Orange County commissioner is moving to Florida. Here’s how to apply for his seat.
Orange County Commissioner and civil rights attorney Mark Dorosin will be leaving North Carolina this summer to join the faculty at Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando.
Dorosin announced the move Wednesday night in a Facebook post. His new job with Florida A&M, one of the last historically Black law schools in the country, will be as an associate professor and director of clinical programs.
“Although I am filled with sadness about leaving North Carolina, I am excited by the opportunity to help raise up an army of young civil rights lawyers to continue the struggle for racial justice,” he said. “Leaving this community and all the people we love here is one of the hardest decisions me and (my wife) Bronwyn have ever made.”
In an interview Thursday with The News & Observer, he said his new job will be to help the university expand its clinical program, which offers in-house opportunities and also connects students with attorneys in the community.
It will allow him “to be even more connected to the kind of systemic racial justice issues that I’ve been working on,” Dorosin said, and there’s “a lot of energy at the school to have this public interest, public service mission,” similar to his previous work at UNC.
Dorosin’s last day as a commissioner is July 31, board Chair Renee Price said in an email Thursday.
Dorosin has “added an interesting voice to the board,” said Price, who cited his work on issues in the historically Black Rogers Road neighborhood in Chapel Hill.
“I say this in a friendly, very heartfelt way, (he’s been) a bit of an agitator,” she said. “We had similar thoughts, so it was good to think that on some issues, I had an ally. When it comes to social justice ... I think we all have been working on social justice and civil rights.”
Filling commissioners vacancy
Dorosin is one of two Orange County commissioners representing District 1, which includes Chapel Hill and Carrboro. He was first elected to the seat in 2012, and re-elected in 2016 and 2020. His current term expires in December 2024.
The process for replacing him will start with the Orange County Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, because Dorosin was a Democratic nominee in 2020. Applicants must be registered Democrats and live in District 1, which covers Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
An application can be downloaded from tinyurl.com/j84feww, or by calling 919-245-2130 or sending an email to clerk@orangecountync.gov. Applications must be submitted to the Clerk to the Board by 5 p.m. July 19.
The committee will review applications and recommend three candidates to the county commissioners by Aug. 16. The commissioners could vote Sept. 2 to appoint a new member from the recommended candidates or choose their own nominee.
State law gives the county commissioners 60 days after Dorosin leaves to appoint a replacement. The new member will serve until 2022, when a new commissioner is elected to fill the seat for the remaining two years.
The last time the commissioners appointed someone to fill a vacancy on the board was in 1981, Price said.
County records show Shirley Marshall was appointed that year to replace Commissioner Anne Barnes. Then-Gov. Jim Hunt had appointed Barnes to fill the seat vacated by N.C. State Rep. Patricia Stanford Hunt, whom the governor had appointed to be a judge, according to an interview recorded by UNC’s Southern Oral History Program.
Law, business, political fights
In the past 25 years, Dorosin also has taught at UNC, where he graduated from the School of Law in 1994, and at Duke University and Alamance Community College. He and his wife, Bronwyn Merritt, also owned and managed Hell, a nightclub in downtown Chapel Hill, for 10 years, and he previously practiced law with the Chapel Hill law firm McSurely, Dorosin & Osment.
Merritt, who is an artist and real estate broker with Carrboro Realty, will continue to pursue her art in and around Orlando, where they plan to make their home, Dorosin said. Two of their children are in college, and the youngest will be moving with them, he said.
Leaving their home in Orange County will be bittersweet, he said.
“Bronwyn and I have really been agonizing over this decision for a while, because we’ve lived here for 30 years and really do feel very much a close-knit part of this community,” he said. “It was a very tough decision, but I think it’s the right one right now for me, for us.”
Dorosin also has amassed adversaries throughout his career, including those in UNC’s governing bodies and state government of whom he has been the most critical, whether the issue was voting rights, school vouchers, racial justice or Orange County’s impact fees, which were singled out for revocation by the General Assembly in 2017.
Dorosin, the board’s chairman at the time, characterized the move as “a crass political calculation.”
He also has taken on big opponents in his professional life, most notably in 2017, when the UNC Board of Governors terminated his job with the UNC Center for Civil Rights and banned the nonprofit center from pursuing legal cases on behalf of poor and minority clients.
He and attorney Elizabeth Haddix, who also lost her job, formed the Julius L. Chambers Center for Civil Rights, a nonprofit law firm serving low-income communities. The center has since merged with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Dorosin is the managing attorney for the group’s North Carolina regional office.
He noted Thursday that Florida is politically diverse but has become more conservative in the last decade, and he expects challenges, as well as opportunities. “It’s not like North Carolina hasn’t broken our hearts repeatedly over the last 30 years,” he said in his post.
Despite North Carolina’s image as a progressive Southern state, he said it also has become more conservative in recent years, from the Harvey Gantt election in 1990 and former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, to Amendment One, House Bill 2 and gerrymandering.
“I think there are a lot of people here doing great work, but it’s very difficult, and there are many challenges here,” he said. “What I meant is there’s always been a lot of promise, and there’s always been a lot of heartbreak when those promises aren’t fulfilled.”
This story was originally published June 3, 2021 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Orange County commissioner is moving to Florida. Here’s how to apply for his seat.."
