Ray Russell Questionnaire Responses 2026 General

1. Please share your overall professional and personal background and explain why you are running for seat on the Watauga County Board of Commissioners.

Watauga County has been home to my family for 35 years. We raised our children here, built our careers here, and put down roots. Like a lot of people, we didn’t choose Watauga County because it was easy or trendy. We chose it because community still mattered here. It felt like home.

Most of my career has been about public service and solving problems. I spent three decades as a computer science professor at Appalachian State University, including years as department chair. That meant working with students, faculty, and administrators to build programs, manage budgets, and make things work better. In 2000, I founded RaysWeather.com. It grew into the most widely read local media outlet in northwest North Carolina because we focused on accuracy, public safety and trust. That work taught me what it means to serve a community every day, adjust when conditions change, and earn credibility by getting it right.

I was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives in 2018, and I later served on the Watauga County Board of Commissioners from 2022 to 2024. I took both jobs seriously. I focused on constituent service, careful policy work and budgets that reflect real priorities. I worked on the issues that shape people’s daily lives: affordable housing, childcare, public schools, public safety, workforce stability, healthcare access and open government. I did my homework and came prepared, because public trust depends on competence as much as good intentions.

Before I ran for office, I completed the 12-week program at the NC Institute for Political Leadership, now the NC Institute of Public Leadership. It was intense. We studied how state, county, municipal and court systems work, North Carolina’s political history, fiscal and cultural issues, how to understand people who see things differently, and what campaigning and serving are really like. It was invaluable.

In 2022, Governor Cooper appointed me to the State Board of Community Colleges. I came away with a detailed understanding of our community college system, which I believe is the most important economic driver in North Carolina. I chaired the board’s Governance Committee for almost a year, and in 2023 I served on the search committee that chose a new system president.

I’m running now because Watauga County is at a turning point. Too many people who work here, including teachers, healthcare workers, first responders and service workers, are being priced out of the county they serve. Families are stretched by housing costs and the shortage of childcare. Our schools and public services are under growing strain. And outside economic and political pressures are reshaping this community faster than many residents realize.

People are fed up with ineffective government at every level. They see it in rising costs and worsening traffic here at home. They see it in Raleigh, where politicians can’t pass a reasonable budget in a reasonable time. And they see it in Washington, from the Reflecting Pool, to the killing of citizens in the streets by federal agents, to the decision to enter the Iran War. More and more, people believe they’re being left out of decisions, that the breaks go to the rich and well-connected, and that politicians are on the take.

So what can a county do in the middle of all this distrust? We can give people honest, fair, competent government that makes our community stronger in hard times. My goals are simple. I will listen to the people I represent, respect and value everyone, and serve with honor and integrity, always focused on making life better for the people of Watauga County. I won’t duck hard problems, and I won’t just tell voters what they want to hear.

My campaign’s theme is No Place Like Home. I mean that literally. When people can’t afford to live where they work, when families can’t find childcare, when public services wear down, the idea of home starts to slip away. I’m running to bring experience, judgment and steady leadership back to the County Commission, so Watauga County stays a place where people can stay, belong and build a future.

A complete professional biography with my education, public service and work experience is attached.

2. Candidates for County Commissioner seats this year are running to represent specific voter districts. How do you plan to bring a different and important perspective to the County Commission for your district?

I know this district because I’ve walked it. I’ve knocked on doors from Poplar Grove Road to Park Crest. Many residents were my colleagues. Some were my students. We’ve lived right here, in this part of Watauga County, for 35 years. I’ve watched new roads go in, the university grow and change, businesses come and go, and tourism take hold. I know the history behind the issues we face today. Our daughters’ friends are now in their 40s, raising children of their own. We’ve known them and their parents since the 1990s.

My wife, Rhonda, taught their children and grandchildren as a Pre-K and Kindergarten teacher in Watauga County Schools. For the past 16 years, she has been a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Child Development, Literacy, and Special Education at App State and Faculty Advisor for the Child Advocacy Club. Every semester, her students come to our house for dinner for an end-of-semester celebration.

During the last nine months, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with District 2 voters, on their doorsteps and at the polls. Some remembered me visiting their schools 10 to 20 years ago. Last March, one man opened his door and said, “Where in the Weather is Ray? Right here on my doorstep!” I have been listening.

Here’s what I heard. People worry they can’t afford to stay here. Young people can’t find a place to live. Young families can’t find or afford childcare. Older residents are tired of watching their children and grandchildren leave the region because it’s too expensive to live here. Traffic is getting worse. Parents want strong schools. People are sick and tired of government that doesn’t address their needs.

Addressing those needs is what I’ve always worked to do, and my record proves it. As United Way campaign chair for three years, I saw our community’s needs firsthand. In the NC House, I held regular town halls across the district. During COVID, I sent weekly newsletters on what state government was doing locally. People still bring them up. One constituent wrote to me about a problem with the State Health Plan. I took it to the State Treasurer and got it resolved. Later she wrote, “I have never felt more REPRESENTED by an elected official in my life.”

This district is diverse, not so much by race or ethnicity, but in life experience. What we share is a desire to call Watauga County home: safe, accepted and connected.

That’s the perspective I bring, and it isn’t new. It’s how I’ve lived and served for 35 years. I put people first. I’m progressive and practical. I do my homework. I stand up to bullies. And I’ll keep showing up, on doorsteps and at the Commission table, so the people of District 2 know someone is listening.

3. If elected in November, please identify the three most pressing issues you will bring to the Board for consideration and why.

These are the same three priorities I named in January, at the start of my campaign. Hundreds of conversations with voters at the polls and on their doorsteps since then have confirmed they’re the right ones.

1. Workforce housing availability and affordability

Housing is the crisis behind most of the problems we face. UNC’s Kenan Institute recently ranked Watauga County the least affordable housing market in North Carolina. Payments on a median-priced home here take more than 60% of the median household’s income. Our large student population pulls our median income down, but that doesn’t change the picture. The county’s own housing study left students out and still found 46% of households are low- or moderate-income. It also found that no new affordable units had been built here since 2015. New construction has gone mostly to student housing, vacation rentals, and second homes and retirement housing built for wealthy buyers.

A Watauga County teacher earns $50,000 to $60,000 a year. At today’s 7.25% mortgage rate, that teacher can afford a monthly housing payment of about $1,250 to $1,500, enough for a home of roughly $150,000 to $180,000. Homes at that price barely exist here. Many sell for over $600,000. Now picture a teacher married to a sheriff’s deputy, earning about $110,000 together. They can afford a home of roughly $350,000. Few homes here sell for that. Two public servants, both working full time, still struggle to buy a home in the county they serve. Teachers are only one example. The same math shuts out police officers and sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, EMTs and paramedics, nurses and other healthcare workers, childcare workers, restaurant, hotel and retail workers who power our tourism economy, clerical staff, university and county employees, and even the carpenters and electricians who build our homes. These are the people who keep Watauga County running, and most of them can’t afford to live here.

The rental market is no better. A one-bedroom apartment in Watauga County runs $1,250 to $1,500 a month. That’s the most a teacher earning $50,000 to $60,000 can afford, with nothing to spare. A three-bedroom runs $2,500 to $2,800. And those are averages. The county’s housing study found that 63% of low- and moderate-income renters struggle to afford their housing. At least 1,700 renter households face severe housing problems, such as paying more than half their income for rent. Rents keep rising, and long-term rental vacancies are near 1% to 2%. When an apartment opens up, it’s gone.

Every day, 6,000 to 9,000 people who live outside Watauga County drive in to work here because they can’t afford to live here. That means more traffic on our roads, more stress on families’ time and budgets, lost tax revenue for our county and towns, and more car exhaust in our mountain air, adding to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Building workforce housing here won’t add to traffic. Done right, it will reduce it. One in four commuters drives more than 50 miles each way, over 100 miles a day. When people who work here can live here, those cars come off our roads.

Recent census estimates show Watauga County losing residents aged 25 to 44, the very people who teach our children, staff our hospital and keep our businesses running. Many of them tell me why: they can’t afford to live here. Solving our affordability crisis would also help ease enrollment challenges in some of our schools.

This problem didn’t happen overnight. Decisions at every level, state, university and local, built it over many years. It won’t be solved overnight either. We must bring state, university, town and county leaders together to rewrite outdated zoning rules and burdensome housing policies. We should encourage businesses that build affordable housing using new materials and methods, including a modular housing industry right here in Watauga County.

The fastest, least expensive way to add workforce rentals in the next two years is Lease to Locals, a nationwide program that communities can join. It has grown across America over the last five years, especially in mountain and resort communities like ours. And it works. Last week I spoke with the housing official at Lake Tahoe, California. In just over four years in the program, they have added more than 150 units to the workforce housing market, for about the cost of building one house. The idea is simple, and no one is forced to do anything. Public, private and nonprofit partners build a fund that offers incentives to property owners who convert short-term rentals to long-term leases for local workers, fix up existing units, or even put units to use that sit empty part of the year. I’ll also work to restore workforce housing to the county’s capital plan. It had $50,000 in FY 2024-25 and has nothing for the next six years.

Losing our workforce is hurting our economy, and the crisis is deepening. We cannot call ourselves progressive, or people who love our neighbors as ourselves, without meeting this challenge head-on. I propose a goal of 1,600 new workforce housing units in the next five years, not counting student housing or vacation and second homes. Reaching it will take an “all of the above” approach: more affordable market-rate housing, subsidized housing, nonprofit efforts, and creative ways to convert existing homes into workforce housing.

1. School construction at Hardin Park and Parkway

Hardin Park has needed replacement for years, and the board has now bought land for the new school. Parkway needs room to grow. The county has been preparing for both, setting aside more than $5 million a year in its school capital fund. Even so, these are heavy lifts. The Parkway project is smaller and can hopefully be paid for with money available now. We can plan Hardin Park now, but construction can’t begin until after 2028, when the high school bond debt is retired. The cost will be high. That doesn’t deter me. The need is real, our children deserve a first-class education, and every year of delay only makes it more expensive.

1. Childcare

Childcare is essential infrastructure, just like roads and water. The county’s childcare study found far fewer licensed slots than children under five, with infant care the worst gap. For many families, childcare costs rival housing. When parents can’t find care, they leave the workforce and employers can’t hire.

We should also retire the term “waiting list.” It’s really a list of children and families being denied care they need.

I’ve advocated the same approach for four years, and it can work, especially with the $20 million in new state childcare funding Governor Stein announced last month for Helene-affected communities.

First, at every level of government, judge each regulation by one question: how many children does this rule price out of childcare? Every regulation has a cost. If the harm of denying care outweighs the benefit of the rule, the rule should go.

Second, focus administration on results. We need state and local agencies to administer and advocate for childcare. Locally, that’s the Watauga Children’s Council. I value their work, and my wife, Rhonda, chaired its board for two years. Their role is essential, and the best way to honor it is to keep administrative costs efficient so more dollars reach what families need most: more childcare slots.

Third, put the money where it adds capacity. An independent local fund already exists at the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce. The county, private employers and nonprofits can all contribute to it, and the fund can make competitive grants to local providers to serve more children. This approach is streamlined and focused on the real problem: too few slots and too high a cost.

These three are connected. Families can’t stay here without housing, schools and childcare. Fixing one without the others won’t keep Watauga County a place where working families can live.

Voters raised other concerns too: traffic, support for families and individuals under financial stress, especially those experiencing homelessness, and the relationship between the community and the university. The three priorities above came up most often, but these matter too, and I’ll work on them as well.

4. If you could eliminate or substantially reduce one line item in Watauga County’s budget, what would it be and why?

It’s time to bring Watauga County’s IT into the 21st century. The county still runs all of its systems on servers housed and maintained here: public safety, EMS, tax, solid waste, general administration and more. That is how it was done in the 1990s, not the 2020s. The path we are on is inflexible and financially unsustainable. We must break out of that mindset.

IT is not one line item. Its cost is spread across dozens of budget lines, and the numbers are big. The costs we can track grew 65% in four years, from $1.28 million to $2.12 million. Staffing is not the cause. Non-staff costs for contracts, equipment and software doubled in those four years. Other costs can’t be tracked at all. For example, every server room adds power, cooling, HVAC maintenance, floor space and redundant high-speed connections to the cost of a building.

I propose a five-year plan to move county systems to secure government cloud services. When each current server reaches end of life, we should not replace it at great expense. Instead, we should move the systems to secure cloud hosting. Nearly all state and local governments use cloud services, and about half already run most of their systems there. We avoid the next round of server purchases, and costs come down compared to the path we are on. Staggering the changes lets IT staff manage the transition. The county’s services stay the same. Only the hardware behind them changes, from expensive equipment we buy and maintain to more nimble cloud services. Where it makes sense, some systems may stay local.

The cloud is the better approach. What about cost? I won’t promise this will shrink the overall IT budget. But I can promise it will reduce the county’s spending on server hardware and the contracts to maintain it. Staying the course lets costs keep spiraling upward. Cloud services bring steadier costs from year to year, without large hardware spikes, and slow the growth over time.

The gains go beyond cost:

• Security: Some believe county-owned servers are more secure. The opposite is true. Watauga County cannot match the physical and digital security of a professional-grade cloud built for government: 24/7 monitoring, offsite backups, encryption, and compliance with FBI and federal standards for law enforcement and 911 data. The systems remain under our control, protected by the highest security standards.
• Reliability: Data is copied to multiple secure locations far from Watauga County. A flood or power outage here no longer takes county services down for days. We should learn from Helene.
• Simplicity: Fewer systems to patch and maintain. IT staff can focus on departments and citizens instead of replacing hard drives and motherboards.
• Flexibility: Right now, we pay for peak demand 24/7. Emergencies and tax season drive real spikes. Cloud services scale up for those moments and back down after.

I have the background to guide this. I hold a PhD in computer science and was a computer science professor for 40 years. I moved RaysWeather to the cloud more than 15 years ago and advocated the same approach in Appalachian State’s Computer Science Department. I know what it takes, where the savings are and where the challenges are. No one on the current board brings this kind of technical background. As a commissioner, I can help the board set policy and weigh the costs and options. Technology will change at a dizzying pace over the next five years. We need an IT backbone ready for what’s coming. Tech-savvy officials are more vital than ever to help government navigate that change.

5. Do you support or oppose the County’s distribution of sales tax revenue to the County municipalities based on an“ad valorem”versus “per capita” formula?  Please explain.

I believe a per capita distribution of sales tax revenue is the fairest approach as a matter of principle. It allocates revenue based on people rather than property wealth and more closely tracks where service demand actually exists. As a general rule, ad valorem formulas tend to favor wealthier communities with higher property values, while per capita distribution treats residents more equally regardless of where they live. From an equity standpoint, per capita is the cleaner and more transparent standard.