By David Rogers. BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — On Oct. 27, Blowing Rock town manager Shane Fox was approved as the new County Manager for Caldwell County. He immediately gave notice to the Town of Blowing Rock that he would be leaving the town’s employ effective Dec. 1, 2025, when he is slated to take on his new responsibilities.
Blowing Rock News sat down with Fox on Oct. 28, to discuss various topics, including his decision to leave Blowing Rock after six years in the town manager role, except for almost 12 months when he served as Alexander County’s county manager during 2022-23 before returning to Blowing Rock.
What you will find below is an interesting read, covering why Fox is leaving for the Caldwell County job, various aspects of his upcoming role there, what has been accomplished in Blowing Rock during his tenure, and some thoughts on what challenges Caldwell County and Blowing Rock both face in the weeks, months, years and decades ahead.
This was not your normal “exit interview” and we found Fox not only articulate and informed, but very candid, too.
Let’s start with you telling us about the opportunity in Caldwell County.
I thought about this last night when I was officially voted in as the Caldwell County Manager. It is a homecoming. My wife and I are both from Caldwell County. Both of our families go back a number of generations there. My family goes back to before Caldwell County was even Caldwell County, to 1841 on my mom’s side. All four sides of my mother and father go back seven or eight generations living in Caldwell County. So, in that sense, it has always been home.
Recalling from earlier conversations, you used to play or coach sports in Caldwell County, right?
Growing up, I played sports a lot. Football, baseball, basketball. I attended South Caldwell High School. Then I played baseball and basketball at Caldwell Community College, before transferring to App State. At that point, I stopped sports and got an accounting degree.
But Caldwell County is home. In this line of work, serving the public is what we do. And it is what I love to do, being able to serve the public. You hope to make a difference in people’s lives each day. So it is an honor to go back and serve the people who have helped make me who I am. It has truly been a dream job that has been out there, that I have watched for a long time. It was open four years ago, but the timing wasn’t right. I didn’t feel adequately prepared.
I feel prepared now to take on the responsibility of leading the county. It is a larger county, some 80,000 people, so quite a bit larger than Watauga County. The budget is about $130 million, total. So, it is much larger than here in Blowing Rock, where our budget is right at $18 million,.
So, it is a huge honor as well as responsibility to take a job of that size and magnitude. More than that, though, it is really near and dear to our hearts to go back and for me to be able to help the people that have made me who I am.
Did your predecessor retire?
He moved on to the City of Asheboro. He is from that area, so it was a similar going home decision for him, too. He left back in the spring. Caldwell has had an interim manager, then back in September started the process, beginning with advertising the open position. Some folks there reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and we had a preliminary conversation. They invited me down for a more detailed discussion and that led to an offer.
Again, it is an honor, to be sure.
What do you see as being the primary challenges and opportunities in your new role?
Right off the bat, the biggest challenge is developing relationships and trust. There are a lot of people in the community who I know, that I have known for most of my life. There are also a lot that I don’t know, so that will be about building relationships and trust so that I can lead them. Leading always goes back to, number one, whether your cohorts or employees, your teammates, trust you. They need to know you are genuine, and where you are coming from. That takes time, so I am looking forward to that and it is a challenge anytime you make a change or transition.
There are a number of things going on right now at the federal level that are going to have a significant impact at the local level, whether it is the recent bill passed by Congress and President Trump or the present government shutdown. For a county government, the federal government’s primary impact is mainly on the Department of Social Services and the Health Department.
In the Department of Social Services it may be your SNAP benefits, WIC benefits or low income housing benefits. There is a lot of money that is federal money, brought down through the state to local government, to help provide benefits to your local citizens. Those funds are either coming to an end or have been stopped already. Others have sunset clauses that may be coming in the next few years related to the so-called “big beautiful bill” that was passed.
On a town level, like Blowing Rock, we deal almost zero with the federal government unless we are seeking a grant of some sort, like the USDA. Here, we can pause a project or survive until the federal government starts up again, but for Caldwell County, for instance, you have 30,000-plus people receiving some level of Medicaid, SNAP, WIC or housing benefits. They are all impacted when the federal government shuts down.
It has been recently noted that what money is suspended by the federal government isn’t going to be reimbursable to the local government if they pick up those (benefits). So, there are challenges that are different than here in Blowing Rock.
When I was in Alexander County, it was a different day-to-day schedule than I have here in Blowing Rock. Caldwell County will also be different. With 700-plus full-time employees, it is much larger. I am going to be removed a lot from the public side of things and really dealing with the bigger picture of how the county operates. Again, one of the first challenges is going to be dealing with the federal government shutdown and the aftermath of that. Hopefully, by the time I start on Dec. 1, the federal government will have opened back up but it may not be. (Editor’s Note: It was announced on Nov. 13 that the shutdown has ended, but there is still the aftermath creating uncertainty).
So you start Dec. 1?
That is when I’ll be sworn in. Last night (Oct. 27), the contract was voted on and approved and I was introduced as the new hire.
You know, one of the interesting things about this transition is that Caldwell County is part of Blowing Rock and vice-versa. So it is an easier transition with the relationships I already have there, whether through the community college, Blue Ridge Electric or various companies. I have long-standing relationships with all of those institutions.
You mentioned that part of Blowing Rock is in Caldwell County, so as town manager here you necessarily had to stay abreast of things going on in Caldwell County and their issues.
Yes. Plus, we still own property in Caldwell County, a few different pieces of property through my father and others in the family who have passed away over the years. So I have always kept an eye on what is going on in Caldwell County.
As a consequence, this will be a very easy transition compared to if we were complete outsiders coming into that local government without a lot of knowledge already. The five county commissioners and I have known each other for a while, some for several years. So there isn’t going to be a lot of that “getting to know each other” process.
I know all of the town managers in Caldwell County and have worked with them previously in different capacities. The neighboring Burke County manager and I have known each other for more than 20 years. I actually hired him when we were at Martin Starnes, the accounting firm. There is another county manager decision coming in Alexander County, who I also hired at one point with Martin Starnes. It will be interesting. Burke, Alexander and Caldwell… and all three county managers coming from the same accounting firm.
You may be the Bill Belichick of county managers!
(Laughing) Yes, I may have a little bit of a coaching tree! But it really all started with Bryan Starnes, who started Martin Starnes. He hired me and we branched out in different areas. But there are three of us who will kind of be linked together, Alexander, Burke and Caldwell counties and all neighboring.
When you look at this region, from a larger perspective, and I include Watauga, Wilkes, Alexander, Burke, Avery, Ashe, Caldwell and Catawba counties, Caldwell is kind of in the center of things. It is a major hub. You have major highways running through the county. You have a lot of growth in the suburbs like Granite Falls and Lake Hickory. The North Carolina Speaker of the House is the staff attorney for the county, Destin Hall. There is a lot of growth that is coming and a lot of opportunities.
We’ve talked a lot about various projects that could happen. There is a tremendous amount of need with the county that I am excited to be a part of in addressing those needs. A new communication center for emergency services, a new courthouse and a lot of things in between. There are a lot of exciting things that the county commissioners want to accomplish in the next 10 or 15 years.
What about economic development?
There are very few major players there that I don’t already have a relationship with. Bryan Moore at the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce was formerly a marketing executive at Chetola Mountain Resort. Ashley Bolick with the EDC, I have known her for 15 years. On the economic development front, it will also be a fairly easy transition because of the relationships I already have.
I guess one of the major differences between Caldwell County governance and Blowing Rock governance is the eagerness there to have economic development, whereas here a lot of the prevailing mindset is preserving the status quo, the small town village feel.
Economic development in Blowing Rock is different in many ways. It has been difficult to lure significant industry. That is the case, really, for Watauga County and in Blowing Rock it is almost non-existent.
Economic development in Blowing Rock is our retail commercial space. It is not industry, per se. In Caldwell County, it is known and zoned as industry. It goes back to the furniture industry and, before that, it goes back to iron works and other manufacturing. For 120 years, Caldwell County has been known as the furniture capital of the world and it has revived itself. Furniture companies are back running at full capacity and a lot of them are running multiple shifts.
On top of that, you now have Google with a major presence there, as well as some specialty companies that have relocated to Caldwell County. There continues to be a huge push to bring industry there.
For instance, $7-8 million per year in rebate-able taxes and payments as economic incentives is a typical number in Caldwell County. That means they are giving those monies back to those industries for economic development deals. It demonstrates the investment the county is making to bring economic development.
$7-8 million… is that a common number for most counties?
It’s a percentage of where your property taxes are going to be refunded back because of whatever investment you put in. The larger the investment, the larger the incentives. Google, for example, was a huge investment and continues to be a massive investment in that area. So they obviously have a large amount of their property taxes coming back to them each year as a rebate, as an incentive. It is all relative to where you are at. Catawba County has a much larger number than Caldwell’s $7-8 million. Alexander County had a next to nothing number for economic development. Each county is going to be different, determined by the deals they put into place and how eager the government leaders are for economic development. Caldwell County has a longstanding history of economic development because of where it is located, because of the furniture industry, and because it is competing with Catawba County in being very economically friendly with industry.
What’s the labor market like?
It’s strong. For a number of decades, a lot of individuals left Caldwell County to work in Catawba County, especially when the furniture industry took a nosedive in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those numbers are coming back. People are staying in the county and working. A lot of individuals come from Tennessee through Watauga County into Caldwell County for work. For some of the industries that has always been an inflow each day. On the other hand, a lot of people working in Watauga County reside in Caldwell County. So for Caldwell, there is that outflow each day but there is an inflow in the other direction, as well.
There has been a strong push for economic development in Caldwell County. I’ve known Ashley Bolick, the Director of Caldwell County Economic Development for well over a decade and she has a strong team that is focused solely on economic development. It is important to note that the cost of housing alone is about half of what it is in Watauga. The short term rental market in Watauga is huge. There are a number of properties that are used solely for that purpose, as investments. But that upward push on housing prices only makes the disparity more severe, prompting more people to commute to Watauga from Caldwell, Wilkes and northeast Tennessee.
That prompts a related question. How long can a small town like Blowing Rock resist the demographic trends that are nurturing the market demand for short-term rentals? And I guess the second question is how long can Blowing Rock cling to the concept of protecting a small village atmosphere?
Everything is truly market dependent. If the homes are not selling or being built because of the restrictions that are in place, I guess that will be a determining factor. It doesn’t appear that it will be because of a shift in elected officials wanting change. The “protection” aspect is as strong today as it was five years ago with people not wanting to change ordinances and allow short-term rentals, even the no or low density signs that you see out there. That is driven by the public. Ultimately, though, the market will determine whether those changes happen.
A lot of individuals in the protectionist element are older. Will the younger generations have the same values and attitudes?
We, in Blowing Rock, are like a lot of tourist destinations whether it is at the beach or Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Tourist destinations have one major advantage. They are destinations because of the locations they are in. The beauty, the opportunities that you have to come to places like this always will keep Blowing Rock and other destination areas filled with a certain number of people. But if things change and the demographics of the next generation want or don’t want certain things, like investment properties or a true second home, I could see some of those market demands being hurt. But not right now.
North Carolina may be the third or fourth fastest growing state in the country. Texas and Florida are No. 1 and No. 2, by a long shot. But any time you are in the top five and then add in the metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Raleigh — and they are right there in the top 10 or 15 in the country — you are going to have the potential for growth in any outlying areas within a hundred miles or so, especially when you have what we have here (in Blowing Rock), a second home destination. Certain people in Charlotte or Raleigh are likely to be looking for a second home, a vacation home or an investment property. The mountains of North Carolina and the beaches of North Carolina are the two places which are the most popular choices for those (objectives).
And the infrastructure is being built to accommodate those goals.
Yes, roads are great. It has never been easier to get from Charlotte to Blowing Rock. It’s an hour and a half, from almost anywhere in Charlotte to here. Four-lane highways make for easy access and once you get here there is high speed Internet. Water and sewer has been upgraded significantly. There are a lot of reasons to think that Blowing Rock is a place that will be in demand by people living off the mountain as a destination, now and in the future.
Well, let’s segue into a discussion of things pertinent to your time here as Town Manager. You came in 2019, as I recall, with a short hiatus away, about a year in 2022-23. What do you feel are the major accomplishments of Blowing Rock during your tenure?
It’s easy to look at projects because there have been a lot of them. The revitalization of Sunset Drive in terms of water, sewer and streetscape. That carries into some of the other major water and sewer replacement on Main Street and side streets. When the water plant is bid out next month, you will be looking at a total of about $25 million in water and sewer projects in Blowing Rock since 2019. Most of those have been completed and that is a big accomplishment for a small town. Our trunk system, our main line, is now pretty much all updated at this point. Most of those lines had only been done once. Most of them were the original lines dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. They were old, terracotta material, breaking apart with age and years-long stress. So, I feel it is a great accomplishment in upgrading the water and sewer system.
We’ve also made some significant upgrades to Memorial Park, including the playground and Phase 2 of the bathrooms. Now we are finishing up everything else, like the tennis courts, pickleball, the walkways and sidewalks. Town Council tells us what they want, what is important to them. Our role as town staff is to oversee it and get the projects done.
We can look at the sidewalk to Bass Lake. The walkability of the Town continues to be a point of emphasis for what we have tried to accomplish here, under the auspices of Town Council. Crosswalks are coming up.
Town Council approved two land acquisitions for future development. We bought the Buxton property on Valley Boulevard that may be a municipal complex one day, perhaps for the police department and other town agencies. We bought the property across from Food Lion that may be utilized for economic development or another purpose. Up by the Assembly Grounds, we bought property that will eventually be home for a second water tank and related infrastructure. That is needed in order to have redundancy in the water system. Heaven forbid something was to happen to the water tank on Green Hill Circle that feeds our gravity-based system, but if it did the entire town would be in trouble. The same property by the Assembly Grounds may be used for a communications tower to meet our town’s public safety needs.
What else have we done during my tenure? We worked through the COVID-19 pandemic and through Hurricane Helene. We opened the Blowing Rock Academy, the child care center and have seen huge success with that. The town is fully staffed, partly because of it. We brought back our communications for the Police Department, which has continued to focus on things outside of the typical speeding issues. It is now a really good, comprehensive Police Department.
Overall, all of those completed projects are second to the growth and stability of our staff serving the town. Previously, the town had some difficulty in hiring and keeping staff in various roles, keeping full-time staff with long-tenured individuals. That has been achieved through increases in compensation, increases in benefits, as well as revolutionary ideas like the child care center. As a result, we now have very competent staffing and that results in better services to the residents, business owners and visitors.
There has been a perception over the years that a lot of those projects, like the water and sewer remediation, were the proverbial can kicked down the road. You seemed to come along at a good time to get things done.
A lot of this started in 2014 with the Community Improvement Bonds aimed at streets and other improvements. A part of that was aimed at water and sewer. I inherited that bond package. The emphasis on water and sewer had started but it wasn’t quite where it needed to be. A lot of any delays were because of the difficult nature of the project. It was a big undertaking and somewhat complicated. The willingness of the then sitting Town Council in 2014, with support from many others, including the editorial I read in Blowing Rock News at the time (Tomorrow’s Blowing Rock: “Let’s Get It Done”), set the stage for getting done what we have gotten accomplished in the last six years.
The state’s involvement in the financing of Main Street improvements, with Ray Pickett and Deanna Ballard coming through to provide the town with the largest allocation it has ever received, over $5 million. Those funds allowed us to refocus town funds that were going to go to Main Street, to address other needs like the water plant.
To the point of kicking the can down the road, it is just nice to know that such essential services like water and sewer are much, much better off today than they were 10 years ago.
Former town manager Scott Fogleman had a huge role. It is not just me. It is a team, including former finance director Nicole Norman, current finance director Tasha Brown, Matt Blackburn with Public Works. It is the Town Council. There is not a better team that I have ever worked with for their willingness to come together to accomplish what we have been able to accomplish. The individuals who work here always want to do better. For a small town, we have accomplished a lot.
There are a lot of people who need to be credited for the Watauga County commissioners taking the huge step in taking on the ambulance service. Blowing Rock has been clamoring for better ambulance service for over 40 years. A number of people involved with our town government have pushed for the county to take it over as a county-owned and operated EMS service, not just me but several of the town commissioners and mayors over the years. Your editorials in Blowing Rock News were quite well done in articulating the case for moving away from a Boone-centric service and moving to a county-owned service.
I can’t take credit for it, but I can look back and say I am pleased it happened on my watch. We’re very optimistic that they will be able to expand the ambulance service and provide the level of care and transport for all of the county. They should finish up the transition in ownership by early December.
You know, Caldwell County has a longstanding tradition of being very pro-public safety, whether that is through ambulance service or law enforcement and fire. On the EMS side, for Caldwell to have 12 trucks operating all the time, one of which sits over here in Blowing Rock’s Station 1, is a great resource. It answers the calls for northern Caldwell County. There is a paramedic sitting over there in that station 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they have been there for a few years now.
In your estimation, as you leave, what are the primary challenges that Blowing Rock faces?
The town is in great shape, financially. It is in great shape with projects to be completed in both the near and longer term. We are wrapping up the major ones. The one that remains is the FEMA project related to Hurricane Helene, down on Valley View Road. The FEMA work, the bidding work, the planning… that’s all done. Now it is just a matter of doing it and the construction company that was awarded the contract has extensive experience in doing the necessary work. Weather, of course, will be a factor in how quickly it is completed.
The other major project is the water plant and getting the Mayview lift station replaced. That should be completed over a period of about a year and a half.
Other than that, I expect the next manager and Town Council will want to consider another bond package. There will be some additional water and sewer work that needs to be done around town. A lot of work on streets and roads, with new rounds of paving. I sense there will be renewed interest in providing more sidewalks, whether that is Ransom Street, Clark Street, or others, in some combination of them all. Town Council has expressed an interest in increasing the walkability around town.
The town will have to vote on any bond measure, just like they did in 2014. One of the things I didn’t mention earlier that I am proud of: the Town remains at a AA+ bond rating, which is the highest rating the town can ever receive. For a AAA rating, you have to have hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to get to that point. I don’t see Blowing Rock ever getting to that point of need.
We have been able to attain and retain the highest rating that a town of our size will ever be able to attain. That makes a huge impact on our ability to operate and complete projects. For instance, the last two debt packages that we were able to receive were in the 3.4 percent to 3.45 percent range. That was at a time when interest rates were double that in the private market for residential mortgages. Those low interest rates for our financing needs makes a huge difference for our taxpayers.
During my time here, as we have worked through the various projects and revaluation, our property tax rate has remained pretty much the same. That is a testament to the hard work of our staff, as well as protecting our debt rating and keeping interest rates low and making sure we are able to smooth out our debt packages.
It is not good management to have a rollercoaster budget. One of the things I learned as an auditor and in the CPA world was… government will always be there. So, our goal if you are a town manager or finance director or on the board of commissioners, should be to accomplish the needs that are before you and do so in such a way that you can keep the (budget) relatively level. You don’t want a rollercoaster of debt or finances. You want to try to smooth out everything.
That way, you keep your tax rate smooth. You keep your debt capacity smooth. And you are accomplishing things. We have been able to do that. We know now that debt is rolling off so we can start planning a couple of years ahead that we can put some level of debt back on, as needed. Citizens don’t like for the tax rates to wildly fluctuate. We’ve been able to accomplish a lot by keeping the mindset of “Where are we comfortable with the debt?” By keeping that, it allows us to do the needed projects systematically throughout the years. It is a long-term planning mindset.
Over the last several years, Blowing Rock has developed some better defined constituent interests. Have some of them become too extreme?
I would say society has changed throughout our country. Society’s view of government has changed dramatically over the last number of years. In the last 10 years, there has been a different view of government altogether. To an extent, local government gets caught up in stuff going on at the national level. The problem is that at a local level, we in government are your neighbors. We live here. We have kids in school here. We have families here. That may not be the case in D.C. when you are representing a state or even a country. On a local level, we are invested here. In turn, we also are very available. We are out and about. We are at the grocery store. At the post office. We’re at the school where my kids are, or we are walking the street.
I suspect that the changed view of government really started with the advances in technology making our representatives in government more accessible. The trend probably started with the first radio broadcasts of President Warren G. Harding in 1922 and Calvin Coolidge in 1923. The relationship of the public with their president became more personal with television, especially color television in the early 1950s. In more recent times, the Internet and social media has brought a raw, up close and personal element to public access. Even if they have never met him or her and are 3,000 miles away, John Q. Public thinks they know their representatives, personally, and that brings a sense of entitlement which at times borders into disrespect.
The changed view of government makes the local interactions more negative than they used to be. There are people who will approach us, wherever we are, and feel they need to voice their frustrations about what is going on. The frustration may be legitimate, but it may be more directed by their overall view of government.
That’s been a drastic switch that I have seen in the last 10 years, how society operates, and it makes it tough. A new town manager is going to have to deal with the access issue because we are a small town. We live here, we work here, we play here. We are accessible. The interactions with the public are not always negative, but the negative that we receive today is drastically different than it was a number of years ago. I don’t know how you change it because the challenge is much larger than a single special interest group.
It is a societal trend. It is not everyone, of course, but it is drastically different than it was 10 years ago.
Well, let’s use your 10-years time frame. In government on a national level, Donald Trump’s emergence at the federal level with the 2016 elections and his unfiltered use of social media seems to have been a factor, whether you love him or hate him.
Absolutely. And I am not talking politics. The accessibility of the president to his posting on social media or constantly being in the news feed that is the world that we hear, in whatever mechanism it is, has opened up the belief that there is accessibility there. Well, there should be, back and forth, but that concept has trickled down to the local level. Accessibility is demanded. “I want to voice my concern directly to the President – or the Town Manager. I want to have that access. I want you to hear that I am frustrated or mad or upset about something.”
In reality, that’s not how this is supposed to work. Sometimes they feel entitled to go around the Town Manager and speak with the department heads or the elected officials. We have all become impacted by it. Our staff oftentimes catches the brunt of the negativity, because they are out there dealing with the public – and the public today is different than it was 10 years ago. That is the reality of it. There are fewer, maybe even no filters.
I guess if there is a silver lining to my taking the county manager job in Caldwell County, I will be somewhat removed from a lot of the public interactions because of the sheer size of the county and my overarching role.
This accessibility issue and dealing with the negativity is not just a Blowing Rock thing. Small towns across the country are experiencing the very same thing. That negativity is a tough thing for anybody to manage. Neither we as staff nor our small town elected officials are politicians. Most small town elected officials want to serve and they want to care for the communities in which they live. That’s why they put their names in the proverbial hat as candidates. They want to serve their neighbors. But that desire to serve and at the same time be accessible can be difficult, because it can work against you in a place like this. It’s tough, because we are all humans. We want to be helpful and caring, but we can be abused as well.
Do you have any final thoughts?
I will wrap up with this: I could not be more proud of the town’s accomplishments these past six years. I am so proud of the staff and what they have achieved. We say we are a family and it is like a family. We are small enough that we are able to be a part of each other’s lives. They have entrusted me, as the town manager, not just to be leading them in projects or day-to-day activities, but they have entrusted me in their personal lives. They come in this office and share heart-wrenching stories of what is going on in their lives, with their kids, their spouses, their mothers and fathers. They share their personal joys. That trust is something I have never taken for granted. Their allowing me to be part of their personal and professional lives is the greatest accomplishment.
