At the end of each year, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners votes on the meeting calendar for the coming year and now the board has approved the schedule for 2023.

That schedule calls for the board’s annual retreat to be held on Thursday, March 9 and Friday, March 10, as well as for only one meeting in July – Thursday, July 13 – after the county passes the budget, something expected to occur at the Thursday, June 15 meeting.

By law, the board of commissioners is required to meet at least once a month, and, if past years are any indication, there may be some months when county business is light and a regular meeting gets canceled.  Otherwise, the commissioners will continue, as they have in the past, meeting on the first and third Thursday of every month except July.

There will also be a host of work sessions for the board in 2023 – though those are scheduled as needed rather than before the New Year starts.

For the last decade and a half the regular county commissioner meetings have been held at 5:30 p.m. – thanks to a long-ago move by former Guilford County Commissioner Mike Winstead who came up with what many county officials consider the best motion the board ever made: moving the Board of Commissioners’ meeting time from 6:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.  Before the change, county staff would get off work at 5 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. and then have to kill time just waiting for the meeting to start.  The 6:30 start time also meant that meetings would go later into the night and, especially back then – when Commissioner Skip Alston and former Commissioner Billy Yow would get into epic verbal battles – the meetings could go until well past midnight.

Over the last decade, the board’s annual retreat has been getting later in the year.  The retreats used to be in January, and then migrated into early February, and then late February, and, in recent years, into early March.  The 2023 Board of Commissioners will be doing their strategic planning for the year more than three months after the new board was sworn in in early December.

In 2023, some board members will attend a National Association of Counties (NACo) Legislative Conference in Washington, DC from Saturday, Feb. 11 to Tuesday, Feb. 14.  Hopefully, they’ll get back home in time to celebrate Valentine’s Day with their spouses.

From Friday, July 21 to Monday, July 24,  a good number of commissioners are expected to attend the NACo Annual Conference in Texas.