Cory Vaillancourt
Years after demolishing a blighted structure in Waynesville’s historic African-American neighborhood, aldermen still haven’t funded the park that was supposed to take its place, and neighborhood residents aren’t happy.
In January, Haywood County Schools Superintendent Dr. Bill Nolte told The Smoky Mountain News that HCS would engage in a “long haul process” to exhaust every “reasonable and legal thing that we can do” in the fight to reassign Tuscola High School’s athletic programs to a more appropriate division.
Sure, summer camps are all about creating precious childhood memories filled with friends and fun, but at Waynesville’s Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center, it’s also about sharpening academic skills and teaching the next generation of young Americans the value of social responsibility.
When Susan Courtney Harris first came to the Smokies, she was just looking for a place to escape the stifling Florida summers. What she actually found in Haywood County was the beginning of a cherished century-old legacy for thousands of girls and women.
Waynesville aldermen have taken a historic step toward replacing the town’s ailing sewer plant — a step that will bind the town with up to $16 million in debt for the next 20 to 40 years.
After years of fits and starts, Maggie Valley’s unified development ordinance is finally about to see the light of day, and town officials are hoping for as much public input as possible to ensure a smooth transition.
A substantial and somewhat surprising gift by two Haywood County natives has the potential to contribute to the community for generations to come.
Although it wasn’t a formal budget retreat, leaders in the Town of Canton met last week to begin identifying budget priorities for when that time does come.
In the ever more competitive battle to lure motoring tourists to Haywood County — and to keep them in the county once they’re here — a plan by the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority to install custom wayfinding signage remains at a dead stop, with no signs they’ll be up any time soon.
Municipal budget season is well underway, and in at least one Haywood County town, the discussion isn’t about rising costs or decreasing revenue — it’s about what to do with a burgeoning balance sheet.
Michael Cohen’s recent testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee took an unexpected dive deep into America’s racial divide, and Western North Carolina’s Congressman Mark Meadows jumped right in to it.
That led to relentless lampooning of the four-term Republican, culminating in his buffoonish portrayal on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, but Meadows’ constituents of color aren’t laughing.
When President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law on Dec. 22, 2017, proponents hailed it as the most significant tax reform in three decades. Lost in the hullabaloo over the tiny, temporary tax bracket adjustments — financed by a burgeoning federal deficit — was a new program designed to spur investment in low-income census tracts across the country.
A broken window, classrooms in shambles, irreplaceable items destroyed, kitchen coolers left open and perishable food thrown all over the floors — that’s what Tausha and Lynn Forney walked in to find last week at the Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center in Waynesville.
What was hoped to be a slick new attraction designed to bring more visitors to Maggie Valley during wintertime has instead been shown to be an attraction of a different sort — a magic trick that turned $36,268 of taxpayer money into just $4,338 of ticket sales.
On Friday, Jan. 29 at the Lake Logan Conference Center, Waynesville Mayor Gavin Brown convened a board retreat where he and aldermen Caldwell, Feichter and Roberson talked about infrastructure, cemeteries, and the general financial status of the town.
Woe to those public bodies that fail to comply with North Carolina’s sunshine laws; transparency underpins American democracy to the extent that there’s a whole chapter of complicated regulations in the N.C. General Statutes that define public records, public meetings, the availability of both and the very real penalties for violations.
As the largest local government unit in The Smoky Mountain News’ four-county coverage area, Haywood County sees more action — in public, and in private — than probably any other government out there.
The Town of Waynesville Board of Aldermen meets every two weeks, or about 24 times a year, depending on the calendar.
Haywood County’s five local governments more or less fall into two tiers — there’s the county and there’s Waynesville, and then there’s everybody else.
Aided by the left and abetted by the media, violent jihadists are slowly but surely infiltrating our government, our schools and our society in furtherance of their nefarious goal of turning the United States into a Sharia-ruled Islamic caliphate — and only a small group of patriotic conservatives, like the Haywood County Republican Party, can stop them.
Not long after retired U.S. Air Force officer and former teacher Mary Ford moved to Waynesville with her husband, she decided to enroll in something called the Waynesville Civilian Police Academy. The next year, she found herself in charge.
Barely a year after he was hired, Nathan Duncan is out at Shining Rock Classical Academy.
In a county as old as Haywood, there exist all manner of half-remembered places and faces long gone from the physical world yet immortalized through penciled notes on the backs of dog-eared, sepia-toned photographs.
Sunburst, in southeastern Haywood County, is one of those places; the subject of intense historical research, it’s been documented better than most ghosts of Haywood past, but the story of Sunburst has always been short one chapter.
With his thick Brooklyn accent, Danny Mannlein isn’t exactly the type of “local” most Haywood County residents are used to seeing, but as Waynesville’s downtown business district continues to boom, more and more people like him are making Main Street their commercial home.
As the Great Recession recedes further and further into the rear-view mirror, most local economic indicators in Western North Carolina appear to have recovered or at least stabilized sufficiently, including the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority’s revenue collections.
Financial aid and scholarships are a great way to pay for college, but not everyone qualifies. For those who do, financial aid doesn’t always cover the full cost of tuition, making it harder for some to break the cycle of generational poverty through education.
The longstanding brouhaha over a makeshift dwelling near Frog Level has escalated to the point where enforcement action is likely in the coming days.
Four-time freshman legislator and recently re-elected Rep. Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville, launched into this year’s legislative session by hosting a trio of town hall meetings across his district, but if the ones held in Jackson and Swain counties were anything like the one in Waynesville on Feb. 16, there’s just one thing on people’s minds — expanding Medicaid.
North Carolina’s rigid school calendar law has been in place since 2004, but over the past few weeks, a pair of resolutions — one passed by the Haywood School Board, the other by Haywood County Commissioners — have again expressed a desire for changes in the “one size fits all” calendar.
During the protracted approval process of a proposed development that would bring around 200 new apartments to a 41-acre parcel of land near Waynesville’s Walmart, opponents threw everything but the kitchen sink at the project — everything, that is, except for the possibility of Cherokee cultural artifacts on the property.
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.
It’s $13 million now, or $40 million later, according to a presentation by Haywood Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bill Nolte intended to give Haywood County commissioners an idea of what it will take to address the district’s classroom and administrative needs for the next several decades.
It’s not Haywood County Manager Bryant Morehead’s first budget, but it is his first budget in Haywood County.
Huddled together in the dark near an old wood stove beneath an elaborate rigging of tarps and tents on a debris-strewn mucky dirt lot they’d called home for nearly a year, Susan “Sassy” Fulp and her fiancé Ronnie Hicks watched the heavy wet snow fall and felt the waylaid limbs of weary trees crash to the ground until Sassy finally noticed an unusual silence rising from the town around them.
A little over two years ago, I woke up in Alexandria, Virginia, less than 24 hours after the inauguration of the nation’s 45th president.
An architect by training, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest became only the second Republican in the last 120 years to be elected to the post when he defeated Democrat Linda Coleman by less that two-tenths of a percent in 2012. Four years later, in 2016, his victory over Coleman was much more decisive, but Gov. Pat McCrory’s narrow loss to Rocky Mount Democrat Roy Cooper created an unexpected opportunity for the state’s highest-ranking Republican.
It’s a perplexing dichotomy. Maggie Valley has been portrayed as a town that rolls up the sidewalks once the leaf-lookers leave each fall, even though it’s home to two popular winter attractions — Cataloochee Ski Resort and Tony’s Tube World draw thousands each year to the western end of Haywood County — but now a third reason to visit the Valley will further test tourists’ appetite for winter wanderings.
Grumblings about Tuscola High School’s athletic reclassification from 2A to 3A seem to have fallen on deaf ears, but administrators at Haywood County Schools say they’re not yet done trying to bring attention to what they say is the school’s unfair plight.
The federal shutdown didn’t have as much of an effect on Haywood County’s social services as one might think, but with another shutdown looming, the belt-tightening may not be over — especially for recipients of food aid.
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.
With the recent actions of Michigan and Vermont, 72 million people in 10 U.S. states — 23 percent of the population — can now purchase recreational marijuana in a retail setting, after decades of strict prohibition and despite a lingering federal ban.
North Carolina isn’t one of those states, but it soon could be if a recent trend towards the legalization of recreational marijuana continues.
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 booming real estate market brings with it many benefits and is a sign of a thriving economy, but some unintended consequences are making it even more difficult for residents of Western North Carolina to find affordable homes for sale or rent.
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.
There are plenty of misconceptions about the federal government shutdown — what it is, who it affects, how it happens, and why — but what is clear is that both parties have engaged in the tactic for almost 45 years, and as time goes on, shutdowns are becoming longer, and becoming more commonly used as a policy tool.
Not for nearly half a century has anyone been able to say, “Haywood County has a new county attorney,” but now that an era has ended, everyone will have to get used to hearing it.
After a minor delay due to the concerns of a newly-elected commissioner, Haywood County has again decided to move forward with the redevelopment of the Historic Haywood Hospital by granting Landmark Services a purchase option on the property, but the looming issue of what to do with its current occupants remains unresolved.
That’s right. It may seem like election season just ended, but it’s also just beginning, and in less than 300 days voters in every Haywood County town will again head to the polls to choose from candidates seeking a spate of municipal offices.
