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.

You don’t have to be a famous athlete or entertainer to take Pilates classes from Nikki Perkovich, but if you do, you just may find yourself training with some of them. 

Taxpayer-funded Shining Rock Classical Academy’s attempt to address its long history of public transparency law violations got off to an inauspicious start when the school failed to provide proper public notice of a Sunday afternoon meeting intended to educate its unelected board – about half of whom actually showed up – on public transparency law. 

Waynesville arts and cultural organization Folkmoot has reached an agreement with the Academy at SOAR, a longtime boarding school in the Balsam community of Jackson County, to move its school operations on the Folkmoot Friendship Center campus.

First steps are being taken on a major new residential development proposed for the site of a former grocery store and strip mall on Waynesville’s busy Russ Avenue.