It’s the sixth day of early voting for the Durham municipal elections, and city council candidate Matt Kopac is hundreds of miles away in a Manhattan hotel. 

He’s visiting for Climate Week NYC, an annual global climate conference. The day before, he attended a panel on supporting working families with a climate agenda. 

Kopac wishes he could be at the polls, but with one look at his campaign website, it becomes clear why he isn’t. 

From his professional background in sustainability advising to his environmentally-focused policy proposals and his volunteer experience on the Durham Environmental Affairs Board, sustainability is at the center of Kopac’s campaign. 

 And his life. 

“My career has really been at this intersection of social and environmental justice and impact work,” Kopac said. “And so I just see it is deeply intertwined with the health of our environment, the health of the financial world, and the health of people.” 

Kopac is running for Ward 1 in the nonpartisan Durham City Council race, where his campaign is focused on sustainable development. He’s facing Elijah King, Andrea Cazales, Samaria McKenzie, Sheryl Smith and DeDreana Freeman. Two candidates will be selected in the primary elections on October 7 for the general election on November 4. 

The central question in the election is the issue of development. A proposed development project in the historic Hayti community, which has since been withdrawn, brought the conflict between the need for affordable housing and the desire to preserve historical communities to the forefront of the public’s mind. 

Kopac proposed several policies on this issue, including a construction loan program, developing public land and support for current homeowners. 

He is undoubtedly pro-development, but the issue is less than black and white. His website suggests both “public-led commercial development” and “housing development by small scale local developers.” 

After spending two years in the Peace Corps right out of college, Kopac worked as a policy associate in Washington, D.C. for two years. He focused on investment in low-income communities, including affordable housing. 

But in addition to that job – and the years of sustainability work that followed – Kopac cited his experience living in Durham’s Trinity Park neighborhood as an influence on his housing and conservation policy. 

Trinity Park, located near Duke University, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

The neighborhood is a perfect example of diverse housing and community character, Kopac told Preservation Durham. He believes that Durham needs more density along transportation corridors, as well as more multifamily and multi-generational living. 

“I feel really fortunate to live in an urban neighborhood with ready, easy access to different parts of the city,” Kopac said. “I’m an avid cyclist, so having a greenway that allows me to scoot getting to downtown and in other parts of the community is a great way to live and it reflects our values as a family.” 

Many of Kopac’s policies are transit-oriented. He is committed  to maintaining free bus services and increasing access to local transit. He also supports policies that prioritize people over cars, like street calming efforts and limiting car-oriented growth. 

With his experience in policy and Durham politics — he has served as a Durham Planning Commissioner since 2024 — Kopac is no stranger to navigating the municipal bureaucracy. 

But one candidate believes it takes more than professional experience to be a good city council member. 

Elijah King, one of Kopac’s opponents in City Council Ward 1, was born and raised in Durham. He prides himself on his “on the ground” approach to politics. 

King is young — he graduated from UNC-Greensboro in May 2025. But he founded several community initiatives in Durham, including the Durham Youth Environmental Justice Initiative, which engages high school students in climate change discussions, according to his website. 

King’s biggest criticism of Kopac is that he believes his sustainability work is too abstract and hands-off. 

“I can spew that I have been the chair of the environmental affairs board, but when you’re living environmental factors, and when you know what that looks like, when you’re organizing behind it and it’s not just for a shiny title, when you’re having to go against the fray, to advocate for communities, that is the difference,” King said.

Kopac is certainly different from many of the Durham residents he would represent. He was the 2009 student class president at the Yale School of Management while studying for his MBA. And Trinity Park, despite its historical charm, has a higher median income and percentage of white residents than the Durham city average. 

But the father of two is no stranger to campaigning and community engagement. He ran for the Durham County Board of Commissioners in 2020 but lost in the Democratic primaries. 

After seeing the housing and environmental challenges that Durham faced, Kopac was inspired to run for office again. He entered the city council race in May, but his community outreach began long before then.

“It hasn’t been so much about the last year, but I think it’s been more about the last 15 years,” Kopac said. “The relationships I’ve built, the friendships I’ve built across the city, the ways I’ve been engaged, the service I’ve tried to offer and support both in formal roles, but also just informally to neighbors and friends and people across all of Durham.”

Kopac has received many endorsements, including from community members, politicians and one of Durham’s most influential PACs — People’s Alliance. 

Former Durham Mayor Wib Gulley has voiced his approval for Kopac. The two first met when Kopac served on the Environmental Affairs Board, and through his work on the Planning Commission they have gotten to have discussions on proposed developments. 

“We share commitments to environmental protection and energy renewal,” Gulley said. “We share commitments to a living wage. So there’s a lot of broad policy agreements, but he’s been also an extraordinary volunteer in all sorts of ways in Durham. And I admire and respect that.” 

Much of Kopac’s plan for Durham revolves around sustainability. 

But he said he also knows that the reality facing Durham requires a diverse dialogue and a multifaceted agenda. 

“There is no blueprint, there’s no, like, one idea that’s going to solve it all,” Kopac said. “It’s going to be us being engaged with each other and working together to figure it out.”