The longstanding brouhaha over a makeshift dwelling near Frog Level has escalated to the point where enforcement action is likely in the coming days. 

The table is set — all you have to do is come sit down and be served.

Editor's note: some names in this story have been changed to honor a request from the family of the deceased. 

At 13, Tuscola High School freshman Zemra Teuta was like almost any other American teenage girl — she liked popular music, boys, hanging out with friends and chatting on social media. 

Zemra, however, wasn’t like every other teenage American girl. She was different. 

Tucked up along a hillside overlooking Richland Creek and the Frog Level district of Waynesville is a cozy bungalow. 

The walls are covered with all types of artwork collected over the years. Shelves filled with books on world travel and Appalachian culture. Dozens of vinyl records lean against the corners of the back room. 

The organization charged with maintaining and revitalizing Waynesville’s downtown core is setting an ambitious plan of work for 2019, to an extent not seen since the major streetscaping projects of the late 1980s-early 1990s. 

On Jan. 15, The Smoky Mountain News contacted almost every elected official in Haywood County for whom an email address was listed with the county’s board of elections. Around half failed to respond, but those who did were sometimes too verbose for print, so an excerpt from their response was used in the Jan. 23 edition of The Smoky Mountain News. In the interest of transparency, their full responses are included here.

Like the region’s opioid crisis, if Western North Carolina’s affordable housing crisis could have been solved by meetings, panel discussions or task force recommendations, it would have been over long ago. 

But last week, the town of Waynesville finally became the first Haywood County government to take concrete steps that could rid the county of a troublesome, underutilized asset — or liability, as some have called it — while at the same time transforming a blighted area just north of downtown into a vibrant, rejuvenated economic center. 

A beef between the Town of Waynesville and local property owner Ron Muse over an ersatz dwelling on an otherwise vacant, garbage-strewn Church Street lot is about to heat up again. 

Just off Main Street in Waynesville, tucked down the hill below Bogart’s, and across the street from American Legion Post 47, sits Mad Anthony’s Taproom & Restaurant.

Originally opened on Branner Avenue some three years ago, the business relocated to Legion Drive in July 2017. With 50 continuously rotating taps, it’s the largest selection of draft craft beer west of Asheville (aka: “Beer City USA”). But, in recent months, the taproom has transitioned into one of the most talked about gourmet farm-to-table restaurants in the area. 

Long-established rules and regulations created by the Town of Waynesville that proscribed periodic cleanup of the town’s historic Green Hill Cemetery upset family members of the deceased, who were taken aback — and, they say, by surprise — when the cleanup resulted in dozens of shrubs, statues, vases and floral arrangements being cleared from plots.