With campaign season barely off the ground, the Jackson County sheriff’s race has already drawn a hefty list of candidates — and of issues.

When Becky Olson first began making house calls, she was barely old enough to walk. She spent her childhood following behind her physician father’s coattails when he made house calls and shadowing her mother, a nurse, through various clinics and classrooms. She saw, too, the bounty that poured into their home from patients who just couldn’t pay her father for his services — at least in monetary terms. 

Summer McMahan remembers the exact moment her life changed.

“Mountain Heritage Day [at Western Carolina University], 14 years ago,” she said. “I watched the Fiddlin’ Dill Sisters and decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

When inflated real estate values in the second-home market came back down to earth, the touchdown wasn’t gentle. 

It was more of a crash-landing, and five years later two mountains counties are still sifting through the wreckage.

Jackson County commissioners have nixed the idea of making volunteer fire departments financially autonomous.

Limits on mountainside development and standards for steep slope building are once again in the spotlight in Jackson County. 

The Jackson County planning board has spent the past 14 months rewriting steep slopes regulations first put in place seven years ago.

They were more restrictive than anywhere else in the mountains at the time. The watered-down version that has emerged from the rewrite is still far more protective than most mountain counties. 

The steep slope hearing scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 13 has been moved to Thursday, Feb. 20.

Who shows up and speaks out at a steep slope public hearing in Jackson County next week could alter what mountainside development looks like for decades to come.

David Brooks grew up dirt poor. His dad farmed corn, apples and tobacco, always with a plow and mule, never with a tractor. Brooks’ mom and five siblings were often left to tend to the 100-acre hillside farm in Jackson County when his dad journeyed in search of cash-paying jobs — taking him as far as Washington state during summers to work as a logger. 

“I guess it was poverty, but we didn’t know it at the time,” Brooks said. 

SEE ALSO: Public could tip scales in steep slope rewrite

After a split vote that followed nearly an hour of discussion, the Jackson County Tourism Development Authority hired three different marketing companies for a five-month period ending when the new fiscal year begins in June. 

Jackson County tourism leaders are weighing the best way to get their message to the masses.