Plank-Buccola promoted from Director of Administrative Services
By Delayna Earley
The Island News
For the first time in 20 years, Port Royal has an Assistant Town Manager.
During the July 10 Town Council meeting, Town Manager Van Willis announced that Brooke Plank-Buccola was being promoted to the position of Assistant Town Manager.
“I am absolutely thrilled and overjoyed about my promotion. This opportunity means so much to me, and I am genuinely grateful for the trust and confidence placed in me by the Town Manager, the Mayor and Council Members, my co-workers and the residents of Port Royal,” said Plank-Buccola.
Plank-Buccola was hired to the town in 2017 as the Clerk of Council, but Willis said that it was apparent that she was capable of doing more than that role required of her.
She was promoted to Director of Administrative Services a few years later, and as of July 1, she started in her new role.
“As the town has grown physically and fiscally, there are just a lot of additional responsibilities that I have just undertook over the past few decades, and it will be nice to kind of spread that burden to Brooke,” said Willis. “It just seemed like a natural progression of her to that position.”
Willis said that it was hard to delegate at first since he has been doing it on his own for so long, but after seeing her tackle a few smaller projects and how she handled those, he is confident in her ability to handle this new role.
Plank-Buccola will work with Willis on budgeting, planning, and personnel issues, as well as capital projects in Port Royal.
“In a small town, with a very small staff, there really is no perfect job description,” Willis said. “You have to do anything and everything on a daily basis and you have no idea what that is going to be from day to day.”
When asked what she thinks she can bring to the job, Plank-Buccola responded that she thinks she can bring a “combination of collaborative leadership and a deep commitment to the community that’s known for being cool, coastal and far from ordinary.”
Plank-Buccola is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Public Administration from Clemson University.
Willis said that her willingness and ability to take on the additional responsibilities at work and her initiative to pursue her Master’s degree were two things that solidified her as the right candidate for this position.
“To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not old, I probably have about a 10-year window of continued employment here,” Willis said. “I want to make sure the town is left in good hands.”
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
