Overview:
• Commissioner Veronica Jones was reelected to be vice chair
• Commissioner Glenn Adams voted against deViere
• DeViere plans to continue efforts for county-wide water, public schools, mental health, and an aquatics center
The Cumberland County Commissioners voted 6-1 on Monday to reelect Kirk deViere to serve as chairman for the next year.
The board also voted 5-2 to reelect Commissioner Veronica Jones to be the vice chair.
Following the votes, deViere made a short speech to the board listing his priorities for the next 12 months. They include continued efforts to expand public water service throughout the county, meet the public school system’s needs, grow an educated workforce to attract employers, improve mental health care in the community, and build a regional aquatics center.
The county made progress this past year, deViere said. “Now we’ve got to build on that momentum, but more importantly, we’ve got to stay focused,” he said.
Afterwards, Commissioners Henry Tyson, Pavan Patel and Jones said deViere has shown strong leadership this past year as he advanced initiatives for clean water, education and other key issues. They all voted for him.
“I want to just see valuable, quality outcomes for our community as we continue to try and work on different areas,” Patel said. “And this past year has been, in my opinion, at least fruitful, and we’ve made a lot of advancements and wins.”
“I think we’ve been able to get a lot done,” Tyson said. “There’s a lot of diversity on the board, and a lot of different perspectives, that’s really contributed to the board’s success this year.”
Break In Tradition
The vote for deViere was a break in recent practice, Commissioner Glenn Adams said, as board chairs usually rotate out of the seat after a year and are replaced with the previous year’s vice chair. Adams was the only commissioner to vote against deViere for chair.
(DeViere also broke precedent a year ago in an upset of the board’s old guard when he was elected chair as a freshman commissioner during his first hour in office, defeating long-serving Commissioner Marshall Faircloth.)
Adams told CityView he voted against deViere on Monday partly because of the break in tradition. His other reason: “I don’t think it was good leadership to cost the county millions of dollars and destroy the Performance Arts center that was to be built downtown.”
The county commissioners voted in June to cancel construction of the long-planned Crown Event Center, about eight months after it broke ground. They opted instead to rehabilitate a theater and arena on the Crown Complex campus near the Crown Coliseum. The Event Center was supposed to replace the theater and arena, which were built in the 1960s and need renovations and upgrades.
DeViere has said the Event Center’s costs, which had been budgeted at about $144 million, were continuing to grow. He also said the Event Center would be an inadequate replacement as a performing arts center, with a flat floor instead of sloped theater seating, and insufficient parking in the downtown area, although there were also plans to build a parking deck nearby for $33 million.
‘No’ Votes In Effort to Stay Neutral
In the reelection votes for Vice Chair Jones, Patel and Tyson both voted against her.
Patel and Tyson both told CityView afterward that they support her as vice chair, but that Patel and Tyson did not want to be perceived as favoring Jones in the 2026 county commission elections. Four seats—those held by Jones, Adams, Faircloth, and Jeannette Council—will be on the ballots in the March primaries and November general elections.
The filing period for the 2026 elections started Monday morning.
“Commissioner Patel and I just felt like it was only fair that we not be seen as putting our finger on the scale during an election year,” Tyson said. “And that we stay neutral, and let voters decide who it is that they want coming into November of this year.”
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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