The Manager You Didn't Vote For

On November 12, 2025, the Boone Town Council paused to say goodbye to Amy Davis. Davis had led the town for nearly four years as permanent manager, after about seven months as interim before that. She led through the tail end of a pandemic and then through Helene. The council thanked her for the flood recovery work on Howard Street along with everything else she'd carried.

"I have literally grown old here," she told the council that night. "I have formed friendships that will last a lifetime, and memories I will cherish forever... Thank you for the opportunity to serve this town, it has truly been an honor."

Then the meeting moved to its next item, and so did she.

Nobody in Boone elects a town manager. That isn't an oversight in the system. It is the system. Boone's council-manager form of government splits the job into two halves on purpose.

Mayor Dalton George put it plainly.

"Not only is the council-manager model the standard for towns like Boone, but nearly all governments of substantial population, north of 3,000 or so, use it."

The council sets policy through the ordinances and resolutions it votes on directly. It enforces that policy the way it hired the manager in the first place, through its control of the annual budget and, ultimately, its power to remove the manager. The manager runs the place day to day.

Under G.S. 160A-148, the statute that creates the position, the manager

"shall appoint and suspend or remove all city officers and employees not elected by the people," "shall prepare and submit the annual budget" and "shall direct and supervise the administration of all departments, offices, and agencies of the city."

Council meets twice a month. The manager works the job every day Boone's offices are open.

Day to day, that authority runs through the town's department heads. They report to the manager, not to the council. A single council member has no individual power to direct staff. Neither does the full council acting together. Hiring, firing and day-to-day direction of staff are the manager's job by statute, not the council's. Even on a unanimous vote. What the council can do together is set the policy, rules and budget the manager has to operate inside.

Hank Perkins is that manager. He's spent more than three decades as a professional manager, with stops in North Wilkesboro, Lewisville and Lake Lure. He's also an Appalachian State alumnus who still lives in Lewisville, more than an hour's drive from Boone. His contract reimburses him for one round trip a week between the two.

Perkins is only a month into Boone, not long enough yet for a story of his own here. But he saw this same pattern for years in Lewisville, residents assuming a phone call to town staff carries the same weight as a request made straight to council. One example was yard waste and leaf collection. Residents would call asking for it, get told it wasn't in the budget, and most gave up right there instead of showing up to actually ask for it.

“It's generally more effective when a resident or a constituent stakeholder makes an individual case for what they're requiring,” Perkins says, “other than just relying on the fact that they talk to the town staff about it.”

Call the town office and you're talking to the wrong half of town government. Show up to a regular council meeting, and you're talking to the right one.

Perkins draws his own line around that authority too. As a full-time manager, he helped carry out council's long-term policy and set strategy at planning retreats. As an interim, he says, that's not his job anymore.

“It's generally not the interim manager's job to try to change things systematically,” changes that “might be undone by the full-time employee that's about to follow.”

He calls it keeping the car on the road. He measures his own success by whether the next manager, permanent or not, can pick up exactly where he leaves off. No stalled priorities. No dropped threads.

The job pays real money too, set entirely by the council rather than voters. Perkins himself is paid $83 an hour.

John Ward, Davis's own predecessor, left abruptly in 2022 after about seven and a half years, hired in 2014 and out the door within weeks of landing a county manager job in Georgia. Since Davis left, the office has stayed occupied and stayed unelected. For most of the last year, it stayed temporary too. Dale Presnell, already Boone's HR director, added interim town manager to his title on December 1, 2025, and carried both jobs for about eight and a half months. Mayor Dalton George says the swap wasn't Presnell asking out. It was a council decision, made once the permanent search looked like it would run long and the town couldn't stay lean on staff through it, not with Howard Street construction and financing for the new public works facility both underway. On August 17, 2026, the council handed the job to Perkins. He's Boone's second interim manager in under a year. The permanent search is still open.

Four days after Perkins started, the council went behind closed doors again.

The notice for the August 21 special meeting cited three sections of the state's open meetings law at once, negotiating real estate, a confidential personnel matter, and the employment contract, compensation, qualifications, fitness and appointment of an individual officer or employee. Citing one of those provisions in an open motion is all state law actually requires to close the doors. There's no advance public review of whether it's warranted. Whatever got decided in that room, the council can act on it the moment the doors open, in open session, with no separate public hearing required. A permanent town manager could be named on any Wednesday afternoon with no agenda item warning anyone it was coming.

Mayor Dalton George has watched the search from inside it. To understand how he's running it, start with how he describes the job itself.

"The person with the most power in the entire governmental area."

Boone has been hunting for that person since at least March 2026, when the town brought on Dr. Patricia Mitchell, who directs Appalachian State's MPA program and spent nine years running Ashe County's economic development office and then the county itself, as lead search consultant. Mitchell is donating her consulting fee to the MPA program rather than taking payment. George put a number on the alternative too, a $35,000 contract for the search, which he says runs about $70,000 less than a private recruiting firm would have charged for the same year of work. The search has run national in scope and in phases, more rigorous than a smaller town would need, because George says the next few years will decide which direction Boone goes.

Perkins's contract runs until a permanent manager starts, or expires automatically on February 11, 2027. That deadline reads harder on paper than George says it actually is.

He calls it a checkpoint. Not a wall. He expects Perkins would stay on longer if the search runs past it. Perkins backs that up, for a reason that has less to do with Boone than his own retirement. He draws a pension through the state's local government retirement system, which caps him at 1,000 work hours a year and limits what he can earn from a job with another government in that same system. He says he'd likely have hours left to sign on again once the new year resets the count.

What George says he's actually weighing in a permanent hire is someone who could stay ten to fifteen years, not just someone he can personally work with, but someone who'll still function well for whoever holds the mayor's office after him. He has three and a half years left in his own term.

Boone's already comfortable filling public jobs without a popular vote, but even that has a limit. When a council seat opens up, state law lets the sitting council fill it by appointment. That's only a placeholder though. An elected successor takes over at the next city election more than 90 days out. That's the seat Anne Pruitt and Anitra Ball hold right now, both up for a real election in 2027. Three of the council's five seats went before actual voters this cycle, the same three from Part 1. So did the mayor's office. The other two council seats did not.

The job that decides who gets hired at town hall, what gets built and how the budget actually gets spent day to day isn't just unelected right now. Under North Carolina's council-manager statute, it cannot be an elected office at all. For as long as Boone keeps this form of government. The council appoints the manager, full stop. That's true of Presnell, true of Perkins, and it will be true of whoever comes next, permanent or not.

Part 4 of this series is about the two council seats nobody voted for either. This one is about the job with no ballot at all.