Welcome & Ballot Basics

Amanda Benbow Lunn 0:09

Hello, friends. I'm your host, Amanda Benbow Lunn, and I'm welcoming you back to the NC Deep Dive, and we will continue on with our candidate conversations for the 2026 general election. It looks like we'll have 18 contested races with 46 candidates in Southern Wake County, specifically in Holly Springs and Fuquay Varina. There are some races that have only one candidate running. We will not be including those in our NC Deep Dive. Of course, the races on your particular ballot will vary based on your address and the specific districts your residence falls within. You can always find your jurisdictions and eventually your sample ballot by searching NC Voter Search made available by the North Carolina State Board of Elections. When you get to the page, you'll fill out your information and it will populate with all those who share your name or the information that you provided. You will scroll until you find your information and you'll click on it, verify your name and address are correct, and then you can scroll down to see the appropriate sections for jurisdiction, sample ballot, your voting history, and also track your mail-in ballot if you are voting that way. Since there are so many races, your ballot will likely have both a front and a back. So make sure you are aware of that. Make sure you flip it over so you can vote for as many races as you are eligible to do so. Keep in mind, if your time is short, you can always start off the episode's chapter titles for the particular questions that we're asking. You can look and see which ones most interest you. And you can also go to www.ncdeepdive.com and check out each episode's transcript if you would prefer to skim through those. For this episode, we are delving into the Wake County Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor Race. There are six candidates running in this race, and you will have the opportunity to vote for two of them. Now, please note this is a nonpartisan race, meaning that these candidates will not have an R or a D or an L or any party affiliation notated on your ballot when you go to vote. If this is important to you for your voting strategy, you will want to make note before you head in to fill out your ballot when you're voting. The candidates that are running for this particular race include Samantha Krop, who is affiliated with the Democratic Party, Jim White, who is affiliated with the Republican Party, Terrence Thomas, who is not affiliated with any party. He is unaffiliated, CeCe Grant, who is affiliated with the Democratic Party, Beth Farrell, who is affiliated with the Republican Party, and Brian Lewis, who is affiliated with the Libertarian Party. Again, this is a nonpartisan race. So when you go to fill out your ballot, many races will have an R or a D or an L next to the candidate's name. For this race, those letters will not be there. So if it is important to you, take note. Otherwise, without further ado, my friends, let's dive

Meet Jim White: Intro, Why, & Experience

Amanda Benbow Lunn 3:19

in. On this episode, I am honored to be speaking with Jim White, who is running for the Wake Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor Seat. Thank you for joining me, Jim. If you want to take a moment and introduce yourself and then go into why you're running for this office and what experiences have prepared you to serve in this role.

Jim White 3:39

Yeah, so my name is Jim White, and we I have a home in southern Wake County. I'm actually an unincorporated Wake County, but my address is Apex, but if I had to say I really am part of a community, it's really more the Holly Spring community. And we've been here in Wake County since 1992. We've moved three times and we're at the home we're at now. Me and my wife have raised our family here. Kids have all gone to Wake County schools. Uh several of them are, you know, are having kids. And so we have grandkids here. So we have a big vested interest in, you know, the future of Wake County. I'm interested in serving in general. But in this particular instance, so I have a business where I work in the food safety, food traceability space, and we've been doing that for a couple of years. And so what that's done is it's exposed me, in addition to a lot of commercial food stuff, et cetera, it's also exposed me to some really interesting local food ecosystems that I've seen around the country. All right. And when I look at Wake County, right, when we started here, when we came here in 1992, this is a true story. I went into a Hardee's and I asked the guy, the kid, it was a kid, you know, and I asked him, hey, is there a good Italian restaurant here? And this was down in Fuquay Varina. And he told me, he said, Pizza Hut. And I my heart sunk, right? But he wasn't completely wrong, right? In 1992, if you wanted to get a pizza in Fuquay Varina, in general, you had to kind of go to Pizza Hut. And if you wanted to go to an Italian restaurant, you'd go to an Olive Garden up in Cary and you'd wait an hour, right? And since then, there's been a lot of development. And that development's brought a lot of great things for us, right? Um, and um, and so, you know, so I I appreciate the value of the development. There's a lot of great, I mean, Wake County is probably one of the best counties in the country. And um, at the same time, it's not hard to see that the trajectory is to continue more and more growth. And the challenge is in what ways can Wake County grow without turning into northern Virginia, right? Where it's just traffic everywhere, skyscrapers all around you. What and it's really still kind of a suburb, but it's not, you know. Um, so how do we preserve that? And so my experience in that food space said, hey, you know what? Um, an interesting thing happens as a county, a county like Wake County develops, is you get more people, which means you have a market for more opportunities. But meanwhile, we have about six, we still have six hundred farms in Wake County. Um and the biggest challenge is in what ways can we preserve some of the bucolic natural stuff that we enjoyed that was really prominent when I came here? You your biggest risk going to work was you're gonna end up behind a tobacco truck driving 15 miles an hour. And and now, you know, the threat is that all those things are gonna go to, you know, all those, all those open spaces are gonna go to development. And that's what the Soil and Water Group is about. It's about conservation, helping collaborate with farmers to figure out ways in what ways can you, first of all, do things so that you're doing it so that you're not polluting and you're conserving and you're, you know, conserving the soil, which they all have a vested interest interest in because it's their land and they want it to be healthy and that sort of thing. And so there's programs for that. But also, how can we make it so that your business is actually profitable so that you can stay here, right? And so that's where I get into the whole local food thing as an opportunity. Um, you know, uh the um the soil and water district is is not really a regulator, right? It's more of a convening body that has the ability to collaborate with different organizations, different parts of the some parts of the federal government, like the USDA and the Department of Agriculture, but also Wake County Board, the school system, et cetera, et cetera, to see if we can come up with good, clever ideas on how Wake County can evolve and maintain and conserve some of the natural open spaces while at the same time making it sustainable. So, for example, the district has a program where a farmer can come forward and they can receive some money to keep their farm, you know, in an agricultural state, and it creates an encumbrance on their deed. And that's a good program, and it's funded by the state legislature, and there's millions of dollars in it. And what it does is it would help a farmer who's basically struggling with cash flow. They have all this land, and of course, agriculture is struggling in general across the whole country because the commodity farming model is really being challenged because of some you know macroeconomics. Some of them are global, some of them are related to tariffs, but some of them are also, you know, just related to the fact that it was very export driven, and some of the buyers for our export products are finding other places to, you know, to get those things from. So the U.S. agricultural market is pretty challenging. And even in Wake County, many of these farms are really still doing commodity farming, right? But there's an opportunity to grow some of the. So in fact, of the 600 farms, only about 5% actually grow food people eat in general. There's probably a little bigger if you include sweet potatoes. But we do a lot of export of sweet potatoes.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 8:17

Could you define what commodity farming is?

Jim White 8:20

Commodity farming is like corn and soybean and cotton. You know, the big industrial commercial farming that is, I mean, you if you were in the Midwest, you would really see it, right? But even here, you know, sweet pot sweet potatoes, tobacco, cotton, those are commodities, you know, where you might have a five, six hundred acre farm and that's the only thing you grow. You might grow hay for horses or, you know, soy is mostly to feed animals, not for people to eat, right? A lot of corn in the United States is grown for seed oils or for ethanol or to export to other countries, right? So it's not what we think of, so it's not like gardening where there's rows and rows of tomatoes or lettuce. That's a small component of the farms in Wake County. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of people here who need to eat food and we're getting all our food. But one of the things I've learned doing the food traceability stuff is our supply chain for food is very long. We import 60% of our produce that we eat. So if you go to a Harris teeter, 60%, 40 to 60% of that produce in that store is coming from outside this country, 90% of the seafood. You know, and we've all seen the challenges with that and this cyclosporum breakout, right? Taylor Farms is a big produce brand, and they were purchasing lettuce that came from Mexico, right? At least that's part of the story. They haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. But the point is we have this big long supply chain. And one of the things that I've seen working is, so for example, we do some work in the upstate region, and we've seen schools buying from their local farms at a rate different than we do here in Wake County, right? And there's federal programs that support it. And there's actually USD and DOD funding for school lunch programs that could support more procurement from within Wake County. Wake County feeds 160,000 kids, you know, every day. And there's other institutional buyers that could help us shape and give farmers a path to create a kind of a local revenue stream that, in addition to them having to put an encumbrance of the deed, they could create a revenue stream that would make it, hey, this is actually more profitable to stay here. So when a developer shows up with a $5 million check, they'll say, you know what, I'll let my kids make that decision later. I'm gonna hold on to it and keep farming, right? Now that's not something strictly that the Soil and Water Board in this role, you can convene some of the resources, right? The county board, the Wake County School System, the USDA, the Department of Ag to put help kind of coordinate to see if there is a way that we can create a better, more local food system that is becomes part of the conservation strategy, right, for the county. And everyone will benefit and we'll have, you know, farms growing food and kids eating fresh food and it in the schools is just as an example. It's this one idea, right?

Amanda Benbow Lunn 10:51

Okay. So you've answered this a bit, but

What Soil And Water Actually Does

Amanda Benbow Lunn 10:54

what does the Wake Soil and Water Conservation District actually do? And why should voters care about it?

Jim White 11:00

So it's not a regulator, right? It's more of a convening body. And their job is to educate and put in place programs that help with conservation. And that can mean recommendations around buffers on streams and waterways, and they have programs for conservation. They have programs that can provide some money to help people, farmers or even landowners, fix certain things that are related to the way water runoff works and that sort of thing. There's other bodies that do the things you think of, like, you know, right zoning rules and building codes and that tell you how far you have to be off something. Some of that is related to the input from the soil and water conservation district, but it gets executed by other entities, right? This is not a coercive regulator kind of organization. It's a supportive collaborative organization that has some staff that's funded by the county, but it's chartered by the state. And so there's, you know, 12 or 13 county employees that work with different parts of the community. Sometimes it's developers and sometimes it's farmers. They organize volunteer groups to go down and clean up waterways where there's just trash or tires or whatever somehow, you know, ended up and they'll pick them up and do those sorts of things. So they do a lot of really good conservation work, and they really are a kind of a planning strategy, kind of an organization for, you know, how can the county develop and preserve and conserve the natural resources and make sure everything's clean and sustainable and that sort of a thing. And, you know, one of the key elements of it is really about setting goals and objectives for the county. And, you know, every county has one of these districts. And every county is a little bit different. And Wake County is very unique in that it's a large, grow, fast-growing county, probably one of the most popular counties in the whole country for people to come to. So we're going to face a lot of that kind of growth pressure. So growth's inevitable, right? And for for me, the goal here is to figure out how to balance that growth. Not only is it inevitable, in some ways it's good, right? It's good for the people who live here. Our property values will increase, we'll have more resources. However, it can be a negative thing if it's poorly managed, right? And we could lose a lot of the things that make, and there's a lot of fear about that. People fear that, you know, a lot of the reasons why I love being in Wake County will go away and it'll turn into just some big giant concrete jungle, you know, from county border to county border. And I don't think there's anybody, even the developers don't want that, right? I don't think there's anybody who wants us to lose what makes Wake County special.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 13:25

Okay. And just to clarify, so for instance, the watershed buffers, y'all wouldn't be setting the the ordinances or limits on what that should look like, but perhaps you are doing the research and the strategies and acting as the experts to talk to the municipalities and the county regarding what those could or should look like?

Jim White 13:49

Yeah. So we would collaborate. So for example, the research, we probably wouldn't do that either, but we would use NC State, right? And you might fund some kind of a program project that would inform a municipality or some entity that has the jurisdictional rights to impose those kinds of rules, right? Okay.

Biggest Challenge for Those You’d Represent

Amanda Benbow Lunn 14:07

What do you believe is the most important issue or challenge facing the people you would represent?

Jim White 14:12

So let's look at it in terms of constituencies, right? There's the average, like me, homeowner, resident, person raising a family, right? It's a quality of life issue for us. There's a lot to be said for jumping in your car and driving to work or to the store and going by open fields and forests and empty spaces and not having a giant complex with 1,500 cars pouring out onto the road. We are every day. That constituency, the general everybody, you know, I think that's every voter in this in the in the county is like, hey, how are we going to preserve and manage the growth we're going to have? Preserve the things that are really valuable to us, the open spaces, the access to and have a clean environment, not have anything polluting our drinking water or our groundwater or that sort of thing, and still have nature and all that sort of thing. Then the other constituency, on the other hand, of it is the agriculture constituency. There's people who own a lot of property and they still farm it, or they use it for occasional forestry, or they're raising wild, you know, animals, or they're just keeping it open. And their interest is obviously to the degree there's cash flow from that, making that sustainable and manageable. And one of the things that obviously works against that is as your costs rise, it becomes, you know, unsustainable to have, you know, certain kinds of businesses operate in a place where everything's expensive, right? The taxes, the gas, everything, right? And or labor, right? And so how do we find models that keep those as sustainable, operating, working enterprises so that they they stay that way, right? Because at the end of the day, every day they have a developer who knocks on their door and says, Hey, I'll give you five million dollars for your for your farm, right? If they have the cash flow and the costs aren't too high, they can say, you know what, that's great. I'll let my kids make that decision, you know, a decade from now. But right now I'm going to keep doing what I do, and we all benefit from that. So and then the third constituency is the development community, right? So, you know, there's opportunity to, you know, aggregate resources and do things that make it an even better place through some development. You know, maybe it's new jobs, maybe it's new interesting kind of housing, it's recreational kind of things like golf courses or clubs or things that make it, you know, like increase the quality of life for all of us and they bring things to us. The developers, you know, they recognize that the reason why my project will be valuable is because people want to come here, want to live there, will pay a high, we'll pay a premium to it, and to a large degree, it's because of the quality of life. So everyone really benefits from the improved quality of life. Um that if we can find the right balance between development and preservation and conservation, you know, and obviously every time you do something, you put pressure on natural resources, you know, you have more drain runoff into waters and making sure you're managing that well so you don't that well so you don't have a, you know, a bunch of erosion and making sure that you're not creating a bunch of future pollution problems as you do these kinds of projects.

Priorities & Hopes for Accomplishment

Amanda Benbow Lunn 17:09

Okay. If elected, what would you prioritize and what specifically would you hope to accomplish during your term?

Jim White 17:15

One of the things I have a lot of passion about is this local food system idea. And in order to pull that together, it would require a lot of collaboration with different parts of the county government, the state government, and parts of the federal government. And that for me would be one of the things that I would put high on my list of things that I think would nudge the county in a direction that right now they they might not go if I don't get elected. Right. And I think everyone would have benefit from it. And then also just to be a good steward of, and you know, I have a lot of learning to do about the conservation, the programs that are in place, the methods that that really matter, you know, these issues about what is right size buffer, how much is too much, and how much is creating a, you know, and I I'm I'm really open to listening to that and learning about that and supporting those sorts of things. You know, there's other supervisors that come from different places. Some of them are appointed and the other ones are elected. And everyone brings a mix and you know, to cooperate and collaborate with them around their passion. So, for example, I think there's people come with a really strong conservancy kind of mindset that could border on being anti-growth, right? Uh, and um, and and to kind of hear their argument and then, you know, try to be a good partner and say, hey, okay, I got that. What ways can we mitigate that so that we can get, like I said, I don't think you're gonna stop growth, right? I think you just have to find a way to balance it. Um, and um, you know, so those are my, you know, I like I said, the local food things are big uh for me, a unique passion that I'm focused on right now, mostly because of my past experience or my present experience, I should say.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 18:46

So you want to go into that a little bit and what that looks like for you?

Jim White 18:50

Yeah. So so for example, I'll just give you an example of something I've seen in another place, right? I'll I'll give you a couple of examples. So one is um there say you have a uh two or three hundred acre farm and you're doing maybe you're still growing to c uh cotton or tobacco or something to sweet potatoes, something like that. You're if you were to carve off a couple of acres, right? And like you see, you pick strawberries, right? There's a resource for the everybody in the community. It's kind of cool, you know, pumpkin patches, you pick strawberries. These are things that like the average residential person gets into. But they're also can be, they can be very profitable, right? Um, you you know, you you put about $20,000 or $20,000 worth of strawberry uh things in there. And there's a guy down in uh Buford, South Carolina, you know, he he he generated about $350,000 in revenue off of that. Off the you made about a $20 or $30,000 investment in the in the seedlings, and then the people come pick it, so there's no labor, and it generates a lot of revenue. Now that that revenue is really important because it's the difference. So when the guy shows when the developer shows up with the $5 million check, right, it's that's the money that says, you know, I actually I'm okay. I don't need to do it now. And quite honestly, I know if you come back 10 years from now, that $5 million check will be $10 million, right? So now you the land stays. There's an example of one thing. So um, and those things can happen now. Um, where I think uh where there needs to be some coordination is the opportunity to turn the Wake County population into a buyer of local food from Wake County. Um so the the disadvantage of being a farmer in Wake County is you're getting crowded out. The advantages is if you've if you have a pathway to sell food to people, you have a market, right? And so we have farmers' markets, but I think for it to really work, you have to give farmers a wholesale path. And for example, there's a farm to school program. It's a USD DOD program. There's money in the school budget to actually buy local foods. One of the things that's missing in many instances that I've seen in the upstate area is value-added processing. So, for example, the problem with strawberries is you grow your strawberries and now you have or any berries, you're gonna have them in the spring and you got thousands of pounds of them, right? And if they're fresh, if unless you eat them in a couple of weeks, they're no good, right? However, if you have some resources like food processing facilities where you can do a process called IQF or quick, you can quick freeze them and you package them for food service, then the school can buy them and put them in a freezer and they can use them all year long. Now you've created a wholesale marketplace. Well, those resources need to be coordinated and collaborated. The school has to decide, hey, I want to buy this stuff, and they have to describe what they need. And for example, these are low margin, high volume food service operations. They're not cutting strawberries up and doing all that, right? They need it pre-prepared for them to show up in a bag, they pull it out of a freezer, they defrost it, and they put it in a tray, and then the kids can eat it. And that happens with all kinds of things. So, for example, in the upstate region, this organization has a scales grant, which is a USDA grant, and they sell to the Greenville County School System. And what they do is they buy basil and they turn it into pesto. So fresh basil has a shelf life of $10. Days, this pesto basil, you can sell it through the whole year because you're going to freeze it once you put it in a bag. They do the same thing: Roma tomatoes. They buy Roma tomatoes, they turn it into pizza sauce. The pizza sauce goes in bags and it goes back to schools. And now the schools are using fresh grown tomatoes that were transformed into pizza sauce within the county, and that's what they're serving their kids. And so it's not some long giant supply chain through Cisco or US foods where the food was grown in another country. And so then the trick is to do these things so that's economically viable. And that's part of why those USDA programs exist, is to kind of subsidize it because they know there's not the scale of the commercial farming that lets you get these super low cost points. So there's a little bit of a buffer room to do that. And the hard part is to make the numbers work, right? Because they're feeding kids for like they have a budget of like 70 cents per kid per meal, right? It's not a really elaborate budget, but it can be done. It's done in other places and it works. So how can we put something like that together in Wake County?

Amanda Benbow Lunn 22:56

What does that look like for equipment? Is that like Wake County having a space to process and do the flash freezing and the packaging? Is that each individual farm having something with the ability to do that? What does that look like?

Jim White 23:12

Usually it's some kind of a co-op operation or a food hub, but it could also be a private enterprise that is set up. It's a commercial kitchen in some instances. It's just, you know, with all the safety stuff there, the staff, the processes, the right equipment, you know, an IQF, a freeze dryer. There's certain processes. For example, if you're going to make sweet potatoes, one of the products that this food hub in Greenville, South Carolina sells to the Greenville County School System is a sweet potato puree. Well, for the food service people, that's like an ingredient that they can use in different recipes. And it gets packaged in these eight-pound bags. And so the process is I get sweet potatoes, I roast them, I peel them, I then blend them and mix them with some other stuff. And now I have a bag full of sweet potato puree. And then I put that in my freezer, I put three bags in a case, I put that in my freezer, and then the schools order them and I deliver them to them maybe once or twice, maybe once a quarter. I ship five or six cases of it. And now you have a market for sweet potatoes to the school system through a processor. What's missing in some instances is that middle process, right? Well, there's money to support that sort of stuff from the federal government that you can get. Now, who's going to make that investment if the schools aren't buying, right? And so you have to have an agreement that says, hey, let's make this a priority. This is really a big part of the planning process. And the priorities is, hey, let's make this a goal. Let's see if we can get seven or eight or 10 or 20% of these certain food categories that we buy coming off of local Wake County farms. And the school system spends $36 million a year buying food for the schools. Most of it is gonna go to the traditional high-volume food stuff. But you know, five, six, seven million dollars of that could be focused as an opportunity for local farmers to use. You split that up among 600 farms, and it makes some sense, right?

Amanda Benbow Lunn 24:59

Okay.

Balancing Development with Protecting Resources

Amanda Benbow Lunn 25:00

How should Wake County balance rapid development with protecting water quality, watersheds, farmland, and natural resources?

Jim White 25:07

For example, there's a policy. I think, I don't know if it's Raleigh or the county. I think it's Raleigh. You know, they have a kind of a build-up policy. So there's a good example of we want to avoid kind of the spread that, you know, consumes a lot in the land. So we have this kind of build-up model, but you, you know, you have a concentration of people, a concentration of all the things people bring with it, cars, oil that drips off cars, and all that sort of stuff. So you, you know, you have to have good infrastructure that ensures that the water runs in the right way. So, for example, the county does not have its own water system. The only water systems that we have in Wake County are municipal water systems. And so for people who live in the county, like me, you have a well. And so you make sure that all these runoffs and and and there are, by the way, there's a lot of really good controls. So I live in the Swift Creek watershed. I have a permeable limitation on what I can do on my property with regard to building. I'm hoping, and I don't know this for a fact, that the rules we have in place are actually adequate to protect that, right? And I'm sure there's people on one side who say it should be even more, and there's other people who say it's too much, and that probably tells you it's right, right? And all you have to do is look around and you see, you know, there's still a lot of trees and there's still a lot of open space. So I think as we grow, it's about coordinating with municipalities to make sure they have all the information they need to do the right things and to monitor them. Now, let me give you an example. So this is something that happened historically, but it's a factor for us, which is there's an article in the Indy, I believe, about the state auditor, audited DEQ, the Department of Environmental Quality. All right. Um, the Department of Environmental Quality has as one of the many things that they have kind of within their jurisdiction, is regulating and managing landfills. All right. There's a category of landfills that were pre-1983. This is before there was a lot of strict rules around landfills. So there was a whole bunch of landfills between 1983. In fact, there's 34 of them in Wake County, right? And in about 2008, the state legislature has some funding that is related to every time somebody puts, yeah, I think it's $2 a ton, every time some commercial person puts stuff in a landfill, there's a $2 tax. And that $2 tax goes into a fund for TEQ to manage these 34. And I'm only talking about Wake County. There's many more throughout the whole state, but there's 34 in Wake County. Only three of them have ever been evaluated. There's a bucket of money to do things, to evaluate them and to do remediation. And that's it's a significant amount of money. I want to say over $10 million, and it might be close to $20 million. But only three of those landfills have actually even been assessed for their risk. So there's 31 landfills that are with, in fact, 90 in the state auditor reporting, but 90, 93% of them are with a thousand feet of a home, a childcare center, a church, places where people are at. And so going ahead and putting pressure and say, hey, wait a second, why don't we use some net funding? Let's get through those 33 and do a risk assessment for each one of them. And I'll give you an example of how this affects all the different constituencies. So, for example, there is a landfill that's in Holly Springs, one of these landfills, and a developer bought the land. He actually started to build and he put the roads in and some of the infrastructure in, only to find out that that landfill was leaching, I think, methane gas. And so there's, I believe, about 50 lots that are still there unused for over a decade, right?

Amanda Benbow Lunn 28:23

Wow.

Jim White 28:23

Because they just didn't have the information about that particular landfill. Now, these landfills could be doing a lot of things. They could be emitting methane gas. Some of them could have had some agricultural chemicals dumped in them, like DDT or something like that, that could be leaching into and to go through that process to make sure what is happening and what's not happening to each one of those. Once you know, hey, we have a real problem here, this thing's actually doing something bad to our air or water or soil, then you go ahead and you tap into the thing that says, okay, now we have to put in place some expensive remediation. And there is a bucket of money to do that. But somebody has to kind of quarterback that and draw attention to it. And I think that's a really good fit for the soil and water district.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 29:04

All right. And is part of this looking at water quality and like PFAFs, is that part of the jurisdiction of this office?

Jim White 29:13

Most of that's going to end up in your municipal, you know, most people are going to be affected by their municipal water and they have some kind of supervision over those sorts of things. But I think it clearly is a topic that can fit in there. So that program I talk about where they go, it's called a big sweep, where they organize volunteers and they go out and they go down. And you know, and what they're picking up is things that cause that sort of stuff, right? Trash that's, you know, just been dumped out there or whatever. And so, yeah, those issues, the sensitivity that most of us have around this kind of chemical pollution that's been caused by, you know, modern society and things we didn't worry about, like PFAS, et cetera, I think are all within the scope of the Soil and Water Conservation District, at least from the standpoint of driving some education, some awareness, some testing, some policy, maybe even a little bit of research, and collaborating with the right parts of the county infrastructure to put in place policies and programs that, you know, mitigate those things.

District Role Managing Stormwater Erosion & Water Quality

Amanda Benbow Lunn 30:12

Okay. What role should the district play in helping farmers, landowners, developers, and communities manage stormwater erosion and water quality?

Jim White 30:20

So this is where they really have a lot of already put in place programs and that sort of things. They have access to some funds. There's like things that you know to do to manage runoff and water and soil erosion and stuff like that. There's you know, well-known kind of mediations and there's funds that can help that. So if a farmer comes forward and says, hey, look, I have an erosion problem over here, there's people who will come out, look at it, and say, okay, this is the intervention you can make, and this is what it would cost. And here's a you know, a funding program to kind of offset the cost for that so that we can fix that problem, right? And those are well established. This is this is the meat and potatoes of what the Soil and Water Conservation District does do.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 31:01

Okay.

Approach to the Responsibilities and Decision-Making Authority of this Office

Amanda Benbow Lunn 31:02

How would you approach the responsibilities and decision-making authority of this particular office?

Jim White 31:07

Like I said, this is not a very coercive and doesn't have a very regulatory authority. And so it's about collaboration and coordination with the adjacent bodies that have those kind of powers. And part of it is understanding where's the right place for something. And by the way, the other thing that this group can do is it can make recommendations to the legislature, say, hey, look, this doesn't work well. We need to realign this, and a different body should handle this particular activity. Now we're only one, you know, uh, you know, there's there's a conservation district in every county in the state. Um, and so, you know, our primary kind of go-to place would be to the Wake County structure. But because we're in Raleigh and we're close to the state level agencies, there's kind of a special influence that says, hey, we're we're aware of this because of this, and you know, we can make recommendations that would would flow up to uh to the state level too.

Adapting Conservation Efforts for Growth

Amanda Benbow Lunn 32:01

Okay. How should conservation efforts adapt to Wake County's continued population growth?

Jim White 32:06

I mean, that you know, that uh that one example I I like is um, you know, in what ways can we keep um farms farms, right? And open spaces, open spaces, um, by making making them sustainable from an economic perspective. If you you gotta put yourself in the shoes of the landowner, right? I have an opportunity cost. My land is very valuable now, right? Um, and so uh and so we have to be thinking about ways to be creative, to create programs um that um make it so that it's economically sustainable for the landowner to hold that land in that particular status. And then developers have to, of course, find creative ways to do and bring the kind of value they want to bring without always just going horizontal. It's more expensive to do things in different ways. And, you know, for example, uh classic developer things, hey, I want to be really dense, right? So how do I take a piece of land that, you know, was going to be residential, whatever, where it was gonna be single family homes with big yards, maybe even not even it's unincorporated. So, for example, you're unincorporated since you don't have city, water, and sewage, that plot has to be big enough to support a well in a septic system, right? That almost puts you close to an acre per lot that gives kind of the sense of space. Developers, that's an expensive development project, right? Hey, you know, the first thing I want to do is have somebody incorporate it so that I can put in attached to municipal stuff and I can get really dense. But the developers, at the same time, if I feel like there's a market for whatever, 50,000 new residential units, how valuable that is is based on the quality of life and whether people want to move in there and live there. So there's a vested interest in making sure that the quality of life stays good. And there's mechanisms in place. You know, the municipalities, they control the zoning stuff, right? And to make sure that for every square foot you cave over, you figure out a way to preserve permeable soil and that sort of thing. Those mechanisms are already there. I think the real challenge will be when we find that those mechanisms that are in place, the rules that are there, are too constrained to meet the growth demand that we have. And that will be a decision about well, do we hold the line, which would force some of that development outside of the county, right? Which would then, of course, impacts traffic, right? In some ways a good way, in some ways in a bad way. So these are all just balancing acts, you have to figure out, right?

Amanda Benbow Lunn 34:21

Okay. When

Deciding What Takes Precedence

Amanda Benbow Lunn 34:22

priorities compete or resources are limited, how would you decide what takes precedence?

Jim White 34:27

That's kind of a value system question. So I think my position is that, like I said, growth is inevitable, balance is something that we would manage. And to me, the litmus test is how do you keep the county special, right? And I think for me, a big part of the specialness of I mean, all you have to do is have people come visit you and to go, wow, look at all the trees, right? And so that's just a me as a resident, knowing that part of the specialness of Way County is the sense of still being in nature while at the same time having these resources near you. I always lean towards there's got to be a creative way to do both things, but you're really asking the questions of at what point would you choose between A and B? I mean, I have a strong sense of the aesthetic personally. So I get the idea that there it's important to have utility and cost efficiency and that sort of thing, but I also recognize that the aesthetic is really where the specialness is. And Wake County, it's in a unique position because it's really is one of the best counties in the country, right? You know, we're not beggars at all, right? I think as a community, we have a lot of uh leverage to get things to be done in a way that is, you know, both value added from a development perspective, but also protecting the aesthetic. So I don't think we'll get too confronted with the hard choices like a poorer place that says, hey, oh, some giant battery factory wants to come in here and mow down a million acres of forest, and you're like, well, we need jobs. You know, we're not in that, we're not in that boat, right? We have a fair amount of options and we have a lot of diversity in the economy. So I think we can be really picky.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 36:00

Would your office be one that would be consulted if a data center were trying to come in?

Jim White 36:06

We'd be aware of it. And there would definitely be, it obviously would depend a lot on where it's at, but to the degree it was in some ways challenging, you know, permeable soil requirements or was adjacent to important waterways or something like that. I think we would have an opportunity to weigh in and provide kind of the conservation view of the impact of that. I know there's a lot of concern about data centers. Honestly, my biggest concern is that there's kind of a bubble, right? And I think the worst case scenario is you build a big giant data center and there's really not the demand for it that you think there was going to be, and you've stranded, you know, an asset. I mean, I actually have a tech background. These things, they're not like a lot of capital investments where you put something in them and they're good for 20 years. They're good for three or four years, and then you have to keep investing in them. And so I'm not I'm not super bullish on data centers. I know people think they're the greatest things in the world. I mean, I think there's a lot of them, and I know we're gonna build more, but I don't know why you won't need them next year, you know. But anyway.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 37:06

Okay.

What's Working Well & What Needs Changed

Amanda Benbow Lunn 37:07

Uh, what do you think this office is doing right? And what would you like to see changed?

Jim White 37:11

I think there's some really good kind of programs and mechanisms in place. They've always recognized the big challenge, which is, you know, people are moving in and there's a trading between, you know, open agricultural space and kind of urban development. And so I think they have some really good, solid programs in place to do that. I think they have great support. I'm really in the campaign and I want to get out and talk to more of the people who are in the rural parts of the county and to make sure that their perception is if I ask for help, I get it. My impression is that is the case. If I have a conservation issue, something I want to do with my land, that there's somebody shows up and there's a resource there. And whether there's I'm gonna guess there's never enough shared money that the burden is, you know, they'd say, I wish there was more, I had to spend this money, and I wish I could have had more of that offset to do it faster, easier, better. Um, but that's kind of normal stuff. So I have a sense that that's that part of it is actually, you know, working pretty well. I think that there's an opportunity, and I don't want to make it a criticism, I just think that there's an opportunity to exploit the population growth and kind of turn the population into a customer for the people who still have land in open space, right? And that's a unique thing that happens in a growing, prosperous community like Wake County that doesn't exist in probably you know 70 or 80 other counties in the state. And so I think there's an opportunity there more than there's like something that hasn't been done. And so, you know, I see my role is to come and just kind of nudge them in that direction and see if that's real. Okay.

Accountability: What & How

Amanda Benbow Lunn 38:39

What should voters hold you accountable for if you're elected and how?

Jim White 38:42

So they should hold me accountable for showing up and participate in those meetings and to listen and to execute on the strategy that I'm kind of putting on the table. And if it can't be done, it won't happen not because of a lack of trying, but just it maybe isn't a good idea, you know, or there's something you can't make work. But that's what I would ask people to hold me accountable for is actually give it the, you know, really see if you can put this thing in motion and and make things work.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 39:09

Okay. As we wrap up,

Last Thoughts

Amanda Benbow Lunn 39:11

is there anything we haven't discussed that you would like voters to know or anything from our conversation that you'd like to expand upon for clarity?

Jim White 39:18

No, I think this is pretty comprehensive. I actually really appreciate this. I think it's a great opportunity. First of all, the reality of it is there's hundreds of thousands of people who are going to show up on November 3rd to vote. And on the back of the ballot, there will be, you know, they'll be able to vote for two people for soil and water. And they'll have two problems. They won't know what soil and water does, and I think this helps with that a little bit, and they won't know any, they won't have any idea who the people are, because you know, I might buy 300 signs, you know, and spread them around the county, and that's the only place they'll ever see my name. So that's the challenge. I mean, I've been there, I've been on the back of the ballot, and you're looking at judges and you don't know who's who, and you know it it's a tough call. And so what you're doing is really valuable, I think. And I look forward to seeing the output from this.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 40:01

Thank you. And

Where to Learn More

Amanda Benbow Lunn 40:02

for voters who want to learn more about you, your platform, your campaign endorsements and priorities, where can they go to find that information?

Jim White 40:09

So it's Jim WhiteNumber 4Wake.com. And then it'll get you to Facebook and all the other places that I'm doing putting some stuff up. All right. Perfect.

Amanda Benbow Lunn 40:18

Well, thanks so much, Jim, for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate you trusting me to put this together for you, and I wish you the best of luck with your campaign.

Jim White 40:26

Awesome. Thank you. All right, take care, Amanda. Bye. Bye-bye.

Closing Reflections & Voting Info

Amanda Benbow Lunn 40:29

Democracy is built on participation. Politics can sometimes feel distant or abstract, but the decisions made by our elected officials at the county, state, and federal levels have a profound effect on the communities we call home and the way we live our lives. From the roads we drive on and the schools our children attend to public safety, parks and recreation, housing, health care, taxes, the economy, and the many other services and amenities that make up our communities. Government plays a role in shaping both our everyday experience and our future. That makes taking the time to understand the choices on your ballot and the people asking for your vote an important part of being an engaged member of your community. Early voting for the 2026 midterm election begins October 15th and runs through October 31st. In Southern Wake County, there will be early voting locations at the Hunt Center in Holly Springs, the Hilltop Needmore Town Park Clubhouse in Fuquay Varina, Beech Bluff County Park, and Southern Wake Tech Campus close by. Election Day is November 3rd. A general reminder that you will need a valid photo ID to vote. The regular voter registration deadline is October 9th, although you may still register when you vote during the early voting period. Please note that you cannot register to vote on Election Day itself, and that that day you will absolutely have to vote at your designated precinct location to have access to your full ballot. And because there are so many races and ballot measures this year, your ballot will likely be double-sided. It can be helpful to start on the back so that you don't accidentally overlook anything. You'll vote for the races that apply to your jurisdiction along with statewide amendments and for Southern Wake County voters, local Wake County bond referenda. Voting is one of the ways we take part in the communities we share. You don't have to agree with your neighbors or even with the candidates you've heard here to recognize that our communities are shaped by the people who show up, ask questions, learn about the choices before them, and cast their ballots. So please take the time to get informed, make your voice heard, and encourage the people around you to do the same. Your vote matters. Your voice matters. And you absolutely matter, my friend. And with that, this episode of the NC Deep Dive has come to an end. Please feel free to check out this episode show notes at ncdeepdive.com for further information and relevant links for this candidate along with general election information. As always, if you have any topics or thoughts you'd like to share, you can find us on social media or email us at ncdeepdive at gmail.com. If you found value in this episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and share it so that others may more easily be informed. Please make sure to stay tuned for all the relevant candidate amendment and referenda episodes for the 2026 midterm election by visiting ncdeepdive.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you currently listen to your podcast. Until next time, my friends, Namaste: The Love and Light in Me sees and honors the Love and Light in You.