Waynesville’s new mayor and aldermen haven’t even been sworn in yet, but based on how the board’s most recent regular meeting transpired, a new dynamic in how town government will operate in the future appears to be taking shape. 

On Election Day, Waynesville voters could have chosen to send almost every single incumbent back to their seats, but when the new board is sworn in on Dec. 10, only two of the five will return to their previous positions. 

The first time Nancy East visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it was the 1990s and she was in veterinary school. But those squeezed-in backpacking excursions provided the catalyst for her later decision to move to Western North Carolina, and 25 years later, East finished hiking all 850 miles of trail running through the park’s 816 square miles of land. 

Editor’s note: This is the ninth in a series of stories on Haywood County’s public charter school, Shining Rock Classical Academy, which has been beset by a host of academic and organizational problems since opening in 2015.

Despite a long history of illegal meetings, improper closed sessions and complaints about transparency, the story of Shining Rock Classical Academy’s efforts to conceal its expenditures of taxpayer money has just entered an alarming new chapter.

A wide-ranging forum held last week at Frog Level Brewing to discuss Haywood’s homeless population revealed deep divisions about how to treat a vulnerable and visible segment of the population.

They’re both longtime board members — one’s a longtime mayor and the other a longtime mayor pro tem. 

One of them, Gavin Brown or Gary Caldwell, will be Waynesville’s next mayor come Nov. 5, and one of them will cycle out of city government, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them. 

When she showed up at Haywood Pathways Center, the woman and her young daughter had been homeless for three years. After three months’ residence in the new women and children’s dorm, the pair recently became the first family to leave it for a home of their own. 

Like much of the United States in 2015, the Town of Waynesville was still straining to stand up straight after the Great Recession of 2008 knocked it knobby-kneed; although Western North Carolina suffered less and recovered quicker, erasing a decade’s worth of economic growth comes with consequences — declining property values, a general economic malaise and few forward strides taken. 

A conditional rezoning request by developers of a 210-unit apartment complex located on the former site of a grocery store sailed through the Waynesville Planning Board on Sept. 16 with little opposition and is now moving toward a final hearing by the Waynesville Board of Aldermen on Oct. 22. 

Within the multi-layered strata of American governance, many people assume that the nation’s most sacred values — liberty and justice — are discussed only at the federal level, but the Town of Waynesville is about to demonstrate that often it’s local governments that must sort out what happens when the rights of one person bump up against the rights of another.