A city manager search gone wrong - and the egregious council behavior that made it so.
Small cities rarely make headlines. Their struggles - fiscal mismanagement, leadership vacuums, the slow erosion of public trust - play out in school gymnasiums and wood-paneled council chambers, witnessed by a handful of residents and largely ignored by the world outside. Washington, North Carolina, a Beaufort County seat of roughly ten thousand souls sitting at the confluence of the Pamlico River and the coastal plain, is one of those cities. And it is quietly facing a governance crisis that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
On Monday, the Washington City Council is expected to vote to hire Jonathan N. Rorie as its next permanent city manager. The offer has been extended. The vote appears to be a formality. It should not be.
The case against rushing this hire begins with Rorie's own record and ends with the troubling political machinations that have brought his name to the top of the list - a combination that, taken together, ought to give any serious deliberative body serious pause.
Start with Peachtree City, Georgia, in 2019. As city manager, Rorie advanced a resolution that would have authorized the use of taxpayer dollars to fund lawsuits against residents, journalists, and social media users who criticized public officials. This was not a fringe position quietly floated in committee - Rorie personally promoted it, told a local television reporter he did not think citizens should have the ability to publicly question their officials, and when pressed on why public money should be used to silence public dissent, offered no answer at all. A First Amendment attorney at Emory University used the proposal as a live teaching case in government overreach. The Peachtree City Council voted it down unanimously after an outpouring of citizen opposition. The fact that Rorie initiated it at all is not a footnote. In a city like Washington - where the council has spent months trying to rebuild public confidence after a period of financial mismanagement and state fiscal oversight - installing a city manager with a documented instinct toward silencing critics is not a personnel risk. It is an institutional one.
The Spring Lake chapter of Rorie's career is no more reassuring. His 21-month tenure in that Cumberland County town - itself a cautionary tale of municipal dysfunction, having cycled through more than a dozen city managers in seventeen years - ended in February 2026 when three newly elected commissioners voted to terminate his contract without cause. Sources with direct knowledge of the board's internal deliberations say that a persistent lack of transparency was at the heart of the decision. All information between staff, board, and public, they say, flowed through Rorie - creating a bottleneck that left elected commissioners uninformed and the public in the dark. The word those sources used to describe his approach was "overbearing." In a council-manager form of government, where the elected body depends on the professional administrator for accurate, timely, and complete information, that is not a stylistic complaint. It is a structural failure. Rorie has now left or been removed from three consecutive positions in under four years - and the fact that he is being seriously considered for Washington's top administrative post in the immediate aftermath of a Town Manager of the Year departing this city speaks less to Rorie's qualifications than it does to the naked desperation of Perreault, Tyre, and the far-left coalition that has rallied around them.
There is also the matter of civic identity. Washington is a conservative, faith-rooted community where the church is not an institution on the margins of public life but woven into its civic fabric - in its neighborhoods, its schools, its civic associations, and its history. Residents have every right to ask whether a city manager who has made identity-driven hiring the signature emblem of his professional identity - prominently and repeatedly citing his appointment of an openly lesbian police chief as a defining statement of his management philosophy - is the right philosophical fit for this particular community. This is not a legal question. Courts have settled those matters. It is a question of whether the priorities Rorie carries into a city reflect the values and the people of that city, or whether he arrives with a prepackaged administrative identity he applies regardless of context. Washington's residents deserve an honest answer.
What makes that question sharper still is a troubling revelation from multiple sources and public records: Councilmen Anthony Tyre and Max Perreault - in apparent violation of proper state statute and established procedural best practices - directed Interim City Manager Bobby Roberson to halt a police chief search that was already in its final stages. That position now sits conspicuously vacant. It appears to have been deliberately held open so that Rorie could make that exact hire his first act in office. If accurate, this is not political hardball. It is an abuse of the council's authority over a public institution, carried out at the expense of a city that needs leadership, not leverage.
That brings us to the conduct of the councilmen themselves - and here, frankness is required. The public behavior of Perreault and Tyre toward Interim City Manager Bobby Roberson has been, by any reasonable standard, an embarrassment to the offices they hold. Their contempt for Roberson has been performed openly at council meetings - interruptions, dismissals, pointed humiliations dressed up as policy concerns - conduct serious enough that multiple potential city manager candidates have reportedly declined to pursue the position after observing it. What the cameras have not captured is worse. Sources with direct knowledge say that Perreault, on multiple occasions and behind closed doors, has screamed at Roberson and cursed him out with a ferocity that staff members have heard through walls. This is elder abuse. Bobby Roberson is a public servant who has given more than forty years of his life to this city and the region. He is owed basic dignity. The citizens who elected these councilmen are owed an accounting.
Perreault's own profile invites scrutiny. A recent transplant to Washington, he rebranded himself as a Republican for electoral purposes while now governing by a set of values that bear no relationship to the conservative community he sought to represent. He has now aligned himself with the council's Democrat members in a coalition whose central purpose appears to be Roberson's removal - and Rorie's installation as the vehicle for it. That Rorie himself does not appear in state voter registration files for any North Carolina county - despite nearly two years living and working in the region - is a civic data point the council ought to explain before asking Washington's taxpayers to trust him with their city.
Monday's vote should not be a formality. This council owes its residents more than a rushed decision engineered by a political coalition with a personal vendetta and a vacancy it helped manufacture. Washington has real challenges ahead - electric utility restructuring, fiscal recovery, long-term credibility with state oversight bodies. Those challenges demand a city manager chosen for Washington, not one chosen against Bobby Roberson.
The citizens of this city are watching. They should be.
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Sounds to me like all of our small govts hav th same illness.
"Municipal government should be conducted openly, honestly, and professionally. It should not be driven by innuendo, half-truths, social media campaigns, or efforts to divide employees, elected officials, and the public.I have O interest in participating in or legitimizing that type of environment." So stated: "Kennedy Thompson sent a resignation letter to Warsaw town leaders Saturday, saying remaining in the role would compromise his principles." (After just 3wks on the job.)
"Unfortunately, a small segment of the Town’s governing body and the uninformed public fostered an environment marked by personal attacks, misinformation, social media theatrics, rumor, and unnecessary drama rather than respectful and productive governance."
READ:
www.witn.com