Last year, I sat down beside Greg Edds in the Norvell Theater at the Christmas reading show by Karl Hales — still the best professor I ever had. Greg said, “Don’t sit here. It will cost me 500 votes.”

I thought my political leanings might help him. “Kidding,” he said, though he does ask me to park behind his office when I visit. Minus those 500 votes but plus my one, he was elected and is now chair of the Rowan County Commission.

Though my political philosophy is occasionally “across the aisle” from Greg, I bucked many of my friends and voted for him. Proudly. Greg is a student of local economic development and proposed a multipronged plan that, with luck, the county will support and embrace.

I’m a member of the Salisbury Planning Board. When he was on the Salisbury Planning Board, Bill Wagoner invited me to work with him on a countywide cooperative initiative to develop and promote the15-mile stretch of I-85 that runs through the middle of Rowan County. We studied maps, examined infrastructure, assessed development possibilities, and proposed involvement by citizens from every county municipality with Salisbury being one of ten municipal equal participants. County leadership wouldn’t talk to us.

So, I invited Greg to lunch, but when a business recruiting opportunity for Rowan County arose in Atlanta, he left before dawn, returned that afternoon, and rescheduled. I invited Bill to join us.

Greg didn’t need Bill or me to tell him has I-85 is Rowan’s most valuable asset. He’s been saying that for years. But he appreciated the work that had been done and before we finished lunch, he was ready to challenge the county to work collaboratively with all hands on deck.

Speaking at the Salisbury Rotary Club this week, Greg said, “Problems between Salisbury, Rowan County, the School Board? Those days are over!”

Greg lamented that Rowan County talent and dollars leave the county. After the county invests more than $200,000 into every high school graduate, our graduates don’t go off to college. They just go off. They don’t come back. Greg wants his kids to come back here to live and work. We all do, but they don’t. Food Lion has hundreds of people working at its corporate headquarters in Salisbury, most of whom do not live in Rowan County.

Greg wants Rowan County dollars to buy local, to create jobs and businesses here, and to increase the local tax base. He wants to bring home some of the $270 million in spending and the $10 million in sales tax dollars that leave the county every year.

Commenting to the Salisbury Planning Board this week, Diana Greene said it best: “A lot of CEOs say, ‘If Salisbury is like East Innes Street, I don’t want to live here.’” Greg wants Rowan County to be a place where people – including his kids – want to live and work and play.

He is a leader with ideas and a can-do spirt, quoting Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Every idea will not work. Greg said that. My vote for him was not only one of my proudest, it may have been one of my most important. Greg is going to make a dent, a good one, in Rowan County.

David Post lives in Salisbury.