newsobserver.com - Apex leaders ponder titles

By TOBY COLEMAN, Staff Writer

APEX -- Being a town commissioner is a time-honored public service in North Carolina, but -- let's face it -- the title is oh-so-Mayberry.

Now, in some of Raleigh's smaller suburbs, civic honchos are calling themselves by a more urbane name: council member.

Holly Springs' town commissioners renamed themselves last year. Apex's commissioners will decide this fall whether to assume new identities.

The towns are making the change to reflect their changing demographics, leaders say. Apex and Holly Springs are no longer tiny towns where people remember when individual commissioners were elected to run the police department, watch over firefighters and ensure their neighbors cut their grass.

Those discrete responsibilities have faded in recent decades as towns hired professional managers for day-to-day operations. Now, town commissioners do the same things council members elsewhere do: They make policy, cut ribbons and run for office every few years.

And people from New York, California and elsewhere are moving to former podunks turned commuter colonies. They bring their own concepts of municipal government.

Joe and Renee Ivkovich presumed that Apex, their current hometown, was governed by a council, just like the Connecticut town they left seven years ago.

"I didn't even know," Renee Ivkovich said when she learned that Apex was run by a town commission. She'd never heard of one, but it made no difference to her what the city fathers (they're all men) call themselves as long as they do the job.

Commissioner Bryan Gossage had people such as the Ivkoviches in mind when he proposed renaming Apex's commission. The move from commission to council would not alter the board's power, but would cut down on confusion, he said.

"It's kind of an ease of use," Gossage said. "In marketing, you meet people where they are, you don't make people meet you where you're at."

Winnie Lyons, 60, an Apex resident since 1959, said she likes the idea: "That's what I'm saying, what the heck is a commissioner?"

Mike Jones, an Apex commissioner, said his uncle Brack Jones even responded to complaints about overgrown lots during his stint as a commissioner. The family called him the "weed commissioner."

In Wake County, seven municipalities have commissioners and four have councils. Garner has aldermen. The city of Durham has a council, as does Chapel Hill.

In Wake County, some towns renamed their governing bodies as soon as they hired professionals to run their bureaucracies. The Cary Board of Commissioners became the Cary Town Council in 1961, a month after residents voted to hire a town manager, according to "Around and About Cary," a history of the town by Thomas Byrd and Jerry Miller.

Other officials decided to keep their old names. "I don't know that it makes a whole lot of difference," said Zebulon Commissioner Don Bumgarner, who said he has never considered renaming the board during his 14 years in office.

There are benefits to becoming a town council, but they might be ones only a bureaucrat can appreciate. The words "Council Chambers," for instance, fit on signs more easily than "Board of Commissioners Meeting Room."

Staff writer Toby Coleman can be reached at 829-8937 or tcoleman@newsobserver.com.