In State Auditor Dave Boliek’s first two years in office, his staff has dealt with at least two investigations into allegations of wrongdoing in Cumberland County, where he lived for 26 years.
One was an investigation of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, which had become a multi-year legal battle. The other was an audit of Hope Mills, a town in which the political knives are sharp and a suspicious electorate constantly watches the Board of Commissioners.
Boliek discussed the two cases and more with CityView during a September 22 stop in Fayetteville.
On Thursday, Boliek will join The Assembly for a conversation about his role overseeing the State Board of Elections, various rule changes that could affect voting and vote-counting this year, and more. The free event takes place in Raleigh at 1 p.m. CityView is a member of The Assembly Network.
Sheriff’s Office Audit
Boliek inherited an audit of the Sheriff’s Office from his predecessors.
“It had to do with the building or construction of a shooting range,” Boliek said, and how materials had been procured for it.
An anonymous tip in fall 2022 prompted the investigation, CityView previously reported.
Court records said the Auditor’s Office in 2022 and 2023 asked for a variety of items during its investigation. These included employee vehicle assignments, payroll reports, a chaplain’s personnel file, documentation about the shooting range construction, a list of equipment and trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a warning citation for speeding, and records about two Chevy Tahoe SUVs.
Former Sheriff Ennis Wright sued in 2023 to try to stop the audit. Wright asserted that the State Auditor had no authority over county sheriff’s offices. The two agencies mutually agreed to drop the lawsuit in January 2025, less than a month after Boliek took office.
“It didn’t seem substance enough to bother with the balance of using state resources to fight a lawsuit—which ultimately would have gone all the way through the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court potentially,” Boliek said. “There didn’t seem to be on the face a lot of smoke, much less fire.”
The legislature later passed a law that clarified the Auditor’s Office can audit a sheriff’s office, he said.
Overspending in Hope Mills
In 2025 and 2026, Boliek’s office investigated Hope Mills. It found the town was spending more money than it was taking in.
Now Hope Mills town is on a watchlist with the Local Government Commission—a state board with staff from the N.C. Treasurer’s Office that monitors and polices local governments to keep them solvent—while it gets its finances in order. Boliek is a member of the commission.
“One of the good things about our audit of Hope Mills is, is that we were able to point out to council members and to the public a trending downwards in terms of fund balance,” Boliek said. Fund balance is cash the government has on hand to pay its expenses.
Spring Lake had a similar crisis in the early 2020s with overspending, plus the town’s finance director embezzled nearly $570,000.
If the troubles in Hope Mills had not been caught, Boliek said, the town could have ended up like Rocky Mount, which was “within one fiscal quarter of being out of money, like unable to pay bills. They were within three months of not being able to cash a check.”
Boliek’s Deep Ties to Fayetteville
Even though Boliek and his wife, Haden, moved to Durham in 2023, “Fayetteville to me is my home town,” he said. Haden still runs businesses here.
“I’ve lived in Fayetteville longer than I lived anywhere else. I’ve lived in 12 different communities across the state of North Carolina, and we spent from 1997 right up until just before running for election here in North Carolina,” he said.
In 2024, Boliek told CityView he and Haden moved to Durham in 2023 because their daughter was getting specialized educational services in that area.
In Fayetteville, Boliek was a longtime partner at the Williford, Crenshaw, Boliek & Frangakis law firm. He said he resigned with his ascension to statewide office.
CityView spoke with Boliek amid the suits, suspenders, and shoes in the showroom of Sugar’s Menswear Studio, the locally owned Fayetteville haberdashery.
Afterward, proprietor Joe Sugar showed Boliek a pair of trousers made with Italian fabric.
“Every well-dressed man should come to Joe Sugar’s and get clothes,” Boliek said. “And I support my home town.”
Fayetteville’s Statewide Leaders
Including Boliek, four people from Cumberland County sought statewide office in 2024. Boliek was the only one who won. The Democrat-turned-Republican won after defeating Jessica Holmes, the incumbent and a Democrat, in November 2024. He took office on January 1, 2025.
Boliek joined a line of statewide elected office-holders with local connections that goes back more than 200 years.
The others:
- Fayetteville attorney John Tyson is a judge on the N.C. Court of Appeals, first from 2001 to 2009, and now since 2015.
- Fayetteville attorney Ed Brady was associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. He was elected in 2002 and served one term.
- Cumberland County attorney and former judge Pat Timmons-Goodson, who was a N.C. Court of Appeals judge from 1997 to 2005, and associate justice of the N.C. Supreme Court from 2006 to 2012.
- Cheri Beasley, an attorney and former Cumberland County judge, was elected to the N.C. Court of Appeals in 2008, then served on the N.C. Supreme Court from 2012 through 2020 (with most of the last two years as chief justice).
- Mark Davis, an E.E. Smith High School graduate, served as a N.C. Court of Appeals judge from 2012 to 2019, and associate justice of the N.C. Supreme Court from 2019 through 2020.
- Terry Sanford, a Fayetteville attorney, was elected governor in 1960 and to the U.S. Senate in 1986.
- John Lewis Taylor practiced law in Fayetteville in the late 1700s. In 1819 he became the first chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, according to NCpedia.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
