Board position on Waynesville Chamber opens.

The Waynesville Chamber of Commerce recently announced it is looking to fill an open seat on its board of directors.

Board positions are supposed to bring experience, leadership, and accountability to an organization responsible for supporting the local business community. They are meant to provide oversight and help guide long term strategy.

In Waynesville, however, the chamber’s structure has raised questions for years.

The same executive director has led the organization for the past ten years. During that time, board positions have often come through internal selection rather than broad community recruitment. The result is a board that has remained largely unchanged and is made up almost entirely of men.

For many business owners, that structure raises an obvious concern. Boards are intended to provide independent leadership and fresh perspective. When the same circle remains in place year after year, new ideas and broader representation can be difficult to introduce.

All of this would matter less if the stakes were small.

They are not.

Communities surrounding Waynesville have been growing rapidly. Waynesville now sits directly in the path of that growth.

Small towns facing this moment have a choice. With strong leadership and thoughtful planning, they can preserve their identity while welcoming opportunity. Without it, they often watch nearby communities move forward while their own business districts slowly struggle.

Which brings the conversation back to the chamber.

If the organization responsible for advocating for local businesses is not evolving with the moment, the consequences will not appear overnight. They will show up slowly.

A shop closing here.

A storefront sitting empty there.

A town wondering why growth happened everywhere else.

The chamber’s open board seat could be an opportunity to bring in new leadership, broader experience, and a different perspective on the future of Waynesville.

Or it could simply continue the pattern that has defined the organization for the last decade.

For a town standing at the edge of regional growth, that choice matters.

Growth is inevitable. Small towns fade, main streets close, and history gets reduced to memory more often than people like to admit. But that is not a law of nature. It is the result of decisions, leadership, and whether a community chooses to act before change happens to it.

signed- waiting for change