- June 23, 2021
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Business
After 16 years and one week on the job, Mike Fitzgerald is officially retired from Dillsboro’s town board— but not from his place as owner of Western North Carolina’s only remaining shoe repair shop.
“I think people were more concerned that I wouldn’t be there rather than the mayor,” he half-joked during a phone interview.
While people across the region have relied on Fitzgerald’s shoe repair skills for about three decades now, those in Jackson County and particularly in Dillsboro have depended on his leadership through good times and bad since he was first appointed to the board on June 6, 2005. Four years later, he was elected to serve as the town’s mayor, and he’s kept the position ever since. For much of that tenure, he was also chairman of the Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority Board, rotating off in 2018.
A resolution the board passed on Fitzgerald’s last meeting — Monday, June 14 — said that he “worked…
