County Commissioner Glenn Adams and Sheila Cuffee won the two Democratic nominations for the District 1 board of commissioners seats on Tuesday, according to unofficial returns.
No Republican, Libertarian, or Green Party candidates filed for these seats, so now it’s all but guaranteed that Adams and Cuffee will take office in December following the November election. The terms run four years.
District 1 includes Spring Lake, Fort Bragg, and parts of western, central and northern Fayetteville, the Murchison Road corridor, downtown Fayetteville, and the Cedar Creek Road area.
Voters were given a slate of five candidates and asked to pick up to two of them, with the top two advancing to the general election. Adams and Cuffee defeated Terri S. Thomas, former Fayetteville City Council Member Larry O. Wright Sr., and Garry “Moe” Murray.
Adams, who was first elected in 2014, will advance to his fourth term.
Cuffee will take the seat held now by Jeannette Council, who is retiring from office. Council has been a county commissioner since August 2000, according to the archives of The Fayetteville Observer, when she was appointed to take the seat of Commissioner Tom Bacote, who had died.
The unofficial results:
| NAME ON BALLOT | PARTY | BALLOT COUNT | PERCENT |
| Glenn Adams – winner | DEM | 3,504 | 26.38% |
| Sheila Cuffee- winner | DEM | 3,494 | 26.30% |
| Larry O. Wright, Sr. | DEM | 3,053 | 22.98% |
| Terri S. Thomas | DEM | 2,487 | 18.72% |
| Garry (Moe) Murray | DEM | 747 | 5.62% |
“I think people like the message that I talk about, which is to take care of the people of this county and the citizens of this county,” Adams said on Tuesday after the results were totaled. “I believe that when you are an elected official and you’re out in the community, people see you. They know you. They get to talk to you. Then they know what you’re about, as opposed to just getting mailers in the mail and all of that.”
Cuffee said she attracted voters by “just being authentic, just being myself. And actually looking at the issues that Cumberland County has, not making up stuff, but actually doing the research.”
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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