Huddled around a table at the White Moon Coffee Shop on Mill Street in downtown Sylva one recent rainy afternoon, Kendall Waldrop, Georganna Seamon and Don Panicko discuss the group’s latest endeavor — the Sylva Art + Design Committee.

With just three days to go before election filing closes, there is still a dearth of candidates for open seats on the Webster Town Council and Village of Forest Hills Council.

The price tag on a project to install sidewalks along Skyland Drive in Sylva has more than doubled, with town commissioners voting July 11 to allocate an additional $175,000 for the endeavor. 

After putting nearly 300 hours and just short of a year toward an effort to develop an alternative vision for the N.C. 107 project in Sylva, the Asheville Design Center presented its findings to the Sylva Board of Commissioners Thursday, July 11. 

With the first two days of election filing in the books, only three people have signed up to run for elected positions in Jackson County municipalities, which have a total of eight open seats between them. 

After 22 years with the Sylva Police Department and two years as its head, Sylva Police Chief Tammy Hooper will retire on Aug. 1, 2019. 

At $4.06 million, Sylva’s proposed budget for 2019-20 will be nearly $200,000 lower than the adopted budget for 2018-19.

Every year, Sylva’s population quadruples on the last Saturday in April as more than 10,000 people flock to the tiny town for Greening Up the Mountains, a long-running festival featuring live music on two stages, a 5K run and more than 125 vendors offering crafts, food and information about local nonprofits. 

Planning the event is a year-round endeavor for town staff, and as this year’s April 27 date drew closer, all the ducks seemed to be sorting themselves into their respective rows — until a different kind of bird threw a wrench in the plans. 

These days, Megan and Bryan Thurman call a 31-foot Airstream home. The iconic silver travel trailer is currently parked on a picturesque property in the rural southern edge of Sylva. 

The Asheville Design Center will soon complete its final recommendations for the N.C 107 project in Sylva, but the document is unlikely to provide any drastic departure from the plan already put forward by the N.C. Department of Transportation.