The Wake Forest small-city operating model needs an upgrade. This brings us to the final, crucial piece of the puzzle. We can have the best plans for balanced revenue, smart growth, and efficient infrastructure, but those plans will fail if we don’t upgrade the Wake Forest small-city operating model that runs them.
A town of nearly 60,000 people with a $139 million budget cannot be run on a part-time bandwidth and an improvised operating system. The shift we need is practical, not political. It’s about building a “Small-City OS” that is capable of professional management and measurable execution.
Components of the Wake Forest Small-City Operating Model
This upgraded operating model must include:
- Professionalize the Governing Body: Governing a complex, $139 million enterprise is a full-time job. We must compensate our elected officials for that workload and provide the Board with shared policy and constituent support staff. This allows them to move from reacting to constituent fires to proactively researching, drafting, and overseeing city-level policy.
- Build Planning and Delivery Capacity: We are leaving money on the table. We need more dedicated data analysts to understand our own trends, grant writers to hunt for state and federal funds, and project managers to keep our complex capital projects on time and on budget.
- Set Expectations in Policy, Not at the Podium: A professional city runs on clear, adopted standards. Our town has these in the Community Plan and UDO. But standards are useless if they are treated as mere suggestions. The goal is not just to write policy, but to commit to it. We must end the practice of making one-offs at the podium—like the Star Road rezoning. In that case, both professional staff and the citizen Planning Board recommended denial, citing an apparent conflict with the new Future Land Use Map. Yet the Board of Commissioners overrode them in a 3-1 vote, approving a high-density project in an area the plan designated for low-density development. When our own governing body votes to break our own taxpayer-funded plan, it makes ‘adopted standards’ meaningless. Predictability and fairness come from defending the policy, not from last-minute political negotiations.
- Publish a ‘Taxpayer Receipt’: Transparency builds trust. The Town should publish a simple, public-facing dashboard showing where every tax dollar goes. This “taxpayer receipt” should report on key metrics: calls for service, pavement condition, project delivery timelines, and development activity.
- Align Growth and Infrastructure: The town manager should implement a standing “capacity check” for all major development approvals, ensuring that our infrastructure (local and NCDOT) can handle the new load before a project is approved, not after.
Upgrading Governance for a Growing City
Small-city governance is not about ideology; it’s about execution. The sooner we upgrade our operating model to match our new size, the sooner we can protect what people love about Wake Forest—without asking them to pay more for less.
Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest’s only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com