This election season, there are three seats up for grabs on the Jackson County Commission, all held by Democrats, all of whom are seeking reelection. One of those seats is the commission chair. Voters will have the opportunity to choose between a candidate with ample experience as chairman and a newcomer to the field.

The Jackson County Commission allocated just over $60,000 of American Rescue Plan funds to AWAKE Children’s Advocacy Center for the organization to finish renovation of its current building.

Jackson County will receive more than $3 million as part of an opioid settlement. The timeline for collecting that money, 18 installments over 18 years, makes meaningful use and allocation complicated. 

The Jackson County Tourism Development Authority created its own Tourism Capital Project Fund  this year. However, when the deadline came around for the first cycle of funding on Aug. 1, no applications had been submitted.

Jackson County Public Schools has more than doubled its preschool capacity prior to the start of the new school year thanks to donations from the Dogwood Health Trust and the Blue Ridge School Education Foundation.

Not far from the intersection of N.C. 107/281, just down Shook Cove Road in the heart of Tuckasegee, a large driveway soon appears to the right. On a recent evening, the massive entry gate is wide open to the public, all in anticipation of the evening’s impending performance.

Jackson County has approved an architectural contract and laid out a timeline for the construction of its domestic violence shelter, acting on a plan that has been several years in the making. 

On Friday, May 27, the day after a big storm dumped inches of rain on Western North Carolina, the air was so clear and the sky so blue it made me think back to the spring of 2020 when Covid shut down the world and for a few weeks the earth’s atmosphere returned 300 years to pre-industrial clarity. I called it Pandemic Blue. 

When the snakes around here want to go somewhere they put their tails in their mouths and contort themselves into the shape of a bicycle tube and roll like a wheel until to stop they straighten out tail-first and stick themselves in a tree which then swells with venom and a man cut one down once and had lumber enough not only for his house but also a barn and a chicken coop however his wife wanted him to paint it all red and the turpentine in the paint drew out the venom from the wood and caused the lumber to shrink back to regular size and he managed to get the cows out of the barn but the chickens did not survive.

For the fourth time in eight years, a person has died while incarcerated at the Jackson County Detention Center.