ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Asheville is adding a familiar face from county government to its top management team. The city announced Friday that Rafael Baptista, now Buncombe County director of strategy and innovation, will become an assistant city manager on Nov. 30.
City Manager DK Wesley made the pick. In the city announcement, Wesley pointed to his background in long-range planning and improving how government works, and to his record leading projects that cross departments and jurisdictions.
Baptista has spent more than a decade in local government, including over six years at the executive level in Buncombe County. There he advises the county manager and senior leaders, and he led the work that produced the county 2030 Strategic Plan.
He also built a countywide system for tracking how departments perform and oversees an internal consulting team that handles more than 175 projects a year. Before coming to Buncombe, he worked in leadership and strategy jobs for Durham County and for Raleigh city government.
Baptista said he calls Asheville home and is eager to give back, meet his new coworkers and learn from the residents the city serves.
His graduate degree, a public administration master, comes from UNC-Chapel Hill, and his undergraduate study in Spanish and political science was at Willamette University in Oregon. He is also a graduate of the Public Executive Leadership Academy at the UNC School of Government.
The move comes as the city keeps working through long-term priorities and recovery needs, and assistant city managers oversee groups of departments that handle much of that daily work for residents.
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