Dalton George was elected to the town council at age 22. Four years later, he’s Boone’s top elected leader.
Boone Mayor Dalton George, one of the youngest mayors in North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of the town of Boone)
Dalton George was 22 years old when he was elected to Boone's town council. He had long hair, a beat-up El Camino, and a habit of showing up to public meetings to push for renters' rights. Nobody had done him any favors politically. Nobody in his family had, either.
"We were not a political family in any way," George said in a recent interview on the Real Boone Podcast. (You can listen to the full podcast here.)
Now 26 and serving as mayor, George earns about $18,000 a year for a role that consumes 30 to 40 hours of his week — on top of his actual full-time job as national organizing director for the Endangered Species Coalition. He's a self-described birder with all the apps, binoculars and at least one bird tattoo to prove it.
He acknowledged the math doesn't quite work. "You really do have to put in full-time hours," he said, noting that most mayors tend to be older or independently wealthy for exactly that reason.
Only 1,100 people voted for him in what he describes as a high-turnout election in a town of 20,000.
Yet George has managed to notch some tangible wins. He pushed to place more than 30 acres of land adjacent to Brookshire Park into a conservation easement rather than selling it, secured a partnership with Watauga County to build a connecting bridge — potentially the largest expansion of public land in decades — and is overseeing the long-delayed Howard Street revitalization, on track for completion in July.
His day job working on wolf reintroduction and hellbender conservation informs his local vision. He sees the giant salamander as a symbol of Boone itself: a creature being squeezed out of the place it has always called home.
"You're not just fighting for this one salamander," he said. "You're fighting for a community."
—Tony Mecia