grandchildren.
Community Connection: Resident of Transylvania since 1980; lives in Lake Toxaway with wife, Tanya, a lifelong resident and member of multi-generation Transylvania family.