A slate of three candidates pledging change and an end to good old boy politics swept into office in Maggie Valley in this week’s the town election.

Longtime Mayor Roger McElroy, who has been on the town board for 30 years, got ousted by challenger Ron Desimone.

Desimone said the established leadership in Maggie Valley had shut the people out over the years.

“I think it is going to be a new day for Maggie Valley. People are going to be involved again,” Desimone said.

“We have four open minds on that board now.”

The old guard that has controlled Maggie politics since the 1980s wasn’t moving the town forward, he said.

“I connected with everybody up and down this valley. I spent a lot of time talking to people and listening to people,” Desimone said. “I guess they made their wishes known.”

Desimone and the other two victors in the race — Alderman Phil Aldridge and Phillip Wight — ran as a team, billing themselves as the candidates that would give the people a voice.

“People want a fresh start, they want a new look. I think it sent a message that this Valley is in need of some repair. I just hope we can be the ones to do it. We have our hearts in this,” Aldridge said.

Aldridge said it won’t be easy to breathe life back in to Maggie’s struggling tourism economy.

“Our plate is full,” Aldridge said

Mayor Roger McElroy wished the new board luck in their efforts.

“Do I think they can do better? I hope they can because I think Maggie needs something better,” McElroy said.

It is hard to tell whether those who came out and voted were those with a bone to pick, possibly swaying the election.

“In an off-year election, all the people who oppose you go and vote. I didn’t get the vote out and they got it out,” McElroy of his opponents.

Voter turnout was quite high as far as town elections go at 34 percent.

Maria Dreispiel, a 56-year-old dental assistant, is one of those coming to the polls in search of change Tuesday afternoon.

“There are a few things that aren’t good in Maggie Valley,” said Dreispiel.

This marked the third straight election that Aldridge has run on a campaign of change. Despite being on the board for eight years, he has been a lone voice and unable to bring about change. Aldridge, who ran a general store in Maggie Valley for years, was probably a shoe-in for re-election and could have catered to voters on both sides of the aisle. But he made the decision to stake out his position and run as a team up with Desimone and Wight.

The only way to accomplish change was to get a majority with the same views elected.

“I needed support on that board. I needed two people I could look at and depend on and somebody who would have my back,” Aldridge said.

Alderwoman Danya Vanhook lost her seat, although she was not exactly part of the old guard in Maggie. She was a newcomer to politics after being appointed to fill a vacancy six months ago. But she did not join forces with the camp pushing for change — or as some would see them, the complainers and critics.

Now, the complainers will have their turn to steer the town that has become known for its small town political bickering for years.

Mayor  

Ron DeSimone 215

Roger McElroy (I) 137  

Town Board

Seats up for election: 2

Total seats on board: 4

Phil Aldridge (I) 196

Phillip Wight 187

Danya Vanhook (I) 156

Danny Mitchell 132

Michael Matthews 18 

Jackson County is nowhere close to cementing a deal with the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad — one that would offer financial incentives in exchange for basing a steam engine tourist train in Dillsboro.

“It is far from a done deal,” said County Manager Chuck Wooten.

The county and the train have yet to agree on key factors.

The heart of the matter is a restored 1913 steam engine and passenger cars the railroad would like to put in service. But there’s a problem. The train is in Maine, and moving it here would cost $430,000, the railroad’s owner Al Harper estimates.

Harper wants the county to chip in half the cost of moving the train, as well as help secure an outside grant to build a turntable and a standing commitment to help with advertising costs.

Discussions have been informal and intermittent since last winter. The deal is primarily being brokered by a Dillsboro business owner and town board member, David Gates, who is acting as a de facto intermediary between Harper and county officials.

Gates recently drew up a draft contract and passed it around to the various parties. Harper lives out of state, but came to town for the train festival in Bryson City in late September. Gates took him a copy — and Harper promptly signed it.

The draft is not a version the county would endorse right now, however, and Wooten was flummoxed as to why Harper would have signed it prematurely.

There’s a key component missing, from the county’s perspective. Jackson County wants a written guarantee the steam engine would be based in Dillsboro for at least five years — not Bryson City, where the rest of its trains depart from.

“We want it to originate in Dillsboro, turn around in Bryson City and run back to Dillsboro,” Wooten said.

Shops would benefit more if people boarded and disembarked in Dillsboro, rather than merely rolling into town for a 90-minute layover before loading back up and heading out.

The trip from Bryson City to Dillsboro and back lasts four hours total, including the layover. Tickets start at $49 for adults and $29 for children age 2 to 12.

Dillsboro was once the main depot for the train, but the headquarters were moved to Bryson City in 2005. Then in 2008, the train yanked service to Dillsboro completely before partially restoring it the following year.

“When the train left, they lost a lot of traffic,” Wooten said of Dillsboro merchants.

County leaders are skittish that could happen again and want an assurance built into the contract. To pass muster with the county, the contract would have to require the train to keep the steam engine based in Dillsboro for five years. If it is moved elsewhere, the railroad would have to pay back a portion of the county’s grant, Wooten said.

Ideally, the train would promise to run a certain number of trips — such as two a day during summer and fall, and once a day during winter. But the county can’t expect the railroad to make such a commitment not knowing what the demand will be.

The draft contract circulated by Dillsboro stipulated that operations of the steam engine would be based in Dillsboro. But it also stated that “only the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad will have complete authority as it relates to all scheduling and operations of the train set originating out of Dillsboro.”

Such a disclaimer could make enforcement difficult if the railroad ever broke the promise.

Wooten also said if a deal was ever agreed on, the county would shy away from writing a check directly to the railroad. Instead, the county would want an invoice from the company involved in moving the steam engine and would pay it directly.

Turntable

A must-have for the train to bring a steam engine to Dillsboro is a turntable, a piece of track that can be spun around to get the engine pointed back the right way when it reaches the end of the line.

The train apparently can’t afford the $200,000 to build one. The tiny town of Dillsboro can’t either. But the town will apply for a grant to cover the cost. A lot is riding on the outcome of that grant.

“No turntable, no steam engine,” Wooten said. “That would be a deal killer.”

The train currently runs on diesel engines. When the engine reaches the end of the line on excursions, it goes in reverse until it gets back to the depot in Bryson City.

Steam engines can’t go in reverse for long distances, however, making the turntable critical. The steam engine would run from Dillsboro to Bryson City, so another turntable would have to be installed there.

A turntable in Bryson City has been discussed for years. In 2005, the train got a $7.5 million low-interest loan from the Federal Railroad Administration, in part to construct turntables in Bryson City and Dillsboro. “How many years ago was that and where is the turntable?” asked Hanneke Ware, an inn owner in Jackson County who doesn’t think the county should give the railroad a grant. Wooten said the train apparently purchased the turntables but never installed them.

A portion of that loan was also for repairs to the track. But the majority was used to restructure existing debt that had a higher interest rate.

That existing debt and federal loan is one reason the railroad wants grants — not more loans — to move the steam engine and for the turntable. Wooten was told by the railroad that it lacked the collateral to take on additional debt right now.

The train has also asked for money for advertising from the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority — tapping into the  pot of money raised from a tax on overnight lodging in the county. The train initially asked for $150,000 a year, but has since revised the request to an unspecified amount of advertising on the train’s behalf, specifically for marketing the steam engine service from Dillsboro.

Opponents to a proposed room tax increase in Jackson County are accusing county leaders of secretly earmarking the money for a grant to the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.

“If this is about raising funds to get the railroad to move back to Dillsboro, then we are against it,” said Hanneke Ware, owner of the Chalet Inn, at a public hearing on the room tax increase this week. “It is not right to increase the accommodation taxes in a county as widespread as Jackson to provide marketing money to a private business.”

The scenic tourist railroad has asked the county for as much as half a million dollars in exchange for offering steam engine train service to the tourist village of Dillsboro.

The train, once headquartered in Dillsboro, cited the flagging economy when it pulled out in 2008. Dillsboro’s galleries, gift shops and restaurants were thrust into a tailspin over the sudden loss of 60,000 tourists annually.

While the train has since brought limited passenger train service back to Dillsboro, business owners worry the train won’t stick around and still pine for the same level of foot traffic they once enjoyed.

County Commissioner Mark Jones, who spoke to commissioners during the public hearing in his capacity as head of the Cashiers Area Travel and Tourism Authority, said if a tax increase is needed to help the train, perhaps Dillsboro should levy it. In Macon County, Jones pointed out, the county levies a 3 percent tax and the town of Franklin levies an additional 3 percent tax there.

County leaders say there is no connection between the proposed room tax increase and the financial assistance being sought by the railroad.

“We don’t have a motive,” said Commission Chairman Jack Debnam.

Anyone who thinks the room tax increase is aimed at raising money to give the railroad is misinformed, Debnam said. The county has bandied the idea around but is not close to a deal, Debnam said. (see related article)

Several speakers opposing the room tax hike believe there is a connection, however.

“Why are they asking the county for money?” Ware asked.

She said the railroad should do what other businesses do when expanding: namely, get a bank loan.

“Is it because they don’t have collateral?” Ware asked. “If they can’t get a loan, why would the county want to put money into a business whose financial plans are tenuous?”

Henry Hoche likewise questioned why the tourist railroad needs money from the county.

“To me it makes no sense why the railroad isn’t paying for it itself,” said Hoche, owner of Innisfree Inn By-the-Lake in Glenville.

Giving tax money to private business in exchange for creating jobs isn’t exactly a new concept. Incentives to land new industry are common at the state level, and counties often get in the game by offering tax credits to lure new companies offering jobs.

Jackson County has a revolving loan fund designed to help businesses moving to or expanding in Jackson County. Al Harper, the owner of the railroad, previously estimated 15 to 20 news jobs would be created under his plan to base a steam engine train in Dillsboro — a plan predicated on financial help, however.

County Manager Chuck Wooten said the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad steam engine project would not create enough jobs to qualify for the size of the revolving loan request, however.

It wouldn’t matter anyway, Wooten said, because the railroad has since told him it can’t take on any more debt.

Spin-off jobs created by other businesses, such as the tourist-oriented shops in Dillsboro, wouldn’t count toward the job creation quota the railroad must meet, Wooten said.

The scenic railroad wants to base trips on a restored 1913 steam engine and rail cars in Dillsboro, but there’s a hitch. The train is in Maine, and it would cost more than $400,000 to move it down to Dillsboro, the railroad estimates. It wants the county to split the cost, plus pony up money to help advertise the new steam engine service.

Currently, tourism tax dollars can only go to marketing and advertising, not to hard costs like steam trains. The narrow criteria were imposed by the state in the 1980s when counties first began charging lodging taxes.

A few years ago, the law changed. Room tax can now fund “tourism-related expenditures,” which can include walking trails, festival bleachers, boat docks, or perhaps a stream train — anything that would presumably lure tourists. The state allows up to one-third of a county’s room tax dollars to go toward such “tourism-related expenditures.”

If Jackson County wants this flexibility, however, it has to adopt new language at the local level reflecting that. It has become part of the discussion over whether to increase the room tax, along with revamping the tourism oversight agency that controls the money.

Clifford Meads, general manager of High Hampton Inn in Cashiers, doesn’t like the idea of tourism tax money going to projects instead of strictly promotions.

“There will be people dreaming up projects so they can spend the money,” Meads said.

Meads said shipping money from other parts of the county to help Dillsboro is “going to be divisive.”

Cashiers business owners led the charge against a proposed tax increase on overnight lodging in Jackson County during a public hearing this week.

Several lodging owners complained that tourism is already down because of the economy. Asking tourists to pay a higher tax when they are reluctant to travel in the first place is adding insult to injury, they argued.

“This is our bread and butter,” said Richard Hattler of Mountain Lake Rentals in Cashiers, adding that a tax increase in these times of economic hardships is “insane.”

SEE ALSO: Is room tax hike aimed at helping scenic railroad? 

George Ware of Chalet Inn said tax increase would represent an “ill-advised action at the worst-possible time.”

About 40 people packed the hearing before county commissioners, with a dozen speaking out against the tax increase.

“You are going to negate the efforts of the tax itself,” said Judy Brown, president of the Greater Cashiers Area Merchants’ Association. “I think this is going to end up blowing up in our faces.”

Jackson leaders have proposed doubling the room tax from 3 to 6 percent. The room tax raised $440,000 last year, which is pumped back into tourism promotions.

The extra revenue from the proposed tax increase should mean more money to market Jackson County as a destination, which in turn should increase tourism. That’s something supporters say Jackson County sorely needs.

Overnight stays have declined by 12 percent in Jackson since 2006. Jackson has fared worse on the tourism front than other counties and has failed to rebound as well as its neighbors.

But a room tax increase is the wrong approach, opponents argued. It would put Jackson’s room tax higher than surrounding counties: Haywood and Transylvania are at 4 percent, while Macon and Swain are at 3 percent.

Tourists are already penny pinching as it is. Industry-wide, lodging owners note a major trend in how visitors book their trips these days.

“It is a last minute reservation, they want only one night, they want a discount, and they want the bottom line of how much it is going to cost,” said Michelle McMahon, owner of Mountain Brook Cottages for more than 30 years.

McMahon claims tourists are savvy enough these days to ask about extra taxes and fees, factoring the total cost — not just the advertised nightly rate — into their decision about where to stay.

“They compare, compare, compare,” McMahon said. “Nobody truthfully cares this is Jackson County. They just want to come to the mountains.”

Mary Korotwa, owner of Cashiers Resort Rentals, said the county is barking up the wrong tree in its quest for more tourism tax money. Instead, the county should be tracking down people who rent out their mountain homes and cabins to vacationers under the radar without levying the tax and remitting it to the county.

“You are leaving money on the table,” Korotwa said. “There are legions of homeowners in the county renting their own properties who are not paying the tax.”

Opponents overwhelmingly hailed from the Cashiers area. None of the county’s large chain hotels showed up.

That led County Commission Chairman Jack Debnam to wonder whether opposition to the rate hike is shared by the majority in the tourism industry. Debnam said the goal is to help tourism, not hurt it.

“We are trying to figure out how to promote Jackson County,” Debnam said. “We’ve got to be able to do a better job than we’ve been doing.”

Finding the best way

Controversy over the room tax increase has opened other wounds in the county. One is whether tourism tax revenue should continue to be divvied up between two tourism entities — the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority and a separate Cashiers Travel and Tourism Authority.

Both of those contract with either the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and Cashiers Chamber of Commerce to carry out on-the-ground tourism marketing. Manning a visitor center, answering phones, mailing out brochures, placing ads in magazines or on billboards, managing a travel web site — all these functions are carried out by the respective chambers of commerce rather than an explicit county travel and tourism staff.

The county has floated the idea of merging the separate Jackson and Cashiers tourism agencies into a single countywide tourism authority. The chambers of commerce fear they could lose their starring role — and their cut of the room tax revenue — under a new structure.

Robert Jumper, chairman of the Jackson Travel and Tourism Authority, spoke up for the vital role played by the Jackson chamber when it comes to tourism.

The Jackson County Chamber of Commerce has the skills, knowledge and expertise to orchestrate tourism promotions on behalf of the county, Jumper said.

“We want our voice to be heard,” Jumper said, adding that any new countywide entity should honor the existing arrangement with the chamber

SEE ALSO: Railroad wants money, county wants assurances 

Debnam said not to worry. He said the two chambers of commerce would, in all likelihood, remain the go-to entities for carrying out the scope of tourism work.

“I think there is a big misconception about what is going to happen,” Debnam said.

Commissioners didn’t offer any comments of their own following the hearing. They will hold a work session to talk about what to do at 1 p.m. Monday, Nov. 14, in the county administration building. The earliest they would vote is at their next formal meeting on Nov. 21.

The commissioners previously voted 4 to 1 on their intent to increase the room tax, but that was prior to such backlash from Cashiers lodging owners. One commissioner is rumored to have changed his mind.

Meanwhile, lodging owners fighting the tax continue to rally their forces. They are forming a Jackson County Accommodations Association “to strengthen our voice,” said Henry Hoche, owner of Innisfree Inn By-the-Lake in Glenville.

As for a compromise, such as increasing the tax to only 4 percent as neighboring Haywood and Transylvania have done, Hoche wasn’t interested. A more modest increase from 3 to 4 percent would bring in another $115,000 a year to bolster tourism efforts. But it simply isn’t needed, Hoche said.

Cashiers could soon lose autonomy over its tourism marketing efforts if a plan to merge two separate tourism entities in Jackson County goes through.

While Cashiers tourism leaders are fighting to save this independent marketing arm, those in favor of a merger question whether the Cashiers solo approach has hampered overall tourism efforts in the county.

“This is a chance for the county to determine whether it is getting the best return on its investment,” County Manager Chuck Wooten said. “I just don’t believe there is a lot of cross communication going on. They are focusing on their one area of responsibility, and we are missing out on some opportunities.”

Dual tourism entities — namely the Cashiers Travel and Tourism Authorities and the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authorities — are less effective than just one entity would be, according to Wooten.

“It appears to be if we had a single travel authority we would have an opportunity to develop a countywide strategic advertising plan and deploy our resources to focus on the specific areas of the plan,” Wooten said.

Cashiers’ tourism agency has isolated itself from larger tourism efforts in the county. Cashiers does not share its marketing strategy or advertising campaigns with the rest of county, leaving the larger Jackson tourism entity in the dark on how Cashiers spends its allotment of tourism tax dollars.

Although Cashiers representatives sit on the board of the Jackson Travel and Tourism Authority, no one from greater Jackson County sits on the Cashiers board. The result is a one-way street, with Cashiers being privy to the tourism activities carried out by Jackson but not the other way around.

Sue Bumgarner, the director of the Cashiers Travel and Tourism Authority and the Cashiers Chamber of Commerce, was unable to provide basic information about their activities.

• She does not keep an accurate count of visitor center walk-ins.

• She could not provide information about how many web hits or telephone inquires the agency got.

• She said she did not have a list of how the Cashiers tourism authority has spent its advertising budget over the past year.

• Minutes from the quarterly meetings of the Cashiers tourism board were not readily available. They are kept in hardcopy format only in boxes at an off-site storage unit. Minutes have not been provided to the county despite a request to do so.

• A database of prospective visitors who have requested travel literature is not shared with the Jackson tourism agency, despite the Jackson tourism agency sharing all of its leads with Cashiers.

The heart of the issue is how best to spend tourism-tax revenue. A 3 percent tax on overnight lodging in the county raised $440,000 last year. The money is pumped back into tourism marketing and promotions.

Tourism revenue has declined in Jackson County by 12 percent since 2006. Jackson isn’t entirely alone. The recession-driven trend was mirrored across the mountains, although to a lesser extent.

Jackson fared worse than its neighbors, experiencing steeper declines. And while surrounding counties have since rebounded to their pre-recession levels, Jackson is still down.

To improve matters, Jackson leaders plan to double the room tax from 3 percent to 6 percent. The extra revenue will mean more money to spend on marketing Jackson County as a tourism destination and hopefully in turn, increase tourism.

A majority of Jackson County commissioners have voiced support for increasing the room tax, with four of the five in favor of the plan.

The debate has now turned to whether there should be a single tourism authority to steer marketing efforts and provide oversight for how the tourism-tax revenue is spent.

Currently, the room tax is split between the Cashiers tourism agency and the Jackson tourism agency. Cashiers gets 75 percent of the lodging tax generated in the Cashiers area — which amounted to $177,000 last year. The remaining $263,000 went to the Jackson Travel and Tourism Authority.

By joining forces, the two could save on overhead and administration, freeing up more dollars to spend on marketing, Wooten said.

“Sometimes I think we get caught up in the ‘that’s way we have always done it’ mentality and this may restrict our opportunity to grow,” Wooten said.

Bumgarner would not say specifically whether she wants the Cashiers tourism agency to merge with a single countywide one, saying she would have to consult her board before sharing her views publicly.

“I would rather not get into it until we know for sure what is going on,” Bumgarner said.

But, she did say that a Cashiers-focused tourism agency is better positioned to market Cashiers than a countywide organization.

“Just being here and knowing the market and what people are looking for, it is a whole different area. We are looking for people to come up and buy million dollar homes,” Bumgarner said. “We are marketing to a whole different group I guess you would say. I felt in order to do that we needed to be able to place ads in different kind of publications.”

Shotgun advertising

Running advertisements — whether in magazines, billboards, or online — is a key component of tourism marketing.

Bumgarner was unable to provide a list of where she has run ads over the past year. She said she did not keep a list of which magazines she has run ads in or what months they ran. Cashiers spends close to $60,000 a year on advertising.

“I would have to go back and think of which ones I’ve done. I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have time to go back and look at all those ads,” Bumgarner said.

Bumgarner also does not share her advertising schedule with her counterparts at the Jackson tourism entity, despite a standing request by Julie Spiro, executive director of the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority and the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce. Knowing which magazines, billboards and other advertisements Cashiers has planned would allow the two entities to maximize their marketing dollars.

Initially, Bumgarner was ambiguous when asked whether she shared her advertising schedule with the Jackson tourism arm. She answered that “they have the same ad agency as us.”

When asked again whether she gave Jackson a copy of her advertising schedule, Bumgarner replied: “I am on the travel and tourism board in Jackson County also.”

When asked a third time, she said the two entities sometimes split the cost of ads in magazines. When asked a fourth time whether she shared her ad schedule with Jackson, she said, “They know our ad schedule.” When asked how, she answered, “because I sit on their TTA board.”

Finally, Bumgarner said she did not provide Spiro with Cashiers’ advertising schedule.

“I don’t give out our whole schedule … not unless they ask for it or want to see it,” Bumgarner said, adding, “It is no big secret.”

Spiro said she has asked to see it, but has never gotten one.

The Jackson tourism entity develops a marketing strategy and advertising plan for the year each spring. Bumgarner gets a copy and so does the county.

The need for niche marketing — marketing that caters to Cashiers’ unique tourist demographic — is the chief argument of Cashiers tourism leaders who want to hang on to their own tourism arm. Cashiers knows best how to market and promote Cashiers, they say.

However, Bumgarner could not provide a list of what that advertising is exactly.

About half of Cashiers’ advertising budget is managed by an ad agency. The agency is contracted to design and place ads on Cashiers’ behalf.

For the rest, Bumgarner places the ads herself. She is able to take advantage of last minute discounts on ad space or buy ads to promote special events that come up over the course of the year, she said.

Bumgarner referred questions about those specific ads to the county finance office, however, which pays the bills when invoices for the ads come in.

Most of the invoices, however, don’t include the name of the magazine, nor the month that an ad ran. The invoices are sent by publishing companies that usually have numerous magazines under their umbrella.

A review of advertising invoices from the ad agency for Cashiers show that it places ads in four magazines over the course of the year for Cashiers: AAA Go, AAA Going Places, Blue Ridge Country and Southern Living. The Jackson tourism entity ran ads in those same publications, according to a review of invoices held by the county finance office.

Nuts and bolts

When a prospective tourist requests information about the area, tourist entities mail out a packet of brochures and guides designed to seal the deal on coming to visit.

The Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority shares every inquiry it gets with Sue Bumgarner, the head of the Cashiers tourism arm.

That way, Cashiers can send out its own Cashiers-tailored literature and brochures to prospective tourists, in addition to what’s being sent out on behalf of the whole county, said Spiro. Spiro shares responses that come in from magazine ads, as well as a database of people who have called or emailed to request travel information.

“If I get leads from AAA Go, Blue Ridge Parkway, Southern Living, I just forward those to (Bumgarner) because I don’t know if she has those leads or not, so I just share the leads with her,” Spiro said.

Bumgarner, however, does not share inquiries coming in to the Cashiers office with the Jackson Travel and Tourism Authority. Bumgarner was vague initially when asked whether she shared visitor inquires with Spiro. At first, she said “yes.”

But when asked specifically how she shared the inquiries, Bumgarner said that she actually did not share inquires that came in from magazine ads — she only shares inquires from people who call or email asking for travel information.

“Yes, we share those. We email them back and forth,” Bumgarner said.

However, Spiro said she has not received any leads or visitor inquires from Cashiers barring a few times in early 2010 from one of Bumgarner’s assistants. But that person left, and since then, Spiro has not gotten any inquiries from Cashiers despite asking for them from time to time.

Upon further questioning, Bumgarner said she shared inquires with members of the Cashiers Chamber of Commerce who pay an extra fee for the inquiry list.

“We send it out to our members that pay to get the inquiry list every week,” Bumgarner said.

Inns, cabin rentals, golf courses and the like can use the inquiry list to send out their own brochures, peppering the prospective tourists with a litany of travel literature in hopes of luring them to their particular establishment.

But, the list isn’t available for non-chamber members.

“You can’t have it, not from us,” Bumgarner said.

Other tourism entities that get tax dollars for marketing make the inquiry list available to all accommodations owners, since they all help collect the tax.

“The accommodation owners are provided it free of charge,” Spiro said of the inquiry list produced by the Jackson tourism agency.

Tracking visitor numbers

The Cashiers visitor center does not keep an exact record of how many walk-in visitors come through its doors.

Bumgarner pegged foot traffic at the visitor center as “close to 10,000” so far this year. Most visitor centers, including those in Maggie Valley, Waynesville and Sylva, use a clicker to count walk-in traffic.

Cashiers uses estimates. Bumgarner was initially vague about the methodology for tracking visitors.

“Just by, you know, daily counts,” Bumgarner said.

When asked specifically whether her office used a clicker to count each person, Bumgarner replied, “we just estimate at the end of the day. I just kind of check off at the end of the day how many we had.”

As for telephone calls or web hits?

“Oh Lord, I have no clue on those,” Bumgarner said.

The visitor center run by the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce in Sylva keeps an exact count of daily walk-in traffic, telephone calls, email inquiries, web page views and downloads.

“All those mediums are ways we can track how well marketing is and is not working,” Spiro said.

Tracking the number of inquiries and traffic from month to month and year to year also provides a picture over time of whether tourism is trending up or down. Bumgarner did not have tracking data accessible to share, saying that it was not saved on her computer but instead existed only on paper and was located in boxes at an off-site storage unit.

Meeting minutes

Bumgarner also was unable to provide minutes from past tourism board meetings. She said she does not save notes or minutes from the meetings on her computer. Bumgarner said she types up the minutes from hand-written notes, prints them out, then deletes the file, keeping only the hard copy.

Bumgarner did not have copies of back minutes readily available, however. They are kept in boxes at an offsite storage unit and would be difficult to pull out, Bumgarner said. They are all mixed in with boxes of magazines, Bumgarner said.

The minutes are supposed to provide a record of what the Cashiers tourism board discusses at its quarterly meetings.

The board is charged with developing and guiding a tourism marketing strategy — finding the best way to spend the roughly $180,000 a year in tax dollars allocated to promote Cashiers.

As a public entity, the Cashiers tourism board is required by law to keep minutes of its meetings and share them with the public upon request.

County officials asked Bumgarner to start providing minutes from the Cashiers tourism board meeting earlier this year, but still have not received any.

The Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority shares a copy of its meeting minutes with the county.

Doing so keeps the county apprised of the what the Jackson tourism entity is up to — spelling out its marketing strategy, plan and vision and a snapshot of its activities from the month.

Cashiers’ failure to do likewise is in violation of the county’s original legislation that first created the Cashier Travel and Tourism Authority. By law, both Jackson and Cashiers tourism arms are supposed to provide quarterly reports to the county of its activities. This mandate was included in the original legislation creating the two entities in 1987.

Shortly after county commission Chairman Jack Debnam took office in January, he asked both tourism boards to start making the quarterly reports. Spiro, who already provided copies of her board meeting minutes to the county, began producing quarterly activity reports as well.

Bumgarner does neither. County Manager Chuck Wooten believes Cashiers is not satisfying the county requirement for quarterly reports on their activity.

“It seems to be there would be at least some understanding or expectation they would at least update commissioners on what activities they are doing to try to improve and increase travel and tourism in the county,” Wooten said.

Chamber fate

The Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and the separate Cashiers Chamber of Commerce get a cut of the tourism tax dollars to carry out the job of tourism promotion.

The Cashiers Chamber of Commerce gets $60,000 a year from the Cashiers tourism agency. It accounts for 40 percent of the Cashiers Chambers total budget of $146,000.

Jackson Chamber of Commerce gets $72,000 a year in room tax dollars, plus another $9,000 a year in rent to subsidize the overhead of the visitor center.

If the separate Jackson and Cashiers tourism arms were merged into a single countywide entity, the respective chambers of commerce would most likely continue getting their cut of the room tax money.

“There is no reason to think you wouldn’t continue to utilize the chambers to do those thing you have to do on the ground to distribute the brochures to answer the telephone to run the visitors bureau,” Wooten said. “Someone has to provide the services they currently provide, so my belief is the chambers would continue providing these services and receive support accordingly.”

Wooten said the county would like to see a formal contract outlining the arrangement with the chambers, however.

“There should be some kind of written understanding of what the expectations are in return for the funds provided,” Wooten said.

The Cashiers Travel and Tourism Authority has not voted on a contract with the Cashiers Chamber of Commerce since 1987, Bumgarner said, despite the dollar amount awarded to the Cashiers Chamber increasing over the years.

If the plan goes through, the two tourism entities that oversee tourism tax dollars for their respective regions — the Jackson Travel and Tourism Authority and the Cashiers Travel and Tourism Authority — would be dissolved and a single entity formed in its place.

Wooten has floated the idea of a nine-member countywide tourism board with cross-county representation.

When Rose Johnson took over at Haywood Community College five years ago, she was clearly a woman on a mission to transform both the campus and curriculum into a model of sustainability.

It wasn’t always obvious at the time, but it is blatantly so looking back. Johnson has instilled sustainable practices into every nook and cranny of the school.

Auto mechanics learn to brew batches of biofuel. Wood-working students will soon be using solar-power tools. Future construction workers are building a green model home. Students are even designing native rain gardens to catch run-off around campus.

When Johnson steps down from her post next summer, she believes the tradition of sustainability will carry on without her.

“It is so embraced by everyone on campus and the community. The interest and desire for that is not me driving it any more. It is now part of the college and part of the culture,” Johnson said.

Johnson hopes her replacement will value and encourage the sustainable efforts.

“The incoming president will need to be someone who appreciates that and has an interest in taking that forward to the next level,” Johnson said.

Johnson announced last week that she would resign when her contract is up in June in order to spend more time with her husband, who lives in Raleigh where he works for the N.C. Rural Center as the director of business development.

Maintaining a long distance relationship is even tougher given the demanding jobs they each hold.

“Three years is a long time to be working the way we both do with high pressure positions and not enough time together,” Johnson said. “This job, as awesome as it is, is very time consuming.”

Johnson isn’t sure what she will do next. Johnson doesn’t seem quite ready for retirement and is contemplating the next stage of her career, somewhere to focus her interest and talents.

She isn’t limiting herself to the Raleigh area where her husband works, although she wants a job with the flexibility to take long weekends when needed to travel.

Johnson said he wanted to give the community college board of trustees ample time to find a new leader and make the transition as easy as possible.

“My goal became to leave the college and community in a loving way,” Johnson said.

At one time, Johnson’s contract automatically rolled over. Thanks to a friendly clause in the contract, it would renew itself without requiring a vote by the board.

This summer, however, the board voted to end the automatic rollover. Johnson would have to actively seek a renewal of her contract when it ended come June.

The make-up of the college board has shifted over the past two to three years. The county commissioners, who appoint people to the college board, got put out with Johnson and the community college last year over a new creative arts building.

County commissioners thought it was too expensive and that the price was being driven up by green building features, including solar panels. But the community college would not back down from the design.

Johnson said the controversy over the building project last year in no way influenced her decision to step down from HCC next year.

Another hallmark of Johnson’s tenure has been involvement off campus in the community.

“You can’t have a community college without a good community interface,” Johnson said.

Volunteer work has found her washing dishes for Folkmoot festival performers to teaching tourists about the elk in Cataloochee. Her most visible work has been a leadership role with the Haywood County Chamber of Commerce, where, not surprisingly, she founded the Green Initiative to help business owners go green.

“I truly believe that a community college is meant to be involved with the community,” Johnson said, adding how she will miss both the college and community. “I believe it is a very vibrant college with a very strong community connection.

Waynesville has spent $7 million over the past four years building a new fire station, police station and town offices — projects that have come under fire by some challengers for the town board.

Opponents point to the architecture — the brick towers on the fire house, the wood timber frames over the police department entrance — and question how much they added to the price tag.

“I think it is a little extravagant,” said Hugh Phillips, who is running for mayor.

“They may be just a bit more than we really needed,” said candidate Sam Edwards, calling the buildings too fancy. “It certainly helped prettify things, but I don’t know if that was what we should be doing right now.”

But the incumbents say the attractive building design added little to the cost and was worth it.

“I am proud of those things, and if they want to rag on me for that, guilty as charged,” said Waynesville Mayor Gavin Brown.

Mary Ann Enloe, a challenger in the race, lauded the buildings and doesn’t consider them extravagant.

“I think the designs are beautiful,” Enloe said. “Why didn’t we make the justice center look like that?”

Alderman Gary Caldwell said the town actually scaled back some elements of the building design.

“It could have been far more fancy than what it is now,” Caldwell said.

The new police department on Main Street also houses the town planning office where developers and entrepreneurs come for their building permits and business licenses. It was important for it to look nice, Brown said.

“You are trying to create atmosphere when they come in to town they are impressed, that they are in a progressive arena, a place where people are doing things,” Brown said.

Criticism of the town building projects has originated from a political action committee called the Waynesville-Haywood Concerned Citizens. A web site by the group cites the “ostentatious” police department and “extravagant” fire station.

The web site questions a few others town spending priorities as well, but one of the chief examples is inaccurate. It blasts the town for spending money on fancy downtown art. However, no town tax dollars went for the public art pieces. They were funded entirely with private donations.

The battle has been an epic one, but Wolfgang Restaurant in Highlands might have finally gotten the best of a bear addicted to a nightly feast of its trash.

The bear had gotten into the unfortunate habit of visiting the restaurant’s trashcans, which were kept in an alley out back, in the wee hours of the morning.

“They would drag the garbage bag across Village Square and there would be piles of garbage and bear poop everywhere,” said Cynthia Strain.

Strain, an expert and leader of a bear education group, suggested ammonia.

“The nights they sprayed their garbage cans and bags with ammonia, they wouldn’t get into it. But the nights they forgot, the bears would get all over it,” Strain said.

That worked for a while, but the bears hankering for trash eventually got he better of them. They overcame their distaste for ammonia and began their nightly trash forays once more.

“They finally worked out a deal where Wolfgang gave the back door key for the town garbage men and would leave the garbage inside the backdoor,” Strain said. The deal was forged just last week, in a win-win deal for everyone, except perhaps the bears.

“The garbage men were happy to do it, because they wound up spending a great deal of time cleaning up the garbage from the street,” Strain said.

While getting into trash is one of the top bear problems faced by mountaintop islands of Highlands and Cashiers, bears have started to find their way into people’s homes.

“If they smell food they will come right in the screen door of the house,” Strain said.

“One fellow had a bear rip his screen door off three times trying to get to the bird seed on his porch,” Strain said.

Strain realized that conflicts between bears and people, particularly in the Highlands and Cashiers area, would only continue to rise — as bears became bolder and people more plentiful.

“Over the years we started hearing more and more and more problems with bears. People just didn’t know what to do. We thought someone needed to step in and educate the public,” Strain said. “There wasn’t anyone in a position to help these people with information and guidance”

So Strain helped start a nonprofit called B.E.A.R., which operates under the WNC Alliance, a regional environmental group and stands for Bear Education and Resources.

“They call and say they are having a lot of problems with bears in their community and want someone to come talk to them and tell them what to do and what not to do,” Strain said. “When bears do things like come in to your house and up on your deck, they are losing their natural fear of people. It is a lot easier to prevent problems than solve problems.”

Inadvertent carelessness, such as leaving out birdseed and dog food, is the biggest challenge Strain is trying to combat. But sadly, she has heard stories of people making and feeding the bears peanut butter sandwiches and coaxing them into yards.

Two groups in the Highlands-Cashiers area are working to teach residents there — and across WNC — how to better co-exist with black bears. Bear encounters are particularly frequent on the plateau area of southern Jackson and southeastern Macon counties where the two communities are situated.

Feeding bears is the biggest mistake a person can make, said Strain. Bears that lose their fear of humans to the point of showing aggression often get put down.

“It’s a bad year for bears, but that doesn’t mean you should feed them,” she said. “Because then you create serious problems that could end up causing the death of the bear. Once bears become accustomed to food, they associate humans with food — and lose their fear. And the more conditioned they get, the more aggressive they become.”

John Edwards, the founder of Mountain Wildlife Days and who lives in Sapphire Valley Resort, helps represent the interests of black bear enthusiasts. This is done with the help of the Bear Smart Initiative sponsored by the Jackson-Macon Conservation Alliance, Wild South and other experts.

“There is pretty much a constant bear issue here,” Edwards said of Sapphire and that community. Like Strain, Edwards warned against feeding bears.

“That can create a problem in a hurry,” Edwards said. “If one person throws food off a deck to a wild animal, they come back.”

Strain has heard a few stories of people being swatted by bears.

A man in Highlands walked out of his house at night and nearly stumbled into a bear.

“He turned and ran, and it triggered an instinct in the bear to chase him. He was running up the stairs of his house and the bear swatted at his leg and scratched his leg before he got inside, so those things will happen,” Strain said.

In a similar story, a lady flipped on her outside lights to see why her dog was barking. She saw a bear cub in her yard and stepped outside for a closer look.

“What she didn’t realize is she just stepped out in between the cub and its mother. That’s something you never want to do,” Strain said. “The mother swatted at the woman and scratched her.”

Stories such as these have led to a fear by some to go out in their yard at night.

“I would not be afraid, but I know how to read a bear’s behavior. The only time to be afraid is if you startle a bear — if they don’t hear, smell or see you coming,” Strain said.

How to act during a bear encounter is another of the bear topics Strain and her group cover during their talks and programs. Chiefly, speak to the bear gently, don’t make eye contact and back away slowly. Don’t, under any circumstances, run.

“If they do charge you, it is a bluff charge,” Strain said.

A mother bear’s finely honed biological clock

Bears have to pack on serious pounds in the fall — three to four pounds a day, or about 25,000 calories — in order to make it through hibernation.

It’s especially critical for the females. They give birth while hibernating and sustain their cubs in their den until spring arrives.

Baby cubs are born in January weighing less than a pound. Essentially born premature, the cubs latch on to their mothers and nurse around the clock for the rest of winter. The mother converts her vast fat stores to milk, producing up to 50 pounds of milk despite taking in no food or calories herself. Cubs weigh eight pounds by the time they emerge from the den in April.

A mother bear calibrates the number of cubs she has based on how well she can nourish them. While bears mate in June, development of the embryo is delayed until fall. A bundle of fertilized eggs simply sits in the mother’s uterus, waiting to see how much weight she’ll gain during the pre-hibernation feeding frenzy. When — and if — she hits the target weight gain, the bundle of eggs pops open and implants in the uterus.

Last year was a great year for acorns, bear’s chief food source, resulting in more cubs than normal. The large number of cubs born in spring has made matters even worse during the acorn and food shortage this fall.

Three candidates running for the Maggie Valley town board with a similar message have buddied up in the campaign and chosen to run as a slate.

They claim the current town leaders discourage new ideas and fail to bring residents and business owners to the table to solve the town’s problems.

“This present regime has really closed out any other ideas other than their own,” said Ron DeSimone, a challenger for mayor. “They are not very open. They have allowed that podium to be used for vile personal attacks while limiting the voice of other people.”

DeSimone has joined forced on the ticket with town board candidates Phillip Wight and Phil Aldridge. They partnered by putting all three of their names on both yard signs and brochures.

“The main reason I am personally running is I think it is the people’s seat and I don’t think it has been represented properly over the years,” Wight said. “I really hope I can help solve problems and reach across the isle.”

Both Wight and DeSimone ran for town board two years ago unsuccessfully. Aldridge has been on the board for eight years, but is a self-described “odd man out.”

“I have been a lone voice on that board for many years,” Aldridge said. Aldridge said he hasn’t been able to bring about the change that he hoped.

“I had the same ideas then that I have now as far as trying to bring this Valley together,” Aldridge said. “We want to invite the public and business to share their ideas and bring them forward to us. That is not happening right now.”

That’s why he needed to run as a team with Wight and DeSimone.

Challenger Danny Mitchell is not part of the slate but shares some of the same views.

“My main concern is that everybody needs to get along and have professional meetings and not argue and fuss,” Mitchell said.

Two incumbents running for re-election — Mayor Roger McElroy and Alderwoman Danya Vanhook — disagree that there is widespread dissatisfaction. Critics have been a near constant element in Maggie’s small town politics, and the town has tried to reach out to them over the years but can never seem to satisfy them.

“I think a good majority of the people are pretty much happy with what is going on in town,” McElroy said, despite what he called “a faction in town that has felt differently for a long time.”

McElroy said despite his 30 years on the board, he is open minded to new ideas for the town.

“If an idea comes up you can’t say we tried that and it didn’t work because situations change. Something that didn’t work 10 years ago might work now, and I’m aware of that,” McElroy said.

Vanhook said being impartial and open-minded is her forte as a former judge. Vanhook joined the town board just six months ago. She was appointed after another an alderman who stepped down and left a vacancy.

At first, she didn’t apply because Maggie politics were known for being contentious but thought her skills may be of use on the town board.

“Someone who is a former judge, who can be fair, has an open mind, who hasn’t even involved in local politics before,” Vanhook said. “I was used to being very neutral and I thought that would serve Maggie Valley well, who would make decisions in the best interest of residents and businesses and didn’t have an ax to grind.”

Vanhook said she isn’t in one camp or the other.

“I certainly don’t vote in lock step with anyone,” Vanhook said.

Vanhook said Mayor Roger McElroy is in a tough spot as the moderator of town meetings. Maggie’s town meetings seem to have the best attendance per capita than any in the region. And, those interested enough to come often want to weigh in from their seats.

When McElroy calls on people in the audience, or lets people speak past their allotted time at the podium, people complain he isn’t keeping order and doesn’t know how to run a meeting. When he limits public input, he is accused of shutting them down, Vanhook said.

“I think he has always erred on the side of being inclusive,” Vanhook said. “I assure you every single person who comes to the meeting is heard.”

Vanhook said the town is better off for debating issues but wishes the debate was more cordial.

Until a few months ago, the town had public comment at the end of the meeting. The odd placement meant people were often commenting after the board had already come to a decision rather than before, so it was moved to the beginning as with other towns and counties.

Musical town board members

The election aside, the town has already seen two newcomers join the board this year. Two aldermen have resigned over the past six months. One alderman resigned after a political falling out with other board members. The second resigned because his motel business was struggling, and he decided to move elsewhere.

Two new board members were appointed to fill the seats.

One is Vanhook, who was appointed in March and now must formally run to keep her seat. The second is Michael Matthews, who was just appointed in September. His seat isn’t among those up for election.

Prior to being appointed, however, Matthews had signed up as a candidate in the fall election and his name will still appear on the ballot, even though he now already holds a seat on the board.

Matthews said he threw his name in the ring after witnessing a “huge disconnect” between the town leaders and the residents and business owners of town.

“I want to get everybody on the same page. I want everybody to start working together,” Matthews said.

While everyone seems to have good intentions — namely wanting the best for Maggie Valley — dueling personalities seem to get in the way, Matthews said.

Matthews considers himself neutral and says he isn’t aligned with either of the feuding camps that have marked Maggie Valley politics.

“People need to put the past in the past and start moving forward,” said Matthews, who works across the mountain at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Resort.

Waning tourism in Maggie Valley and what to do about it is dominating the town’s election this fall.

Four people are running for two seats on the town board, and there is also a contested race for mayor.

A slate of three candidates — Phil Aldridge, Phillip Wight and Ron DeSimone — say the current town leadership is a rudderless ship without a plan to bring back tourism.

“The town has been run off the hip. It really hasn’t followed a business plan,” said Ron DeSimone, a challenger for mayor.

Aldridge agreed.

“There is no game plan,” Aldridge said. “We want to sit down with the business people and come up with a plan. I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think any one person does. I think the town needs to be more willing to listen.”

Wight, a motel owner, has experienced declining tourism in Maggie first-hand.

“We are obviously suffering,” Wight said. “There are some people with good ideas out there that are not being heard.”

Maggie Valley was a kingpin of tourism in the mountains in the 1960s and ‘70s but has fallen from its former glory in recent years. The decline is blamed largely on the shuttered Ghost Town amusement park, which drew tens of thousands of people to the valley in its heyday.

Meanwhile, the rise of quaint downtowns like Waynesville and Bryson City and the burgeoning casino resort in Cherokee have proved tough competition for the older strip of mom and pop motels and restaurants that line Maggie Valley.

Candidate Danny Mitchell learned the ropes of tourism the hard way: a trial by fire after buying a motel and moving to Maggie Valley from Georgia 13 years ago as a mid-life career move.

Tourism has been decreasing steadily since then, Mitchell said, with motels losing up to 50 percent of their business when Ghost Town closed. The answer?

“Somebody with a lot of money to put Dollywood or Six Flags back on the mountain,” Mitchell said. “Look at Pigeon Forge. The main reason it has grown is Dollywood.”

Short of that, Mitchell didn’t have many ideas for how to improve Maggie’s tourism prospects. He also wasn’t sure what role the town could play in getting “somebody” to put in an amusement park where Ghost Town once was.

“Good question,” Mitchell said. “The economy is so bad right now as far the banks loaning money, it would take someone with a lot of money to buy Ghost Town.”

He suggested the town could offer them free sewer if they would come.

Wight said some guests at his motel check out early and spend the rest of their vacation in Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg after running out of things to do in Maggie Valley.

Motorcycle tourism has become a brisk market for Maggie Valley, with the region’s myriad scenic roads at Maggie’s doorstep. Wheels Thru Time, a world-renowned motorcycle museum, is the crown jewel of Maggie’s motorcycle tourism scene.

The town has seen an outgrowth of bars catering to motorcyclists, while restaurants and motels go out of their way to advertise themselves as biker-friendly on their signs out front.

Wight and Aldridge said the town could hurt establishments catering to bikers if it goes through with a plan to tighten the noise ordinance.

Balancing tourism and residents

Striking a balance between tourism and year-round residents is a tough challenge for Maggie Valley leaders who find themselves trying to serve two masters.

Business interests want the town to double as a promotional arm and take an active role — including spending tax dollars — to help tourism. Residents, however, don’t want to see too many of their tax dollars plowed into aiding the struggling motels, shops and restaurants.

“It’s a fine line,” Aldridge said. “You try to make both sides comfortable or happy. The big picture of it is if the businesses continue to fail, taxes are going to go up for everyone else.”

Alderwoman Danya Vanhook said the town’s interests aren’t mutually exclusive.

“There is a difference in philosophy over whether the town should promote business and tourism at a loss or whether we should be fiscally conservative and better stewards of the taxpayers’ money — that is a false dichotomy,” Vanhook said.

In its current budget, the town didn’t lay anyone off, gave employees a cost-of-living increase, and didn’t raise taxes, Vanhook said.

The town in its early days consisted almost solely of businesses, the town limits drawn like a snake along the strip of motels, shops and restaurants lining Soco Road. But the snake began bulging over time, taking in a neighborhood here, a subdivision there, until the town gradually grew from a few dozen business owners to a population of more than 1,000 residents today.

Much of that growth has occurred in just the past decade, with the town nearly doubling its population since 2000 by annexing new subdivisions into the town limits.

DeSimone is one of those new town residents after the town’s forced annexation of the subdivision in which he resides, Brannon Forest.

“I’ve always been of the opinion they were paying attention to the businesses and not the residents,” DeSimone said.

But since his first run for office two years ago, DeSimone said even business owners are having a hard time getting the attention of town hall.

“I was surprised even the business people feel disenfranchised,” DeSimone said.

DeSimone said the town does have a responsibility to promote a friendly business environment.

“Let’s face it, the majority of the town is around that strip. We can’t ignore that fact,” DeSimone said. “It is in the town’s best interest for that business district to be thriving and active.”

DeSimone, Aldridge and Wight have questioned the town’s budget, calling it large for a town of Maggie’s size and questioning if there are items in the budget — such as the size of the police force — that could be cut.

The town’s tax base is split almost evenly between residential communities and businesses. The town provides services for residents that businesses don’t get, such as garbage and brush pick-up, McElroy said. So the way he sees it, it’s OK to spend town resources to help promote business sometimes.

McElroy said there are positive economic signs in the Valley. Around 10 new businesses have opened this year. The majority are bars or restaurants — four are new bars as a matter of fact, adding to at least that many already in Maggie.

But the list also includes an archery range and antique shop, plus a couple businesses that clearly cater to locals, like a hair salon and bakery.

“I think it is a good combination,” McElroy said, adding that he would like to see even more. “For us to continue to draw people, we need good restaurants and activities.”

Aldridge, however, pointed to the oft-used tally of 47 closed, vacant, ‘for sale’ or ‘for rent’ businesses along the roadside from Soco Gap to the stop light at Jonathan Creek.

As for the newly opened businesses?

“It sounds significant, but who is going to be here next year? Who is going to survive the winter?” Aldridge said.

Vanhook wants to see more businesses catering to residents. She also thinks the town could take a role in improving the quality of life by leasing Carolina Nights or Eagle’s Nest — performance venues that closed this year — to show movies, something locals and tourists would enjoy.

McElroy touted a new town park in the works, Parham Park. It will feature a picnic pavilion, public restrooms and other amenities.

The town has also taken steps to improve its appearance, requiring a “mountain vernacular” architectural style for new businesses being built or those undergoing major remodeling.

“We want to try to make it look like a mountain place,” McElroy said.

Festival ground drama

The town-owned festival grounds has emerged as a lightning rod for controversy as town leaders debate the best way to bring tourists to Maggie.

The town has latched on to its festival grounds as its best asset in the fight to increase tourism, attempting to pack the calendar with car shows, carnivals, craft fairs and motorcycle rallies to lure warm bodies to the Valley.

“We’ve tried hard to fill in the gap somewhat with more festival activity,” said Mayor Roger McElroy. “Other than sight seeing and visiting the stores, there is not much else to do. If there is nothing for them to do, they won’t come back.”

While the town won’t stop waiting and hoping for someone to open a major amusement park to replace Ghost Town, in the meantime, recruiting more festivals to fill the void has become the town’s top strategy.

The town pays half the salary for a festival director, who is tasked with recruiting events and festivals to the Maggie venue. The other half is paid out of a room tax on overnight lodging. The town also spent big bucks putting on two of its own festivals this year.

Critics have blasted the town for the expenses and claim the festival director is going about her job all wrong.

“I think the two events were grossly overspent,” Wight said. The town took on the risk associated with throwing the festivals, paying bands and ride operators up front and then collecting proceeds off ticket sales.

The net loss on the two taxpayer-funded festivals was around $50,000. The town spent just over $89,000 to throw the four-day Red, White and Boom but took in only about $47,000. The town lost $13,000 on the Americana Roots and Beer festival in the spring.

“I think there is a way to promote the festival ground without the town losing tons of money to do it,” DeSimone said.

DeSimone questioned what benefits businesses saw for the $40,000 cost to taxpayers for the July Fourth carnival.

“The results have been ethereal at best,” DeSimone said. “There is no discernable way to measure results.”

McElroy and Vanhook see it as an investment rather than an expense however.

Vanhook said she has heard rave reviews from people who came to Red, White and Boom. More importantly, they plan to come back next year and make Maggie Valley their annual July Fourth tradition. Vanhook sees the inaugural year of the festival as an investment that will pay off down the road.

Wight said there are more effective ways for the town to get a bigger bang for its buck, however. Instead of plowing so much in to two festivals, the town should put the money in a kitty and pay bonuses for festival organizers who bring a target number of people through the gate.

Wight also thinks it is a waste of money to send the town’s festival director to trade shows in Texas and California, a strategy to convince event organizers to look at Maggie as their next venue.

Candidate Danny Mitchell doesn’t like the town spending so much on the festival grounds, regardless of the strategy for how to spend it.

The town has recently debated whether waive fees for the festival ground as a recruitment tool to get organizers to hold events there.

Wight put the drama in perspective at least.

“It is nice to have the festival grounds to fight over,” Wight said.

Alderman: pick two

Phil Aldridge, 55, current alderman

Former owner of Phil’s Grocery for 12 years

Danya Vanhook, 33, current alderwoman

Attorney

Danny Mitchell, 55

Owner of Laurel Park Inn and estimator for WNC Paving. Bought a motel and moved to Maggie Valley 13 years ago.

Phillip Wight, 42

Owner of Clarkton Motel

Mayor: pick one

Roger McElroy, 73, current mayor

General contractor and owner of Meadowlark Motel and Cottages.

Ron DeSimone, 58

General contractor.

The medical community in Western North Carolina is embroiled in a debate over Mission Hospital — should its influence and reach be reined in or given the freedom it needs to serves as the region’s health care leader?

A state committee is examining whether Mission needs more checks on its health care monopoly, and will hold a public hearing on the issue at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 20, at the WNC Agricultural Center in Asheville.

Physicians in surrounding counties fear encroachment by Mission could siphon patients away from their local hospitals to Asheville, despite the same quality of care and caliber of physicians serving in their community closer to home.

“You have to have a certain volume of business to be viable,” said David Markoff, an ophthalmologist in Haywood County. “At some point, you reach this tipping point where you can’t keep quality health care locally because the physicians aren’t busy enough.”

Mission has made overtures to buy physician practices in Haywood County and has set up an outpatient clinic for doctors from Asheville to hold office hours in Haywood on select days. If successful, this could result in patients being sent to Mission for procedures and take business away from MedWest-Haywood.

Janet Moore, vice president of communications for Mission, said Mission is trying to fill in gaps of medical specialties that aren’t accessible now, citing a doctor shortage in America that could grow more acute for the region.

Yet that doesn’t explain why Mission is courting local doctors to join its payroll, nor accounts for all the doctors, including general orthopedists, coming over the county line to set up shop in Haywood.

Graham Fields, a spokesperson for Park Ridge Hospital, said Mission’s maneuvers could ultimately undermine patient choice by squelching the free market.

“Missions’ success is inversely proportional to small hospital’s success. As Haywood gets better at keeping patients at home, Mission loses business and has to get more aggressive,” said Fields.

Mission currently attracts about 32 percent of Haywood County’s impatient market share.

Mission sees itself unfairly placed in the crosshairs, however.

“Rather than stepping back with the patient at the center saying what’s right for the region, we have a lot of politicking, frankly,” Moore said.

Mission, however, isn’t the only one playing offense. Carolina’s HealthCare System has brought four hospitals in the region — including Haywood, Jackson and Swain — under its management umbrella. It is based out of Charlotte and dwarfs Mission.

“Carolinas has a footprint that reaches from Murphy to Manteo,” Moore said.

Mission seems to be concerned that Carolinas could funnel specialty care away from it. It is a troubling prospect as Mission’s thin margins grow even thinner. More patients lack insurance and are being written off as charity cases, while Medicaid and Medicare continue to reduce their level of reimbursements to hospitals.

“What you have is a pie that isn’t getting any bigger,” Moore said. “Nobody can afford to lose market share. Everybody wants to stay where they are or get better.”

Markoff said Asheville has attracted lots of doctors since it is such a desirable place to live.

“Asheville has too many physicians for the patients in Buncombe County. They have to pull patients in from surrounding counties to keep their physicians happy,” Markoff said.

Mission is governed by anti-trust regulations dating back to its merger with St. Joseph’s 15 years ago.

“We are the most regulated hospital in the state of North Carolina and in the United States. We live under a microscope and have for 15 years,” Moore said.

Mission sent out a mass email to employees and community members encouraging them to come out and voice support for Mission.

“If you are an employee who is planning on attending and would like a boxed dinner, please click below,” the email read.

Public art can be a tricky business for a town, given the wide range of public tastes.

For years, Waynesville boasted rotating pieces of public art downtown. But it was labor intensive to find artists willing to lend pieces for a short-term basis, let alone installing and uninstalling them.

So several years ago the town appointed an official public art commission to select permanent public artwork.

There have been three pieces installed to date:

• An enormous sculpture of men playing a washtub bass and banjo.

• A whimsical tribute to the international Folkmoot music and dance festival.

• A hand-forged railing paying homage to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

For past pieces, the public art commission put out a general call to artists, narrowed it down to the top three and asked them to submit their concepts. Artists were given wide poetic license to come up with a design, and the commission then voted on which one it liked best.

For the arch, however, the public art commission has developed schematics for the piece, simplifying the artist selection process and a quicker timeline for the project, according to Ed Kelley, a member of the art commission involved in the arch project.

The piece has structural parameters, specific dimensions and wording.

“It has been very much an exercise in logistics,” Kelley said.

The lettering on the arch won’t be cut out like a stencil, but instead mounted on the face of the arch on both sides. Stencil lettering is harder to read, and can only be viewed properly from one side, Kelley said.

The public art commission will move forward with bids from artists this fall and hopes to have the arch installed by this time next year.

It doesn’t take much of an artist’s eye to appreciate the newest piece of public art planned for the streets of downtown Waynesville.

By this time next year, a replica of a historic arch — boasting Waynesville as the “Eastern Entrance” to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park — will once again crown Main Street.

The original arch spanning Main Street dates to the mid-1930s and remained up for four decades. Mention the arch to locals, and nostalgia is quick to set in. The arch was larger than life, omnipresent in old memories of downtown.

For Buffy Phillips, it was marching under it during parades, banging away on a snare drum with the high school marching band.

“It was just part of Main Street,” said Phillips, now the director of the Downtown Waynesville Association. “It would have been great if we could have brought that back.”

Indeed, the town tried to resurrect the actual arch in all its glory, soaring over the street once more. But Main Street doubles as a state highway, and erecting an overhead arch didn’t pass muster with the N.C. Department of Transportation.

“We’d have to go through an act of Congress to do it,” said Mayor Gavin Brown. “It just wasn’t going to work.”

Instead, a replica of the arch will grace the entrance to a mini-park at the intersection of Main and Depot streets near the historic courthouse.

The arch will hopefully draw attention to the mini-park, which gets little use now. It is easily missed, or mistaken as a private space for the adjacent office building. The arch over its entrance will change that.

“I feel like it will be inviting people to make use of that park and chill out for a little bit,” said Ed Kelley, a member of the Waynesville Public Art Commission spearheading the effort.

Bringing back the arch will also rekindle Waynesville’s connection to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has slipped since those early decades after the park’s creation.

“I want Waynesville and North Carolina to have a better tie to the national park. I think we have let an asset go to waste over the years,” Brown said.

When the original arch went up, newfangled national parks were all the rage, and the region was beside itself over having one to call its own. The Smokies was the first national park in the East, joining the ranks of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon — and Waynesville was quick to hitch its wagon to that train.

After all, you couldn’t get to the Smokies without coming through Waynesville back then, so why not declare itself the “Eastern Entrance?”

There is some debate, albeit mild in nature, over how many different signs there were over the years.

“The consensus is there were three,” Brown said.

But not according to local historian Bruce Briggs, who counts only two. Briggs has an unfair advantage when it comes to arch trivia: his father built the original one back in 1936.

Briggs said the actual arch — bearing the words “Great Smoky Mountains National Park” — never changed. But a smaller sign beneath it did. Originally, an arrow-shaped sign hung from the arch baring the words “Eastern Entrance” and pointing down Depot Street, out of town, through Maggie Valley and eventually to the park, albeit 30 miles away.

The arrow was replaced at some point with a plaque listing the mileage to certain place names, like Black Camp Gap.

“The one giving the distances was put up later when Waynesville couldn’t exactly claim to be the eastern entrance anymore,” Briggs said.

New roads through the region meant traffic bound for the Smokies no longer had to pass through Waynesville’s doorstep.

Briggs was only 10 when his father built the arch while serving as superintendent of lights and water for the town. Oscar Briggs made the sign at the town maintenance garage, but Briggs believes the materials were paid for by the chamber of commerce.

Business leaders were a driving force behind the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, hoping to boost the tourism economy of the region. So it makes sense the chamber of commerce would commission the arch to draw attention to Waynesville’s proximity to the new destination.   

The arch finally started to show its age, however, and was taken down sometime around 1970.

“It was getting in bad shape,” said long-time former mayor Henry Foy, who grew up on Main Street in the 1930s.

No one knows for sure where that old arch is today, but Foy has little doubt it ended up on the scrap heap somewhere.

Foy remembers it laying in the yard outside the town’s maintenance shed after being taken down, getting more and more corroded.

Tribute to the Smokies

The arch replica is just one piece of art that will commemorate the Great Smoky Mountains. There will eventually be a trifecta of public art pieces in the mini-park to represent the Smokies.

One is already in place: a hand-forged metal railing with subtle references to the Smokies, including mountain peaks and salamanders.

The final art piece for the mini-park will be a series of metal panels mounted on the wall of the office building beside the park. In an odd bit of real estate lore, the wall of the office building is town property. While the rest of the building is owned by Jeff Norris’ law firm, the town-owned wall is fair game for sporting town-sanctioned art.

“The mini park is a strategic part of our Main Street,” said Jan Griffin, chair of the public art commission. “It will be a great place for people to sit and relax.”

The art commission still has to raise money for the piece, which Kelley estimates could be around $6,000. But he thinks fundraising will come easily.

“It is a commemorative piece. So many people remember the arch and will support bringing back that element of Waynesville that has been missing for a long time,” Kelley said.

As for what words to put on the replica? The public art commission has gone with an approximation. Instead of “Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Eastern Entrance” the arch will say “Gateway to the Smokies: Waynesville, North Carolina.”

“History and art and commercial endeavors all come into play,” Brown said. “A lot of people want to see the name Waynesville in the sign.”

Brown figures the arch will become the most photographed spot downtown, and there’s no better publicity than tourists posing under it and posting photos of themselves to Facebook with the town’s name in them.

Buffs, enthusiasts, aficionados, nuts: call them what you will, but remember the saying about strength in numbers. American’s fascination with the Civil War history is alive and kicking in the Appalachian mountains, where a group of 75 Civil War fans — collectively known as the Western North Carolina Civil War Round Table — meet monthly to study the finer points of war’s history.

No topic seems too myopic for them to tackle. Chuck Beemer doesn’t think they’ll ever run out.

“God I hope not. I am the program chairman,” said Beemer, 71, a retired lawyer in Waynesville. Beside, he points out, “there were an awful lot of battles.”

And a lot of personalities. Personally, Beemer can’t wait until next October, when the great, great granddaughter of the president of University of North Carolina will talk about the Romeo and Juliet love affair between her ancestor — a belle of well-heeled Southern stock — and a high-ranking Union officer during an occupation of Chapel Hill.

Next May’s program also promises to be a humdinger, when the club will dive in to the life and times of a female Confederate spy named Belle Boyd, a.k.a. Cleopatra of the Secession.

“We don’t just study the battles but the people and personalities involved on the political and battlefield side,” said Ray Rouser, a longtime club member from Waynesville.

Beemer has programs lined up for the next 12 months, and is even plugging in some speakers for 2013.

At times, it’s a challenge to find speakers who know more than the club’s members on a certain subject.

“If you know all about something and somebody else is talking about it, it isn’t as interesting as something that is new,” said Rouser, who runs a photography studio in Waynesville since 1958.

One endlessly fascinating subject is what went wrong in a particular battle, the most debated perhaps being Gettysburg.

“Where did the South go wrong, what could they have done differently,” Rouser said. “There’s probably 10 or 15 different theories about how the South could have won the battle at Gettysburg.”

Luckily, there’s no shortage of books to fan the flames. There’s 55,000 titles on the Civil War.

Beemer was reluctant to admit on the record just how extensive his own book collection is.

“I’ve got a quite a few. More than my wife would like to think I have. I probably have upwards of 200,” Beemer said.

After he retired, he renovated a spare bedroom into an office with built in bookshelves to hold his burgeoning collection.

Personal libraries brimming with too many Civil War books was such a common problem, the group concocted a collective solution. Members donate books after they’ve read them for a monthly raffle. The proceeds pay travel expenses for the speakers.

Civil War enthusiasts can devour books at an alarming rate, so the book raffle also serves as a supply line.

Rouser is relishing in the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which got under way this year. It’s a dream come true for the buffs.

“It is fantastic. It will go on for five years now,” Rouser said. He’s already looking forward to 2013, when the battle of Gettysburg will be enacted on the 150th anniversary with a week of festivities planned.

No choosing sides

The Civil War Round Table prides itself on a neutral stance toward the war.

“We do not take sides,” Rouser said.

Rouser and one friend have taken to calling each other “Yank” and “Reb.” Fighting words to some, but not in this amicable group.

“That is just good humor. It is not facetious. We are really good friends,” Rouser said.

Occasionally, someone with partisan leanings on the war comes to the round table and realizes it isn’t what they thought it was.

“When they see that people with ancestors on both sides get along they realized it wasn’t their cup of tea and they quit,” Rouser said.

The group formed as an outlet for enthusiasts who want to study the Civil War, not dwell on which side was right or wrong. It’s a scholarly approach, not an emotional one, said Carrie Kirkman, an insurance salesperson in Sylva.

It’s not always easy.

“In the South you can’t go back two or three generations without coming in contact with a Civil War solider,” Kirkman said.

Stories of the war’s toll were handed down through the generations, and the bitterness is hard to forget.

Captured Confederate soldiers would be paroled and sent home if they signed paperwork pledging their support for the U.S. Constitution, but Rouser’s great, great, grandfather spent 21 months in a prisoner camp in the middle of frigid Lake Superior because he refused to sign it.

“Some people had very strong opinions,” Rouser said.

Rouser’s own family has passed down a story about Union troops raiding their farm, looking for hams and horses.

“Three soldiers came to her door, but word had got out. People went out in the community and said, ‘The Union soldiers are here. Hide your food, hide your horses, hide your valuables!’” Rouser recounted.

East Tennessee, which was known for its Union leanings from the start of the war, fell to Union control by 1863.

Union troops short on food and supplies made forays over the mountain into Confederate territory of WNC to forage, with at least three excursions into Haywood County. A special legion was assigned to protect the mountain passes along this frontline in the Civil War between the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains.

Mountain lineage isn’t a requisite for joining the Civil War Round Table. In fact, its growth over the past decade is due partly to retirees with a Civil War fascination moving here.

There’s also been a marked growth in women with an interest in the Civil War. Some, of course, have their husbands to blame.

“I guess I drug her around to enough battlefields that she began to get the bug,” Rouser said of his wife.

But others came into the field on their own.

Kirkman has witnessed the rise of women in Civil War circles. When she traveled to Civil War conferences and symposiums in the early 1900s, she was lucky to find another woman.

“But in recent years, 50 percent of the attendees at a seminar would be women, and the attendance of our round table reflects that,” she said.

The role of women in the Civil War, as they struggled to eek out a living with the men away, is an important part of Civil War history, one told again and again through letters in Civil War archives.

“It was very disheartening to the soldiers for their wives to write a letter saying, ‘We don’t have any food. Can you come home?’” Rouser said.

The passion

Every Civil War enthusiast has a story about how they found their passion. For Rouser, it was a book report in fifth grade. Rouser went to the school library at Hazelwood Elementary and picked out a book on General Stonewall Jackson.

“I can still remember the first page of that book, it just clicked with me,” Rouser said.

Kirkman picked up the passion from her father as a child.

“When my mother was preparing supper she would say ‘Read to the children.’ So my dad read Lee’s Lieutenants and my brother and I would sit and listen,” Kirkman said.

The Civil War Round Table was started by two Western Carolina University history professors in 1997.

Word spread quickly among fellow Civil War buffs, who have an uncanny knack for ferreting each other out of a crowd.

“I don’t know how we find each other, but somehow we do,” Kirkman said.

Far from dwindling, the group has gone from 50 members 14 years ago to 75 today.

It’s unique to find a Civil War group of this caliber. It takes people with the gumption and drive to start it, plus hard work to keep it going.

The group goes on regular fieldtrips, with one planned this weekend to the site of Bloody Madison, the famous Shelton Laurel massacre where Confederate soldiers rounded up and executed an unarmed group of Union sympathizers and deserters.

The average age of the group is on the older side, but that’s when most people finally have time to pursue their hobbies and passions. Beemer himself didn’t join til he retired.

“January 1, 2007, the day I retired, is the day that joined the Civil War Round Table,” Beemer said.

Haywood County commissioners sent a message to Raleigh lawmakers this week to abandon the notion of merging small community colleges.

The plan to merge some administrative functions at small community colleges was floated by some Republican lawmakers as a cost-cutting measure earlier this year, but has been met with stiff resistance across the state.

“It concerns me,” Commissioner Mark Swanger said. Haywood Community College could lose local control of its college, like which courses and degrees to offer.

“We need to keep local control,” Commissioner Kevin Ensley said. “We tailor-make our community colleges to the needs of our community.”

Ensley cited courses offered by HCC to prepare students for jobs in paper making technology and engineering at the paper mill in Canton. HCC also created a new degree in low-impact development to help answer the demand for more sensitive mountainside construction.

HCC’s ability to respond to needs in the community could be compromised under a merger plan, Swanger said.

The plan would merge administration of community colleges with less than 3,000 fulltime students. It would save relatively little — only $5 million, which amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the state’s community college budget — said Laura Leatherwood, vice president of student and workforce development at Haywood Community College.

Leatherwood brought the resolution to county commissioners this week.

“There’s a reason they call it a community college,” Swanger said.

Commissioner Bill Upton said he was concerned about jobs that could be lost if administration was consolidated with another community college.

The Haywood County Health Department will be able to expand dental services for the needy thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission

The money will be used to outfit and equip two additional dental exam rooms, one for dental hygine and one for dental work.

“We will be able to see approximately 2,000 more clients a year. It will mean more dental care for more people,” said Carmine Rocco, director of the Haywood County Health Department, who shared news of the grant at a Haywood County commissioners meeting this week.

The health department will hire an additional part-time dentist to meet the need.

The Appalachian Regional Commission is a federal entity established in the 1960s to assist improvished communities in the Appalachians.

An ambulance garage and substation for deputies is being constructed in the Canton area, allowing for faster delivery of medical and law enforcement response in the eastern part of Haywood County.

It will have showers and bunks for ambulance crews and bays for two ambulances, plus offices for law enforcement.

The new EMS and law enforcement hub will be housed alongside a new urgent care center being built by MedWest-Haywood. Construction started this summer off Interstate 40 at exit 31 near Sagebrush.

MedWest-Haywood is building the facility in conjunction with the new urgent care center and will lease the space to the county. The county will make no lease payments for the first three years. After that, it will cost the county $1,500 a month. County Attorney Chip Killian said it was a good deal for the county.

Currently, a county EMS crew and a single abulance are stationed at the Canton Fire Department. The EMS workers share the bunk room in the fire house, but the ambulance is kept outside and is exposed to the elements.

The new ambulance substation will also have room to stage a second ambulance. It won’t be staffed, but can be quickly dispatched if a back-up EMS crew gets called in in an emergency, according to County Manager Marty Stamey.

Meanwhile, the substation for deputies will give officers somewhere to pop in and do paperwork while on patrol or serving warrants, and provide space to interview victims and suspects without bringing them back to the main sheriff’s office in Waynesville, which is 15 minutes away.

The time savings will allow deputies to be more responsive and increase their presence in the Canton and Beaverdam area, according to Stamey.

While the rest of the mountains remain mired in a construction slowdown, a new building supply and home improvement store opened in Cherokee last month, filling what seems to be a very real void.

A steady stream of construction workers on tribal building projects and a massive expansion at the casino have been frequenting the store since it opened four weeks ago. Saw blades break, nail guns run out of nails, the bolts brought to the job site are the wrong size.

But there wasn’t anywhere in Cherokee to buy them.

“You couldn’t buy a paint brush, a gallon of paint, a hammer or nail,” said Danny Wingate, who is vice president and a partner in the new Cherokee Home Center. “I had a guy come up to me the other day and say Mr. Wingate, I want to thank you. This cost me 22 cents but if you weren’t here it would cost me $5 and 22 cents because I would have to drive to Sylva to get it.”

Of course, Wingate isn’t going to make payroll and keep the lights on by selling nuts and bolts and pipe fittings. Cherokee Home Center is a miniature version of Lowe’s or Home Depot, stocking a little bit of everything a homeowner might need — washing machines, refrigerators, light fixtures, faucets — none of which could be found on the Cherokee reservation until now. Even simple tools like drills, lawn mowers, chainsaws and ladders weren’t available at any local stores.

Wingate invested close to $1 million to get the store up and running, most of that in inventory.

Wingate looks forward to his daily forays over the mountain to Cherokee from his home base in Waynesville, where he is the manager of the successful and longtime building supply store Haywood Builders.

Cherokee’s thriving economic scene fueled by Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Resort is a welcome contrast to the rest of Western North Carolina, where the construction trade is still very much stuck in the recession. Sales at Wingate’s Haywood Builder’s store in Waynesville are off 65 percent from their high during the peak of the building boom.

“It is exciting to be doing something like this at time when people are still in a slow down,” Wingate said of the new Cherokee enterprise.

The venture wouldn’t be possible if not for the booming casino business and its trickle down effect  — from the salaries it provides local people, the annual cut every tribal member gets from casino profits, and the myriad tribal programs and services it funds.

The casino attracts 3.5 million guests a year. There are hundreds of hotel and motel rooms in Cherokee — and that means hundreds of potential plumbing malfunctions. Every time a hotel had a leaky faucet or broken toilet handle, they used to make a trip to Lowe’s in Sylva. The casino has its own stock room for the parts that commonly tear up in its hotel rooms, but inevitably they don’t have everything and have already been hitting the new Cherokee Home Store.

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“They have hundreds of hotel rooms that tear up every day. They come in here with certain light bulbs, certain plumbing valves, certain knobs,” Wingate said.

There has also been a steady stream of construction workers working on the $633 million expansion of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Resort stopping in for parts and tools. At its height, the expansion boasted 1,100 construction workers and was the largest building project in the Southeast. While it is in the final stages now, it’s still the biggest construction site in the region and won’t be completely finished for a year — and there’s still plenty of money to be made selling to the contractors.

Crews building a fountain for the new casino entrance keep stopping in and buying concrete mix and epoxy.

“Nobody figures everything they need on a construction job. It makes sense to pick it up here instead of having to drive for miles,” Wingate said.

Wingate has also realized that with over 1,000 campgrounds and RV sites in Cherokee, travelers constantly need parts to fix or outfit their camping rigs.

Wingate and Haywood Builder’s manage Cherokee Home Center under a contract from its majority owner, tribal member and Cherokee businessman Chandler Ray Cooper.

A service to the tribe

The casino nets a profit of close to $400 million. Half goes to tribal members, and Wingate hopes to figure out just what kinds of things tribal members want to buy so he can stock them. Next week, he is bringing in a line of mattresses, something else you couldn’t buy in Cherokee.

“If we match the products up, appliances, bedding whatever it is, with what people want, we know they would prefer to spend their money at home rather than go out,” Wingate said. “We want to be everything they could get at a big box store.”

Tens of millions of dollars hit the wallets of tribal members twice a year on per cap day. But many tribal members spend ahead, buying things in advance with the promise to pay when their casino checks come in. So Wingate has an in-house financing and credit department at Cherokee Home Center.

There’s also the commercial side of the business, and Wingate anticipates the tribe may be one of the store’s biggest customers.

The tribe has been engaged in a constant construction cycle for the past decade. Casino revenue has allowed the tribe to expand services, and with that comes new buildings: a massive public school, an emergency dispatch and IT center, a transportation hub, a new courthouse, soon a new jail — even a movie theater and skateboard park.

The tribe has a major housing division, and just keeping pace with the maintenance needs of the tribal housing developments, from government-run condos to a retirement home, is big business. The Cherokee Boys Club also builds tribal housing, with more than 40 new units planned for the coming year.

Cherokee Home Center acts as a distributor for construction materials for job sites, shipping truckloads of drywall, siding, you name it. It will soon have a lumber yard for builders to pick their stock if they choose.

It’s one thing to snag the low-hanging fruit — the big wholesale orders for truck loads of lumber, drywall and siding. But Wingate say he and Cooper are making a real investment in the community with a fully-stocked hardware and home improvement store, from paint brushes to shop vacs. Cherokee Home Center even has a line of construction clothing, from Carhartts to work boots.

“That’s the thing where it is a service to the community and a cost savings to the tribe,” Wingate said. “They were having to go elsewhere for all this, primarily to Lowe’s.”

Now the money can stay on the reservation with a Cherokee-owned business.

The money stays at home, plus it saves tribal workers gas money and work time.

“We are on a mission to try to meet the needs of the repairs they have,” Wingate said. “We find something everyday they need but we don’t have, and we promise to put it in stock.”

Help wanted signs aren’t too common these days. But there’s an anomaly here in the far end of the state, where Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Resort is in the throes of a $633 million expansion, one that will bring 800 new jobs to an otherwise desolate labor market.

Hiring that many new workers — plus keeping up with turnover — is no small feat. The casino has averaged 30 new employees a week during the height of its expansion. It takes a staff of seven, day in and day out, to sift through all those applications and set up interviews. Hiring is such an all-consuming task that official signs point the way to “applicant parking” and even an “applicant entrance” on the casino property.

Harrah’s has hired 500 new employees over the past two years to run the new hotel tower, expanded gaming floor and half a dozen new restaurants. It has another 300 to go by this time next year when the expansion is built out.

“We are one of the few businesses that is adding jobs,” said Darold Londo, the general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee. “Name another company in North Carolina that will have 300 more employees at this time next year than they do today. You can’t. There isn’t one.”

The recession has made hiring easier for Harrah’s.

“When the economy was really going well, we had a bit more of a challenge finding people,” said Jo Blaylock, vice president of human resources at Harrah’s Cherokee. “The economy has helped us in that sense because a lot of people are without work.”

Employees are staying longer as well. Turnover averaged about 30 percent before the recession compared to 20 percent now.

“People are tending to hang on to their jobs. There aren’t a lot of other opportunities out there,” Blaylock said.

While out-of-work Realtors or laid-off teachers have given Harrah’s hiring a boost, Blaylock predicts some will return to their primary field when the economy recovers.

But for now, Harrah’s is an oasis of jobs in an employment desert.

Kim Gurdock of Franklin was ecstatic to land a job with Harrah’s recently after months of looking for work. She moved to the mountains from south Florida earlier this year, giving up more than two decades as a teacher to forge a new life in a better place. But the only job she could find was working at McDonald’s.

“I had applied for 42 jobs in Franklin,” Gurdock said, a list that included the school system, banks, grocery stores and retail. Gurdock felt like her lack of local roots was a strike against her.

She starts this week as a food runner in the VIP lounge at the casino. Her boyfriend also got a job at Harrah’s as a cook, and she hopes they can work the same shifts to carpool for the 45-minute commute.

Her story isn’t that unusual.

“It is amazing the number of job applications any more that we get for jobs. It used to be 15 applications, and now it is 75 or 80,” said Dale West, the Employment Security Commission manager for Jackson, Macon and Swain counties. “If there are openings, people will apply if they think they are at all qualified.”

Josh Williams, an accounting student at Western Carolina University trying to pay his way through school, was commuting from Sylva to Asheville to work at J.C. Penney, one of the only jobs he could find. But his hours kept getting cut. So he applied at Harrah’s on the advice of a friend at school. He starts this week in food service at the new Paula Deen’s Kitchen restaurant on the property.

He considers himself lucky “considering jobs are scare right now,” he said.

A blow to unemployment

Harrah’s payroll accounts for 8 percent of all wages and salaries in Jackson and Swain counties. It’s one of Western North Carolina’s largest employers, and not just for people in Cherokee.

Tribal members make up less than 20 percent of Harrah’s workforce — only 350 of the nearly 2,100 employees are Cherokee.

The number seems low at first blush, considering Cherokee is home to about 7,000 tribal members. Some are obviously too young or too old to work. Others are stay-at-home moms, disabled or have otherwise dropped out of the workforce.

A large number of tribal members work for tribal government and agencies, nearly 1,000. Then there’s the myriad gift shops, hotels and restaurants plying the tourist trade in Cherokee — and suddenly the pool to draw from locally isn’t all that large.

The upshot to the region is that the casino has to look outside Cherokee for a huge number of its employees.

Unemployment in Swain County was 18 percent in 1995 before the casino opened. It dropped to a low of just 5 percent in 2006.

“It has made all the difference in the world as far as unemployment,” said Brad Walker, the mayor of nearby Bryson City. “If you want a job, you can get one. It has improved the lives of a lot of the people in Bryson City and Swain County. It is fantastic.”

While the recession has driven unemployment in Swain back up to about 13 percent, it could be far worse without the casino.

Most notably, perhaps, is the improvement in the labor market in winter months when tourist jobs historically dried up. Before the casino, the unemployment rate in Swain regularly topped 30 percent in the winter. By 2006, however, unemployment even during the dead of winter was as low as 8 or 9 percent.

“Before the casino a lot of tourist places closed for the winter and now they stay open,” said Vicki Horn, who works at the Employment Security Commission in nearby Bryson City.

Interestingly, the success of the casino has made the total job market more robust, eating into the available workforce for the casino itself.

“The casino has allowed tribal members to work other places,” said Vicki Horn with the Employment Security Commission in Swain County.

Casino revenue flows to tribal coffers, creating jobs for members of the tribe. The same goes for private businesses now thriving thanks to casino spin off.

“This hotel wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the casino,” said Walker, the general manger of the Fairfield Inn in Cherokee.

A challenge to hiring

The huge influx of casino employees has stressed the affordable housing market. Affordable housing for blue-collar workers is a challenge in most communities. But it was particularly true in the mountains, where real estate prices have been driven sky high by the burgeoning retiree and vacation home market, leaving low-paid hourly workers in the service industry struggling to find housing they could afford.

A surprising number of new hires at the casino have moved here specifically for the work, but have trouble finding somewhere to rent.

“I had a guy come in yesterday who told me he had accepted a position at the casino and was looking for a rental,” said Megan Cookston, a Realtor at Yellow Rose Realty in Bryson City. “That is a problem in this area. They ask ‘Where do we look?’ and really the only place to guide them to is the newspaper, but there is not that much there.”

Yellow Rose manages short-term vacation rentals, and those have been doing a brisk business thanks to the massive $633 million expansion at the casino. Construction companies have been renting houses to put up their laborers in town for the job.

“Electricians, plumbers, people hanging sheetrock — it is just everything,” Cookston said.

To meet its hiring goals, Harrah’s solicited the help of Haywood Community College to hold job fairs on the casino’s behalf. Once a month, Harrah’s hiring team travels to Waynesville to tap a fresh pool of applicants.

“We can see 30 in a day instead of 30 driving over here,” Blaylock said.

Harrah’s has a strict drug testing policy that likely hurts its employment pool. All new hires are tested for illegal drugs using a hair sample, which detects substances going back 90 days, far more stringent than the standard urine test. Every month, the casino does random drug testing on 1 percent of the work force, selected from a computer-generated list.

“The drug test is something that we do not waver on,” Blaylock said. “I think some people don’t apply because they know we do drug testing.”

All about the perks

Salaries at Harrah’s vary widely based on the job. Stewards make $8 an hour, while cashiers make $9. But food service supervisors make $45,000 a year, and the grounds supervisors and top chefs make up to $55,000.

But the benefits, particularly the health insurance, make up for what the salaries may lack.

Nationwide, businesses are cutting benefits as they grapple with rising health care costs. Employees are ponying up a greater share of their insurance costs and forking over higher deductibles and co-pays.

At the casino, workers don’t pay a dime toward their health insurance.

“They are better benefits than you will find anywhere else,” Londo said. “You can thank the tribe for that. Cherokee has established that as the norm for anyone who works for the tribe.”

The tribe covers the full cost of medical, dental and vision insurance for all tribal employees, and extends those benefits to the casino as a tribal entity. Legally, the casino can’t have two tiers of benefits for employees — it can’t offer better coverage to enrolled members than non-tribal members — so everyone, whether Cherokee or not, enjoys the generous health insurance plan of the tribe, Blaylock said.

Harrah’s takes the health of employees seriously. As a self-insured entity, every doctor’s visit comes out of the casino’s bottom line.

To cut those costs, the casino is hiring an in-house physician’s assistant and will open two onsite exam rooms in January. Being able to see a doctor at work will also cut down on employees clocking out for doctor’s appointments.

Employees also get a physical every quarter. If they are overweight or if their cholesterol is too high, the casino gives them a cash incentive to meet health goals. Al Lossiah, a employee trainer, bragged about getting $75 for losing 25 pounds this year.

“Then I gained it back and they’ll pay me to lose it again,” he joked.

To encourage fitness, Harrah’s has an onsite workout room with treadmills, bikes and rowing machines open to any employee who wants to use it.

Some employees probably don’t need it though. Gaming hosts walk an average of eight miles every shift, while the laundry team hefts 12,000 pounds of linens in and out of machines each day.

Alternatively, a pair of black leather vibrating massage chairs are up for grabs on breaks or after your shift.

While health insurance tops the list of coveted benefits, it’s one of many offered by a company that prides itself on taking care of its employees. Workers get a 3 percent match to a 401K, plus a pension worth another 3 percent of their salary. Vacation time maxes out at a liberal six weeks after nine years on the job.

There’s non-tangible perks, too. Harrah’s partners with Southwestern Community College to offer GED classes onsite at the casino and covers the enrollment fee for anyone who wants to pursue it.

There’s also assistance of the monetary variety. Harrah’s makes grants or loans to employees that have fallen on hard times through its “employee care fund.”

If an employee is dealing with a difficult teenager at home, substance abuse in their family or the stress of caring for elderly parents, Harrah’s pays for counseling.

“It is easy to say leave those concerns at the door and come in and service the guests, but in reality it is not that easy to do that,” Blaylock said. “We take a holistic look at our employees. If they feel good about themselves, they will exude that when they are talking to the guests.”

In that sense, Harrah’s loyalty to its employees isn’t entirely benevolent. It’s a little more mercenary than that: happy employees equal happy players equal more money at the end of the day.

Total Harrah’s Cherokee employees: 2,084

In a basement classroom at Harrah’s casino, a fresh group of new hires stretched out before Al Lossiah, the latest in an endless stream of weekly newbies.

They were here to learn the art of moneymaking, with Lossiah as their guide, motivator, acting coach.

“You don’t have to like them, but you got to be nice to them,” Lossiah said. “You guys have been hired as entertainers now, you learn to act. When they walk in the door, this is what I see when I look at their face.”

He picked up a marker, turned to a dry erase board and drew a giant smiley face. But in place of eyes, he put two dollar signs.

“When you do your job, we all get paid,” Lossiah said. “Keep these people happy, keep them spending that money here.”

With 3.5 million guests tromping through the casino every year, smiling at each one of them can be taxing. But employees can’t afford to let down their guard. You never know which one is the high roller, Lossiah said.

Players spend hundreds of millions at Harrah’s every year. But it’s a relatively small number of players accounting for most of the play — roughly 10 and 20 percent of players account for 80 to 90 percent of the gaming revenue.

Lossiah and those who have worked there long enough know who the high rollers are. There’s one lady who spends about a million a month, every month, he said.

“She can go anywhere in the world she wants to go, the Riviera, anywhere. But she chooses to come to Cherokee. Why? Because we treat her like a queen,” Lossiah said.

“If I was out in the public and someone said ‘I got some dust on my shoes’ I’d say, ‘Here’s a quarter go call somebody who really cares,’” Lossiah said. “Here, I can treat anybody like a king and a queen. Can I get you a drink, can I get you a cup of coffee, and you smile at them.”

He pointed to his smiley face with the $$ eyes again.

“They pay good money for us to be nice to them,” Lossiah said.

For tribal members who work at the casino, there’s a double incentive. Tribal members get a share of casino profits, amounting to more than $7,000 for each of the 14,000 members of the Eastern Band last year.

“You do your job well, guests are happy, they stay longer and play more, the casino makes more money, and per cap checks are higher,” Lossiah said.

A different kind of interview

Job seekers eager to jump on the Harrah’s Casino gravy train should be forewarned: brush up on your singing and learn a few jokes.

To measure stage presence, applicants are put on the spot, not only in front of the hiring team but as one of 10 job seekers in a panel-style interview.

“We might say imitate your favorite celebrity. We want to see if they are inhibited and can’t stand up and talk, versus who can stand up and really sell themselves,” said Jo Blaylock, vice president of human resources at Harrah’s Cherokee.

It doesn’t matter if you are applying as a hotel maid or kitchen dishwasher, Harrah’s wants all employees to think of themselves as being in the entertainment business.

“Do you have the energy, do you have the personality, can you talk in front of people,” Blaylock said. “We are really looking for people who can converse and have good relationships with guests — people that can have a good time and have a good personality.”

Not every job demands such a disposition. There are plenty back-of-house jobs, from the laundry to the landscaping team. In that sense, placing new hires in the right job is just as important as who gets hired.

Harrah’s is loyal to its employees and will work to find a good fit

“There’s about 250 different things to do here,” said Darold Londo, the casino’s general manager.

There’s fulltime light bulb changers, people who repair torn upholstery — there’s even a full-time staffer dedicated to making sure the culinary desires and whims of stars performing at Harrah’s are met during their stay. Grocery bags of soda and chips were piled up in a posh backstage lounge a couple of weeks ago awaiting the weekend arrival of country star Travis Tritt.

‘Opportunities abound’

Rising through the ranks is common at Harrah’s. The prospect of promotion is part of the job allure.

“What I convey is if you like the organization and our DNA that is unique to Harrah’s, there are opportunities abound within our organization,” Londo said. “There are people doing things that are beyond their wildest aspiration when they started at this organization.”

Londo tries to plant the seed of a Harrah’s career track when speaking to new hires.

“I want you to look back in five years and see this as the defining moment in your professional career,” Londo told a recent batch.

To help develop managers from within, Harrah’s Cherokee has a team of four fulltime, in-house trainers.

When the Eastern Band launched its casino enterprise in 1997, the tribe was angling for more than just money. It hoped the business would provide jobs for tribal members, Londo said. Many in top jobs today are Cherokee who rose to their positions.

Employing columns of tribal members remains a major goal, but not everyone is cut out for customer service jobs, particularly in the casino sector where wooing players with smiles and charm seems to fall on everyone’s shoulders, even the $8.50  an hour food runners and carpet cleaners.

“That is a real live business challenge,” Londo said.

Since taking the helm at Harrah’s six years ago, Londo has made a point of dropping in on every new hire training, a first for general managers at the Cherokee casino. He spends an hour chatting up the week’s new hires, a non-scripted and free-wheeling spiel that feels more like friendly banter over happy hour than a corporate lesson from the top boss.

Londo’s goal is buy-in.

“I want you to look for ways to make this a better place to work and play tomorrow than it is today,” Londo told new hires.

As a kid, Londo was frustrated by Coke machines only accepting coins. So he wrote a letter to “Dear Mr. Coca-Cola” and suggested vending machines that took bills.

Londo encouraged employees to ignore the chain of command. While his old West Point military academy instructors might cringe to hear him say it, Londo told employees they don’t need to run to their supervisor with every question or problem, but instead take it to the person whose job it is.

Oddly, Londo stops short of the mantra of that the customer is always right.

“We will part ways with customers if they do or say something inappropriate because we value our employees,” Londo said. “We want to convey that we value our human resources and our most valuable asset.”

Keeping morale high for 2,000 employees and keeping everyone pulling in the same direction takes constant maintenance beyond that first week of training.

Londo recalled the “have you hugged a security officer today” campaign. It was fun at first, until security officers starting getting dozens of hugs every day from their coworkers.

“It kind of backfired,” Londo said.

Before every shift, supervisors lead their team in a “buzz session.”

“They play a game to get their energy going and get the laughter coming out, to get them pumped up for the day,” Blaylock said.

“A job doesn’t necessarily have to be a job. A job should be something you enjoy and have fun at,” Blaylock said.

“If we are having fun our guests are more likely to have fun. If guests have an enjoyable time they will come back.”

That’s where Lossiah comes back again and again to his smiley face on the dry-erase board, the one with dollar signs for eyes. His red laser pointer frequently finds its way to those $$ eyes during his new hire training.

Lossiah makes no apologies for it.

“That’s Harrah’s financial strategy,” Londo told a recent group of new hires. “We treat you well, you are satisfied you take that to the guests, treat them well, we have job security and financial success,” Lossiah said.

When new bikers show up for his weekly ride in Waynesville, Cecil Yount pulls out all the stops: a riveting trip through town to Super Wal-Mart and back.

While lacking in scenery, Yount is sending a message to the cyclists — look how easy it is to bike to the store.

Yount’s regular jaunts down South Main Street give him a rare insight on traffic, one he hopes to impart as the town crafts a vision for a South Main makeover. Namely, Yount doesn’t think the street needs to be much wider than it already is.

“I have yet to see the need for four lanes of traffic,” Yount said. “There have been fairly minimal times I have spent sitting waiting on a light. I just don’t see it.”

Yount, the chair of Bicycle Haywood NC, plans to be front and center at a road design workshop next Tuesday when the town will collect input on South Main from the community.

Perhaps it’s no surprise a cyclist wants a quainter road, one with slower traffic, wide sidewalks, shady trees, and not as many lanes for cars.

But even development interests aren’t necessarily clamoring for more lanes, even though South Main sports the ultimate magnet for commercial sprawl. Property owners raced to put their lots on the market when Super Wal-Mart came to town three years ago. They are still waiting for the boon, although real estate experts claim it will come to fruition sooner or later and has merely been sidelined by the recession.

Brian Noland, a Realtor with RE/MAX Mountain Realty, represents half a dozen sellers marketing their property for commercial development along South Main. His office sits on South Main, making Noland another authority when it comes to sizing up traffic needs on the road.

His verdict: three lanes would do nicely, perhaps even with roundabouts instead of the standard stoplights.

When asked whether South Main seems congested, Noland paused, then answered, “I don’t think it is.”

To be sure, he wheeled around and asked his coworkers in the office. Not congested, they concurred.

Noland believes South Main will eventually be home to a row of fast-food restaurants, drug stores and retail. But he wants to keep “our hometown image.”

But Noland is also trying to protect the lots he’s marketing. More lanes will eat into the property fronting South Main and make the lots harder to develop, he said.

That’s also why he’s a fan of roundabouts. Traffic lights equal turn lanes for stacks of cars to pile up while waiting for their signal. Those turn lanes add to the road’s width and encroach on precious commercial lots.

Roundabouts, on the other hand, keep traffic moving and don’t need turn lanes for cars to queue up in, Noland said.

Waynesville has two roundabouts, which were initially met with skepticism but in practice have been well received.

“I didn’t like them immediately when I moved here because they were new, but they really move the traffic through,” Noland said.

Road designers with the N.C. Department of Transportation are conducting their own feasibility study of South Main concurrently with the town, and have proposed a large four-lane road with a center median.

“I think everyone has been assuming that is what will happen there, that it will be four lanes,” said Paul Benson, Waynesville’s town planner.

But Benson said the DOT plan is too big and too wide for the town’s tastes. Town leaders want a more tailored vision, designed in keeping with smart growth principles and walkable community ideals.

“DOT strictly stuck with just a road and trying to get people through the area as fast as efficiently as they could,” said Mark Teague, a private traffic engineer consultant in Waynesville.

That’s largely what led the town to pursue a feasibility study of its own. The independent feasibility study will cost $55,000, with 80 percent of the cost paid for with a federal planning grant.

Yount is pleased the town is rejecting the DOT’s feasibility study and doing one of its own.

“I think the DOT study is going to do nothing more than create another Russ Avenue and that’s the last thing this town needs,” Yount said. “The philosophy needs to change from ‘Let’s move cars as quickly as we can’ to ‘Let’s have smart transportation alternatives and livable streets.’ We may need to de-emphasize moving a single car from one point to another.”

To most, anything will be better than the status quo. South Main doesn’t exactly look the part of a booming commercial district. It is pockmarked by boarded-up windows, weed-engulfed parking lots, cracked pavement — even concertina wire around one windowless cinder block building.

“That is not what Waynesville is all about,” said Ron Reid, the owner of Andon-Reid Bed and Breakfast. “That corridor just needs help. It needs to be cleaned up.”

Reid winces to think about tourists coming to Waynesville for the first time via South Main.

Reid, also a member of the town’s planning board, wants the usual pedestrian-friendly features of street trees, sidewalks, perhaps a planted median.

“I really envision something halfway between what Russ Avenue is and what our downtown district is,” Reid said.

Bull by the horns

Fred Baker, the town’s public works director, said the DOT’s feasibility study doesn’t live up to the town’s design standards.

For example, the town requires a row of street trees in between the sidewalk and road, while the DOT plan puts the trees on the far side of the sidewalk. The rationale: so swerving cars don’t run into the trees. But surely that’s better than hitting pedestrians, Baker said.

It might seem like a small detail, but whether street trees go between the sidewalk and road rather than the far side of the sidewalk speaks volumes to the road’s character.

“It gives you that sense of security on the sidewalk that you could relax,” Baker said.

There’s several points like this where the DOT’s proposed design diverges from the town’s street standards.

Waynesville’s standards call for bike lanes, but the DOT left them out, instead making the outside car lane a couple of feet wider so bicycles can “share the road.”

Another incongruity: Waynesville’s standards call for ?-feet-wide sidewalk but the DOT’s plan called for only ? feet.

Baker said he will lobby hard for the town’s higher standards.

But the DOT may ask the town to foot the bill for these as perks. When the town wanted a multi-use path included in the widening of Howell Mill Road a few years ago, hoping to fill in a missing gap of the Richland Creek greenway, the DOT told the town it would have to pick up the tab for the extra right-of-way required for a multiuse path. It was half a million the town didn’t have, Baker said.

“Ultimately when DOT starts buying right-of-way, it charges the town for the extra width for all these things,” Baker said.

Baker hopes that will change by the time a South Main makeover becomes a reality, citing the complete streets movement that is infiltrating the DOT.

More lanes will make it harder to also squeeze in the town’s desired bike lanes, wider sidewalks, a planting strip with street trees

“It would be nice if we could get away with three lanes,” Benson said.

All in the numbers

But ultimately, whatever plan the town comes up with will need DOT buy-in, since the DOT holds the road-building purse strings.

DOT will have to be convinced that the road is wide enough to handle projected traffic, Benson said. Benson is anxious to get a look at the latest traffic counts for South Main, being conducted as part of the town’s process.

Those traffic counts — data on not just the number of cars moving along the road, but also where they are turning in and out — will be used to predict future traffic, which in turn will make or break the number of lanes.

Mark Teague, a traffic engineer consultant who used to work for the DOT, has been conducting counts up and the down the road for weeks in preparation for the public design workshop next week.

The real heavy lifting, however, will be coming up with a road design that amalgamates everyone’s visions.

“We are serving a lot of different groups, the residents who live and work on the road, the people who drive on it, bikes and pedestrians. We have a lot of different groups of people who are unrelated,” Teague said. “It is a balance.”

Share your vision

A community brainstorming session to gather ideas and visions for South Main Street in Waynesville will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 20.

“Residents all throughout Waynesville use this space,” said Rodney Porter, a consultant with La Quatra Bonci, facilitating the town’s new street plan for South Main. “When the public is in charge of what they want to see their roads look like, the outcome is a little bit better.”

Drop in anytime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to explore maps and road images and offer comments during an open charette-style planning session. Porter will give a presentation on the project starting at 8:30 a.m., and at 9:30 a.m. there will be a design workshop to kick off the charette session.

Held at the West Waynesville Campus of Haywood Community College on South Main (the old Dayco Union Hall across the street from the Verizon Wireless store.)

828.456.2004 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

There’s a new call to arms for hunters of wild boar: shoot as many as you can — day or night, anytime of year — and ask questions later.

Wild boar are a reviled scourge on the landscape. Yet until now, hunters couldn’t shoot more than two per person and the hunting season was limited to only six months of the year in the six western counties.

The game laws didn’t make sense given the nearly universal loathing of wild boar, prompting the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to consider a more liberal hunting policy toward the animal.

The open invitation to hunt them in mass quantities is a plea to hunters to help get rid of the destructive beasts that have taken root in the mountains despite not belonging here.

“Ideally, statewide from the mountains to the coast, all feral swine would disappear,” said Evin Stanford, a wild boar expert with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

But the hunting community might not be so eager to see wild boar wiped out.

“I like to hunt them, and I would hate for them to be eradicated,” said Curtis Bradley, a hunter from Canton and member of the WNC Sportsman’s Club.

Many hunters don’t like the idea of an open, year-round season with no bag limits. Bag limits are intended to protect game animals from over hunting, ensuring their viability as a huntable species in the future.

“I think the ones that actually hunt them wouldn’t want the bag limits to go away,” Bradley said.

Hunters are expected to voice their disapproval at a public hearing on the new hunting laws for feral swine being held at 7 p.m. Wednesday (Sept. 14) at Haywood Community College by the N.C. Wildlife Commission.

Ecologists have a different view, however. Feral swine are nature’s version of a bulldozer, devouring everything in their path and leaving a wake of uprooted earth.

The hunting changes will apply in the six western counties. In the rest of the state, hunters can already shoot an unlimited number of wild boar all year. The change will bring the six western counties in line with the long-standing policy toward wild boar everywhere else.

In fact, they aren’t even called wild boar in the rest of the state, but instead are bestowed with the far less romantic name “feral swine.”

“Everything is wide open on feral swine outside those six western counties,” Stanford said. “Our agency for a long time has not seen them as a desirable species on the landscape.”

Saying so publicly is a big step for the Wildlife Commission, however, which until now has been swayed by hunting interests when it comes to wild boar in the mountains.

“In that part of the state it is a traditional big game species that has been hunted for generations,” Stanford said.

The Wildlife Commission had attempted to balance interests of wild boar hunters with the ecological harm wrought by the species. But it now seems poised to buck pressure from the hunting community and shed the special status for wild boar that had persisted in the far western mountains.

“I think that was a fight we thought at one time we could not win,” Stanford said. “It seems the tradition of hunting wild boar has been waning, at least compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago.”

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where hunting isn’t allowed anyway and the ecosystem always comes first, was alone in its admitted mission to eradicate wild boar until recently. The Smokies has made an impressive dent in the wild hog population by trapping. Realistically, they’ll never get rid of them completely, but hope to keep them in check.

“It is definitely a daunting task, given the manpower and the amount of area we have,” said Bill Stiver, wildlife biologist in the national park. But, “We have kept the pressure on.”

Until recently, however, the Smokies begrudgingly turned over some of the boar it trapped to the U.S. Forest Service, which in turn set them free in the Nantahala National Forest. The Smokies’ more rugged stock of wild boar is particularly desired by the hunting community, which pressured the forest service to save the wild boar from the Smokies’ traps and release them in the forest. The practice wasn’t ended until 2005.

Rogue introductions

Fringe elements in the hunting community have been doing their part to keep the species alive and well in the state, albeit illegally. Rogue hunters are suspected of releasing hogs and pigs into the forests to boost the feral swine population and counter efforts to eradicate them.

While no one has been caught in the act, Stiver has encountered feral swine in the wild with pale skin, curly tails, smooth skin, even spots — signs of domestic pigs rather than the course-haired, tusked feral cousins.

“Historically wild boar in the park were traditionally black. They had that Russian look. But in recent years we’ve seen hogs with much shorter snouts, with much shorter legs, animals that appear to be semi-domesticated,” Stiver said. “They just stand there. They had no fear of people as if they had been in a pen and then been let loose.”

That, more so than pigs accidentally escaping from farmers, is how the population of feral swine has spread across the state.

“In most instances the population is established by individuals intentionally releasing feral swine with the intention of establishing a population that could be hunted,” Stanford said.

It has been illegal to release swine into the wild for several years, but it technically wasn’t illegal to move them.

“Individuals could trap swine and move them up and down the roadways and there was no violation involved,” Stanford said.

That loophole was closed with a new state law this year, banning the transport of live hogs without identification approved by the state veterinarian, so now only hog farmers can legally transport their livestock.

The law also prohibits the removal of live feral hogs from traps. Anyone trapping a feral hog has to kill it inside the trap before opening the door — removing any doubt over whether “relocating” feral swine versus “releasing” them is legal or not. It also gives wildlife officers more ammunition to crack down on rogue introductions.

Oddly, an open season on feral swine — allowing hunters to shoot as many as they want year-round — can backfire. Those who like hunting feral swine are tempted to set out new animals to keep the population viable and huntable.

Some states are trying a novel solution

In Tennessee, hunting wild boar was outlawed this year for most parts of the state.

“The strategy we are going after is pretty radical, but a very aggressive approach at eradicating hogs across the state,” said Grey Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Commission. “It is a little against the grain. The traditional method is to liberalize your season, and then you get more hunters and it reduces the population.”

But Tennessee found that quite the opposite played out on the ground. After changing its wild hog hunting rules in 1999 — lifting the bag limits and allowing year-round hunting — the population actually increased. The reason is no surprise: hunters launched rogue campaign of illegally releasing hogs in the wild, resulting in more feral swine instead of less, Anderson said.

“It was counter productive to what we were trying to do,” Anderson said.

Kansas was the first to try the alternative strategy, and Tennessee decided it was worth a try. Hunters aren’t too pleased, however.

“We are getting a ton of pushback now,” Anderson said.

Now that hunting wild hogs is illegal, the Tennessee Wildlife Commission has started trapping and killing them itself. Without hunters propagating the species, however, Anderson believes the agency will be able to make a dent in the population.

There is one exception to Tennessee’s new policy. In the mountains of East Tennessee around the Smokies, wild boar hunting is still allowed under some circumstances. If hunters are hunting bear or deer and come across wild hogs, they are allowed to shoot them.

“If your bear dogs get on a hog trail you can take them,” Anderson said.

The reason is a familiar one: a storied tradition of wild boar hunting in the mountains.

“They have been hunting wild hogs in that part of the world that we know of since the early 1900s. There is a very strong tradition of hunting,”Anderson said, Agricultural interests are backing North Carolina’s crack down on feral swine. Feral swine carry lethal diseases, including several documented cases of pseudrabies.

“They are tremendous risk to our domestic livestock and swine industry,” Stanford said.

Going native

Most of the feral swine in the state are descendants of domestic hogs turned out by early settlers to graze on the open range, or in more recent decades, animals that have been purposely released. After a few generations in the wild, they start to sport hair and tusks.

“In as soon as three generations they can start to develop some of the feral traits,” Stanford said. “They start to revert relatively quickly.”

Wild boar lineage is unique in the far western mountains, however. Here, their ancestry can be traced back to the true European wild boar.

A stock of European wild boar was imported by a hunting preserve in 1912 in the Hooper’s Bald area of the Smokies. In 1920, they all escaped, with estimates ranging from 60 to 100 of the beasts.

This genetic line still lingers in mountain wild boar, but has been dramatically watered down by domestic swine injected into the population.

Feral swine are unfortunate proliferators. Mothers have five to six young a year on average, and in a bumper year for acorns or other food mainstays, they can have two litters a year. They are fertile at just a year old.

The young pigs stick close to their giant mothers, and probably have pretty low mortality from predators such as coyotes or bobcat, Stanford said. As adults, humans are their only enemy.

Bradley, who has hunted wild boar on game lands in Swain and Jackson counties, said it is a challenge to hunt them, mostly because you can’t find them. They don’t frequent the same place day after day. They come through, eat, then move on.

“You can go out there for an entire season and never see a single one. You will see the remnants of them, where they have torn the woods up,” Bradley said. But, “It may be weeks before they come back through there.”

Bradley is no stranger to hogs. His family ran a hog farm and slaughter house in Jackson County for 100 years, going back four generations. He is the first to agree feral swine are destructive.

“When they tear it up, they tear it up big time. They come through like a carpet roller,” Bradley said.

Bradley believes the N.C. Wildlife Commission is giving in to political pressure from the growing number of upscale subdivisions in the mountains pushing into the forest habitats, and then complaining about the animals in their yards.

“You got a lot of influx of people and they want to change the rules to suit their lifestyle,” Bradley said.

When a new federal law in the 1990s opened the door for Indian tribes to build casinos, it set the stage for economically-depressed reservations to become masters of their own destiny, to create wealth where none existed before and improve the quality of life for their people.

“Some have and some haven’t,” said Darold Londo, general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee. “Cherokee was willing and able to make tough decisions that didn’t come easily within the tribe. They were wise and courageous to have done what they did.”

While the casino appears from the outside to be a shining beacon of money, launching the enterprise took more than flipping on an “open” sign and watching the money roll in.

“It took a lot of smart, difficult work with a lot of people in the tribe and Harrah’s to market this operation,” Londo said. “It blew the expectations of the tribe and Harrah’s away. It was more successful than people had ever expected.”

A decade later, Cherokee found itself once again at a crossroads. Since the casino first opened in 1997, there had been growth spurts followed by plateaus.

“We knew there was another plateau coming,” said Principle Chief Michell Hicks said. “At some point, like any product, it gets stale. The customer loses interest. If you don’t keep it fresh there is a risk of losing the customer base.”

The risk of doing nothing — of watching the casino grow old and tired — seemed much worse than the leap of faith by the tribe to go for another expansion.

“It is making sure the casino stays ahead of the customer wants and needs but also make sure we can push the profit level as high as we can possibly can,” Hicks said.

The tribe embarked on a massive $633 million expansion in 2007 to remake the casino and hotel into a luxury resort.

Since then, however, the recession has taken its toll on casino profits. Revenue fell for three consecutive years following a high in 2007. Cherokee was not alone. The trend was industry-wide.

But the decline led many in the tribe to question whether the massive expansion was ill-conceived.

The outlook is improving. Profits are up 10 percent for the first six months of the year over the same six months last year. It’s a sign perhaps not so much of a better economy, but that pieces of the expansion coming on line: the third hotel tower is humming, the concert venue is in full-swing, new restaurants are opening every few months.

Was it worth it?

A big question still looms in the minds of tribal members: was the expansion worth it? It came at a cost — $633 million to be exact. And now the tribe must pay off that debt using its cut of casino profits.

The expansion must reap enough new business to justify the cost — otherwise it could hurt the tribe’s bottom line instead of help, the massive debt eating away at profits.

But that seems unlikely.

“Any business decision you will look back and say ‘should we have done it, should we have not,’” Hicks said.

But for Hicks, he still believes it was the right move, particularly given the bargain interest rates the tribe could get.

As for the recession, however, Hicks admits the timing wasn’t ideal.

“With regards to the economy it didn’t match up as well,” Hicks said.

Cherokee is smart for remaking the casino into a resort, according to Vin Narayanan, a national casino industry expert and managing editor of Casino City Press.

Had Cherokee remained static and not pushed for a massive expansion, its outlook five years from now would not be good. The casinos faring poorly right now are those offering little to guests other than a gaming floor lined with slot machines.

But resort-style casinos, with onsite hotels, shopping and dining: “that has been a proven formula for success,” Narayanan said.

Cherokee had been somewhere in between: not a simple slot-parlor, but not a full-fledged resort either. The new resort amenities will not only attract new guests, but also younger guests.

It will also diversify their revenue stream. Less than a decade ago, 80 to 85 percent of revenue for Vegas casinos came from the gambling side.

“Now it is almost 50-50. Almost half their revenue is coming from dining, hotels, the shopping, that whole thing,” Narayanan said. “It is not just about gaming.”

Cherokee’s casino competition doesn’t just come from Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast or Vegas. It is competing against cruise lines and Disney World — the whole sphere of entertainment dollars.

At least revenues are climbing again now. If not for the expansion, they could be flat or still dropping.

Londo predicts the Cherokee casino won’t get back to past profit levels until 2012 — three years ahead of the rest of the industry.

“In the industry they are not projecting a return to those types of levels until 2015. That is a testament to the capital investment in this property that we’ll return much sooner to previous levels,” Londo said.

Hicks points out that 2010 would in fact have held steady from 2009 if not for three bad months in the winter, when Cherokee was surrounded on three sides by landslides blocking the way to Western North Carolina. Rockslides shut down Interstate 40, U.S. 64 and U.S. 441, essentially blocking all routes to Cherokee from points west.

“We had some variables there we couldn’t control,” Hicks said.

Protect the monopoly

While the economy has tempered the tribe’s hopes for the expansion, things could be much worse: gambling could be legalized in North Carolina or a surrounding state.

That should be the tribe’s biggest fear, according to Narayanan.

“States are in a world of hurt from a revenue standpoint,” Narayanan said. “If the North Carolina budget becomes bad enough, they might bring in an industry that is willing to get taxed at a ridiculously high rate. A few hundred million in revenue starts to look pretty good.”

That’s exactly what’s happened in some New England states, putting a major dent in Atlantic City’s monopoly, and thus its profits.

“It is like McDonald’s and Burger King, there is a finite amount of fast food revenue that the industry is competing for,” Narayanan said.

Closer to home, the state of Ohio sanctioned four casinos in the throes of recession budget woes. Each will rival the number of games offered at Cherokee, and two are resort-style casinos carrying a construction price tag of close to $1 billion.

As the only game in town, Cherokee has a clear advantage. The next closest casino is a day’s drive any way you slice it: the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, Atlantic City, or the many casinos run by northern and mid-western Indian tribes, from Oklahoma to Iowa.

But that advantage only goes so far. The rest has taken the blood, sweat and tears of an entire tribe to realize.

“The thought that we aren’t in a competitive market based on our geography is a false perception,” said Londo, general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee. “There is a percentage of gamers that are relatively promiscuous. They will travel to the right environment for them. In some cases, it is just as easy to hop on a plane. Nobody has the lock on that business, even if they have a geographic advantage.”

The lack of competition can even be a turn-off. Some gamers like the action of casino-hopping.

“Some people if they are going to make an effort to game they want options and choices,” Londo said.

Cherokee’s sprawling casino expansion does its best to make up for that.

“Here we were very deliberate in creating zones, so it had a different look and feel because people do want that change in scenery,” Londo said. Different lighting, different music, a different mood — and different luck.

The marriage between the tribe and Harrah’s has been a happy one. Harrah’s brings the expertise and know-how to running a casino. The tribe benefits from its name recognition and cross-marketing of other casinos.

In return, it gets a management fee, based on a percentage of the profits.

“As we’ve grown in our capabilities, Harrah’s has learned as much from us as we learn from them,” said Erik Sneed, construction oversight liaison for the expansion. “We’ve been very smart in the way we do our business to stay ahead of the curve.”

Ultimately, Harrah’s is a corporation, while the tribe is beholden to social, cultural and civic goals. Their goals aren’t mutually-exclusive, but there are differences, Londo said.

“What you will find inherent for tribes is they want to prevail over a longer period of time, whereas companies beholden to Wall Street want to focus on short-term results,” Londo said.

Cherokee is more interested in ensuring revenues will still be strong five years from now and less concerned about the current state of business affairs, Londo said. And the tribe also wants to provide jobs for tribal members and see them promoted in the company.

In the trenches

When 46-year-old Londo took the helm at Harrah’s Cherokee in 2006, the tribe was eyeing an expansion in the neighborhood of $400 million.

Not big enough, Londo thought. He believed Cherokee had more market potential than that. It meant “going bigger, and a lot bigger in some cases,” Londo said.

But there’s a fine line.

“Nobody wants to be in a facility that feels empty, that lacks excitement and enthusiasm,” Londo said. “If you were going to err you would err on the side of being just a little smaller than a little too big. It feels energetic.”

Londo has Ojibwa ancestry, though he didn’t grow up on a reservation. His parents ran a restaurant in Milwaukee. His first memory is as a five-year-old boy, filling an ice chest in Londo’s Lounge.

He went to West Point, and became a captain in the military, flying Cobra attack helicopters and then training other pilots. He got his MBA on the side, then quit the service and went to law school. After working 10 years in the field of business law, he landed a job with Harrah’s in Atlantic City 2002 and rapidly rose through the ranks.

Londo is cool and calm by nature, to be expected from his West Point education and military training. He exudes the virtue of self-discipline.

The expansion on the horizon was a major drawing card for Londo to leave Atlantic City and move to comparatively rural Western North Carolina.

Londo lives in Sylva with his wife and three kids, ages 12, 16 and 17. As far as the family is concerned, it stacks up to their past life just fine.

“My wife probably enjoys it the most. She says if you have a Wal-Mart and a Lowe’s you are good-to-go,” Londo said.

“I would have been a lot less excited to come here if Cherokee wasn’t on the eve of exploiting its growth potential,” Londo said.

Londo instantly immersed himself in the master planning for the expansion.

No decision seemed to small for Londo to weigh in on. Where should valet parking drop-off be? How many seats should the buffet have, or the concert venue? Which would be better, a new Italian restaurant or a steak house? As for retail, a ladies footwear shop or consumer electronics?

A master planning committee of the casino’s top management and architects had their own “situation room” dedicated to the expansion, where such details were hashed out.

“There was a time when I was in design, construction and right-sizing type meetings three-and-a-half days a week,” Londo said.

But it was his forté and he loved it.

“The military trains you to plan, plan, plan. Planning is important,” Londo said.

When the tribe set its sights on a major expansion of the casino, one of the first steps was a critical casino-hopping tour in Atlantic City to check out the competition. Far from a sightseeing junket, however, the team had a rigorous itinerary, visiting several casinos a day with notepads in hand.

Those on the trip each had their own take-away goals. Rather than honing in on the price points for buffet menus, Sneed was on a big-picture quest.

“For me, it was about the quality of the experience. How do you design a space that is beautiful and fabulous but is still functional?” Sneed asked.

He also wondered how amenities were integrated into the gaming floor. Restaurants and shops were one thing the casino lacked, and in addition to sheer square-foot expansion of the gaming floor, the amenities would be a major focus of construction.

How are drink windows tucked in to the gaming floor? How close does the food court come to the tables?

The master plan team didn’t close the books once ground was broken. They were constantly refining.

“That blueprint or playbook that you established isn’t set in stone, so as conditions change you can adapt to it,” Londo said.

Most notably, the advent of alcohol. Talk about a game changer. The casino was dry — like the rest of the reservation — until just last year. Plans were rapidly redrawn to include bars and walk-up drink windows on the gaming floor.

The recession also led the casino to scale back the square-footage for the spa.

The expansion is taking the casino from 1,600 to 2,400 employees. Londo makes an hour each week to drop in on the new hire training sessions — averaging about 30 new hires a week right now.

“How are we expanding when the rest of the economy is contracting?” Londo asked after hitting the highlights of the expansion. “It’s magic. We can’t figure it out either.”

Cherokee is consistently a top performer out of 17 Harrah’s casinos in the country. Once a week, the general managers from every Harrah’s hold a conference call to compare numbers.

Likewise, Londo reports to his boss at Harrah’s corporate headquarters almost daily. Londo has goals to meet — not just for the year, but every month and every weekend. Every Monday, his boss wants to know: how was weekend performance? Did you meet your goals? Did the promotions do as well as expected?

“If not, what do we do about it?” Londo said. “That’s how myopic we get.”

It’s hard to gauge just how high the bar should be for Cherokee. Harrah’s expects growth from one year to the next, but setting revenue goals has been complicated by the economy, with even the most well-versed industry experts flummoxed over how much of a hit casinos could expect in the recession.

But in Cherokee, it’s been doubly complicated. Will new revenue from the expansion off-set the recession? Or for that matter, finally introducing alcohol?

Londo flipped an imaginary coin in the air with his thumb when asked how Harrah’s even begins to set profit expectations for a property in such flux. But he quickly donned his business demeanor and returned to casino-speak.

But Londo’s remaining time in Cherokee is probably short. With the expansion due for completion next year, Londo is looking for that next move.

A chandelier over a high-limit gaming table at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino costs $150,000, more than the median selling price of homes in Western North Carolina last year.

Like all the luxury touches found in the casino, it was custom designed. Carpets weren’t picked from swatches. And you won’t find the light fixtures in a catalogue. A team of interior designers invented everything from scratch and had them manufactured to order.

They exude class. On average, the casino’s interior finishes cost $250 a square foot. The tile mosaics on giant columns are real slate. Any paneling is real wood.

“They didn’t skimp on quality at all. When people come in here and play, they look at finishes. They look at décor. If it looks cheap their perception is going to be this was just thrown together,” said Matt Pegg, executive director of the Cherokee Chamber of Commerce.

But in some spaces, such as the posh Asian gaming room — boasting a traditional moon gate over the entrance, thought to bring wealth to those who pass through it — interiors ran as much as $600 a square foot.

If dropped in to Harrah’s blindfolded, the glitz and glam could easily place you in Vegas. But behind the veil, the subtle influence of color and design leave no doubt this casino is in Indian Country.

“In the beginning, we created a story, what I call the backbone, of the entire casino,” said Michelle Espeland, the lead interior designer.

Native American themes had to be present, but not “in your face,” Espeland said. “It has derivatives of Native American influence, but not over the top.”

Cherokee art with highly literal images once decorated the hotel rooms and corridors. The new art package, as they call it, is much more subtle in its native themes.

Espeland was one of nine interior designers at the project’s peak working for The Cunningham Group, the architect firm over the casino expansion.

Common threads run through the casino, from the hotel’s front desk to the shopping concourse. But such a large, sprawling space needed variation, too.

Themes define four blocks within the casino: Mountain Breeze, Woodland Moon, River Valley and Earth Water. The interiors team devoted an entire wall of their office to a creative board, papering it with key words and adjectives that related to each theme.

Set into the ceiling above gaming tables in Woodland Moon, lighting shines through yellow glass set in a tangle of wooden beams, meant to convey dappled light filtering through tree branches. In Earth Water, a light display covers a three-story wall to give the sensation of falling water drops.

Also part of the Earth-Sky zone, the 600-seat buffet has a soaring ceiling bulging with angular rust red boulders. A giant two-story marble slab on one wall is inlaid with jagged, elongated mirrors representing fissures in a rock face.

“It’s the notion of being in a geologic formation,” said Erik Sneed, construction manager of the project. He pointed out the ceiling overhead dotted with constellations.

The finer points of design are so imbedded throughout the casino, it’s impossible to discover them all. Even the newly-opened food court, featuring a Dunkin Donuts, Boar’s Head deli counter and the like, is so polished that “food court” is hardly the right name for it.

“Of course, we did it with typical casino flare — spent a fortune on all the fixtures,” Sneed said.

Pegg thinks it was the right call.

“We’ve all been to that place that is supposed to be great but you get there and it is only alright,” Pegg said. “Here, there is going to be that ‘wow’ factor. People will want to come back again and again.”

The Mirage has a volcano. There’s the Fountains of Bellagio, and the pyramid-shaped Luxor.

Cherokee will have the Rotunda, the crown jewel of the $633 million expansion to be unveiled next year and serve as the new casino entrance.

“With any casino, the notion of a grand arrival is key to create a sense of excitement,” said Erik Sneed, the tribe’s construction manager over the project. “You want a huge sensomatic, volumetric experience.”

And that’s exactly what Cherokee will have.

Shining five-story trees made of colored glass, like giant Tiffany lamps, ring the Rotunda with a 75-foot waterfall cascading down the middle. A 140-foot screen wraps around the walls where choreographed shows will be projected in concert with visual manipulation of the lighting in the trees and waterfall, along with intense audio effects.

“The lights will go down, you hear thunder rumble, suddenly the trees glow an intense red, the screen comes on, the music start and the show plays,” Sneed described.

One of 15 shows will play on an hourly schedule.

A massive, floating, spiral staircase winds through the trees and wraps around the waterfall. The self-supporting staircase was designed without columns underneath.

“We wanted the effect of a staircase that looked like it was suspended in thin air,” Sneed said.

But it also took an engineering feat to float with 50 tons of twisted steel.

“The only place that could roll steel that big was in Canada. We had to buy the steel, have it fabricated, shipped to Canada and then back to Cherokee,” Sneed said.

As Harrah’s Cherokee Casino closes on the final year of a massive $633 million expansion, the hum of construction that’s been a backdrop to life in Cherokee will give way to a luxury resort positioning the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for unparalleled economic dominance in the region.

“It is unlike anything else that has ever been attempted,” said Erik Sneed, the tribe’s construction oversight manager for the expansion. “You’ve seen projects like this in Vegas or Atlantic City. Rarely have you ever seen it in Indian Country.”

The project had 1,100 construction workers at its peak and 43 architects and interior designers.

Anecdotes depicting the sheer size of the project are limitless. Sneed traveled to Korea to negotiate directly with Samsung for televisions. Nothing quite says purchasing power like an order for 800, 42-inch flat screens.

The expansion was a monumental attempt to change the face of Cherokee’s casino into a resort destination and draw a new demographic of gamer.

It was pursued at great cost, and perhaps risk. It’s the largest construction project in the Southeast, no small feat in recession times. But the tribe simply could not continue to sit on its laurels, said Darold Londo, general manager of Harrah’s Cherokee.

“There were people who were happy with what they had, the whole ‘one in the hand worth two in the bush thing,’” Londo said. “We don’t have that luxury because our customers play elsewhere. They go to all the other gaming markets in the country. There is an incentive to keep pace with them.”

When the expansion is finished next year, the casino will have pulled off a five-year construction project while remaining one of the most profitable Harrah’s casino properties in the nation.

“My boss never wanted to hear construction used as an excuse. He said ‘Don’t tell me your revenues are off or your services scores are down because you’re building something new. I just don't want to hear it,’” Londo said.

Londo’s boss at corporate headquarters wasn’t the only one unwilling to give the Cherokee casino a pass on making revenue goals while in the throes of construction.

There were 13,900 other people — the enrolled members of the Eastern Band — counting on profits holding steady. Casino profits flowing to the tribe hovered around $225 million the past two years, with half funding tribal programs and the other half paid out directly to the Cherokee people in the form of twice-annual checks.

The tribe relies on casino money for many of its services, from subsidizing the hospital and the school system to native language programs for children. Families rely on their individual cut to make car payments, buy medicine and put their kids through college.

“One of the primary goals was to not affect the tribe’s distribution,” Sneed said.

The expansion won’t only double the number of games to a total of 4,600, but includes a complete renovation of the existing gaming floor.

The biggest challenge: maintain players’ experience and never, ever, go off line. Keeping the casino’s 3.6 million annual guests isolated from the construction zone around them was a feat in itself. False walls created a bubble around the operable areas of the casino while hundreds of construction workers toiled just on the other side.

“I call it the ticking dominoes,” Sneed said. “We’re cascading through a construction sequence.”

Matt Pegg, executive director of the Cherokee Chamber of Commerce, has been a doting spectator of the expansion.

“It has been impressive just to watch it,” Pegg said. “One day you walk around the corner and there is a big wall. The next day they have taken that wall away and there are 500 more machines or a food court.”

One work-around to keep the casino running amidst the construction — quite literally — stemmed from the unfortunate location of the main electrical room. It sat smack dab in the middle of the old motor coach lounge, destined for demolition to make way for an upscale steak house.

Contractors ruled out moving the main electrical room, which houses all the power panels that run the casino. Instead, they decided to demolish the building around it. Crews couldn’t mess up. Knock out the casino’s electrical power, and the lost revenue per minute was unthinkable.

“They were nervous as cats,” Sneed said of the demo crews.

Electrical crews couldn’t exactly kill the power either when it came time to move or add circuits, so specialized teams donning full-body rubber suits and helmets to work with the high-voltage live circuits.

While the guests are oblivious to the construction zone surrounding them, it’s hard to miss once you’re back-of-house.

Drill-slinging construction workers clad in blue jeans and work boots, tool belts clanging about their waists, scurry up and down the employee corridors. Drafting tables, spilling over with blueprints, are tucked into every corner of the hallways. The noise of saws and sledgehammers, somehow imperceptible on the gaming floor, is pervasive.

Even in the administrative wing, hardhats are never far from reach, looped over coat racks and stowed on bookshelves behind nearly everyone’s desk.

Taskmaster of great proportions

On a construction tour of the casino last week, Sneed made a stop over in the new 600-seat buffet, stepping around paint buckets and drop cloths, dodging men on ladders and weaving through a mine field of flying sawdust from table saws.

He excitedly started talking about the grand opening of the buffet just two weeks away without a hint of hesitation or flicker of doubt. It would all come together quite quickly, he said, not at all bothered that the flooring still wasn’t down, dining room tables were no where in sight, let alone finishing touches like napkin dispensers.

“We haven’t delivered anything late so far,” Sneed said.

Execution of the construction project was critical, and the tribe wasn’t leaving it to chance. True to form, the tribe once again proved its capacity for foresight by hiring two of its own contractor liaisons. Their job: ride herd on the construction crews, make punch lists, double check work against blueprints, even scout for the best pricing on interior fixtures.

Harrah’s corporate, with a lot riding on the expansion as well, sent two of its own experts in construction oversight.

“Because of the size and the scale, we wanted to make sure the interest of the tribe was represented in the performance of the work,” Sneed said.

There were 50 to 60 subcontractors working on the job at any given time. Sneed set up shop smack in the middle of the contractor’s encampment, a field of 20 trailers across the street from the casino that served as the central nervous system of the expansion.

As Sneed strolled through the buffet still under construction last week, he pointed to newly installed light fixtures that were the wrong kind and need replacing.

“We saw those and thought, ‘Those don’t blend very well with the architecture. Is that right?’” Sneed said. “So we had to go back and compare it to the drawings.”

The tribe switched contractors part way into the project, parting ways with the crew initially hired for the job over what Sneed referred to as “some mix-ups along the way.” Turner Construction, a century-old company and one of the largest in the country, was brought on. It was a good move, Sneed said.

“You are hiring that company because of their resources, but also their credibility. They have a reputation to protect in the industry and so they aren’t going to screw something up and leave it,” Sneed said.

A maze of construction

Most people would need a road map, if not a handheld GPS, to find their way through the maze of construction corridors and work zones, accessed to those in the know by slipping behind black curtains or ducking through the many “no-entry” doors pocking false walls on the gaming floor.

“It’s confusing. You could easily get lost on this project,” Sneed said.

But not Sneed. He knows the project like the back of his hand, a three-dimensional map of the blueprints seared into his mind.

For the directionally challenged, the casino has maps for hotel guests. Navigating the gaming floors, eateries and retail concourse is tricky enough without adding in the complexity of trekking there from one of the hotel towers and back.

But to steer the majority of guests, way-finding signs are mounted overhead, designed by an expert in such signage brought in a consultant.

“When you have a building this size, you have to make sure way finding is clear cut,” said Sneed. “It is so enormous, people have to understand clearly how to get out of this building in case something ever happened.”

At regular intervals on the casino floor, there are large interactive signboards, akin to a digital version of a shopping mall key, for resort guests to find what they are looking for and how to get there.

Getting lost isn’t the only problem. Getting around is too, especially for the older population of gamblers who make up the large part of Harrah’s customer base. They don’t have the mobility to make long treks.

“If you’re staying in hotel tower one and your favorite game is in Mountain Breeze, you are going to walk about a mile,” Sneed said. “It is a challenge.”

The solution: layover points to stop and rest and visually pleasing elements along the way.

“We designed it with a sense of journey so that as people make their way through, you have this or that to catch your eye and look at,” Sneed said.

It might be a group of sofas by a fireplace, artwork inlayed into the tile floor or balconies overlooking the gaming floor. A collection of sky bridges means players never have to go outdoors.

Londo said the casino is breaking industry norms with the lounging areas. For years, consumer psychology experts preached against places to loiter, warning that it is best to keep people on their feet browsing and shopping.

But Darold Londo, Harrah’s Cherokee general manager didn’t subscribe to that school. The casino was just too big for older guests not to stop and rest.

“It’s a haul for anybody, but if you are challenged getting around ...” Londo said.

Londo also cited insight from his current bedside reading, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. The author’s studies of consumer habits found lounging areas are not, in fact, detrimental to sales.

In coming weeks, the casino plans to deploy a fleet of golf carts to shuttle people back and forth to the hotel towers similar to those used in an airport. It also rents electric scooters.

Going vertical

Harrah’s hotel towers are the only structures west of Asheville in the state that are equipped with seismograph detectors. Hemmed in by mountains on a landlocked reservation, Cherokee had little choice but to build up.

“We shoehorned it all in,” Sneed said. “We couldn’t take a horizontal site and expand out. We had to think vertical.”

It’s obvious from the outside — with the soaring hotel towers and parking decks. But it also influenced the basic layout inside. A giant 600-seat buffet overlooks the gaming floor from a mezzanine, while a large 3,000-seat concert venue sits above it on the second floor. The stacked layout called for dozens of elevators and escalators.

The site limitations came at a price.

“We spent millions developing the site to accommodate an expansion this large,” Sneed said. “We went through literally months of blasting everyday getting through solid rock.”

Ultimately, construction called for nine retaining walls, including a 75-foot “soil nail” wall, the largest in the South. There was $1 million on a dewatering system for the parking garage. Another $2 million for federal stream mitigation to work around a creek that courses through the middle of the sprawling casino property.

Site work was the only portion of the construction that faced delays or cost overruns, a nasty side-effect when dealing in the unknowns of what lies below ground.

The project, once finished, will undoubtedly be a towering symbol of the tribe’s progress, a fitting monument to how a once persecuted people have bootstrapped themselves into the single largest player in the region’s economy through foresight and vision.

“It is going to attract an entirely different clientele. This isn’t just a daytrip casino any more,” Sneed said. “There’s a legacy in this also. We want to build something the community is proud of.”

A sweeping status report on natural resources in the mountains is being developed by a regional task force, serving as a tool for decision makers to understand the ecological context of issues they face.

The Mountain Resources Commission plans to issue the WNC Sustainability and Vitality Index by the end of the year.

“It is going to be a report card for Western North Carolina,” Jay Leutze, a board member on the Mountain Resources Commission. “This sustainability and vitality index is giving us that snapshot now of how we are doing.”

Leutze said the index will provide a benchmark that the health of the region’s natural resources can be measured against in the future. It is a massive undertaking, funded with a $140,000 grant from the U.S. Forest Service.

Much of the data already exists, whether it is endangered species surveys by the Fish and Wildlife Service or imparied waterways by the N.C. Division of Water Quality. The breadth of ecological data on the region is enormous.

“We live in on one of the most progressive places in the world for understanding its natural resources,” Leutze said.

But it doesn’t reside in one place. The Sustainability Index will change that.

“It is going to be a major, big organic living document,” Leutze said. “We want to be a resource people can access across the mountains where people can get standard data sets.”

The Mountain Resources Commission was formed in 2009 by the N.C. General Assembly and got to work in 2010. The 17-member commission was tasked with studying environmental issues facing Western North Carolina, particularly those brought about by growth and development.

The bill creating the Mountain Resources Commission narrowly made it through the General Assembly that year.

“It was the last bill that passed in that session of the General Assembly,” Leutze said.

It was well into the night on the last day of the lawmakers’ session when it slid through.

“They are bound by law not to go past midnight unless they climb up on a ladder and literally stop the clock. That bill passed with the clock physically stopped, and it was a miracle it got through. Mountain legislators are the key to it passing,” Leutze said.

Joe Sam Queen, a former state senator from Waynesville, was integral in the formation of the Mountain Resources Commission, helping to give birth to the idea and providing the heft to get it passed, Leutze said.

“There were a lot of fears raised over who these people were going to be and are they going to come into our communities and tell use how to be,” Leutze said.

That’s not the case, however.

“We are not regulatory,” Leutze said. The commission may recommend policies and other solutions to safeguard natural resources, but would have to convince state lawmakers or county commissioners to take them up on it.

Leutze spoke about the Mountain Resources Commission during the annual conference of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area held at Lake Junaluska Conference Center this week, bringing together players in the tourism industry from across WNC.

“A very important part of our mountain culture is agricultural and natural heritage,” Angie Chandler, executive director of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, said by way of introduction. “It is vital we sustain that so we can continue to reap the benefits of being able to live and work in Western North Carolina.”

Leutze showed a series of maps depicting development over the past four decades. What was a thumb-print sized patch over Asheville in 1970 had spread like a ink blot over the map by the last slide.

“It is a challenge to us to handle well what is coming our way,” said Leutze, who is also on the board for the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, a land conservation trust.

Those from this area on the commission include Tom Massie of Sylva and Bill Gibson of the Southwestern Regional Commission.

Haywood County is on the hook for $700,000 after an arbitration panel found the county wrongfully fired the contractor overseeing renovations to the historic courthouse four years ago.

The contractor sued the county for $2.3 million after being fired from the job. The county claimed the contractor was “significantly behind schedule” and was “incapable” of finishing the job they were hired to do.

Meanwhile, KMD Construction claimed it was working off inaccurate blueprints. As a result, the project took a lot longer than expected, and was more expensive.

The county refused to pay for cost overruns, however. KMD says it was left holding the bag and wants the county to pay up. The suit cites wrongful termination by the county and negligence by the county’s architect.

A panel of three arbitrators versed in construction and contract law heard the case this summer, but just issued their decision last week to award KMD damages.

Steven Smith, the attorney for KMD, said the decision proves the contractor was in fact not doing faulty work, despite repeated public criticism by the county accusing KMD of shoddy work.

“I think this vindicates them. I think this exonerates KMD,” Smith said.

The firm won money for change orders the county had never paid for and the unpaid balance on their contract, money the county withheld for work that was in fact completed, plus interest.

The county isn’t pleased about paying up, but isn’t totally surprised either.

“We anticipated we were going to have to pay something,” said Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick.

The county had withheld more than $400,000 from what it owed the contractor, citing substandard performance and costs incurred by the county due to the rigmarole.

That money is still set aside, so coming up with the payment won’t be as bad as it sounds. That said, the county would have liked to come out a little better in the arbitration than it did.

“The award was probably more than what we anticipated, but it is obviously much less than what they ever offered to settle for,” Kirkpatrick said. The county attempted to negotiate a settlement but could not talk KMD below $2.3 million, Kirkpatrick said.

In addition to the monetary award, the arbitration panel found that KMD had been wrongfully fired by the county.

Smith said KMD was most excited about that.

“Anytime they did a public bid on a project they had to disclose they had been terminated from a public project and that is huge,” Smith said. “That is like a death sentence.”

Smith said the real issues with the job lay with the architect, which had faulty plans and provided inadequate design direction. But the architect, which apparently had the county’s ear, would blame the contractor.

“I think it is really unfortunate the county didn’t recognize from the outset this is the architect’s fault,” Smith said. “I think they were misled or at least the architects chose to eliminate certain details from the critical decision making process.”

Haywood County commissioners are now deciding whether to go after the architect of the job. They will weigh how much it would cost to sue the architect versus how much they could feasibly recover.

Legal fees have already proved a costly proposition.

The county spent more than $400,000 defending the lawsuit by the contractor.

Kirkpatrick said the county thought long and hard before firing KMD from the job, knowing that a lawsuit wouldn’t be out of the question.

By the same token, the county was paying rent to house its administrative offices elsewhere while work on the courthouse dragged on and on. And, the most important thing was that work would be done properly.

“It was a priority to make sure it was done in a manner the people of the county could be proud of,” Kirkpatrick said. “You certainly don’t want to screw up a building that had been there since the 1930s.”

The state might have pulled the plug on a long-range project to map landslide prone areas in the mountains, but Haywood County hopes to take matters into its own hands.

Shortly after Republican lawmakers axed the state’s landslide mapping unit and laid off a team of five state geologists, Gordon Small, a longtime volunteer with Haywood Waterways Association, began pondering how to continue on.

Small hopes to raise grant money to hire the geologists on a contract basis to do the maps for Haywood County, a project that could take 18 months and cost more than $500,000.

Haywood County commissioners this week pledged unanimous support for the idea if funding could be found.

“I’m proud of my county,” Small said afterwards. “Now the big deal is raising the bucks. The fact that the county unanimously supported it is a big, big help.”

Haywood County has had its share of landslides and destroyed homes where the occupants narrowly escaped death. Emergency workers have found themselves digging people out of rubble in pitch-black rain storms, unsure whether more of the mountain could still collapse.

“For emergency preparedness it is critical you have this in place,” said County Manager Marty Stamey.

Commissioner Bill Upton said if he was buying property or building a house, he would want to know if there was a high landslide risk.

Commissioner Kevin Ensley, a surveyor and the only Republican on the board, said the maps would hopefully encourage smart building.

“I occasionally have clients that want to develop in areas and I have basically told them they shouldn’t but they do anyway,” Ensley said.

If the county had maps like these, it could at least require more detailed engineering.

“There needs to be enough sets of eyes or a different type of development criteria for those areas,” Ensley said.

Landslide hazard mapping has faced opposition from some development and real estate interests, who fear the stigma of landslides would unfairly blacklist property.

That’s exactly what happened in Macon County, the first of just a few counties to receive landslide hazard maps. An attempt by a planning group tasked with writing recommendations for a steep-slope ordinance derailed, in part, because they used the maps as indicators of where builders might need more regulatory oversight — triggering a backlash that the maps were not accurate and were confusing.

Marc Pruett, the soil and erosion control officer for Haywood County, doesn’t understand why the landslide hazard mapping was seen as controversial.

“Wouldn’t you want to know if your brake fluid was low before you run your car down the highway at 60 miles per hour,” Pruett said.

Small thinks as a whole, buyers will look more favorably on buying somewhere if they have access to landslide risks.

“I do believe in the long term that counties that have this information will have an advantage in the real estate market,” Small said.

Opponents also feared the landslide hazard maps were a backdoor for development regulations.

Small said he was pleased that county commissioners put public safety and common sense first.

Three of the laid-off state geologists came with Small to the commissioners’ meeting this week. They were pleased to see a community openly value their work after being shot down by the state.

“We have seen more landslides than anyone else in the state, and possibly the east coast, and we hope to continue using this expertise to benefit WNC,” said Stephen Fuemmeler, one of the geologists.

Jennifer Bauer, another of the state geologists, hopes Haywood Waterways can raise the funds, not just so she will have a job but so that the work will carry on.

“Making the citizens of Western North Carolina aware of landslide hazards is something I’m passionate about,” Bauer said.

The state landslide mapping team was created in 2005 with the mission of mapping landslide hazards in every mountain county. The team only finished four counties: Macon, Buncombe, Henderson and Watauga.

The unit was working on Jackson County when it was halted in its tracks. Haywood County was next in line for landslide mapping when the program was killed.

To get involved or contribute, contact Haywood Waterways Association or Small at 828.734.9538.

Nearly every town has one — a five-lane road lined with fast-food stores, gas stations and grocery stores — and most sport a few. But those, it turns out, may have been a bit of a mistake.

The N.C. Department of Transportation has kicked five-lane roads to the curb in favor of landscaped medians. Throw in some sidewalks and street trees, and there’s an uncanny resemblance to the boulevard design lobbied for by new urbanists and smart growth advocates over the years — although the DOT’s version is decidedly larger and more utilitarian.

Despite a paradigm shift dating back at least a decade, the design is still being embraced by the mainstream, particularly in the mountains where there are few examples of boulevards.

“Part of that is a trickle down from Raleigh,” said Wade Walker, an engineer and transportation planner with the Charlotte firm Fuss and O’Neill. “The DOT central office has basically admitted it is going to take time for this thinking and philosophy to trickle down into the individual districts. It is like turning around an air craft carrier. You can’t do it overnight.”

When Derrick Lewis started working for the DOT road design unit in 1997, everyone was still designing five-lane roads for nearly every application.

“It was the standard at one time to be five lanes,” Lewis said.

By the end of the decade, however, five-lane roads were on the way out.

“It was probably more of a project by project decision at first and at some point it made a swing in the other direction,” Lewis said.

At first, medians cropped up only along part of a road, with a combination of a middle-turn lane and a landscaped middle, much like the Old Asheville Highway in Waynesville; it was designed in the late 1990s when the five-lane design was beginning to fall out of favor.

Now, medians are the standard for commercial roads.

Lewis said he was an early convert to medians.

“I was one of the ones trying to get people trying to think about putting a median in,” Lewis said.

He oversaw feasibility studies for makeovers of N.C. 107 in Sylva and South Main in Waynesville — and both have proposed medians.

The DOT hasn’t necessarily embraced medians for their aesthetics, but for their ability to move more traffic without adding more lanes every couple decades.

Traffic moves faster with a median. Without cars darting in and out of parking lots across lanes of oncoming traffic motorists aren’t as brake-happy.

“You feel like they are about to cut out in front of you,” said Joel Setzer, head of the DOT division for the 10 westernmost counties. “Once you start getting congestion, and you have one person that has to come to a stop to make a turning maneuver, it creates an accordion effect, or slinky effect. That stop leads to congestion all down the stream.”

Businesses are often the opponents to medians, however, fearing they would lose prospective customers cut-off from making left turns into their parking lots. And so the DOT acquiesced by installing that middle-turn lane.

“In the past they just kowtowed too much to adjacent property owners,” Waynesville Town Planner Paul Benson said.

Far from being newfangled, boulevards historically were the design of choice for the flagship artery of a city, moving high volumes of traffic through town, yet flanked by high dollar commercial real estate.

“It is basically reinventing an old idea,” said Scott Curry, an urban designer and planner with the Lawrence Group, one of the state’s most well-known and progressive planning firms based in Davidson. “Boulevards are one piece of rediscovering design that is more oriented toward the pedestrian.”

So where did the DOT go wrong all those years?

“For many years, street designers and transportation engineers have been preoccupied with the volume and speed of cars only,” said Curry. “The car became the singular focus of what people planned and designed for.”

Enter the boulevard.

“When it is done effectively it is a good compromise between accommodating through moving traffic and local traffic and pedestrians,” Curry said.

There’s a novel solution afoot for traffic woes on Sylva’s commercial thoroughfare: widen the road so much it obliterates most of the businesses.

“You certainly wouldn’t have a traffic problem on 107 if you took out 80 businesses,” said Sarah Graham, a community transportation planner with the Southwestern Development Commission.

Yet that’s the top option in a study of how to fix N.C. 107 recently completed by the N.C. Department of Transportation.

Of course, bulldozing businesses wasn’t the goal, but rather an accidental side-effect of all the lanes along with a 30-foot medians the DOT says will be needed one day to allay congestion.

The massive widening contained in the DOT’s study has been summarily rejected by elected leaders in Sylva, and at the county level.

“Nobody liked it,” Graham said.

Joel Setzer, head of the DOT Division for the 10-western counties, can understand why. It’s not exactly the vision people in the community had in mind, Setzer said, citing comments he heard at a public input meeting during the feasibility study.

“Folks said they wanted to see 107 operate more as a Main Street commercial district and be improved within the existing footprint,” Setzer said.

But 107 also has to move a high volume of traffic.

“For it to be both will be a difficult thing to pull off,” Setzer said.

In hopes of finding a middle ground, Graham has applied for a grant to hire an independent consultant to do a new feasibility study. Graham believes a solution for 107 is within reach if the community thinks outside the box.

“We’ve all been to areas with roads similar to 107 but that function better, look nicer, are safer to drive on, but are equally as full of businesses,” Graham said.

It will take a whole bag of tricks to solve 107 traffic woes, she said, ticking off a list of catch phrases common in traffic planning circles: access management, traffic calming, intersection redesigns, turning nodes, rear-access drives and shared entrances.

“We might just need to look at it one block at a time and look at fixes that are real specific to each area and what it can handle,” Graham said.

Graham hopes a do-over of the DOT’s feasibility study will come up with such suggestions.

Setzer said these micro-fixes might work for a while, but would be temporary Band-Aids.

“We can do a little bit here and a little bit there,” Setzer said. But “after some time we are going to run out of tricks.”

Jason Kiminker, a Sylva businessman and advocate with the Smart Roads Alliance, disagreed.

“I think the correct solution is going to be surgery. A very precise surgery. Not a bomb that is dropped on the road,” Kiminker said.

Setzer countered that the feasibility study is far from a final road plan.

“If this project goes into design, we would be looking at finding ways to avoid these impacts,” Setzer said.

Setzer said there is wiggle room in the lane width and the width of the median, which is a whopping 30-feet in the feasibility study.

But the community also has to figure out how much congestion they are willing to tolerate.

“Is congestion out there today an acceptable level? Can we live with more or do we need less congestion?” Setzer said.

Kiminker questions the so-called congestion, and considers the future traffic estimates predicted by DOT a flawed premise.

“They can forecast whatever they want then say 107 won’t be able to carry it,” Kiminker said.

What about the bypass?

Percolating at the edge of the debate over 107 is the looming question of whether to build a new bypass around the commercial stretch. Once known as the Southern Loop and now deemed the 107 Connector, the bypass would plow virgin countryside to skirt the business district, giving through commuters a direct route to U.S. 23-74.

Opponents to the bypass clamored for the DOT to instead fix 107 traffic congestion without building a new road.

County commissioners and town board members also called for examining fixes to 107 first.

So the DOT sanctioned the feasibility study, and like Setzer predicted, it concluded 107 would have to be much, much wider to handle future traffic on its own, without the aid of a bypass.

“I intuitively knew it would be very disruptive but I wanted to have people take a professional look at it,” Setzer said. “Everybody said fix 107, but the devil is always in the details as to what it would take to fix 107.”

Graham said even with a bypass, however, future 107 traffic woes won’t be resolved.

“The studies show the connector will relieve some traffic on 107 but not enough to solve our problems,” Graham said.

Setzer agreed.

“I have been an advocate for both projects. Fixing 107 and also offering an alternative to 107,” Setzer said.

Kiminker fears the DOT is using fear mongering to steer the public toward supporting a bypass.

“They are showing you all the worst possible scenarios,” Kiminker said of the feasibility study.

Kiminker said there are “much more palatable, much less expensive and more low impact” options, but the DOT had an ulterior motive.

“The entire point of the study was not to see how 107 was improved, it was about showing that the connector was needed,” Kiminker said. “We haven’t been fooled — this feasibility study can be shelved in the garbage can where it deserves to go.”

Setzer said the public wanted a feasibility study, and that’s what they got. He can’t help the findings.

“We had input from the general public, we had input from advocacy groups and input from local government that said they would like us to look and see at fixing 107 before relieving congestion through other means,” Setzer said.

Setzer welcomes a second feasibility study by an independent firm should the grant come through, as well as the continued dialogue it is bound to bring about.

Of course, talk is cheap. The price tag for the full-blown widening outlined in the DOT’s feasibility study is $103 million. And it’s nowhere on the horizon, at least according to the DOT’s long-range road building list.

Nonetheless, it’s not a moment to soon to start crafting a design the community can get behind, Graham said.

“At least the town and county would be armed with a plan so as funds came available to do some road improvements they would have defined what their problems were and solutions were on more of a micro level,” Graham said.

If given a blank canvas, no road engineer today would build a road that looks or functions like 107. Constraints posed by commercial development flanking the corridor certainly makes it harder to fix, she said.

“So it is working backwards a little bit, but there is no time like the present. I don’t think it is hopeless,” Graham said.

Waynesville has one chance to get South Main Street right, or live with the consequences for decades to come. And the town isn’t taking any chances. The N.C. Department of Transportation had barely gotten started on a feasibility study for a street makeover when the town began hunting for grants to do its own independent yet simultaneous feasibility study.

The community has to speak up on the front end to let DOT know what it wants, said Mayor Gavin Brown.

“There is a default button over there and they will hit it,” Brown said. “That’s what I want to avoid. I want to make sure we have input into the process when DOT finally gets around to doing something.”

There’s a lot riding on a South Main makeover. It will dictate what Waynesville’s west side becomes. Will West Waynesville become the next West Asheville, transforming into a hip walkable community, albeit three decades from now? Or will it follow in the footsteps of Russ Avenue, a high-traffic commercial hotbed?

“We want to create a place that is a destination — a place that can be called a place and not just a street or a bypass,” said Rodney Porter, a consultant hired by the town to steer the feasibility study. “It is nice to look at public streets as public spaces. When we do that, we really can sort of revive a community based on a streetscape.”

But as a key gateway into town, South Main currently leaves a lot to be desired, said Porter, an urban designer with LaQuatra Bonci in Asheville.

“I don’t know if South Main right now is the character of Waynesville,” Porter said. “I think we can really change the voice of what this street is saying.”

Paul Benson, Waynesville’s town planner, didn’t put it quite so tactfully.

“It is so blighted right now, it is like a third-world country,” Benson said.

The street is pocked by vacant buildings with boarded up windows, and a crop of litter-strewn, weed-speckled parking lots.

Porter said it’s not terribly difficult to transform the status quo, however. A few tricks of the trade can make a big impact: trees edging the street, sidewalks and bike lanes, a planted median, clusters of benches — simply marked crosswalks would be a start.

“A strong design will give a sense of place on the street,” Porter said.

But all these niceties add up, with the street’s footprint inching wider and wider all the while. There’s five feet for each bike lane, six for each sidewalk, five for a planted tree strip, at least 17 feet for a median. The road quickly balloons to a 100-foot swath, and that’s where the rubber will likely meet the road, Benson said.

The wider the footprint, the more property gets gobbled up. In some cases, when it comes to the dilapidated buildings and vagrant parking lots, seeing them go might not be such a bad thing.

But South Main is also home to long-standing businesses that could be wiped out if the new street gets too wide.

“Does it sacrifice those of us who are in that route to get there?” asked David Blevins, owner of the gas station across from Super Wal-Mart. “There are people who do make a living from those rundown gas stations and I was curious how they will reconcile that.”

South Main is also the lifeblood for nearby neighborhoods: the upscale Waynesville Country Club, middle-class Auburn Park, and the many tightly packed, working class neighborhoods that radiate through West Waynesville, testament to its bustling mill village days when factories dominated the blue-collar side of town.

A wider road will push commercial development back and up against the edge of these neighborhoods.

“I don’t want to impact that community more adversely than it has to,” said Waynesville Mayor Gavin Brown. “My preference would be smaller so it wouldn’t impact the neighborhoods.”

Benson said middle ground might actually be simple. Usually, commercial interests are the chief lobby for wider roads. But in this case, the businessmen fear the front of their lots being lopped off too much.

“The people who want the widest road are also the people who don’t want as much of their property taken,” Benson said. “I think it will be easy to find middle ground on this project. It is so bad right now that anyone will welcome any kind of improvement.”

But there will be choices to make. It might not be possible to add lanes, plus a planted median, street trees, bike lines and sidewalks on both sides. Which make the cut will likely be the subject of debate as the planning process plays out.

Plus, the DOT has some flexibility to narrow lanes and narrow the median, making them smaller than the standard — deviating from that default that Mayor Brown referred to. But those are mere kinks, and not the purpose of the feasibility study.

“You can make those choices later,” said Derek Lewis, DOT road planner in Raleigh overseeing the DOT’s South Main feasibility study. “We don’t get that deep into the weeds in the feasibility study. A feasibility study is at a 40,000 foot level shooting down while still being as context sensitive as we can.”

Input wanted

The town kicked-off the planning process for South Main three weeks ago with a community meeting.

Property owners along South Main and existing business owners dominated the table. But Porter wants regular folks in the mix, too.

“Not just business owners but residents all throughout Waynesville use this space,” Porter said. “We want to make sure we are doing the right thing for this corridor as a whole and not just particular individuals. We want a strong public process.”

Nancy Felder, a resident who travels South Main everyday, sees a street makeover as the key to a better community.

“We’re interested in seeing things revitalized in this area,” Felder said.

The nearby Waynesville Country Club is among the players vested in South Main’s makeover.

“This South Main Street traffic flow is totally critical to our business,” said David Stubbs, co-owner of the Waynesville Country Club.

The independent feasibility study will cost $55,000, with 80 percent of the cost paid for with a federal planning grant.

When looking for the right consultant, town leaders wanted a firm that understood new urbanism and valued multimodal streets, incorporating pedestrian and bikes.

“We wanted a progressive plan,” Benson said.

Porter said his firm would take a holistic view of the street makeover.

Primed for growth?

Even before Super Wal-Mart opened in 2008, property owners eagerly erected For Sale signs accompanied by staggering asking prices.

But the commercial boom the community was both hoping for and bracing for has yet to materialize.

While property in the Super Wal-Mart development itself has moved — a Verizon, Best Buy, car wash, beauty supply store, and soon a Belk’s, Pet Smart and Michael’s — the rest of the property owners along South Main found they weren’t sitting on quite the goldmine they thought.

Commercial property values only rose 8 percent along South Main Street since the Super Wal-Mart came in, according to the recent property reappraisal conducted by the county.

Benson said the recession has merely delayed inevitable commercial growth on South Main, not sidelined it permanently.

“I think the national economy right now is what is going to keep that area from developing more,” Benson said.

For at least 15 years, a South Main makeover has been at the top of Waynesville’s road wish list. But it was the coming of Super Wal-Mart gave South Main a needed push to get the DOT’s attention.

A makeover was no longer a purely aesthetic undertaking, but the promise of commercial growth would mean more cars, and the element of traffic congestion now warranted an examination by the DOT.

The DOT in 2009 launched a feasibility study of the street. When exactly DOT will get around to redoing South Main isn’t clear. For now, it’s not in the DOT’s 10-year plan.

And while congestion is becoming a problem, until it gets worse, the project may not be considered a priority by the DOT.

How congested does it have to get before DOT will tackle the makeover?

“That is the $64,000 question,” said Benson. “As congestion get worse it will rank higher and become a higher priority to build.”

Yet without a street makeover, commercial growth might not materialize as quickly, posing a chicken and egg conundrum. Porter said a nicer street, if built, would help attract commercial development and investment.

“If we improve the street life will we have changes in development?” Porter asked. “That is what we are looking for: how can we re-energize this street.”

Mayor Brown believes that commercial growth will come regardless of whether the makeover happens now or later.

“The business people will go wherever they can to make dollars. If they see an opportunity to make money, they will do it whether there is a new road or not,” Brown said.

But, the town will soon have a plan on paper at least, giving prospective developers an idea of what they can expect to happen one day, Brown said, even if it might be a long time off.

“Once a businessman knows that, he will build accordingly,” Brown said.

Which is why Brown wanted to hire a consultant to come up with a makeover plan, even if it will be a decade or more before it earns a spot at the top of the DOT’s build list.

“Is it an exercise in futility?” Brown asked. “No, it will benefit the community as a whole.”

Meanwhile, the DOT has put the final version of its feasibility study on hold to see what the town and its consultant come up with.

Waynesville and Sylva are at a crossroads, ones that will irrevocably shape the character of their communities.

Both towns are clamoring for a makeover of their commercial avenues — South Main Street in Waynesville and N.C. 107 in Sylva — but neither likes the plans that the N.C. Department of Transportation came up with.

Instead, both communities want to do their own street plans, drawing from new urbanist philosophies that use street design as a springboard for creating vibrant and lively shopping districts where not only cars but people feel at home.

But traffic is a fact of life, and whether the communities can marry the needs of the thoroughfares with their lofty visions remains to be seen.

Read more:

• Waynesville primed for makeover of South Main

• Fast for cars or pleasing for people? Tug of war rages over 107

• The advent of the boulevard, the death of the five-lane

• A look in the rearview at N.C. 107

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park boasts the largest backcountry in the Eastern United States, yet for backpackers hoping to take in a slice of that wilderness with an overnight trip, finding a park ranger to help with logistics can be elusive.

Even seasoned backpackers tackling new terrain in the Smokies are bound to have questions. Where’s the closest water source? What’s the elevation gain? How likely is snow in April?

Yet the so-called Backcountry Information Desk is staffed for only three to four hours a day, and by volunteers at that.

“That phone is constantly busy,” said Melissa Cobern, backcountry manangement specialist with the Smokies. “That’s where we get a lot of complaints, where people have to call and call and call to try to get through.”

Cobern said the Smokies needs to beef up the backcountry desk with fulltime rangers, whose sole job is to help backpackers plan their routes.

It’s not that the volunteers don’t know their stuff. Most are members of the 900 Miler Club, an elite group who have hiked all 900 miles of the park’s trails.

“You are going to get good information when you get on the phone with them,” Cobern said.

But there just aren’t enough of them to keep the desk staffed all day long or handle the volume of calls, not when you consider each call takes 10 to 30 minutes.

The park hopes to hire rangers to staff at the backcountry information desk, as well as hire more rangers to patrol the backcountry. But to do so will take more money, and that has prompted the park to consider charging backpackers for overnight camping.

A meeting to hear from the public on the plan will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 16, at the Old Oconaluftee Visitor Center at the park’s main entrance outside Cherokee.

Unlike front country campgrounds with picnic tables, bathrooms and running water, backcountry sites are usually miles from nowhere, scattered across the park’s vast half a million acres and some embedded so deeply in the wilderness it takes three days to reach them from the closest trailhead.

Backpackers in the park have to camp at one of 100 designated backcountry sites, intended to limit impacts on the wilderness.

“The rest of the park is so dense and so steep, you can’t just throw down anywhere. The park would be a mess if people did that,” said Bob Miller, a spokesperson for the Smokies.

The backcountry sites have no amenities other than a fire ring and cables to hang food out of reach of bears.

The Smokies is hardly plowing new ground. All the big parks out West — Glacier, Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite, Denali and so on — charge a fee for backcountry camping.

But the plan to charge for backpacking here could hurt “the common man,” said Tom Massie, a fisherman who frequents the Smokies.

“In these tough economic times there are families that can’t afford to go to Myrtle Beach or a big vacation somewhere else, so they take their vacations fishing or camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Massie said. “The park systems have already been bought and paid for by the citizens of this country, particularly this park. What we are doing is making people pay to use their own national park.”

Whether to charge, and, if so, how much, is one thing the Smokies rangers want to hear from the public.

The park has floated a few options to jumpstart discussion. At the high end: $5 per person per night plus a $10 reservation fee covering the entire group no matter how large or how many nights. At the low end: just $4 per person per night with no reservation fee.

Unless the fee plan goes through, the park isn’t willing to reallocate existing rangers to backcountry assignments.

“Front country has always gotten more attention than the backcountry,” Miller said of the Smokies.

While the Smokies is the most visited national park in the county with around 9 million visitors, only a small fraction come to backpack.

In 2010, there were 33,000 backpackers and a total of 79,480 backcountry nights — meaning each of the 33,000 backpackers averaged 2.5 nights in the woods.

Overnight backpacking is down from 20 years ago, but has started to climb back up in the past five. There were 92,000 backcountry nights in 1994. It dropped to a low of 70,00 backcountry nights in 2006, and is now back up to 79,480.

All the park’s backcountry sites have limits on how many people are supposed to camp at them a given night, ensuring the wilderness experience backpackers are expecting and limiting human impact.

About one-third of the park’s more popular backcountry sites already require reservations to prevent overcrowding. Those are currently taken over the phone, and can be equally frustrating for backpackers trying to get through.

The rest of the park’s backcountry sites require simple self-registration. Backpackers pause at a registration box found at each trailhead, fill out a slip and drop it in the slot before being on their way.

There’s no way for park rangers or other backpackers to know how many people ahead of them or behind them might also have plans to camp at that site.

“A lot of those self registration sites aren’t that popular, but you could certainly end up in the situation where there are a lot of people at that site and there would be more people than you find comfortable,” Miller said.

A more formal reservation system would solve that problem. But it could also complicate matters for the last-minute backpackers, those who live in nearby communities and want to make an overnight jaunt to their favorite trout stream.

Under the new system, they would either have to go online before leaving the house and print out their permit, or get in the habit of planning trips in advance so the permit can be mailed to them.

Their only other option is make a trip to a staffed visitor center that can issue backcountry permits, which would be out of the way for backpackers heading into outlying areas like Cataloochee or Fontana.

Along with beefing up the backcountry information desk, Cobern said the park equally needs more backcountry presence and ranger enforcement.

While backpackers are supposed to get reservations for the more popular sites, some don’t with little threat of being caught.

This frustrates those who have actual reservations, who arrive at the site to find there isn’t enough room, Cobern said.

The most serious problem, however, is there aren’t enough bear cables for everyone to hoist their food off the ground, and that leads to bear problems, Miller said.

Maggie Valley’s business community hopes to bring natural gas lines to the valley, but it will hinge on drumming up enough interest from paying customers to making it worth the gas company’s while.

Natural gas is a cheaper form of fuel, whether for heating hotel rooms or powering restaurant ovens. But first businesses must prove there’s enough demand for the gas company to recoup its cost of running gas lines to Maggie.

Natural gas lines run through commercial and industrial areas of Waynesville, but not into Maggie. In fact, natural gas lines don’t even run close to Maggie’s doorstep at the moment.

To reach the town’s main commercial strip, lines would have to be run four miles along U.S. 19 from the end of Russ Avenue to reach the town limits at the intersection with Jonathan Creek. From there, it’s another three miles along the main drag.

That’s a total of seven miles, with a very rough estimate of $2 million.

PSNC, the leading natural gas supplier in the state, met with a couple of business leaders and town officials last week. They didn’t say outright how many future customers it would take to make the lines a go, said Town Manager Tim Barth.

But it would have to be more than a few.

“I think an overwhelming majority of businesses would have to respond and say ‘Absolutely, I would hook on to it if it was available,’” Barth said.

But the natural gas company isn’t the only one that will be crunching numbers in coming weeks. Business owners will have to do a cost-benefit analysis of their own.

While natural gas is cheaper, business have to weigh the upfront costs, such as retrofitting their equipment to burn natural gas and hook-up fees from the gas company.

Businesses could save money over the long run, but it would be contingent on having the money for the upfront investment, Barth said.

“I’m sure the number one question is how much is it going to cost, and then how much would the monthly costs be,” Teresa Smith, president of the Maggie Valley Chamber of Commerce, said.

But for now, the gas company is merely gauging interest.

“It is very, very preliminary at this point,” Smith said.

The Maggie Valley Chamber of Commerce put out a call to businesses in the community last week, encouraging them to fill out a survey from the natural gas company if they think they might be interested. Contact the chamber at 828.926.1696 to find out more.

The U.S. Postal Service wants to close Fontana Dam’s tiny post office to save money, a downsizing move critics say would further isolate the small community.

This far-flung outpost in Graham County is frequented by tourists, and serves as a vital waypoint for thousands of hikers on the Appalachian Trail.

Despite the region’s remote location, it turns into a bustling place in the summer with throngs of tourists coming to Fontana Village Resort — as well as an influx of seasonal workers topping more than 140. Those seasonal workers rely on post office boxes to get their mail, with so much demand some years the Fontana post office has run out of post office boxes.

Residents also rely on the post office boxes, according to Craig Litz, an employee at Fontana Village Resort.

“You have a significant number of people who live in the village,” Litz said. “Their round trip to the next closest post office is 45 miles.”

And it will hurt the resort as well, he said.

“From a business standpoint we have tons of guests at Fontana Village resort who forget stuff that we have to mail back to them,” Litz said. That would now require a trek to town every time grandma left or glass or junior left this favorite stuffed animal behind after their stay.

The next closest post office is in Robbinsville or the Nantahala Gorge, a 45-mile trip respectively. Factor in the slow speeds required on the curvy, twisty roads, and a trip to the post office would require a two-hour investment.

The community, just this year, become a bonafide town. The new town is home to only 33 fulltime residents, but that population number is deceptive: about 100,000 people a year visit the resort.

Appalachian Trail woes

The Fontana post office is perhaps most critical, however, to hikers along the Appalachian Trail.

The long-distance hiker traversing the 2,200-mile trail from Georgia to Maine mail themselves care packages, as do friends and family, full of needed supplies.

“Everything from food to extra socks,” Litz said.

The Fontana post office is a key drop point for these care packages.

“In the spring time, we have a room dedicated just to stuff from the hikers,” Litz said. That’s when thru-hikers doing the entire trail are coming through in waves of 30 a day.

Hikers also use the post office to send unneeded equipment back home, such as winter jackets they started the trail with but no longer need. Fontana Dam is just 1.8 miles from the trail.

“It’s very important — Fontana is part of the long-distance hiking experience, and part of the logistics of resupply,” said Laurie Potteiger, an AT thru-hike veteran and information services manager for the Appalachian Trail Conference, headquartered in Harpers Ferry, W. Va.

Fontana Dam is the first post office hikers hit after starting the trail in Georgia, once any distance under way, that’s in such close proximity to the trail.

The proposed closure is part of a broader cost savings measures by the U.S. Post Office. Last week the postal service announced it would study whether to close nearly 3,700 local offices and branches because of falling revenues. Facing an $8.3 billion budget deficit this year, closing post offices is one of several proposals the Postal Service has recently considered to cut costs, and one of three that are drop points for Appalachian Trail hikers.

Fontana’s leaders are fighting the proposed closure. They have appealed to U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, for help.

Shuler hopes to stop the closure, spokesman Andrew Whalen said this week.

“We are doing our best to ensure it stays open,” Whalen said Tuesday. “We’re drafting a formal appeal to the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission.”

Harrah’s Cherokee casino bought nearly half a million dollars of liquor over the past year, netting almost $50,000 in profits each for the ABC stores in Sylva and Bryson City — which had the privileges of being the casino’s suppliers.

But despite the numbers on paper, it is hasn’t proved quite the windfall the two towns hoped.

“It was nothing like they said it was going to be,” said Monty Clampitt, chairman of the Bryson City ABC board.

“People thought there would be a world of money flowing in all of a sudden if we did this,” said Kevin Pennington, chairman of the Sylva ABC board. “I think it was a little surprising that there was not near as much money coming in.”

The casino began serving alcohol to customers last year. The Cherokee reservation was — and still mostly is — dry. The tribe made an exception for the casino, but lacked an ABC store of its own. So it turned to the ABC stores in neighboring Sylva and Bryson City to buy from.

Since the reservation lies partly in Jackson and partly in Swain counties, figuring out which store had dibs on being the casino’s alcohol supplier got complicated. Ultimately, the stores in Bryson and Sylva launched a joint venture with the sole mission of filling bulk liquor orders for Harrah’s and decided to split any profits 50-50.

Both towns hoped it would be a lucrative deal for them, since profits from the ABC stores go straight to town coffers.

But neither town has seen a penny yet, despite being more than a year into the operation.

“We haven’t gotten any of it yet. None,” said Pennington.

The joint venture has cleared $100,000 in profit so far, so at first blush it’s not clear why that money hasn’t been meted out to the towns along with the regular ABC dividends.

But Clampitt and Pennington said the profits to date have been used to build up working capital and inventory.

Roughly half the profits are tied up in inventory — $50,000 in liquor is stacked on pallets and shelves in the back storeroom of the Bryson City ABC store, ready and waiting to fill the weekly orders coming from Harrah’s.

Another $50,000 is sitting in the checking account, a cushion to ensure smooth cash flow, Clampitt said.

Since the state warehouse will only ship to local ABC stores once a month, they have to buy the liquor up front.

Harrah’s makes out a shopping list of what it will probably need, but its actual order may vary, so it could be weeks before the inventory moves off the shelves.

“You can’t tell a customer what to buy,” Clampitt said.

But with inventory and reserves now built up, profits made from here on out will be paid out quarterly. Sylva and Bryson City can each expect checks for $11,600 to arrive any day, a payout from the second quarter, Clampitt said.

Cherokee forays into ABC store of its own

No sooner than Bryson and Sylva’s joint venture has started paying off, however, and the end is in sight. Cherokee is well on its way to an ABC enterprise of its own and within the year will stop buying from its neighbors.

From the beginning, Cherokee has wanted to setup its own ABC store, selling the liquor to Harrah’s itself and keeping the profits for the tribe rather than sending them down the road to Bryson and Sylva.

The logistics of starting one haven’t been easy. The tribe ultimately needed a special bill passed by the General Assembly allowing it to start its own ABC venture, so it can order directly from the state warehouse without going through the Sylva or Bryson stores as middlemen.

The Sylva and Bryson stores weren’t planning on riding the casino’s liquor gravy train forever.

“I figured it wouldn’t be long before the tribe got it worked out,” said Larry Callicut, town manager of Bryson City.

“I was not at all surprised when the Cherokee said they can just buy stuff directly from the state,” Pennington added.

Delayed gratification

It will be several more months, and possibly even a year, before the new Cherokee ABC board is up and running, however. There’s a complicated computer system to set up, a staff to hire and a place needed to hold all those waiting pallets of liquor.

“They’ve got some organizing planning and what not to do,” Clampitt said.

Once that’s done the Sylva and Bryson joint venture will become obsolete. It would make sense to shut down the operation and close out the books, liquidating all that inventory and cashing out the checking account.

At that point, the two towns could expect a final payout of $50,000 each.

That’s a good chunk of change for small, cash-strapped, recession-burdened towns to clear. It’s better than nothing, Clampitt supposed, but it wasn’t exactly free money.

“It’s been a whole lot of work,” Clampitt said.

The Bryson ABC store lends its staff to the joint venture serving the casino. It takes labor to manage the inventory: keep up with what’s running low, place monthly orders with the state, parcel out weekly shipments to the casino and all the related bookkeeping.

They also personally deliver weekly orders to the casino — a perk afforded to their special customer. (Run-of-the-mill bars and restaurants have to do their own pick-up.)

The Bryson ABC store gets compensated for some of those hours. In June, for example, the store billed the joint operation for $607 worth of its employees’ time.

But the Bryson board also donates some of the labor and overhead to the joint venture. It doesn’t pro-rate a portion of its utilities to the Cherokee operation, for example. Nor does it bill for the labor of unloading the truckload of orders coming from the Raleigh warehouse each month.

The two stores have finally paid themselves back for start-up loans taken from their own bank accounts to get things up and running — namely building up the necessary inventory.

The stores also had to purchase a $15,000 computer system for the joint Cherokee venture. The state ABC system is particular about the software used by all the stores, requiring a certain type of program that interfaces directly to the state warehouse, not only for placing orders but also allowing the state to track the whereabouts of every bottle of liquor.

The state wouldn’t let Bryson’s ABC store use its existing computer system, since the Cherokee venture was technically considered a new standalone enterprise, Clampitt said. So both stores dipped into their own funds to buy the computer system, cutting into profits they would have made otherwise.

Pennington said he was skeptical from the start.

“It was such shall we say a unique situation to start that combined store, I personally never felt like it was done for the best interest of the people of Jackson County to begin with,” Pennington said.

Pennington said he actually advocated against it, but the state ABC people made them do it.

“It wasn’t our idea at all,” Pennington said.

As for the $15,000 computer system? Bryson and Sylva ABC boards have already written that off and deducted it from the Harrah’s profits. But it would be nice to get a little something back for it when the joint venture is shut down,  Clampitt said. He hopes they could sell it to the new Cherokee ABC board.

Coincidentally, a countywide alcohol referendum on the ballot in Jackson County next year could lead to a new ABC store in Cashiers, which if passed, might just need a computer system as well.

Why so complicated?

Liquor sales in North Carolina are a tightly regimented affair. All liquor coming in to the state makes its first stop at warehouse in Raleigh. Local ABC stores in turn order from the state warehouse, a means of controlling the sale and distribution of liquor to the public.

Local stores act as middlemen. They get the liquor at wholesale prices, then mark it up to resell to customers, both to the general public and to bar and restaurant owners. The state dictates how much of a markup is allowed, about 25 percent.

After covering overhead and salaries, local ABC stores turn the remaining profits over to the local government, either the town or county, or in some cases both.

The oft-threatened closure of the state prison in Haywood County has finally come to pass, but by now, it hardly comes as a surprise.

“Every year, they would always say it is going to close,” said Haywood Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick.

And so every year, county leaders appealed to mountain legislators to save the prison, who in turn mounted political pressure on their colleagues in the General Assembly to put the prison back in the budget.

The prison was spared the chopping block, but the victory was always short-lived, giving way the following year to cries of “here we go again” and another round of lobbying.

“I think our representatives at the state level had indicated inevitably it was going to close. They could push it off or prolong it, but inevitably they wouldn’t have the votes to keep it,” Kirkpatrick said.

“At some point we realized we were going to lose it,” Commissioner Bill Upton said.

It’s not clear exactly what the state will do with the prison it abandons. Haywood County has an idea, however, that’s still in its infancy and might not come to fruition, but county commissioners are giving a hard look.

Commissioners are contemplating leasing the prison from the state and going in to the inmate business. For $40 a night, the county would house prisoners from other places — from other counties that don’t have enough space in their own jail or from the state itself.

Commissioners say they won’t plunge headlong toward owning a prison yard unless it makes sense.

“You don’t just necessarily want to take it because you can,” Swanger said. “You want to make sure what you are taking. We have to make a wise decision.”

They asked County Manager Marty Stamey to put together a feasibility study and hope to hear back in another week.

The fact-finding mission would include estimated utility costs, staffing and upkeep.

With the county jail next door, the prison wouldn’t need its own cooks or medical officer or canteen. It could piggyback on the jail’s support staff and really only need the guards. The number of guards could be adjusted depending on how many prisoners materialized.

The county could also operate just half the facility, cutting down on utilities.

The beauty of the deal may be the rate the state will lease it for. Commissioners are hoping for the bargain rate of a $1 a year.

Why such a good deal? It’s doubtful the state would find a buyer for a 128-bed prison on the open real estate market, and at least leasing it to the county would keep it from being a maintenance headache and liability for the state.

No matter how cheap the lease is, the county doesn’t want to be saddled with a deteriorating facility that becomes more work than it’s worth. But based on an inspection of the prison by the County Maintenance Director Dale Burris, it is in surprisingly good shape.

“The buildings are old but very well maintained,” said Commissioner Kevin Ensley

The big kicker, however, is whether there are actually inmates out there who need to be housed somewhere.

When someone is first charged with a crime, counties bear the burden of housing them in their local jails. Only after they go to trial and get sentenced by a judge are they shipped off to a state prison.

The state doesn’t seem terribly pressed for space: the existing population at the Haywood prison is easily being absorbed into the state’s other prisons. So demand for bed space, if it exists, would likely come from other counties who have maxed out their own jails.

But there’s the rub.

“A lot of the counties have built new jails,” Haywood Sheriff Bobby Suttles said.

Over half the counties bordering Haywood have recently built new jails of their own and have room to spare: Swain, Jackson and Madison counties all have new jails, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is about to build one.

Cherokee County also has built a large new jail, capturing overflow inmates from other far western counties.

With so few jails at capacity, there might be little overflow for Haywood to capitalize on — if not for a new state law that would keep inmates serving minor sentences in county custody. (see related article.)

The new law would pay counties to house inmates convicted of misdemeanors and serving less than 180 days. In the past, they would have entered the state’s prison system.

It will give Haywood another 14 prisoners a year, not enough to make leasing the shut-down state prison viable. But Haywood could volunteer to keep some of those convicted misdemeanor prisoners on behalf of other counties, who have enough room for their own inmates but not enough room to take on the extra load.

“We are trying to determine how many of those there actually are in the state,” Swanger said, adding however that there probably won’t be that many

And that may sideline the whole idea.

“I am skeptical about short-term profitability,” Swanger said.

Suttles is more inclined to strike while the iron is hot, assuming that the inmate population is bound to grow in the future.

“Eventually, I think there will be a need for it, to hold inmates. It would be real handy,” Suttles said.

The fences around the perimeters of the state prison and county jail are practically touching already.

Commissioners are contemplating a worst-case scenario where the county essentially mothballs the site for now to see if more demand materializes. And in the meantime, the county looks out for its interests by keeping something else from moving in there, something that may not be compatible with the county’s neighboring jail or public dumpster station.

“If we don’t lease it and the state sells it, who is going to be our neighbor?” Swanger said.

After hours of scouring the ground for renegade marijuana plants from the air last Thursday, the pilot of a Highway Patrol helicopter was ready to call it day. But as he crested the Balsams, in the homestretch of his flight back to Asheville, he looked down and hit the jackpot: 664 pot plants clustered in more than two-dozen small plots.

“This pilot is pretty alert. He was just looking out and saw what he knew as marijuana,” said Detective Mark Mease, a narcotics investigator with the Haywood County Sheriff’s Office. “When you know what you are looking for it kind of stands out.”

The cultivator of all that pot had done his best to disguise it, though. The plots were a scant 6 feet across, tucked in to an overgrown pasture awash in all manners of briars and brush.

But once on the ground, it wasn’t hard to figure out who was responsible, Mease said. Narrow but distinct paths led from plot to plot, and eventually back to a nearby trailer on the property.

“It is kind of hard to hide when the trails lead back to your house,” Mease said.

Daniel Keith Messer, 51, was home at the time. He answered the door when Mease knocked, and in short order had confessed. Messer has been charged for now with manufacturing marijuana, but more charges are likely.

Officers worked well into the night chopping down the pot and hauling it off. The pilot, meanwhile, flew back to Asheville to refuel then returned to run air support, both for security and to lend a spotlight as officers dragged armloads of the tall pot stalks down the mountain.

It was a big bust, one of the biggest Haywood has seen in years. Mease said there isn’t as much pot grown today as there used to be. Pot cultivation in the mountains has been tapering off since the 1980s.

“It is a lot of labor. If you have it planted out somewhere on a mountain you have to hike in, and they aren’t willing to do that for the reward,” Mease said.

Plus, searches from the air like this one and the ensuing busts have become an annual ritual this time of year. More pot is being grown indoors in hydroponic operations these days.

Mease doubts this was Messer’s first foray into growing marijuana, not with that many plants under his wing. It’s a lot to maintain.

Had Messer gotten to harvest all that pot, he could have made half a million dollars on the wholesale market, Mease estimates. All that for some seeds, potting soil, a little fertilizer and sweat equity.

“It is a huge profit. There is nothing else you can grow that makes money like that. Of course, there is nothing else you can grow that gets you arrested either,” Mease said.

Conflicts over public land continued to heat up in 2009 as more people turn to outdoor recreation in WNC. More people equals more pressure on the national parks and national forests as they struggle to be all things to all users.

Here’s a recap of some of the conflicts brewing this year.

Chattooga River

Three years in the making, the National Forest Service concluded a study on whether to lift the ban on paddling on the Upper Chattooga River. The long-awaited verdict: to allow paddling, but only in very limited quantities. The proposed compromise would curtail paddling to just a few days out of the year with a cap of 16 paddlers any given day and limited to just seven of the 21 miles now off-limits. Paddlers vowed to keep fighting for full access, while purists lamented even the slightest foot-in-the-door by paddlers.

The forest service’s proposed compromise was dubbed a “preliminary decision.” Another round of public comment followed, with a final decision due out in early 2009.

As part of the decision on paddling, the camp-anywhere status of the Chattooga River backcountry will be changed to designated sites only and parking at roadside pull-offs will be limited to deter overuse.

Graveyard Fields

The popular spot off the Blue Ridge Parkway has long suffered from overuse, but the problem has gotten so bad it degrades the outdoor experience of those who visit.

The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and National Forest Service hatched a plan to rein in use. It includes limiting camping to designated areas, stamping out user-created trails, installing restrooms, and curtailing willy-nilly parking along the roadside by putting in guardrails. The plan was devised this year, but actually putting it in place will happen over the coming year or two.

DuPont State Forest

A prolonged debate on whether to allow bear hunting with dogs in DuPont comes to an end. The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission changed its rules to allow bear hunting in the state forest, despite significant public opposition from hikers, horseback riders and mountain bikers.

But the state forest service, which holds final say, decided it would not allow bear hunting — at least for now.

Fires Creek

The Fires Creek Wilderness in Clay County is threatened by the construction of a road and homes. Owners of a 50-acre tract surrounded by national forest want to build houses on their donut hole of private land, but lack a road to their property. They ask the national forest for right-of-way to build a four-mile road.

While the forest service legally can’t bar access to an in-holding of private land, environmentalists argue that a narrow Jeep trail would suffice as access, and the owners aren’t entitled to a full-blown road.

Panthertown

Use in this idyllic, bowl-shaped paradise has sky-rocketed, prompting the forest service to tackle a trail use and recreation plan. Trails once shared by hikers, mountain bikers and horseback riders will now be designated for specific uses, with many reserved for hiking only. The recreation use plan — which had been several years in the making — also bans guided trips by commercial horse outfitters. The plan went to public comment, but hasn’t yet been implemented.

Tellico

The forest service floated plans to shut down 11 miles of the 40-mile trail system at the Tellico Off-Road Vehicle Area to stem erosion from heavy ATV and four-wheel drive use. For years, rutted-out trails sent reams of mud into waterways, affecting brook trout populations. The forest service was spurred to address the problem by the threat of a lawsuit from environmental groups.

In response, four-wheel drive enthusiasts filed a lawsuit of their own protesting the closure of any trails. The environmental groups came to the defense of the forest service and filed as interveners in the case.

The past year has been marked by some good and not so good news for the environment in Western North Carolina. This week, we look back at some of the top environmental stories of the year.

On the horizon

Duke started building a new coal-fired power plant near Forest City in Rutherford County this year. The very notion of a new coal plant despite the looming planetary catastrophe known as global warming is among the most depressing stories of the year for environmentalists in Western North Carolina.

College students got arrested for civil disobedience at the site of the coal plant where they broke-in and chained themselves to bulldozers. Protestors also descended on a Bank of America shareholders meeting in Charlotte, who are culpable for their role in funding new coal plants. And yet another entourage picketed outside the Asheville office of the N.C. Division of Air Quality, targeted for issuing the air pollution permits to Duke to build the plant.

The Canary Coalition organized a weekly energy boycott encouraging people to turn off their lights for 15 minutes every Sunday night at 9 p.m. hoping to teach Duke a lesson about the power of consumers.

Meanwhile, environmental groups took to the courts to try to stop the new coal plant, or at least make it comply with tougher air standards. A federal court sided with environmental groups’ assertion that Duke was dodging mercury emission standards required under the Clean Air Act. This sent both Duke and the Division of Air Quality back to the drawing board to devise more stringent pollution requirements on toxic substances like mercury, triggering a new round of public hearings in early 2009.

Also on the air front, Canton schools were pinpointed for being exposed to some of the worst air quality in the nation. Students going to school in the shadow of Canton’s paper mill, Evergreen Packaging, are likely exposed to pollutants from the coal-fired boilers operated by the mill.

Watch that water

Speaking of mercury fallout from coal plants, news broke this year that people should watch their intake of certain fish from mountain lakes. Larger species of fish in mountain lakes have unsafe levels of mercury and should be avoided by children and pregnant women and adults should limit they amount they consume.

Samples were taken of walleye on Fontana and Santeetlah lakes, but the results likely apply to all large fish species in all mountain lakes, according to state water quality scientists.

Another not so cheery story for water quality was the revelation that a popular swimming, fishing and wading spot on the Tuckasegee River in Dillsboro is contaminated with high levels of fecal coliform deemed unsafe for extended human contact. The contaminated area, the confluence of the Tuck and Scotts Creek, is also where commercial raft companies start their trips.

Interestingly, the state had failed to inform the public of the water contamination issues until first prodded by the media, namely by The Smoky Mountain News.

Alternative energy

At last a good news story for the environment. Progress Energy sanctioned a giant solar farm to be constructed on an old landfill site in Canton. The $8 million solar farm will make enough electricity to power 1,200 homes. Progress was spurred to pursue the clean power thanks to a new state law requiring them to do so.

Meanwhile, clean fuels continue to catch on. Haywood Community College started making its own biodiesel. The operation doubles as a demo for people to see how it’s done. HCC also adds a biodiesel component to its auto mechanic courses.

Biodiesel got so popular that Jackson County killed plans to make its own biodiesel because the main ingredient — used oil from restaurants — was already all claimed.

When the first batch of 25 elk were released in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park seven years ago, it was dubbed an experiment. Park biologists hoped, but weren’t sure whether the elk would thrive.

Indeed, the early years were touch and go. While a second batch of 27 elk joined the herd the following year, a ban on importing any more elk and poor survival among newborns threatened to stagnate the herd’s numbers.

But now in its eighth year, the elk herd in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has nearly doubled, from the 52 imported elk to an estimated 95 today.

“This year’s calving season was another big success in terms of survival for the calves,” said Joe Yarkovich, Smokies elk project manager.

There were 19 confirmed elk calves born this year with one of the best track records yet —16 are still alive, for an 84 percent survival rate.

In the early years, calf survival averaged just 50 percent due almost entirely to predation by bears. The momma elk have wizened up to the bears in many ways, improving how they camouflage their newborns when they leave their babies’ side to forage and being more aggressive toward any bear seen lurking about.

Park biologists lent a helping hand as well. In 2006, the park trapped bears and temporarily relocated them elsewhere in the park during calving season. It made a huge difference, prompting a repeat performance of the trapping every year since.

The bears are trapped during the late-May to early July calving season, then radio-collared and relocated to the Twenty Mile area at the western edge of Lake Fontana.

Many of the bears eventually return to Cataloochee, but the young calves are mobile enough by then to travel safely with their mothers.

Of the three calves that died this year, Yarkovich said one appeared to die from natural causes while the other two were never found, so they could have died of natural causes or been eaten by bears or coyotes.

It’s all about the females

There was another element threatening the herd’s survival in the early years: bad luck on what should have been a 50-50 coin toss. The momma elk gave birth to far more males than females, producing a lopsided herd. Had it been lopsided in the other direction, biologists would have rejoiced, as it only takes one male elk to get a herd of female pregnant.

“Ultimately, the number of breeding females in the herd will have the greatest effect on their long-term success, so we would always like to see more females being born,” Yarkovich said.

But the odds were in the male camp. That unfortunate trend repeated itself again this year.

“If there is a downside this calving season, the sex ratio of the calves born was fairly poor from the standpoint of herd growth,” Yarkovich said.

Nonetheless, if all the females that gave birth this year do so again, and the new females do as well, the numbers look good.

“In terms of calf production there are several young cows that should give birth to their first calves next summer, so we have the potential for another record-setting year for herd expansion,” Yarkovich said.

Of the 16 calves that survived, only five are female, 10 are male, with the sex of the last one still unknown.

Every year, a few adult elk die from various causes. This year the number was five. Of these, three died of undetermined, but apparently natural, causes. Another was struck by a vehicle along Big Cove Road in Cherokee and was euthanized as a result of the injuries. The fifth, a yearling bull, was found dead in Little Cataloochee on Nov. 5, but necropsy results and disease tests on the animal have not been returned yet.

Yarkovich said he is already looking forward to next years’ mating contests among males.

“Next fall the rut should be quite a contest as we have quite a few bulls which are nearing 10 years of age, which is when they develop the largest antlers,” Yarkovich said. “So if the food supply is good we have the potential for even more spectacular racks to be seen next year. There are also a few rather aggressive younger bulls that will be gaining weight and antler mass, so competition during the 2009 rut should certainly be exciting.”

When Haywood Regional Medical Center suspended its care of Medicare and Medicaid patients last February, Jim Pressley realized there was no time to waste.

The announcement, kept secret by the hospital CEO until the last minute, was effective immediately. The result: hundreds of patients flooding across county lines to the hospitals in either Asheville or Sylva. As the Emergency Services director, Pressley’s job suddenly got a lot harder.

Within 24 hours, Pressley had an extra ambulance added to the county’s fleet.

Ten months later, Pressley says the county needs to keep running that extra ambulance.

Although the hospital has been fully functioning since July, more patients continue to be transported out of the county than previously — mostly to Asheville. Ambulance trips out of the county are up nearly 50 percent this year, Pressley said. Out-of-county transports now account for 26 percent of all ambulance trips.

Aside from the increase in out-of-county transports, EMS has simply seen a rise in calls. Last year, ambulance drivers handled around 8,000 calls. This year it will be nearly 10,000, Pressley said.

That increase, coupled with the continued out-of-county transports, makes the case for making the extra ambulance a permanent part of the county’s fleet, Pressley said. He made a pitch along those lines to the Haywood County commissioners last week.

The county’s budget currently only has enough money to operate the extra ambulance through the end of the year. Pressley asked the commissioners to allocate the money to keep it in operation.

The extra ambulance has been staffed to date with existing medics working overtime. Pressley wants to hire six full-time medics instead. Pressley said the current medics have been worn out on overtime trying to staff the extra ambulance over the past 10 months.

“Quite honestly there are days when it is a struggle to cover that truck with the people we have,” Pressley told commissioners.

To hire the six new full-time medics, it will cost the county $60,000 a year over and above what it is currently paying in overtime. The total cost to staff the extra ambulance is about $400,000 a year, according to Finance Director Julie Davis. The county makes roughly 60 percent of that back through fees paid by patients, their insurance or Medicare.

Since ambulance trips are up, so are payments from patients. In fact, payments are up so much it’s enough to cover the cost of the extra medics without dipping into county coffers for the current fiscal year.

Commissioner Mark Swanger said the extra ambulance sounds like a necessity.

“Given our demographics in Haywood County, we are older than the national average and we aren’t getting any younger,” Swanger said. “I think it is important to keep up with that changing demographics or it will require large sums of money to catch up.”

Pressley said even if the hospital crisis hadn’t occurred, he would have asked the commissioners to fund an additional ambulance this year, citing the rising number of 911 calls and the growing need for transport to high-level trauma care offered at Mission.

Commissioners agreed to make the extra ambulance permanent and will vote for the necessary budget allocation at their first meeting in January.

Straight shot

One reason for the growing out-of-county transports is a new strategy to send trauma patients in need of high-level care directly to Mission Hospital in Asheville. For example, Mission does heart catheterizations, a life saving treatment for heart attack patients, while hospitals of Haywood’s size generally don’t.

“Now when someone has a heart attack we are diagnosing those on the scene and taking a lot of these patients straight on to Mission, not even stopping at the Haywood emergency department and just going straight to the cath lab,” Pressley said.

There’s a similar protocol for stroke patients.

Ambulances often transport patients with broken backs, hips or legs to Mission, too, not because the care couldn’t be handled locally but because Haywood continues to be plagued by an orthopedic shortage. The shortage means there isn’t always an orthopedist on call, so patients even with routine problems could be sent on to Mission sometimes.

“I know HRMC is not alone as a community hospital in their struggle to maintain orthopedic coverage,” Pressley said.

Down to a science

The county runs a fleet of six ambulances, including the extra one slated to become permanent. Each ambulance is assigned a general territory, and sticks to that territory until a call comes in. There’s two in Waynesville, one in Canton, one in Clyde, one in Maggie and one in Bethel.

Before the addition of a sixth ambulance to the fleet, there wasn’t one stationed in Bethel. When a call came in from Bethel, Cruso or Lake Logan, an ambulance roving the Canton or Waynesville territories raced there as fast as they could. With the addition, ambulance crews have shaved five minutes off the average response time to an area that once had the slowest response.

“We’ve made great strides in decreasing our response time to that area,” Pressley said.

But having that sixth ambulance in Bethel helps response times everywhere else as well. When an ambulance assigned to Waynesville was dispatched to Bethel, that left Waynesville down an ambulance. Throughout the day, the roving ambulances are continually shuffled between territories in a pre-emptive strategy to predict where the next calls will come in, a technique called a “move-up.” Pressley said there were 3,000 of these “move-ups” logged this year. “We are constantly moving trucks around to try to anticipate where the next call is going to be with the end goal of trying minimize our response time and maximize the amount of coverage we can provide to the rest of Haywood County,” Pressley said.

Commissioner Curtis Skeeter said he doesn’t want to lose improvements made on response time.

“If we don’t fund this, we are going to backslide,” Curtis said.

Commissioner Kevin Ensley said the county clearly can’t keep using overtime medics to staff the ambulance.

“I got family that lives in that area and I think it is important not to have a fatigued paramedic,” Ensley said.

A cell tower company jumped the gun by building onto its tower without the necessary permits from Haywood County.

Verizon Wireless added 20 feet to the height of its tower off Mauney Cove without applying for a permit. When it eventually submitted one last month, it failed to mention the work had already been done.

County commissioners learned of the blunder at their meeting on Monday (Dec. 15).

“It’s almost like they built it on speculation,” said Commissioner Kevin Ensley.

The construction not only needed a permit, but also an exemption from the county’s cell tower ordinance. The extra 20 feet built onto the tower means the tower’s fall zone is too close to the neighboring property line.

The ordinance requires a fall zone that’s half the height of the tower, which would be 60 feet, and a set back of another 25 feet, from the closest property line. The new height of the tower makes it 6 feet too close to the property line to meet the ordinance — 79 feet instead of 85 feet, Boyd said.

Commissioners asked if that posed a risk to neighbors.

Boyd said cell towers are theoretically built with a weak link at a mid-point in the tower, so should it fall, it buckles on top of itself rather than toppling like a tree.

“I can’t stand here and tell you that I know that 100 percent for sure that’s what would happen but that’s how it is supposed to be designed,” Boyd said

The tower sits below the tree canopy. That wasn’t the case when it was built five years ago, but the trees have since grown taller and obscured the signal.

“We know there is a lack of service in the area,” Boyd said.

Commission Chairman Kirk Kirkpatrick also said he won’t argue with the need for cell service.

“But we certainly don’t need to overlook the fact they built the structure without first going through proper channels,” Kirkpatrick said.

What we know now

The county found out about the illegal construction from neighbors around the tower. When the cell company finally put in its application to increase the tower’s height, the county scheduled the requisite public hearing per the cell tower ordinance.

But when neighbors learned of the pending hearing, they called County Planner Kris Boyd and asked why he would have a hearing for work that had already been done.

The public hearing was supposed to be held at the county commissioners meeting this week, but Boyd recommended calling off the hearing until the county figured out its next move.

“I think the board should determine whether there should be some penalty,” Boyd said.

Verizon Wireless, or any cell company for that matter, doesn’t apply for its own permits. Instead, an outside legal firm handles the permitting on the cell company’s behalf.

Boyd said it’s possible the legal team and construction crews got their signals mixed.

“In talking to them last week, it was very obvious they were just as misinformed as we were,” Boyd said of the company, Crown Castle. “The last question they asked was ‘What do you want us to do to take care of this situation?’”

Commissioner Bill Upton said the commissioners should go ahead with the public hearing on the merits of the application, unswayed by the fact the work has been done.

“I think the only thing we can do is proceed like no work has been done,” Upton said.

If the county commissioners decide not to grant the variance, the company will have to take down what they’ve built.

County commissioners decided the original application is flawed, however, since it makes no mention of the work already being done. So the commissioners decided the company should start over by submitting a new and accurate application, and a new public hearing date would be set.

In the meantime, commissioners heard from neighbors who turned out for the public hearing even though it was technically called off. Neighbors said they were displeased by the situation.

“I feel it is very deceptive. They don’t tell anybody, they just do it,” said Adele Wilkins.

Their top complaint, however, was the construction trucks barreling up and down their gravel road. The road held up poorly to the wear and tear of the big trucks, said Richard Moore.

I don’t have a great objection to the tower being where it is, but I would like to see them do some paving or something,” said Moore, who said the road is in shambles.

Wilkins said the trucks contributed to erosion of the road itself and collapsed some of the shoulders. The trucks also threw dust everywhere and ran over some of her landscaping when turning around in her yard.

As the debate over the Southern Loop rages on, a faceless cadre of number crunchers have been assigned a seemingly impossible task: predict who will be driving on N.C. 107 and why 25 years from now.

The answer could ultimately propel or table the Southern Loop, a proposed bypass around Sylva meant to alleviate congestion on N.C. 107. While 107 serves a dual purpose — both a commercial strip and commuter corridor — the question for planners is whether a new road would divert enough traffic from N.C. 107 to do any good.

“Does a new road in that vicinity offer relief to 107 or does it not?” said Pam Cook, a transportation engineer working with the Jackson County Transportation Task Force. “Does it offer enough help to be worth continuing to look at in more detail?”

For now, DOT’s number crunchers are deploying a complex formula to figure out how many cars will be on the road in the year 2035. The magic number will be unveiled in January.

The numbers being plugged into the formula are coming from the Jackson County Transportation Task Force. The task force met last week to finalize their input.

“What is Jackson County going to look like in 2035? Where is the employment, where is the population going to grow, where will schools grow, how will the college grow?” Cook asked. “That’s what we’ve been looking at for the past couple months.”

The numbers being plugged into the simulations assume the same rate of growth over the next 25 years as the past 25 years, from homes to jobs to population.

County Commissioner William Shelton, who sits on the task force, questioned whether this was an accurate assumption. Shelton said at some point the holding capacity of the land couldn’t keep up with infinite growth at today’s levels. Shelton said there could be a paradigm shift in the county’s future.

“At some point that same template is not going to work, so at what point do you make that determination?” Shelton asked.

DOT planners told the task force not to get too caught up in the details.

“Don’t get too concerned about these growth tables beyond five years,” said Ryan Sherby, community transportation planner for DOT and the Southwestern Commission.

Cook said the projections could be revisited in five to 10 years.

“We plan the worst-case scenario,” Cook said. “If we can back off some, great.”

Considering DOT plans to buy up right-of-way for the Southern Loop in 2015, revisiting the projections in 10 years could be too late to change course.

Shelton again expressed concern that the numbers being plugged into the model are flawed.

“I think it is a fairly safe assumption that the growth pattern we have experienced over the last 30 years isn’t going to continue indefinitely,” Shelton said. “In that case, how are we going to get data? How do we create a model based on what we don’t know?”

Cook said the DOT doesn’t have a magic globe, but can make a fairly safe bet.

“You make your best effort. It’s more than a guess,” Cook said.

All in the formula

Short of standing in the middle of the road with a clipboard to ask drivers where they’re headed, the task force will rely on the DOT’s formula to accurately predict who will on the road and where they’re going to be headed.

While the DOT knows how many people drive on N.C. 107, it doesn’t know whether a student commuting to Western Carolina University stops off for a sausage biscuit at McDonald’s every morning, or whether a professor picks up their kid from band practice on the way home every day.

While straight-up commuters might be candidates for a bypass, the commercial pull of Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Ingles, gas stations and fast-food joints could have drivers seeking out N.C. 107 anyway.

“I think we need to look at what is on 107. If all the commerce and services are on 107, then this connector is not going to take 50 percent of the traffic off or even 25 percent off,” said Susan Leveille, a member of the task force representing the Smart Roads Alliance. “We need to figure that out somehow.”

DOT claims it has a formula that will answer that question.

“We don’t do a survey of every single person and map out every person’s movement, but we know our model does a pretty good job,” Cook said. “It takes into account someone who goes to work, leaves for lunch and comes back. The equations have taken years and years of research to come up with.”

Cook said the DOT’s formulas have proved accurate in Jackson County when used for present-day traffic counts. Applying the formula to today’s demographics — population density, employment, schools, stores and the like — the number crunchers estimated how much traffic should be on which roads. When compared to actual traffic counts — captured by counters across the road — the predictions were accurate within plus or minus 10 percent, Cook said. Cook said that was exceptionally accurate.

But whether the formula will still hold true when projecting traffic for 2035 is another story. There could be entirely new variables, and current ones could be obsolete.

One likelihood is public transportation to and from WCU by then. Allen Grant, a task force member representing Jackson County Greenways, said future public transports up and down N.C. 107 should be factored in to the equation.

“I think we need to put these things into it,” said Grant.

Pat Brown, dean of education and outreach at WCU, agreed.

“I think public transport would relieve some pressure,” said Brown.

But Cook said public transportation wouldn’t put a dent in N.C. 107 traffic and won’t be factored into the 2035 traffic simulations.

“I don’t know that it would be enough to help,” Cook said.

Western’s giant role

A giant wildcard in predicting traffic 25 years from now is Western Carolina University. If the school grows, so grows the county. And growth is most certainly in Western’s plans.

“It seems the elephant in the room is Western’s growth projections,” said Dr. Cecil Groves, the president of Southwestern Community College and member of the task force.

Western plans to more than double the number students taking courses on campus from 7,000 to 15,000 by the year 2035, according to figures shared by Brown.

A lot of that growth could be self contained, however. WCU has aggressive plans for building on-campus housing, coupled with a commercial district to serve students. Known as the Millennial Campus, plans call for a new town center with restaurants, coffee shops, even a grocery store.

“The intent is to support that population,” Brown said. “The students would live there, eat there, have their services there and spend time studying there.”

If so, traffic on N.C. 107 may not be as elevated as it would under the current model that assumes students buzz into Sylva for most of their needs.

Of the 8,000 additional students WCU foresees, 3,000 would live on campus and 5,000 off-campus.

Jay Spiro, a member of the task force representing the Jackson County Smart Growth Alliance, asked how certain WCU is that the growth will come to fruition.

“When you start talking about 2035, it is definitely guess land —fantasy world is more like it,” Brown replied.

Groves said that regardless of the exact numbers, WCU would certainly grow and the role of N.C. 107 as a gateway would only become more important over the years.

What’s next?

After the traffic projections for 2035 are unveiled to the task force next month, the real work begins. The task force will start to develop ideas for solving transportation issues, namely congestion.

“They’ll brainstorm alternatives to help relieve any problem areas,” Cook said.

The result will be a “comprehensive transportation plan,” but the problem areas getting the most attention will be the main drag of N.C. 107 and U.S. Business 23.

The goal of the task force’s transportation plan will be reducing congestion during rush hour periods, regardless if it occurs any other time of day, Cook said.

Leveille questioned whether such an approach is realistic. Rush hour congestion is part of life, she said.

“The goal to have no traffic congestion is lala land. It is just not achievable ever,” Leveille said.

Cook said she hopes the duration of rush hour congestion would be taken into consideration. If it’s just a short window, building the Southern Loop might be overkill versus other solutions.

“I would certainly say if it is only 30 minutes I would hope they look at congestion management,” Cook said.

Congestion management experts within DOT have already taken a gander at N.C. 107. With so much publicity brewing over the road, the experts made a trip here from Raleigh to see if any quick fixes jumped out at them.

“That’s a practice I would like to see in DOT, for congestion management to come in and offer simple suggestion if there are any,” Cook said.

The idea of fixing N.C. 107 congestion without building a new road will be explored more fully as part of yet another more formal study currently under way.

With only a couple weeks left for holiday shopping, local outfitters are stocked with solutions for the outdoor aficionados on your list. Even for the casual outdoors person, simply living in the mountains gives rise to the need for outdoor-related items, whether it’s trinkets like carabineer flashlights or expensive winter jackets.

We checked in with outdoor shops for a few suggestions to whet your appetite.

Budget stocking stuffers

n The stainless steel water bottles with screw-on tops are all the rage, from the woods to the office. Although they have an uncanny resemblance to camping stove fuel canisters, they are durable, lightweight and have nearly nudged the old Nalgene bottles out of the market. Every outdoor store carries them in a line of funky metallic colors.

n The Nantahala Outdoor Center carries a cool item called Kayak Joe Benders, a crazy bendable stick figure sitting in a little tin kayak. You can stick it on your fridge or on your desk at work to remind you of what you’d rather be doing. The little dude is a hip and cheap trinket for boaters. “We tell people it is our number one selling kayak,” said Melanie Singer, the manager of the outfitters store at NOC.

n It’s the T-shirt to have in the paddling world: “Paddle faster, I hear banjo music,” the shirt reads. NOC keeps it well stocked. “We get orders for that shirt from all over the country,” Singer said. For those who don’t know, the reference is to the movie “Deliverance,” which was filmed in the area in the 1970s.

n While socks might sound unexciting — like the gift you got dad as a kid — who can’t use an extra pair or two of Wigwam or Smart Wool socks? They are no doubt the prized possession of your sock drawer, and the more pairs you have the less you have to ration yourself. While the big, thick ones are great for inside your hiking boots, the light weight ones give you all the benefits of moisture-wicking fabric for a day around town or at the office.

“They’re for everyday use and also when you are out camping,” said Drew Cook, the manager at Blackrock Outdoor in Sylva.

n Maps, maps and more maps. Even those who don’t plan on any bushwhacking expeditions, maps of the mountains are just fun to pore over.

“We have plenty of maps for all of Western Carolina and Northern Georgia and Tennessee,” Cook said of Blackrock in Sylva.

Or, go full hog with a CD-ROM of the Southern Appalachian mountains allowing the user to zoom-in as detailed as they’d like for armchair perusing or to print out ahead of an adventure. With the CD-ROMS, you can periodically update the data to stay on top of the latest map editions.

n Useful for the outdoors, little LED lights come in all shapes and sizes and make perfect small gifts. NOC has a line of little lights called Life lights. “They are little carabineer flashlights shaped like little critters, like salamander and bears. They are really cute,” said Singer.

Toggle lights at Mast General Store are mini-lights that go on the drawstring of a jacket, backpack or anything with a cord. They weigh nothing but give you a light where you need it.

As for the ubiquitous Key chain light, who couldn’t use one? “It’s a cool gift that every time they use it will say ‘Oh yeah, cool Jay gave me this,’” said Jay Schoon, outdoors gear expert at Mast General Store in Waynesville.

n Hands-free lights — what they call headlamps now — are useful to anyone, not just those backpacking or night riding. They can be used around the house, whether you’re trying to see in the attic or take the dog out at night.

Outdoor clothing

n You can’t go wrong with outdoor clothing, according to Jay Schoon, outdoors gear expert at Mast General Store in Waynesville. Schoon sometimes sees shoppers riffle through the price tags on North Face fleeces and winter jackets and question why they should pay more instead of going for a look-alike product at Wal-Mart.

“What’s the difference? It lasts,” Schoon said of the real McCoy brands. Instead of a jacket that will last a year or two before it either comes apart or starts looking ratty, the outdoor clothing lines at Mast and other outfitters are products that will still be with you a decade from now.

“This one has been through hell and back,” Schoon said of his own Patagonia fleece.

It’s also about buying a coat that will be someone’s “favorite” thing to put on instead of something they’ll wear a year and then send to the thrift store.

“You’re going to feel good when you put it on and you are going to enjoy it more than you would a cheaper version,” Schoon said. “I would rather have one really good jacket than three that are so-so.”

Buying quality products rather than cheap ones that need constant replacing is better for the environment and the economy.

“That’s the right way for us to go as a country,” Schoon said.

Drew Cook of Blackrock in Sylva agreed. Whether it’s Patagonia, Mountain Hardware, North Face or Columbia, the extra cost is worth it.

“Compared to the cheaper knock-off companies, they are better quality, they last longer, they will keep you warmer, they have better wind stopper performance and better waterproof performance,” said Cook.

Schoon said he is offering deep discounts now to get people buying, making it a good time to strike if a purchase is in your future.

n The latest and coolest shoes for outdoorsy types are Keen shoes — the Austin for men and the Presidio for women, said Melanie Singer an NOC. They’re lace-up soft leather, looking like a cross between a hiking shoe, bowling shoe and dress shoe.

“They are super comfortable and stylish,” Singer said. “Pretty much all of our staff either have them or want them. That is the hot thing going on around here.”

n With the tough times, who doesn’t need a reminder that life is still good in WNC. Jake’s Mountain House in Sylva, run in conjunction with Blackrock, has the full-line of Life is Good clothing and paraphernalia.

“Basically everything you need from ‘Life is Good’ we got it,” Cook said.

Specialty items

n With disc golf courses at WCU, the Waynesville reek park and soon on the campus of Haywood Community College, the sport is surging. Blackrock in Sylva carries a full spread of disc golf gear. He’s got every type of disc from drivers to mid-range putters, disc golf baskets for mounting your own practice goal out back, carrying bags and other accessories.

n Bike accessories are a good buy for the biker on your list, said John Midge, the owner of Rolls Rite Bicycles in Waynesville. There’s always new gadgets to be had — gloves, lights, mirrors, hand grips, speedometers, water bottles and locks to name a few. For carrying stuff on your bike, there’s everything from racks for books to zipper pouches for a wallet. If you know a biking parent of a small child, a pull-along for kids to ride in behind the bike is super present.

If you don’t know what to get, buy a gift certificate, said Dave Molin, who works at Motion Makers bike shop in Sylva.

“If someone isn’t all that familiar with the bicycle world, they are overwhelmed when they come in here because they don’t know what all these gadgets are for,” Molin said. But that biker on your list does, and armed with a gift certificate will be like a kid in a candy store.

n What about the fisherman on your list? Matt Rosenthal, the owner of Waynesville Fly Shop, recommends a fly-tying kit.

“This is a great time of year to bunk in and get ready for the spring. You have time in the evenings when it’s cold and gets dark early,” Rosenthal said. But be warned, once you learn to tie flies, it’s addictive.

“A lot of times once they start they completely get absorbed by it,” Rosenthal said. “It is a productive way to spend time, too, because you are actually saving money.”

For the fisherman who already has the gear he needs and a workshop full of tying materials, you could pick up a video. Topics range from casting instruction or region specific information like where to fish in the Smokies.

And fishermen always like to surround themselves with fishing décor, so the fly shop has everything from hand-painted gourds with trout or paddles with carved outdoors scenes.