On Thursday, Dec. 4, Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston will be voted into that role for another year.

When the board gathers for its annual “organizational meeting,” the Democratic-majority board will do what it’s done year after year – get behind Chairman Skip Alston and hand him another 12 months leading the county’s most powerful governing body.

Alston isn’t just chairman again – he’s running up the score.

He’s already served as chairman ten times, more than twice as often as former chairmen Wally Harrelson and Bob Landreth, who each held the job four times. This will mark Alston’s eleventh term in the center seat on the dais – extending a record that already makes him by far the longest-serving chairman in Guilford County history.

The Rhino Times has taken to calling him “chairman for life,” and one reader recently simply labeled him “King of Guilford County.”

Alston is a Durham native who studied business administration at North Carolina Central University before moving to Greensboro in 1979.

He built a real estate career here, founding The Alston Realty Group, which now manages a large portfolio of local properties. He has represented the county’s District 8 on the Board of Commissioners since 1992 – with a brief hiatus of a few years – and, in 2002, he became the first African American chairman of the board.

That was a milestone Democrats still point to when they talk about his legacy.

Outside of county government, Alston’s name is permanently tied to the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in downtown Greensboro. As a county commissioner in the early 1990s, he pushed to save the old Woolworth’s building where the Greensboro sit-ins began and he co-founded the non-profit that ultimately created the museum – a project that took years of fundraising battles, political fights and financial controversy to get across the finish line.

 Over the years, local media have often described him as a “colorful and controversial” figure, and, at one point, a news outlet editorial called for him to step aside from the museum’s leadership to restore public confidence. The museum survived, and Alston’s role in creating it remains a major piece of his public resume.

In recent years, he has tried to wrap his county leadership in the language of unity: His 2025 State of the County address, delivered recently in the commissioners’ meeting room in the Old Guilford County Court House, carried the theme “One Guilford: Measuring Our Success, Planning Our Future” – a slogan meant to cast county government as data-driven, collaborative and focused on outcomes rather than traditional partisan bickering.

Alston himself argues that he tries to lead a nonpartisan board. In interviews, he has pointed to times when he has worked with Republicans to avoid tax increases and restructure county leadership – and he often notes that the current board “very seldom” votes on party lines.

He likes to remind people that Republican commissioners such as Alan Perdue and Pat Tillman regularly get projects for their districts.

Still, he has always been a hard-nosed politician who knows how to get and count votes. The Democrats hold a firm majority on the board and, as the Rhino has reported for years, they rarely break with him on major questions – including who sits in the chairman’s seat.  In fact, in the last five years, the Rhino Times can only recall a few times when Democratic commissioners have not voted with him. (Not counting the “Democratic” commissioner about five years ago who was actually a Republican and who stepped down from the board.)

During Alston’s time as chair, the board backed a $300 million school bond in 2020 and a $1.7 billion school bond in 2022 – one of the largest local school bond packages in state history. Total school debt service is now projected to exceed $3 billion by the time the borrowing is paid off. County documents show that tens of millions of dollars in annual property tax revenue are already earmarked just to pay those bills, and county officials admit the debt will force some tough decisions in the years ahead.

Alston has also put himself at the center of the county’s growing housing crunch. This summer, he convened what he described as a major meeting of builders, planners and other industry leaders in the Carolyn Coleman conference room in the Old Guilford County Court House to talk through projections that showed Guilford County will need roughly 97,000 new housing units over the next five years in order to keep up with expected growth. He has called for a larger summit with mayors, city managers and developers to attack permitting delays and other bottlenecks – arguing that the county must move faster if it wants to be ready for the flood of new jobs coming from companies like JetZero and other big employers that are now landing in the area.

On top of all that, Alston is once again climbing the ladder of state-level influence: Earlier this year he was chosen as vice chairman of the North Carolina Real Estate Commission – the board that licenses and regulates real estate brokers across the state. He’s widely expected to move back into that chairman’s role too, which he previously held in the mid-2000s. If that happens, the same man who chairs the board that sets Guilford County’s property tax rate would also chair the commission that oversees the real estate industry statewide.

To his admirers, especially among local Democrats and civil rights leaders, his resume is exactly why he keeps getting the votes. They see someone who’s helped save an international civil rights landmark, co-founded a museum that draws visitors from across the world, led the state and local NAACP, and uses his political clout to direct investment toward long-neglected neighborhoods. They credit his long tenure with pushing for affordable housing, expanding county services and making sure that District 8 has a loud voice at the table.

To his critics – and there are a whole lot of those in Guilford County – Alston is something else entirely: Many conservatives regard him as the ultimate insider, accuse the board of tax-and-spend politics and argue that one man has held the gavel for far too long.

Some property owners blame him personally for tax bills rising after the school bonds and the countywide revaluation. Others still bristle at the long financial controversies surrounding the civil rights museum.

Among his opponents, the phrase “king of the county” isn’t meant as a compliment any more than Trump critics consider calling him a king a compliment.

With billions in school debt coming due, a housing shortage looming and a wave of new industry arriving, Guilford County is headed into a complicated 2026 and will face a lot of new challenges.  But the man leading the county will not be new at all.

The Who sang it best: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…”

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