When Mary Ann Enloe was growing up in the blue-collar hub of Hazelwood, she didn’t know anyone with an alarm clock. The town woke to the sound of the factory whistle and followed its cues all day long.

“Everybody here had jobs,” said Enloe. “Industry is what made Hazelwood what it was.”

The town’s stationary and the badges of police officers even bore the town’s motto: “A Center of Diversified Industry.”

Tight-knit neighborhoods proliferated around several factories, especially after WWII. A quintessential mill town, everyone walked to work carrying their lunch pails. Credit flowed from merchants, be it the local grocer, the drug store or dress shop.

“I could go down there and get what I wanted and it would be written up on mother’s bill,” recalled Enloe, who was the last mayor of Hazelwood before it merged with Waynesville. Enloe’s father was also mayor of the former town.

But one by one, the factories have closed shop: a leather tannery, a textile mill, a furniture plant, a rubber factory. There was just one holdout from a bygone era— until now. Wellco shoe plant announced last week that it will cease operations in Waynesville in September, taking with it 80 jobs and yet another piece of Hazelwood’s former heart and soul.

Wellco shoe plant opened in Waynesville in 1941. Enloe remembers Wellco’s early days, when you could walk through town and see women on their porches stitching boots under contract for Wellco.

“They have been extremely important to Hazelwood,” Enloe said of Wellco. “This is a sad day for Hazelwood.”

Wellco was taken over by new owners in 2007. The owners issued a press release announcing the closure last week, but declined to elaborate beyond calling the plant “no longer economically feasible.”

Wellco had long been battling the pressures of cheaper imports, said Rolf Kaufman, president of the company for 30 years and vice chairman up until 2007.

In Wellco’s early days, it made shoes of all sorts and even slippers, but the market “became so dominated by imports from China we could not longer compete,” Kaufman said.

Over the years, Wellco had shifted more and more of its production to Puerto Rico where wages and overhead were cheaper. By the mid-1990s, nearly all production was done in Puerto Rico to remain viable, but it was an uphill battle to compete against plants in Mexico, China and India.

Wellco ultimately survived as long as it did by catering to a single but powerful customer: the U.S. military.

“The military must purchase garments, including footwear, from U.S. sources whenever available,” Kaufman said. “That protection did save us.”

Wellco began courting military orders in the 1960s, when the company’s innovative technology for attaching soles to boots proved invaluable.

“They had so much trouble in Vietnam in the jungle with soles not staying attached,” Kaufman said.

Military contracts became a larger and larger portion of Wellco’s production line, eventually dominating it operations.

A mega developer in Jackson County has landed in foreclosure due to sluggish lot sales in the down real estate economy.

Legasus development company saw a portion of its massive land holdings auctioned off on the courthouse steps last week. The company’s business plan is not uncommon among developers: borrowing money to buy the land, market lots and build roads, meanwhile banking on revenue from lot sales to pay the debt. But lots sales haven’t been forthcoming, and the company couldn’t make its payments.

Over-extended developers have been on the rise, according to Rick Boyd, the trustee handling the sale.

Just five years ago, Boyd did an average of three to five foreclosures a month. Now, he may see as many as 40.

The day of the Legasus’ sales last week, Boyd had 20 foreclosures in one day, dashing from Haywood to Jackson to Macon counties all before lunchtime to read out lists of foreclosure notices on the courthouse steps.

While most are single homes and lots, developers with large tracts have been turning up in the mix as well.

“I have done quite a few of the developers that have over-built and got caught,” said Boyd, a real estate broker with Beverly Hanks in Waynesville. “They needed to sell so many lots per quarter to maintain their payments, and when those slowed down they didn’t have the reserves to keep up with the payments. People never foresaw they would build four or five spec homes and have them sit on the market for over two years.”

The foreclosure proceedings against Legasus are for two large tracts: a 368-acre tract on Cullowhee Mountain that’s part of the River Rock development and a 630-acre tract in Whittier called High Grove. They are two of the largest tracts Boyd has seen go into foreclosure.

In both cases, the opening bids were made by Macon Bank, the lender that initiated the foreclosure. Bidding on the tracts can, and likely will, continue for weeks. Buyers have 10 days to submit an upset bid through the court. An upset bid has to be at least 5 percent more than the previous bid.

Phone calls to Legasus’ president, Legasus’ project developer and Legasus’ primary owner were not returned.

Bidding war ahead

Few large tracts of this magnitude have changed hands since the housing boom tapered off two years ago.

The final selling price could be a sign of whether investor confidence has returned in the real estate market, according to Todd Baucom, a real estate broker with Western Carolina Properties in Cullowhee.

“This will be a big signal,” Baucom said. “The question will be how high it goes.”

Baucom predicts the current bid of roughly $5,300 an acre for the Cullowhee Mountain tract could approach $7,000 an acre by the time bidding tops out.

As for the Whittier tract, the rock bottom opening bid of $357 an acre could make for a wild ride.

“That is going to upset and upset and upset. It could go through upsets for the next year,” Baucom said. “It will be very interesting to see what plays out with that.”

It is highly unusual to see an opening bid that is so low compared to the assessed value of the property. Typically, the opening bid is put down by the bank or lender that initiated the foreclosure — in essence buying up their own debt to protect their investment.

What makes the foreclosure unusual is that Macon Bank was owed so little — only $305,000 — on a tract worth millions. Macon Bank’s initial loan to Legasus was for $400,000 in 2004 to fund development activity on the tract. Legasus had paid off some of it, leaving a debt of just $305,000.

Given the small sum that was actually owed, it seems Legasus would try hard to come up with the money and hang on to the land. Baucom surmised Legasus wanted to divest themselves of the tract anyway and therefore didn’t fight to save it.

There’s another possible explanation: more outstanding debt associated with the High Grove tract. Even if Legasus got out from under its small debt to Macon Bank, there was a much larger lender waiting in the wings: a lender of last resort known as Kennedy Funding.

Legasus had borrowed $9.5 million against the property from Kennedy Funding last April. It’s not known exactly how much of the $9.5 million Legasus ever saw, however. Kennedy only made a portion of the full loan available through draw downs. Legasus apparently never realized the full amount of the loan promised by Kennedy.

Whatever Kennedy is still owed will come out of the final sale price.

Collateral for loans

Until recently Legasus owned more than 4,000 acres in Jackson County. The majority of the holdings were in the Tuckasegee and Glenville area, where plans called for 1,800 lots in five separate gated communities spanning 3,500 acres.

In addition to the foreclosures last week, Legasus sold off 300 acres to a private investor for $10.1 million two weeks ago.

The first sign of financial trouble for Legasus appeared in late 2007 when Legasus sold off 850 acres to a private investor for $16 million.

A few months later, the company sought financing from hard-money lender Kennedy Funding for $30 million: $9.5 million using the High Grove development in Whittier as collateral and $20.5 million using a portion of River Rock as collateral.

Legasus has been adept at using its land holdings to leverage financing. Legasus has used various parcels as collateral for more than 50 loans from at least two dozen different banks and lenders to finance property, according to a search with the Jackson County Register of Deeds Office.

It is difficult to figure out just how much outstanding debt Legasus has on all its property. For starters, the loans aren’t all in Legasus’ name. Legasus sometimes created subsidiaries to run the loans through, making it impossible to search for all of them unless you know the names of the subsidiaries.

In addition, there is no way to tell from the deeds of trust how much Legasus has paid back versus how much it still owes on each loan.

Aside from the two big tracts under foreclosure, Legasus is facing foreclosure on a few small lots as well. Last week, two lots of two acres each in the Water Dance development between Tuckasegee and Glenville were sold at foreclosure. The two lots went for a total of $325,000, purchased by Macon Bank, who was doing the foreclosing. Legasus still owed on a $423,000 loan made by Macon Bank in 2006.

There are pending foreclosures against five additional lots in Water Dance.

Only the most farsighted and intuitive of those who labored for the creation of the Smokies could have foreseen the slate of environmental challenges that would be facing the park mere decades after President Franklin Roosevelt stood astride the North Carolina-Tennessee border at Newfound Gap in 1940 and officially dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Roosevelt could see over the heads of onlookers to vistas 80 miles away. But today — on a good day, primarily in winter — you might get a vista of 25 miles. The brown haze that plagues Atlanta, Knoxville, Asheville and other urban centers is trapped against the mountains and bathes the park in pollution while reducing visibility.

Invasive, exotic species of plants and animals have crept into the park and are wreaking havoc on natural ecosystems. The popularity of the Smokies — the most visited park in the country with more than 9 million visitors each year — brings its own set of environmental challenges. Meanwhile the specter of anthropogenic global warming hangs over the park like a black fog.

 

Ecosystem assault

“The issue of invasive species is number one in my book,” said Greg Kidd, senior program manager of the National Parks Conservation Association’s Blue Ridge Field Office. “What makes the Smokies so incredible is the opportunity to keep this unique set of ecosystems intact. But the fact is we have so many exotic, invasive species in the park now, hammering at the natural ecosystems, particularly the diversity of tree species, that it’s not too hard to envision a Great Smoky Mountains National Park devoid of much of its ecosystem diversity.”

Indeed, the biodiversity of the Smokies, with its amazing array of ecosystems, is what makes the park so unique. The Smokies has some of the most diverse plant life on the planet — more than 130 tree species alone. Arthur Stupka, who served as the park’s first naturalist from 1935 to 1965, put the Smokies lush forests in perspective this way: “Vegetation is to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park what granite domes are to Yosemite, geysers are to Yellowstone and sculptured pinnacles are to Bryce Canyon National Park.”

But 75 years, later, that diversity is being threatened.

The balsam woolly adelgid has decimated most of the high-elevation Fraser Firs and the hemlock woolly adelgid is quickly dispatching hemlocks across the park. Butternut canker, dogwood anthracnose and beech bark disease are changing the composition of the park’s mighty forests.

Meanwhile, invasive plants pose a serious and silent threat of their own. As they edge out native flora, the natural balance between the park’s plants and animals that evolved in tandem over the eons is being thrown off-kilter. On a micro-level, even soil chemistry is disrupted by a takeover of an exotic plant species.

Supervisory Forester Kris Johnson and her staff have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with alien species like multiflora rose, garlic mustard, honeysuckle, princess tree and a multitude of others. The Smokies actively targets 50 species of invasives. Tactics include labor intensive digging and pulling by hand, as well as the use of chemicals.

“We’ve been working on invasives for decades and we are seeing the benefits in many of our target areas,” Johnson said. “But we’ll never reach any kind of equilibrium. There is just too much constant pressure from outside the park.”

Rooting out exotics from an area the size of the Smokies is daunting, but with the sanctity of the largest intact ecosystem in the Southern Appalachians on the line, it’s a battle worth fighting, said Bob Gale, a biologist with the WNC Alliance, an environmental group working with the park to combat exotic plants. When Gale escorted a volunteer corp to pull a privet infestation in the Deep Creek area, the sight was depressing at first.

“It was so bad it was literally the entire understory of the forest,” Gale said. “We lost all the plant diversity on the forest floor.” Just a year after their work, native plants are springing back from the forest floor, Gale said, calling it a “miracle.”

 

Air pollution woes

On hot summer days, visitors seeking the respite of cool mountain air in the Smokies might be shocked to see a sign in the park visitor center warning of dangerous ozone levels. Rangers even have to cancel guided hikes, as physical exertion under high ozone conditions is ill-advised.

Air quality monitors show the Smokies has some of the most polluted air in the nation, stemming mostly from dirty coal-fired power plants hundreds of miles away, and to a lesser extent auto emissions from distant urban areas. The Smokies’ high ridges are particularly susceptible to wafting pollution. Researchers over the past decade have shown a direct correlation between ozone levels and leaf die-back on certain plant species.

But the average tourist doesn’t need an air monitor to tell them there’s pollution in the air.

“It’s easy to see that visibility is not as good as it was,” said Jim Renfro, air quality specialist in the park since 1986. The park is even in violation of federal air quality standards.

The political will to make coal plants clean up their act has been slow at best, Kidd said. So environmental groups have turned to the legal arena over the past decade and successfully forced progress on the issue. The state of North Carolina even got in on the act by suing the Tennessee Valley Authority, a major source of dirty coal pollution for the region, and won its case this year. Impacts of TVA’s pollution on the Smokies figured prominently in North Carolina’s legal argument, including a claim that tourists will stop coming if the famed mountain vistas are obscured by smog.

 

Global warming in the Smokies

Air pollution also takes the form of acid rain, which is five to 10 times more acidic than normal. As a result, some high elevation streams have an acid content comparable to 200 railroad cars of sulfuric acid being spilled in the park each year, according to researchers. A loss of brook trout in particular is blamed primarily on acidification of streams, which alters the ions in their blood, according to park researchers.

Soil in the park has grown more acidic since regular monitoring began in the mid-1980s, which could eventually prove harmful to some plant species. The high peaks of the Smokies, often shrouded in clouds, even have the unusual problem of acid fog.

Another side effect of air pollution is mercury fallout, which also comes from coal-fired power plants. Mercury levels in Lake Fontana, flanking the park’s southern end, led the state of North Carolina to issue a consumption advisory for wall-eye from the lake last year.

Over the past 10 years, monitoring shows air quality in the park is improving or at least remaining stable.

“We’re mandated to preserve our resources unimpaired for future generations so we keep doing what we can do — monitoring, research, educating and sharing our information with regulatory agencies,” said Renfro, a self-avowed optimist. “It’s not going to happen in the next 10 years but we’re making advances. And the fixes are there. The technology exists.”

Another side effect of air pollution is global warming. It poses a serious threat to the park’s ecosystems. Plants and animals have adapted to niche microclimates on the flanks of the mountains, each claiming its own corner in the spectrum of elevations. If the temperature gradient shifts, the niches could be bumping into each other or simply disappear.

The Smokies has been highly engaged in climate research in recent years, both in-house and from outside researchers who see the range of elevations in the park as fertile ground for tracking temperature changes. Global warming is now leading the research permits sought in the park.

A leading climate researcher in the park, Syracuse professor Jason Fridley, peppered the park with 170 temperature-loggers about the size of a nickel called “eye-buttons.” While some theories assumed the species adapted to the highest, coldest peaks could get pushed off the top of the mountain if temperatures warm, Fridley found that the peaks could hold their own thanks to the cooling effect of moisture while the ecosystems in the mid-range elevations get compressed.

 

Loved to death

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited in the country. It’s a badge worn with honor, but comes with its own share of challenges. Take the 1.5 million visitors that swarm Cades Cove every year, and just that small slice of the Smokies would still rank in the top 10 most visited parks.

“An overcrowding of vehicles in certain parts of the park puts a terrible strain on the resources,” Kidd said. “People pull off and park anywhere they can. They get stuck in traffic jams with idling engines spewing exhaust. People who planned on a pleasant trip in the park find themselves in a four-hour traffic jam.”

North Carolina is oft-called the quieter side of the Smokies without the hoards or hustle and bustle found around Gatlinburg.

“For whatever complex of reasons, once you get more than three or so miles from a trail head, you very quickly find yourself without a whole lot of people around,” Kidd said. “You can very quickly find solitude in the Smokies.”

But the human impacts are nonetheless an issue to grapple with. The Smokies’ popularity strikes at the conundrum faced by any national park. The best way to protect it would be placing it in a lock-box, off-limits to humans. But the mission of the park service calls for providing for the park’s enjoyment today while at the same time protecting it “unimpaired” for future generations.

“When you think about the problems facing the park, it’s actually quite remarkable what a good job the Smokies has done through the years to accommodate all the visitors as well as they do,” Kidd said. “It’s a huge task to provide a high-level wilderness experience while policing the resources at the same time.”

Legasus developers have been attracting attention from Jackson County residents for almost two years.

When news of the plans got out in early 2007 — calling for 1,800 lots on 3,500 acres between Tuckasegee and Glenville — Legasus evoked the ire of locals. While Legasus developers pledged to create a high-quality, environmentally-friendly development, locals feared the loss of viewsheds, degradation to water quality and an eroding sense of place from the growth of gated communities.

Residents of Tuckasegee publicly raised concerns about what would happen if the developers got part way into the project only to realize they didn’t have the capital to see it through.

“Two years ago I said, ‘What if the housing bubble bursts?’” recalled Jeanette Cabanis Brewin, a resident in Tuckasegee. “What if they get up there and start ripping the top of the mountain off and they run out of money? What is going to happen to the rest of us?”

That fear has indeed played out in some places.

“Legasus is definitely not alone. There are so many right now that have folded,” said Bryan Tompkins with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Asheville.

Tompkins has seen developers make an initial foray into development, cutting roads and grading lots, only to find out there isn’t a market for those lots after all.

“When they go bust, they have all these roads cut and they are not there to maintain it,” Tompkins said.

Environmental agencies are left trying to figure out what to do and who is responsible. In Madison County, a development abandoned by its owner needs $750,000 in work to get it back in compliance, Tompkins said. Tompkins wonders if a new owner would be able to take on such a liability.

“Who can do that and what bank is going to give you money to do that?” Tompkins said.

 

Vested rights

Rumors of Legasus’ plans in early 2007 helped spur the creation of a comprehensive development ordinance in Jackson County. The county adopted some of the most stringent development guidelines in the mountains.

The very development that led to the creation of the ordinances was ultimately grandfathered in, however. Legasus received vested rights, allowing it to proceed with development plans exempt from Jackson County’s new rules.

The vested rights most likely will be passed on to any new owner, according to Michael Egan, an attorney in Hendersonville who advised Jackson County during the creation of its development ordinances.

“It would be my opinion that common law vested rights would run with the land,” Egan said.

Vested rights are intended to protect developers caught mid-stream by new ordinances. Legasus argued they’d already spent a great deal designing a master plan and marketing the development to prospective buyers. If they had to start over again, they would be unable to recoup the investment they already had in it, they argued.

The same still holds true, Egan said. If the vested rights don’t pass to the new owner, it would devalue the selling price of the land, and put Legasus back in the same spot of being unable to recoup its investment, he said.

There is one catch, however. Legasus’ argued that all 3,500 acres were entitled to vested rights, even though development forays were further along on some of its tracts than others. Legasus claimed that the disparate tracts shared a common marketing theme. Residents of each development could use the amenities of the other properties, from a clubhouse at one to the golf course at another.

“If a sale of the property would somehow interfere with that common promotional plan then it is possible it might affect the vested rights,” Egan said.

Vested rights aren’t good forever. In this case, the county granted vested rights for five years.

“The clock is ticking,” said Jeanette Cabanis Brewin, a resident in Tuckasegee who has expressed concerns about the mega development. “They have used up almost two and half years of their five years.”

The economic slump may have given the community a reprieve, said Mary Jo Cobb, a Tuckasegee resident who was opposed to the scale of the development.

Most of all, “I hope this has bought us some more time to step back,” Cobb said. “There is so much interest in our environment now than there ever was before. I think that is good. We need to be aware and preserve these mountains.”

Cobb hopes the foreclosure will sideline Legasus’ plans for a golf course.

“That would be fine with me,” Cobb said.

Indeed, the foreclosure throws the fate of a controversial Phil Mickelson-designed golf course on Legasus’ property into question. A tract currently in foreclosure encompasses some of the land slated for a golf course in Legasus’ original plans.

The buyer of the tract could decide to partner with Legasus, in which case the golf course could still be pursued. If the buyer goes off on their own, Legasus could be forced to redesign the course on a different portion of the property or scale it down.

The golf course has yet to receive its state and federal environmental permits. The Army Corps of Engineers and the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources had several concerns with the original design. Legasus’ application has been on hold until it could address those issues — for nearly 18 months now.

“They have not made any effort to address those concerns,” according to Bryan Tompkins with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Legasus has lined up a biologist to conduct a bat survey of old mine caves on the property in the fall, but that has been the only movement Tompkins knows of.

Thompkins said it was abnormal to go so long without hearing from Legasus. Tompkins monitors environmental permits from developers all over Western North Carolina and often has to send them back to the drawing board.

“When things were going like gangbusters we would have gotten a response a month later,” Tompkins said of typical developers. “They would turn around with a response on a dime to speed up the permitting process so they could get on with their project.”

The recent news that part of the property is in foreclosure could explain Legasus’ silence, Tompkins said.

In the heyday of curbside service, Jim Caldwell had a special talent for dressing hot dogs.

He could balance 10 buns up on one arm, stacked from his wrist to his bicep, while his other wielded ketchup and mustard bottles, striping the dogs in rapid succession, sprinkling them with onions and topping with chili.

Those were the glory days though, and the cars that once lined the curb in front of Jim’s Drive-In on South Main Street in Waynesville are few and far between today. The once blue-collar community anchored by four factories and tight-knit neighborhoods has been slowly deteriorating over the years, largely passed over by urban renewal.

“It’s just really decrepit looking,” said Joellen Habas, who travels the South Main business district several times a day. “They are never going to attract businesses if that stretch is so ugly.”

Planning is currently under way to overhaul the corridor, which connects downtown Waynesville with a new Super Wal-Mart at the south end of town. The road passes through three distinct districts: a residential stretch defined by affluent homes and mature trees, a mixed-use district with professional offices, and a commercial stretch.

After years of prodding by town leaders, the N.C. Department of Transportation has launched a feasibility study for a redesign of South Main Street. A public meeting was held Monday (July 13) to gather input from the community on which plan they prefer. Nearly 150 people turned out to voice their opinions.

While planning is only in the early stages, it already promises to be a bitter debate over how wide the road should be, particularly through the main commercial district. Some want more lanes to prime the pump for redevelopment, others want a small-town feel. Some want to hang on to the strip of old buildings, others want to raze them and start over.

There are three options currently on the table. One calls for keeping it two lanes, one calls for adding a single middle turn lane, and one calls four four-lanes with a small raised median. The four-lane version, which also includes sidewalks, bike lanes and street trees on both sides of the road, would consume 120 feet of right of way. A road that wide would take out nearly all the existing businesses on both sides of the road, according to the DOT.

Business owners along South Main Street don’t want to see their buildings bulldozed in the name of progress.

“It would take a barrel full of money to buy that much property,” said Dick Bradley, the owner of an Ace Hardware and gun store on the corridor.

While not a fan of a significantly wider road, Bradley does think the road needs an appearance overhaul.

“The junk cars, the filthy lots, the big weeds,” Bradley said of the aesthetic problems plaguing the road.

Currently, the road has patchy sidewalks and lacks curbs, with the road and adjacent parking lots forming a giant sea of continuous asphalt.

Long-time residents are distraught about the thought of razing the corridor in the name of gentrification, however.

“I can’t see them doing something like this just because Wal-Mart moved up here,” said Oma Lou Leatherwood, 63, who lives just off South Main Street. “It seems like they are trying to get rid of old Hazelwood to beautify the town. That’s what the whole purpose is.”

The area seems primed for redevelopment, although it has not yet been realized. Many properties in the commercial district are for sale or perpetually for rent. Economic development planners thought Super Wal-Mart’s recent arrival would spur growth along the corridor, with corporate chains like Chili’s and Walgreens expressing interest so far.

“Change is something that happens whether you want it to or not,” said Thom Morgan, the owner of Mountain Energy gas station along South Main.

Morgan has bought additional property to the rear of his lot that would allow him to move back should widening claim the front of his convenience store. Morgan hoped to use the extra property for an expansion, however, with plans to add more pumps, make his store bigger and bring in a Dairy Queen.

Morgan has already started designing a site plan for the expansion.

“I’m ready to start doing something in the next year,” Morgan said.

But a final road design could be years away, making it difficult for anyone to redevelop while in limbo over how much property a wider road might claim.

 

How wide is too wide?

Many at the meeting questioned the need for four lanes.

“There doesn’t seem to me like there is too much traffic,” said Joellen Habas, who travels the South Main business district several times a day.

“It gets backed up a little when people get off work, but then it moves on,” agreed Leatherwood.

Henry Foy, the former long-time mayor of Waynesville, said a two-lane road with roundabouts would suffice to handle traffic. Foy wants to preserve the small town feel. He said a large four-lane road with a median would destroy the town’s character.

“We don’t want Waynesville to get that big,” Foy said.

Habas said she doesn’t want another major commercial thoroughfare like Russ Avenue. Instead, add some sidewalks and curbs, plant some trees, but leave the basic width alone, she said.

Patrick Bradshaw, an engineer with an office on South Main, said a four-lane with a median would be “overkill.”

Bradshaw said town leaders understand that, but the challenge will be convincing the DOT of that. Bradshaw thinks a combination of turn lanes, intersection redesign and congestion management techniques could improve traffic flow without a drastic widening.

Tracy McCracken, who owns property on South Main Street, called the four-lane design “too much for that part of town.”

Waynesville town leaders have not weighed in on which design they prefer. Alderwoman Libba Feichter said the town board will likely endorse a vision at some point.

“I feel like it would let people know we are together, that this is the plan that suits our community,” Feichter said.

Feichter hopes it is possible to pick a combination of plans, judiciously adding extra lanes at intersections but not the full length of the corridor.

The public seems united on one front: to leave the road alone through the core residential stretch. Widening that stretch would take out the tunnel of mature shade trees arching over the road.

“I don’t want them to destroy the character of our town,” said Pam Kearney, who lives in a neighborhood off the residential stretch of South Main.

As 10-year-old Dayini Lossie stood on the shore eyeing the wide shallow waters of the Tuckasegee River last week listening to the marching orders for the exercise about to unfold, one word came to mind: awesome.

Lossie had never heard of a fish weir before, but now she was about to walk in her ancestors’ footsteps, using the same stone wall her people built centuries ago to once again — hopefully — trap some fish.

“The objective is to herd the fish, stomping and screaming and basically scaring them downstream,” explained Mark Cantrell, a biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

Lossie, along with two dozen other Cherokee students, couldn’t wait. They’d been in and out of the river all day, their shoes, shirts and shorts soaked through many times over as they swam, splashed and explored aquatic biology along the way.

But as they waded into the river this time, stringing themselves out in a long line and facing the ancient weir downstream, they realized they were part of something big.

“We’re learning about our history and how our ancestors used the river,” Lossie said.

As the students began moving downstream, flushing the fish toward a trap at the mouth of the weir, it didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. One student would fall, then another, then suddenly the chain would disintegrate leaving big gaps for the fish to sneak through. Some started splashing each other instead of the water in front of them. Others took intermittent breaks to float on their backs.

But eventually, the line closed in on the weir and two modest-sized fish were ushered into the trap.

“We all would have starved if this was dinner tonight,” Cantrell declared.

It became apparent just how much cooperation a fish weir entailed.

“I learned so much myself,” said Roger Clapp, director of the Watershed Association of the Tuckasegee River, which coordinated the event. “Though it is obvious, you could really see how Cherokee fishing at a weir is a community experience, not just one, two or three people.”

The re-enactment was orchestrated by WATR, an environmental group whose central focus is water quality. Funding came from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Bank of Canada and WATR. To help pull off the re-enactment, biologists with the Cherokee Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and several volunteers with WATR pitched in.

The field trip brought kids not only in touch with their heritage, but the ecosystem, Clapp said.

Armed with nets and buckets, kids took to the river upturning rocks and sifting through sediment in search of crawdads, bugs and fish lurking below the surface. A science station allowed them to examine their finds under microscopes.

“The creek bottom underneath them is actually teeming with life,” said Clapp. “It is a living ecological unit.”

The students also got to hear a program from Russ Townsend, a historic preservation officer for the Cherokee, who quizzed them on the role rivers played for their ancestors, which included everything from transportation to the gathering of mussel shells that were ground up and mixed with clay for pottery.

“The Cherokee were very smart. They knew how to use the environment. They loved living here because they could get everything they needed and the rivers were a major source of that,” said Townsend

South Main Street in Waynesville is headed for a major roadway redesign, one that could take out rows of long-time businesses to make way for more lanes, sidewalks, bike lanes and a median.

South Main Street — the two-lane thoroughfare that is the major artery between downtown and the new Super Wal-Mart — has long been in need of a makeover with an increasingly run-down appearance over the decades. Despite the close proximity of walkable neighborhoods, South Main lacks sidewalks in some sections. There is no curb: rather parking lots and the street form a continuous sea of asphalt. Despite the arrival of a Super Wal-Mart along the corridor, many lots and buildings remain vacant or perpetually for rent.

A road redesign has been high on the town’s list of project requests submitted to the N.C. Department of Transportation every year. The DOT has finally launched a feasibility study for the road, spurred by increased traffic brought on by the new Wal-Mart. The plan calls for keeping the road two lanes with intersection redesigns only, adding a single middle turn lane, or bumping up to four lanes with a raised median.

The Cadillac version of the redesign would claim a 120-foot wide swath of right-of-way: four lanes, a raised median, and bike lanes and sidewalks on both sides, along with curbs.

“If you did that, all these buildings would be gone,” said Waynesville Mayor Gavin Brown, standing on the side of South Main Street one day last week. “The necessity of having four lanes is in conflict with current uses.”

Brown doesn’t want to say good-bye to many of the long-time businesses that he grew up with, from a local Ace Hardware store to chili dogs at Jim’s Drive-In.

“But in the long run, is it better for the community?” Brown asked, admitting that many of the businesses along the stretch have seen better days. “In 50 years from now, this entire corridor will be redeveloped.”

Brown envisions a new corridor that will have tree-lined sidewalks and rows of new businesses sporting aesthetic and pedestrian-friendly facades, as required by the town’s land-use plan.

“Its useful life for the most part has been expended,” Brown said of the current road design. “This is an opportunity for it to be a Phoenix.”

The widening could favor one side of the road or the other, claiming the majority of right of way from just one side of the road in an effort to preserve buildings on the other side, according to Eddie McFalls, a contracted road designer conducting the study for the DOT.

If town leaders, business owners and residents along the stretch don’t want to see large numbers of buildings taken out, a value call will come into play over which elements to cut, such as median or the sidewalks.

“Either it is going to be very wide or there will be trade-offs,” McFalls said.

Joel Setzer, the head of the DOT for the 10 western counties, said these are decisions that need to play out locally between town leaders and the community.

“We need a vision for the corridor,” Setzer said. Setzer said since South Main Street is mostly a local road and not integral to the state transportation network, the DOT is more likely to defer to local wishes.

“When you start looking at more of a local road, the designs and characteristics the local folks want weigh in even more,” Setzer said.

 

Residential section

The feasibility section is not only examining the commercial stretch of the road, but sections passing through residential neighborhoods as well. At one point, a DOT plan called for widening South Main Street through the South Main residential district known for its shady mature trees arching over the road, rock walls and affluent homes. Brown said the town would fight any plan that would ruin the character of the two-lane residential stretch.

“It is so comfortable to drive through the large, shady trees,” Brown said.

Setzer agrees.

“Based on the traffic counts, it doesn’t show we need to disturb that area,” Setzer said. “That was a big relief because no one really wanted to tackle that.”

It appears the DOT planners in Raleigh agree in principle.

“It would really change the character a lot to wipe out those trees,” said McFalls.

However, there is still the possibility of a middle lane being added at key side roads so people waiting to turn left into their neighborhood don’t back up traffic behind them, McFalls said. Brown agreed, partly.

“At the same time, I don’t want to create turn lanes for people who aren’t turning,” Brown said.

The much-anticipated roller coaster at Ghost Town opened amid fanfare last week, then was promptly shut down again.

The coaster is one of the primary attractions at the mountaintop amusement park in Maggie Valley, but has been plagued by a series of glitches in the two years since the park opened under new ownership. The new owners pledged to breathe life into the 1960s-era amusement park, including rebuilding the coaster that had been shut down due to safety issues under the former owner.

The park hired a ride manufacturer to build an all-new roller coaster train that could run on the existing track. The new train has been slow to pass state ride inspections, however — from the type of harnesses it used to the way the cars rode on the track.

All those hurdles were finally cleared, however, and the coaster debuted to the public for a single day last Wednesday (July 1). By Thursday, it was shut down again.

The latest glitch involves the way the seat frames are bolted to the cars, according to Jonathan Brooks, head of the N.C. Elevator & Amusement Device Bureau. The seats will have to be taken apart and the connections analyzed — all the way down to which forge and which batch the steel came from, Brooks said.

Brooks said the ball is now in the ride manufacturer’s court to do an evaluation and come up with a fix.

“Until their engineers come back to us with a suitable solution to the problem, there is where we are,” Brooks said.

Ghost Town characterized the issue as “fine-tuning” in a press release sent out last Friday announcing the set back.

“The maintenance of a coaster is an ongoing and continual thing. This is just part of a process,” said CEO Steve Shiver. Indeed, a roller coaster at Carowinds was shut down by the state over the weekend due to concerns that arose there.

Shiver said the ball is already rolling on a new design for the seat brackets. If the new design is approved by the state, it should not take long to make the modifications to each seat.

Shiver said issues like this aren’t unusual and in fact are to be expected as part of the process in launching a new roller coaster.

“If it were easy everybody would be doing it,” Shiver said. “Some of it is trial and error, particularly given the uniqueness of our location and the logistics of being on top of this mountain. That’s why we are excited about having one of the most unique roller coasters in the world.”

 

How it was discovered

The state signed off on the final round of lengthy and arduous inspections Tuesday afternoon, but Brooks asked one of his inspectors to hang around and keep a close eye on the first couple of days of the ride’s operation.

“This being a brand new coaster, it is not unusual to have the inspector hang around and make sure the operations are running properly,” Brooks said.

In fact, ride inspectors make both surprise and announced inspections of all amusement parks and fairs in the state. Sometimes inspectors will pay the admission price at Carowinds and go in undercover as a tourist. Brooks said the repeated monitoring goes with the territory.

“You are taking people and turning them upside down and flipping them and spinning them, so there is a constant oversight that happens,” Brooks said.

The Cliffhanger roller coaster was open to the public all day on Wednesday. But Thursday morning, a Ghost Town ride operator detected something that didn’t seem quite right. He noticed what seemed to be abnormal movement of one of the seats in a car at the back of the train. The movement was most likely imperceptible to most, but not for an attuned ride operator.

“You get to know every little clink. They know when they see some abnormal movement,” Brooks said.

The ride operator in turn called the state inspector over who was still on the grounds. The inspector examined the seat fastenings, which wasn’t an easy task in itself.

“You have to get on your belly, standing on your head with a flashlight and mirror, to be honest,” Brooks said.

The inspector called Brooks and told him something didn’t look right in there. Brooks’ response: shut down the coaster and take the seat apart. The ride inspector found a hairline crack in the seat frame near the bolt that fastened it to the car.

“I took some heat for shutting it down, which I was willing to take. I don’t have an issue with that. My family may be on it and I certainly want it safe for my family, your family, everyone else,” Brooks said, reciting the rule of thumb behind his decisions.

Shiver said that while the setback is “absolutely frustrating” he, too, puts safety first.

“We want a safe and enjoyable experience for all our patrons,” Shiver said. “We have waited this long to open the coaster and because of our false starts in the past, we want to make sure that all of our theming and the complete Cliffhanger experience is satisfactory according to the high standards I personally set when we embarked upon the renovations and remaking of Ghost Town in the Sky.”

 

Inspection process works

The closure is a testimony to the state’s inspection system working properly, Brooks said. Brooks said his inspectors had been all over the roller coaster train examining every bolt and the crack wasn’t there. Brooks surmised it is a stress crack that developed during operation. It’s one reason the state requires a roller coaster to make 1,000 runs loaded with 170-pound sand bags in each seat before it can pass inspection.

The test runs not only familiarized ride operators with the coaster enough so they would detect any abnormality, but also meant the stress crack appeared early in the coaster’s debut while an inspector was still on site and not back in Raleigh already.

“We crossed all our T’s and dotted all our I’s,” Brooks said.

Shiver agreed.

“The process worked like it should,” Shiver said. “That’s why we have daily inspections and well-trained ride operators. It worked.”

Brooks’ expertise in ride operations helped the amusement park overcome a problem that had been stumping them for months. The roller coaster was repeatedly getting stuck on the track in certain places. The ride manufacturer, Rotational Motion, was unable to diagnose the problem that seemed potentially insurmountable without either rebuilding the cars or making serious alterations to the track itself.

Ghost Town had hired Brooks’ former counterpart with the state ride inspection bureau, Clyde Wagner. The two were on site at Ghost Town one day trying to troubleshoot the confounding problem.

“He and I were just talking one day and I said something ain’t square here,” Brooks recounted.

It turned out the neoprene wheels weren’t quite hard enough. Using an instrument to taking readings on the softness of the wheels, they tested the old wheels from the original roller coaster cars and discovered they were slightly harder than the ones on the rebuilt cars. New, harder wheels solved the problem.

There was another issue as well. The park has greased down the track with cooking oil. Lubricants aren’t uncommon to reduce friction since roller coasters operate on gravity.

The cooking oil left a residue, however, and sand sifting out of the bags placed in the seats during test runs had stuck to the track and even gotten in the bearings. Brooks had the maintenance crews strip the tracks of the build-up.

The ride manufacturer suggested switching to baby oil as a lubricant, which is applied to the wheels of the cars by hand every morning.

 

The Cliffhanger

Ghost Town’s Cliffhanger roller coaster is truly amazing. The track perches on the side of a 4,700-foot mountaintop, offering sweeping vistas of distance mountain ranges in every direction and the valley floor visible far below. See footage of the short-lived opening of the coaster filmed by a tourist, including footage of the ride from the front seat of the coaster train at www.ghosttowninthesky.com/Special/cliffhanger.html.

Lamar Marshall had been canoeing the Little Tennessee for years before he knew what a fish weir was. In retrospect, the low rock walls spanning the river are too symmetrical and too uniform to be a naturally occurring rock vein. But for years, Marshall paid them no heed other than reveling in the small rapid they created.

That was before Marshall started spending time on the river with Brent Martin, an outdoor friend in Macon County who works for the Wilderness Society. Martin introduced Marshall to the hidden world of fish weirs, ancient stone walls placed in the river to corral fish into traps.

Marshall knew what fishing weirs were, of course, but like most, he didn’t realize the community fishing practice was once used in the mountains by Cherokee. To Marshall, the ancient weirs are a symbol of a time when man lived in harmony with nature.

“The lifestyle of the Native Americans was self-sufficient. Nature provided everything. It was an intense form of freedom,” said Marshall, who works for the environmental organization WildSouth.

A few weirs in the region are so pronounced they show up in aerial photographs and are even obvious when viewed from the shore. But the vast majority are only visible from the river itself, and thus have gone uncatalogued. It was astonishing to Marshall that there had been no systematic effort to map the weirs so far.

“These weirs are national treasures,” Marshall said. “Every stone you see in that weir was picked up and placed there by a Native American. They are historical landmarks. More than that, these are relics, traditional places where people can connect to their heritage.”

So when water levels in the Little Tennessee dropped to record lows during the height of severe drought last August, Marshall called Martin and pitched the idea of a scouting trip to plot all the weirs they could find. Low water would render any weirs that are typically obscured much easier to spot.

“We were seeing weirs everywhere,” Marshall said of their trip. “They are so defined, once you know what you are looking for there is no missing them.”

The team counted 13 weirs in a single seven-mile stretch of the Little Tennessee. Marshall’s GPS unit was broken at the time, so the best he could do was sketch their location in on a map as they paddled downstream. But Marshall knew he would one day have to repeat the exercise and capture their exact coordinates.

That chance came last week, thanks to a break in the rains that had dominated the summer so far. Marshall set out on a downriver expedition, this time with a GPS unit in hand.

Marshall’s expedition came at the perfect time for Dan Perlmutter, a professor at Southwestern Community College and a long-time fish weir enthusiast. This month, Perlmutter is leading a week-long field course on fish weirs for middle and high school students, many of them Cherokee.

His goal is to give students hands-on experience using surveying instruments to map the rocks of a single weir, hopefully inspiring the students to pursue math and science fields. The project is funded in part by Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Cherokee Preservation Foundation.

“When the students have a concrete product and one with community significance, it automatically interests them,” Perlmutter said. “In school, when someone talks in the abstract about research they will have a practical knowledge of it. They’ll say ‘I’ve done some of that.’ They aren’t just passive observers.”

Among those cashing in on the chance to spend a day on the river with Marshall was Mo Moody, who put aside reservations about never being in a kayak before and joined the expedition. Moody, a recent graduate of the surveying program at Southwestern Community College, will lead the technical aspects of surveying with the students in Perlmutter’s program.

Moody will show the students how to use surveying instruments to capture the shape, size and exact location of the rocks in a weir. If the weir was vandalized or disturbed by flooding, it could be reconstructed based on the survey work.

“It’s important to be able to put them back in the exact same spot,” Moody said. “Surveying is going to lock it down on the map.”

Moody, a recent convert to the circle of fish weir enthusiasts, finds it hard to believe this work hasn’t been done already.

“It’s like an ancient find right here for us to see,” Moody said.

The fish weirs are one piece of what Marshall and others have come to call the “cultural landscape” — essentially what the landscape would have looked like during the time of the Cherokee. The broad rivers served as highways for trade and communication, with a network of Cherokee towns along their shores. Large mounds marked the political and spiritual centers for the villages. Cleared fields radiated through the flat river bottoms, while forested mountainsides served as hunting grounds.

“This was the Garden of Eden for the Cherokee Nation, right here in the Cowee Valley,” Marshall said.

Saving the cultural landscape has become the rallying cry of preservation groups in recent years, including the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee.

Another unmapped piece of that landscape is the myriad Cherokee trails that moved trade and foot traffic. Marshall is currently engaged in a year-long project through WildSouth to map those Indian routes, thanks to funding by the Cherokee Preservation Foundation.

For a man who’s spent his entire life outdoors — alternately making a living as a fur trapper, outfitter and environmental advocate — Marshall calls his current job the best he’s ever had. He holds a deep respect for the Cherokee.

“I love everything to do with the Indians and their way of life. They lived independently of this corporate-dependent system that now seems to be failing us,” Marshall said.

Sylva’s mayor for the past 17 years, Brenda Oliver, has announced that she will not run for re-election this fall.

Oliver, 67, said she has enjoyed serving the town and is optimistic about the direction it is headed. Oliver said she was ready to do something else with her life, and by the same token the town was ready for new leadership.

“I just feel it is time for a change,” said Oliver. “I really feel that Sylva is a good place. We are headed on the right track and it was a good time for someone else to step up.”

Oliver has been on the town board for a total of 28 years, serving as a board member before becoming mayor. Oliver has not been a subject of controversy nor has there been an apparent lack of public confidence in the job she’s doing.

“Brenda was without a doubt one of the most popular local elected officials,” Town Commissioner Maurice Moody said. “Most local politicians have maybe a fourth or half of her tenure. Brenda still has a positive attitude toward the town. If we needed a volunteer I think she would be right there.”

Moody has already stepped up to run for mayor following Oliver’s announcement at a town board meeting last Thursday (July 2).

“The main reason is I couldn’t talk Brenda into staying,” Moody joked.

In actuality, Moody said the move seems like a natural one. With 12 years on the town board, he is the longest-standing member after Oliver.

“I think I can handle it without any difficulty,” Moody said.

The sign-up period for candidates began this week and runs through Friday, July 17. Moody said he will be surprised if no one else files to run for mayor.

Moody has two years left in his term as a town commissioner. If he doesn’t get mayor, he will keep his seat on the board. If he wins, the incoming board would choose a new member to fill his vacated seat as commissioner.

The Sylva town board is comprised of five members and the mayor. The mayor doesn’t get a vote except in the case of a tie.

“That is the one negative thing. I will miss that if I am elected,” Moody said. “But with my personality everyone will know what I think.”

Oliver was the opposite. She rarely took a public stand, but acted more as an arbiter in guiding discussion rather than voicing her opinion on issues.

Moody agrees with Oliver that the town is on the right track. Moody and Oliver have both been advocates of a progressive agenda, which has the support of the majority on the board right now. Moody offers a disclaimer, however.

“That’s not a name we picked. Other people gave it to us,” Moody said.

Moody said he wants to continue the momentum of the current board.

“Sylva is a good place to live and we need to enhance it anyway that we can,” Moody said. “I think there are some good things going on right now and I think we need to continue that.”

For example, Moody wants to advance projects like Bridge Park near downtown and Pinnacle Park in the town’s old watershed.

Town Commissioner Stacey Knotts said Oliver will be deeply missed. Knotts said her deep knowledge of the town and municipal operations have been invaluable to the town.

“Her integrity and deep knowledge of municipal government have been invaluable for the Town of Sylva,” Knotts said. “On a personal level, she has been a great mentor and close friend during my time in office.”

Likely contributing to Oliver’s decision are her eight grandchildren spread out in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina.

Town Commissioner Harold Hensley had favorable words for Oliver as well.

“I try to get along with everybody and I always got along with Brenda,” Hensley said. “We didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but we never had a cross word.”

Knotts and Hensley — while coming from different viewpoints on the board — are both already backing Moody.

“I think he will be great for it,” Knotts said. “He has been a great board member and will do a great job as mayor as well.”

Hensley agreed, even though he admitted he and Moody aren’t always on the same side of issues.

“He definitely knows the ins and outs of the town,” Hensley said. “I don’t know who else will file but I know Maurice and I know he would do a good job.”

How Canton residents envision the future of their town could play a pivotal role in who gets elected this fall.

The current town board has been locked in a power struggle recently, with two long-time board members often at odds with three newcomers who swept into power on a platform of change two years ago. Canton Mayor Pat Smathers said strife on the board is holding the town back from making advancements.

“I think the next board needs to reach a consensus on the direction for the town,” said Smathers, mayor for the past 10 years. “There is not a lot of consensus on the current board. I am not saying who is right and who is wrong. I am not throwing bricks at those guys. It’s just a fact there is not a lot of consensus.”

The town needs to get on the same page and figure out where it is going and how to get there, Smathers said.

Smathers’ opponents on the board say they have fundamental differences with Smathers over what that vision should be, however.

“Pat’s vision for the town and my vision for the town are two opposite things,” said Alderman Eric Dills, one of Smathers’ chief opponents. “Pat’s vision for the town is a vision to try to make the town a tourist town. That’s what they have been trying to do for the past 10 or 12 years: to draw visitors.”

Dills said Smathers often talks about finding a way to capture more of the traffic that passes by Canton on the way through the region.

“But it passes by on Interstate 40 at 70 miles an hour. To put all this effort into promoting Canton as a destination is to forget about the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the room, which is this paper mill over here,” Dills said.

Alderman Troy Mann agreed that Smathers’ emphasis on making Canton attractive to tourists is the wrong direction.

“There are some on the board who do not feel like that is Canton’s potential and we are not going to spend a bunch of money trying to bring about something we don’t envision,” Mann said. “That is the point of friction between what the mayor sees for the town of Canton and what the board sees for the town of Canton.”

Increasing the mill town’s visibility to the outside world has indeed been a recurring theme for Smathers in recent years. Capturing tourists and travelers has only been part of his vision, however. Smathers wants to see the town’s retail sector expand and downtown developed. He has pushed for parks and recreation complexes, from ball fields to river walks. He also wants to create and implement a long-range economic development plan.

Smathers has worked to make Canton more of a player in the region, be it politically or economically. He sees having events as one way to achieve that.

“We need to be more active in having events. Who would have thought two years ago we would have the Beach Boys in Canton and Charlie Daniels? It puts us out there,” Smathers said.

Dills said some of the initiatives have not been worth the time and effort, citing the $175,000 fund-raising campaign to bring the Beach Boys to Canton for a concert. Dills wants to see more energy put into making the town’s neighborhoods attractive, which means more stringent enforcement of the town’s ordinances.

“What Canton must do is promote itself as a family-oriented, family-friendly town. These people moving into WNC will look at Canton as a place to come and raise families,” Dills said. That means ensuring good, clean, safe neighborhoods — one of the chief assets Canton has going for it, he said.

Patrick Willis, 29, a challenger seeking a seat on the board this year, agrees that Canton should focus on developing its image as a good place to live.

“Canton has a lot of charm and a lot of personality. There is a growing younger crowd that is discovering the town and moving here to start families,” said Willis, himself being one example. Canton has been discovered for its proximity to Asheville, affordable homes, and traditional neighborhood feel, Willis said.

But Willis said the town is at a crossroads and town leaders are too busy arguing to get focused.

“I don’t think the board has done enough in the last two years to try to act on the town’s potential,” Willis said. “Looking at the past two years now, I don’t think the town has gone forward with economic development. I think the mid-term and long-term planning are not there.”

 

At odds with little progress

The shake-up two years ago when three new members were elected — shifting the majority control on the board — has produced no shortage of disagreement, but tangible change has been little.

Dills said the board has been stymied in some of its attempts at change. Despite drawn-out, heated controversy, the town board has kept on the same town manager, Al Matthews, which Dills said has made it difficult to accomplish some of the reform he would like to see.

“The town manager, not the board, truly has 75 percent of the power,” Dills said.

A hot button issue two years ago was a move by the former board to raise the property tax rate by 5 cents. It became a top campaign platform of the new aldermen that won election.

While the new board members haven’t raised taxes further, they failed to lower them back to the former levels, however.

“Sometimes when people are running, they will promise people stuff they can’t do because they don’t know about city government,” said Ted Woodruff, a former alderman who was ousted two years ago.

Woodruff said they had to raise taxes to cover costs incurred by flooding to the town in 2004, and a decrease in taxes paid by the paper mill, which accounts for a large chunk of the town’s budget.

Charlie Crawford, another former alderman who lost re-election two years ago, said that town residents don’t like the turn the board has taken the past two years.

“I’ll be honest — I think there is a lot of dissatisfaction,” Crawford said. “I don’t know whether they voted for the opposition the last time, but they are expressing dissatisfaction with what they got.”

Crawford added they failed to deliver on their promises.

“They definitely didn’t lower taxes like they said they were going to do,” said Charlie Crawford. “They raised water and sewer rates, building permits, trash pick-up — anything they could raise without raising taxes they raised.”

Alderman Troy Mann said they never promised to lower taxes.

“I just said I hoped not to raise it like the board then had,” Mann said.

 

Changing management

Another platform of the new board members — Dills in particular — is reforming the general administration of the town. Dills said there is an engrained way of doing business based on favoritism. Far too many town employees are given town vehicles to drive home and use for personal use, including one employee who works only 10 hours a week for the rec department. The town was also paying a cell phone stipend to its retired town clerk because they occasionally called him with questions.

“I wanted to break the good old boy system,” Dills said.

The division on the current town board has also been defined by those who support Mayor Smathers and those who don’t. The three new board members felt Smathers was exerting too much unilateral control over town affairs. Those who were ousted were pleased with Smathers leadership.

“I think Pat is a wonderful mayor, really I do,” Woodruff said. “Pat loves Canton and has worked hard to make canton a better place.”

Patrick Willis, a challenger for town board, said the old board agreed with Smathers too often, while the new board seems to oppose him every step of the way.

“It is not good to have a board that says yes to the mayor and town manager all the time, but at the same time the board is put there to get things done. They either need to work out with their personality conflicts and differences and try to work together better,” Willis said. “There needs to be a middle ground.”

Andy Zivinsky and Diane Cutler were determined to move to the mountains.

Their passion for all things outdoors was making the Raleigh area increasingly ill-suited to the type of lifestyle they wanted.

“We were only taking an outdoor trip once a month and it wasn’t enough. That was only 12 fishing trips or 12 backpacking trips a year, and we wanted that to be the main part of our life,” Cutler said.

Between mountain biking, bird watching, hiking, camping, rock climbing and fly-fishing, they couldn’t get it all in during weekend trips consumed by driving back and forth across the state. Last year, they spent a week of vacation backpacking and fishing on Hazel Creek in the Smokies and romping through Joyce Kilmer.

But it was a trip into Bryson City that sealed their fate.

“It was a kind of fluke. We had been backpacking for four days and thought ‘We could use a shower and comfortable bed,’” Cutler recounted. “When we got into Bryson City our jaw dropped and we were like this is where we want to live. It is small and it wasn’t real polished. It wasn’t yuppie.”

Cutler said it had just what they were looking for: lots of outdoor recreation every direction you turned.

“Some people look for good schools, some people look for great restaurants or art and culture, but our thing is outdoor recreational activity and this place has everything — paddling and hiking and biking and fishing and bird watching,” Cutler said.

Zivinsky was also impressed with how unpretentious it is in Bryson.

“We decided, ‘Wow this was just the best place in the world.’ It wasn’t built up and over exposed,” Zivinsky said. “We tried to find jobs and that didn’t exactly happen so we decided to make jobs.”

In the Raleigh area, Zivinsky worked at a tire store and Cutler worked for a non-profit energy efficiency firm, which she has stayed on with as a consultant.

But “Andy had always wanted to have a bike shop,” Cutler said.

So the couple could hardly believe their luck when they not only stumbled into the town of their dreams but found it lacked a bike store.

There are already two bike stores within 15 miles: Motion Makers in Sylva and the NOC bike shop in the Nantahala Gorge. But Cutler and Zivinsky think there is enough market share to go around.

“We don’t want to come in and step on anybody’s toes,” Cutler said.

Motion Makers in particular has a long-standing and loyal clientele. Cutler sees their Bryson City bike shop catering to a different type of customer, however, citing their emphasis on mountain bikes and bike rentals versus the more serious road biker.

The new bike shop owners want their store to fill a void for the greater Swain County biking community as a gathering place. They hope the shop will serve as a home base for bike riders new to the area looking for routes. The bike shop will have free trail maps and directions to trailheads, as well as a computer for riders to print out maps of their choosing.

“You can waste an awful lot of time trying to figure out where to ride and which direction to ride,” said Zivinsky

“Even people who have been coming here for years had no clue there was anywhere to ride other than Tsali.”

As jacks-of-all-trades when it comes to outdoor recreation, they know how hard it can be to stuff all your gear for a trip into one vehicle. Between kayaks and climbing gear and backpacks and tents and coolers, a bike rack thrown into the mix, especially for a whole family, can be the breaking point.

So the bike shop will rent bikes of all sorts, including all the gear from helmets to a repair bag.

“It is turnkey,” Zivinsky said. “You get everything you need.”

It will also be good for novice riders who might not think to travel with their bikes, but once here, would like to ride.

A public hearing over a sewer discharge permit into the Little Tennessee River will be held on Tuesday, July 7, in Rabun County, Ga.

Rabun County plans to convert a former industrial wastewater treatment plant at a closed-down textile mill into a sewer treatment plant. The plant would discharge into the Little Tennessee River, which flows north into Franklin and Macon County and ultimately ends up in Fontana Lake.

Residents of Macon County have expressed concern over the prospect of 2 million gallons a day of treated wastewater being dumped into the Little Tennessee. The Little Tennessee is known for its excellent water quality and biological diversity. It flows through the heart of downtown Franklin and is a source of recreation. The town may one day need to use it for drinking water as well, fueling concerns.

Macon County and the town of Franklin along with environmental organizations requested a formal public hearing during a written comment period on the permit.

Rabun County leaders hope an operational sewer treatment plant at the former factory site will lure a new industry to set up shop there. County leaders also hope to facilitate general growth and development. With a sewer treatment plant, the county could make a foray into the sewer business, although it would also mean running sewer lines, something it currently can’t do because it lacks a treatment plant.

Part of Rabun County lies in the Little Tennessee watershed, which flows north through Macon County and eventually into the Tennessee River. The rest of the county lies in the Savannah River watershed flowing toward Atlanta.

Once Rabun County gets in the water and sewer business, it could theoretically swap water and sewer across the two watersheds — called an interbasin transfer — which could include sucking water out of the Little Tennessee and depositing it on the Savannah River side bound for Atlanta, according to opponents of the discharge permit.

An information session will begin at 7 p.m. with a public hearing to follow at 8 p.m. The hearing will be held at the Rabun County Courthouse in Clayton, Ga.

The race for the Sylva town board this fall could once again gauge the extent of shifting demographics of the town.

Two seats on the board are up for election. Town Commissioner Stacey Knotts confirmed she will run again while Commissioner Harold Hensley said that he probably will.

Meanwhile, a third candidate had thrown his hat in the ring as a challenger: David Kelley, son of the longtime downtown business owner Livingston Kelley. The two-week sign-up period for candidates does not open until next week, when additional candidates may emerge. The deadline is July 17.

Mayor Brenda Oliver is up for election as well, but would not confirm whether she is running again.

“I am not ready to make any announcement yet. I am still pondering,” said Oliver, who has been mayor for 17 years.

A split has emerged on the town board in the past two years with a progressive camp outnumbering the more conservative camp. The most prominent disagreement to erupt was over the firing of former town manager Jay Denton. The conservative camp has consistently opposed town funding for the Downtown Sylva Association and has been less enthusiastic about spending money on amenities like sidewalks and town parks.

Hensley, 72, a retired maintenance director for the school system, has led the conservative camp. Knotts, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom whose husband is a Western Carolina University professor, has largely sided with the progressive camp.

Hensley agreed that he and Knotts are different types of candidates.

“She’s a young woman and I’m an old man,” he joked.

Hensley said he speaks up for a demographic of the town that could be left underrepresented if he was no longer on the board.

“I am not a lone wolf with an agenda of my own. I try hard to be a good steward of taxpayers’ money. That is my number one platform,” said Hensley, who prides himself on being a stickler when it comes to town spending.

Knotts cited several accomplishments of the past four years; in particular, curbside recycling, the Pinnacle Park grant, the renovation of Bryson Park, and the Bridge Park project.

“I would love the chance to complete a number of additional projects such as the Dillsboro to Sylva sidewalk, the Fire Department building renovation, additional trails in Pinnacle Park, economic development, and most importantly preserving the rich history and culture in the town of Sylva,” Knotts said.

Knotts got more votes than Hensley when the two appeared on the same ballot four years ago. Like this time, there were two seats up for election on the board. Both seats happened to be vacant, however. One board member had decided not to seek re-election. The other dropped out of the race after being charged with embezzlement from her church.

It created a shoo-in for both Knotts and Hensley, although Knotts got more votes: 205 to Hensley’s 164.

Knotts worked hard during the campaign by going door to door to introduce herself to voters. Hensley said he would not actively campaign if he runs.

“If I’m on there another six months or four more years, I’m not going to be out there doing a big campaign of knocking on doors. If they want me they want me, if they don’t they don’t,” Hensley said.

Kelley could create an entirely new dynamic. Kelley has observed the split nature of the board, but says he hasn’t consistently agreed with one side or the other.

“I have been where I could see both sides and going either way on different issues,” Kelley said.

Voters who perceive Knotts and Hensley to be in opposing camps could allocate one of their votes to Kelley.

In the vote over Denton, Kelley said he would have sided with Hensley to keep Denton.

“I think it could have been handled better,” Kelley said. “He had good intentions for the town and just screwed up.”

Denton’s misstep was investing money in funds not allowed by the state, which stipulates only the least risky funds be used to park town investments. Denton said he had merely been trying to get the best interest rate. Town leaders had little patience, however, as the mistake came on the heels of a miscalculation by Denton when ordering a foot bridge for a town park that cost $100,000 more than expected.

Kelley is also not a fan of the current level of financial support the town provides the Downtown Sylva Association, to the tune of $12,000. He thinks that may be too much.

When it comes to long-range planning, however, Kelley is more in tune with progressives on the board who would like to plan for growth.

“It doesn’t hurt to have some educated people thinking about the future,” Kelley said. “You got to look long-term, what is going to happen with the cause and effect of everything.”

Kelley, 32, works at his dad’s store, Livingston Photos.

Danny Allen, an alderman on the board for several years until two years ago, said he did not foresee a run again this year.

“I am not planning on it at this time,” said Allen, who is still battling health issues. Allen said many people have been pestering him to run, however.

Canton Mayor Pat Smathers could face opposition this fall from his leading opponent on the town board, Alderman Eric Dills. Dills said this week he is considering a run for mayor against Smathers, although he has not made up his mind for sure.

Meanwhile, two board members ousted two years ago may put their hats back in the ring and try to retake their old seats. The race gets even more interesting with the prospect of a few new challengers.

The upshot: the battle for who will lead the town going forward is still clearly in flux.

Of the four current Canton town board members, none would say definitively whether they are running for re-election.

Alderman Ernest Stines said he hasn’t made up his mind yet.

“I’m not going to say one way or the other at this point,” Stines said. “I am going to think about it, pray about it and make up my mind.”

Alderman Troy Mann also said he was still contemplating.

Alderman Mike Ray, the only alderman who has tenure on the board, also said he wasn’t ready to say.

Alderman Eric Dills is definitely going to run, but may run against Smathers for mayor instead. If he doesn’t run against Smathers, he will run to keep his seat as an alderman.

Meanwhile, former town board member Charlie Crawford said he will most likely run to get back on the board.

“I am definitely thinking about it,” Crawford said. “I haven’t made a final decision yet. The chances are about 90 percent I will.”

Former town board member Ted Woodruff was not as definite as Crawford, but said he may consider another run as well.

“I hadn’t really decided yet,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff was on the board for 36 years before losing two years ago.

“Some people said I’d been on there too long,” Woodruff said.

As for challengers, Patrick Willis, 29, is the only one to confirm a run so far.

Another potential candidate is Ed Underwood, 60, a member of the town ABC board who is a correctional officer at Craggy prison.

“A lot of it depends on who else will be running,” Underwood said. “It is a tough decision.”

Underwood considered running two years ago, but felt his work schedule would potentially be prohibitive. If he runs and wins, he would retire, which is part of his decision.

Selling space in the Haywood County landfill might not be the windfall some county leaders were hoping for.

The latest filing in a lawsuit over the massive landslide in Maggie Valley last winter claims the collapse of the mountainside was triggered by a broken waterline at Ghost Town in the Sky amusement park. Until now, accusations centered on a failed retaining wall intended to shore up the slipping mountainside.

Not a day goes by that Judge Monica Leslie doesn’t realize the gravity of her decisions.

Leslie is one of six District Court judges in the seven western counties. They decide how to split property and wealth when a couple gets divorced. They decide whether a restraining order is warranted in a domestic violence claim. They make heart-wrenching decisions in custody battles. And perhaps most difficult, decide whether a parent with a history of neglect is ready to get their children back.

“We deal with families in crisis,” Leslie said.

Gavin Brown, a Waynesville attorney, said that in some ways who serves as judge is more important than the president.

“A District Court judge affects the citizens directly in my community and on a daily basis. They take care of domestic disputes, they take care of foreclosures, they take care of car wrecks and traffic violations,” Brown said. “They are so critical in everyday life — in what they say and do and how they do it.”

There’s even more at stake in this year’s judge race than normal, however. Three long-time judges have retired in the past two years — creating a void of experience. Turnover is rare on the bench, let alone this level of turnover all at one time.

“Once you win a position as a judge, barring a health problem or some personal issue, you don’t lose that job,” said Brown.

Out of six District Court judges for the region, half are in flux. The watershed election year attracted a staggering 10 judge candidates in the May primary. The list has now been narrowed to six going into the November race. Two candidates are vying for each seat, with each still considered a toss-up just a month away from Election Day.

Two of the three seats will fill vacancies left by Judges Danny Davis and Steve Bryant — who retired this summer with a combined 50 years of experience on the bench.

“Whoever replaces them will have big shoes to fill and will need to be able to handle the load almost immediately,” said Judge Richie Holt, now the senior District Court judge with 17 years on the bench. “My number one job in the next year is to get everybody going on the right direction and handling the cases adequately and appropriately.”

That’s not to say that different styles of running a courtroom can’t be equally effective, he said.

“The folks can use their own styles and their own personality, but it will take them a while to figure out what type of things to do or say to keep it moving,” Holt said.

The legal community will certainly tread cautiously until they get used to the new lay of the land — and the tendencies that the new judges manifest.

“From a lawyer’s point of view, lawyers like consistency. We like to be able to predict under certain sets of facts what the likely outcome might be so we can advise our clients accordingly,” said Don Patten, a Haywood County attorney.

That’s going to be tough when 50 percent of the judiciary will essentially be new at the job.

“I would guess the general public, I don’t think they have any idea the gravity of our situation to a certain extent,” said David Moore, a Sylva attorney.

That said, experience isn’t everything.

“Temperament, knowledge, skill, intelligence — those are all factors that are fairly critical,” Moore added.

Not to mention time management. There’s hundreds of cases on the line across the seven-county district every month.

“You sure want someone who knows what they are doing and can handle it fairly, judiciously and expediently,” said Patten.

The election for District Court judges is non-partisan. In other words, candidates on the ballot won’t be labeled as Democrats or Republicans. Partisan views aren’t as relevant as personality traits when it comes to electing judges.

To help voters familiarize themselves with the candidates, Western Carolina University’s Public Policy Institute and The Smoky Mountain News are putting on two forums next week.

“This particular judicial race is probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for this region,” said Smoky Mountain News publisher Scott McLeod. “Three District Court judge seats being decided in one election is very unusual, and so we hope voters will take the opportunity to familiarize themselves with who is running and their backgrounds.”

On the bright side, after this hump the bench will most likely enjoy another 20 to 30 years of long-term stability, Brown pointed out.

See also: Judge candidates to take stage in Jackson, Haywood next week

 

Who’s running for district court judge

Seat 1

• Danya Vanhook, a sitting judge based in Haywood County who’s been on the job a little over a year

• Donna Forga, Waynesville attorney in solo practice

Seat 2

• Kris Earwood, Sylva attorney with solo practice (formerly of firm Lay and Earwood)

• David Sutton, Waynesville attorney with Kirkpatrick law firm

Seat 3

• Steve Ellis, Waynesville attorney in solo practice (formerly with the firm Brown, Ward and Haynes)

• Roy Wijewickrama, Waynesville attorney serving as prosecutor in Cherokee

Fundraising for the new Jackson County library may have entered the home stretch, but is far from home free.

Friends of the Library is only $250,000 away from its $1.6 million goal. But the final leg will prove the toughest, longest and hardest yet.

The library fundraising committee has spent most of the past year going after big dollars and large grants from corporate sponsors and foundations. The fundraising will now enter what’s known as the public phase: eking out $50 and $100 checks from the general public to raise most of the remainder.

“This library complex belongs to all the people of Jackson County, and we need the citizens to support the project financially,” said Mary Otto Selzer, co-chair of the capital campaign committee formed under Friends of the Library. “Everybody’s circumstances are different, but if people will give whatever they can afford, we will reach our goal.”

In coming weeks, the public will start to see cardboard banks shaped like books on the counters of local businesses throughout the county where people can drop their spare bills and checks.

The fundraising committee got welcome news last week. The campaign was still half a million short when word came through of a major windfall: a $250,000 grant from the N.C. State Employee’s Credit Union. It comes with a caveat that the community must match the money.

“We can say to the people of Jackson County for every dollar you give, it means two dollars for your library. That is a powerful thing in fundraising,” said Dr. John Bunn, co-chair of the capital campaign.

The challenge grant provides a needed push to carry the campaign across the finish line.

“The $250,000 challenge grant from SECU is a strong incentive for our community to reach the $1.6 million we need to complete the new library complex,” said June Smith, president of the Friends of the Jackson County Main Library.

The library is scheduled to open in December 2010. Construction, including the courthouse renovation, is estimated at $7.9 million and is being covered by the county. The furnishings, fixtures and equipment for the library were left up to the fundraising campaign.

Bunn hopes the final dollar will be raised by next spring.

“I think the people of Jackson County will respond,” Bunn said. “When you give to this, you have made a gift to something that will keep on giving to generations.”

Bunn said there was skepticism in the early stages of the campaign when a $1.6 million goal was looming ahead of them.

“They told us it was impossible,” Bunn said.

Bunn credits the concept of the library itself as the main driver in the fundraising success.

“This is the kind of thing that brings a new quality of life for all of the people here,” Bunn said.

Those courting donors had another major selling point up their sleeve. The new library is being constructed alongside the famous historic courthouse, which is being restored and renovated in tandem with the library project.

“That just clinched it,” Bunn said.

The library’s main entrance, atrium and courtyard — features that connect the library complex with the historic courthouse — will be named for the State Employees Credit Union.

Bunn said the new library and courthouse restoration will be a point of pride for the community.

When the 3,500-acre Legasus development won exemptions from Jackson County’s development regulations two years ago, it raised the hackles of residents in the Tuckasegee community who claimed the hard-fought growth protections they ardently supported had failed when needed the most.

Now the disgruntled residents have raised the rallying cry again, this time contending that the mega development should be stripped of its vested rights after selling off portions of the land, whether through foreclosure or a voluntary move to raise cash and pay off debt.

“There are so many questions that have come up recently with foreclosures and land sales that totally change the dynamics of what the county granted Legasus vested rights for,” said Thomas Crowe, a member of the United Neighbors of Tuckaseigee.

Vested rights are an exemption intended to protect developers caught mid-stream by new ordinances. When Jackson’s new ordinances came along two years ago, Legasus argued they’d already spent a great deal designing a master plan and marketing the development to prospective buyers and should be allowed to proceed. Jackson County ultimately awarded vested rights to every developer that applied for them.

The Legasus development once called for 1,800 lots on 3,500 acres between Tuckasegee and Glenville spanning five separate tracts. With lot sales falling short of expectations, the company has had to sell off portions — including part of the proposed golf course. It is unclear whether new property owners will join forces with Legasus to carry out the existing development plan or will do their own thing.

“The question arises exactly what kind of rights do the new owners have? Can they come in under the auspices of the vested rights granted to Legasus initially?” Crowe asked. “We want to be on the front end of this new situation.”

A community forum on the issue of vested rights will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 2, and will aim to answer these questions. Attorney DJ Gerken with the Southern Environmental Law Center will give a presentation and lead the discussion. The forum has been organized by the Western North Carolina Alliance and the United Neighbors of Tuckasegee.

“Those of us in the community as well as the county political leaders need to come up to speed on the whole issue of vested rights because of all the high-end developments here in Jackson County and in particular the Legasus development,” Crowe said.

When voters head to the polls to elect town leaders in Webster this fall, the choices will be slim. Mighty slim.

Only two candidates are running for five openings on the board — leaving three seats unclaimed.

The tiny Jackson County town has just 444 registered voters. The sign-up period for candidates to run in town elections was held in July, but the two-week window came and went without enough takers putting their name in the hat. Jackson County Election Director Lisa Lovedahl-Lehman extended the filing period by five days, which is the maximum allowed under state law. But no additional candidates emerged.

So come Election Day, the makeup of the town board will largely be determined by write-ins.

“We’ve never had this happen before,” Lovedahl said. “This is the first widespread write-in candidacy.”

Billy Jean Bryson, a Webster town board member who defied the trend and will run for re-election, said she doesn’t know why three of her fellow board members are stepping down.

“I asked them the same question myself,” Bryson said. “I guess they just decided they didn’t want to.”

The long-time mayor of Webster, Steve Gray, is stepping down this year as well, but someone has stepped up to run for mayor at least.

The line-up — or rather lack of one — has prompted Bryson to go on the stump to recruit prospective candidates rather than leaving it up to chance that a write-in will emerge.

“I have several neighbors who would certainly do an excellent job,” Bryson said. “I will have to consult with them.”

Bryson knows of two people whom she believes have agreed to serve on the board. Next it will be a matter of disseminating the word to voters what name to write in. Bryson said if push comes to shove, the town board could function with just four members and a permanently vacant seat. They would still have the necessary majority for a quorum and the mayor could vote in the case of a tie.

“We could work with that if we had to,” Bryson said.

Being a small town doesn’t usually preclude competition in local elections. In fact, the opposite can be true. Four years ago, there was healthy competition in the Webster election with two contestants for mayor and eight people running for the five town board seats.

A steering committee tasked with examining and recommending possible changes to Waynesville’s land-use plan is finally getting down to brass tacks.

Town aldermen commissioned the project nearly a year-and-a-half ago as a five-year review of how the town’s new land-use plan is working. A land-use planning consulting firm was brought on board for a fee of $54,000 to collect input and offer an assessment of problem areas in the comprehensive town ordinance. The consultant, Craig Lewis with the Lawrence Group out of Davidson, delivered his initial assessment to the steering committee last week.

The steering committee will begin holding twice-a-month meetings to plow through the issues identified by the consultant.

Lewis said one of the biggest gains the town will see at the end of the process is an ordinance that is easier to use. He called the current document “disorganized.”

“There are cross-references everywhere. There are requirements you need to know that are hidden in the definitions or hidden in special use requirements,” Lewis said. “If we do nothing else but reorganize and simplify it, I think we have earned our fee in this project.”

Waynesville’s land-use plan promotes pedestrian-friendly development and aesthetic standards for commercial development in an attempt to preserve small-town character. It was praised by smart growth groups throughout the state for its novel approach.

The land-use plan lays out guidelines tailored to 29 different neighborhood and business districts throughout town.

“It’s a ton of districts, more than I have ever seen for a community of your size,” Lewis said. “The initial reaction is ‘That’s too many.’ After looking through it and talking with you, I would say right now, I can’t come up with a good reason to throw that baby out.”

Lewis said they could be made more uniform and the language made much simpler, however. For example, the maximum size for signs between similar districts might vary by as little as four square feet.

Town Manager Lee Galloway said the myriad districts were an attempt to let each part of town dictate what type of development would best fit that area. It was also intended to be user-friendly.

“You could pick up the plan for the Raccoon neighborhood district and know exactly the rules in your district,” Galloway said.

But the result has been a nightmare for the town planner and zoning enforcement officer who have to keep all those rules straight.

“We want to satisfy the irritated without irritating the satisfied,” Lewis said of the pending rewrite.

 

Parking lot placement

The looming hot-button issue the committee will face is whether parking should continue to be relegated to the side and rear of businesses. Indeed, dissatisfaction over that issue drove town leaders to sanction the five-year review of the land-use plan.

“This is a clear issue that is gong to warrant more discussion from you all,” Lewis told the steering committee.

Lewis said there are merits to the town’s protocol. By placing parking to the rear and side of businesses, the streetscape is defined by building facades, sidewalks and street trees rather than expansive asphalt parking lots. Lewis said those who oppose the policy hold up two businesses on Russ Avenue as examples: Home Trust Bank and CVS, which sit across the street from each other on the commercial thoroughfare. While CVS has parking to the rear and side rather than in front, the building is far less attractive than Home Trust Bank, which has parking in front.

“People say the reason they need front-yard parking is because CVS is not a good- looking building,” Lewis said. “It is very stark along the front. The windows are small. It is squatty proportionally. It has a high, harsh retaining wall.”

Meanwhile, Home Trust Bank is handsome, he said.

“It has varied rooflines. There are more window openings. It has columns. It is more residential looking. The landscaping looks a little bit softer,” Lewis said.

The comparison between the buildings has nothing to do with whether parking is permitted in front, however, according to Lewis.

“Those are two different issues,” Lewis said. “I wouldn’t say we want to throw everything out all over town because of those issues.”

Town Planner Paul Benson said the town’s land-use plan attempts to dictate architecturally pleasing buildings, but the intent was skirted by CVS.

“It’s where our current ordinance really failed us,” Benson said. “They could comply with the letter of our current ordinance without creating a good building.”

But Joe Taylor, a member of the steering committee, questioned how the town can police the aesthetic appearance of a building.

“When you look at the beauty or lack of beauty in a building, that is a matter of opinion,” Taylor said.

Another issue facing the committee is whether businesses should be required to connect their parking lots. Currently, the land-use plan requires new businesses to provide passage for cars between parking lots behind their buildings.

Taylor, who owns the Ford dealership on Russ Avenue, said he doesn’t like the idea of people cutting through his parking lot to get the restaurant next door.

“So you are saying you want all the cars to go back out on to the main road if they are going from one place to another?” Lewis countered. “Generally speaking connecting driveways is the number one way to improve traffic flow on the main road.”

Taylor said if the town wants to create an extra street for traffic to move between buildings it should buy the right of way and build the street itself rather expect businesses to undertake it.

 

Where from here?

Ultimately, any changes to the town’s land-use plan or building standards must be approved by the town board. The steering committee will merely do the legwork and make recommendations.

Members of the steering committee questioned whether they should accommodate public input during their part of the process, or wait until the recommendations are sent up the chain to the town board.

“Do you want to try to integrate some wider public participation on our end of the process or wait until the end?” Bradshaw asked.

“I think we should have some feedback in the middle somewhere,” said Steve Kaufman, a committee member and president of Reece, Noland and McElrath engineering firm.

The committee agreed that it would be good to solicit input along the way on some of the more volatile issues.

Only four of the eight members of the steering committee were present for the meeting last week. Two had said ahead of time they couldn’t come, while two were no-shows at the last minute. It was only the second meeting of the full committee that afforded face time with the consultant.

The committee agreed to meet every other Wednesday from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., although the consultant, who is based in Davidson, won’t be attending. The first meeting will be held Sept. 2.

 

Waynesville’s land-use plan steering committee members:

• David Blevins, appointed by Alderman Gary Caldwell

• Patrick Bradshaw, appointed by Mayor Gavin Brown

• Steve Kaufman, appointed by Alderwoman Libba Feichter

• Joe Taylor, appointed by former Alderman Kenneth Moore

• Ken Wilson, appointed by Alderman Leroy Robeson

• Patrick McDowell, chairman of the planning board

• Daniel Hyatt, chairman of the community appearance commission

• Mike Erwin, chairman of the board of adjustment

Ghost Town in the Sky did not bring in enough revenue from its amusement park operations during the months of May, June and July to cover its overhead and operating expenses.

Ghost Town recently filed financial statements with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for May, June and July that show how much it made off ticket sales, concessions and souvenirs. For the three-month period, Ghost Town made $1.531 million in revenue off the park.

Meanwhile, the Maggie Valley amusement park paid out $1.845 million in operating costs, including salaries, utilities, insurance, taxes, advertising and equipment.

The operating loss was offset thanks to contributions from investors to the tune of $322,000. The financial statements do not say where or who the cash infusion came from. The cash infusion mostly came in May, when the park bore significant expenses to get the doors open for the season. Once open, the park began to break even and during the month of July, the park even made money.

Ghost Town CEO Steve Shiver made a modest salary of $5,426 over the three-month period. However, a company Shiver is president of, Global Management Services, was paid $27,000 by Ghost Town for the period. Shiver’s company is billed as a professional services company and dates to Shiver’s former life in the Miami area. The services Shiver’s company provided were not spelled out in the financial filings, but the fee was listed under a section for payments to insiders.

The theme park has suffered a setback this summer by failing to get the Cliffhanger Roller Coaster open.

The Maggie Valley theme park filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March in hopes of holding off bill collectors long enough to get back on its feet. In addition to a $9.5 million mortgage, the park has a trail of unpaid bills with more than 215 companies totaling $2.5 million.

Ghost Town has been granted an extension to file its reorganization plan under bankruptcy protection. In early July, days before the plan was due, Ghost Town asked the court for an extension. The bankruptcy court granted a three-month extension, making the plan now due in early October. The plan is supposed to spell out how the company plans to make money to pay back its myriad creditors.

Those owed money get to vote on whether to accept Ghost Town’s reorganization plan. The plan is supposed to be voted on by creditors within two months of being filed.

The bankruptcy court turned down a request by Ghost Town that would have paved the way for another $250,000 loan from a private investor, Alaska Pressley. The loan would have been used to help get the incline railway working. Ghost Town wanted to pay back the loan by dipping into proceeds from ticket sales, but the bankruptcy court ruled that this in effect would allow Pressley to jump in line ahead of others already owed money by Ghost Town.

A comprehensive economic development strategy would go a long way toward solving the quagmire that is holding back progress on the Jackson County Economic Development Commission, the EDC board decided this week.

“This is probably the most important issue,” said Joe Cline, the chairman of the EDC. “If we wait until the economy starts turning back around and everybody has done the groundwork and are ready to go, they will be miles ahead of us. We won’t be on a level playing field.”

The EDC has been preoccupied for much of the past year with what its role is. The county, which provides most of the funding for the EDC and employs its director, has provided little direction on what the nine-member volunteer board should be doing. The body is also caught in a power struggle between the county and towns.

It is further plagued by lingering controversy over alleged financial mismanagement dating back several years that remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the EDC director has just resigned, leaving the entity even more rudderless.

Bringing in a consultant and assembling a task force of stakeholders to forge a new direction could be the answer to the problems, Cline said.

“I agree there should be some kind of strategy on the table,” said Cecil Groves, president of the Southwestern Community College and an EDC member. “I think it will take someone out the region, outside the immediate family, to come in and look at this and give some objective approach to get people together and unified in a direction they are comfortable with.”

Cline said the question is how much such a study would cost and who would put up the money. The outgoing EDC director estimated a good one would cost $200,000.

“You almost can’t afford not to do it. It is something that is definitely needed,” Cline said. “But that is a lot of money.”

County leaders have expressed interest in taking a step back and developing a comprehensive economic development strategy under the guidance of a consultant. The EDC has money sitting in its coffers, which has accumulated over several years. The county would have to approve spending the money, however.

EDC members came to a consensus that Cline should approach county leaders to gauge interest and their level of financial support.

 

Elusive audits

Meanwhile, the EDC continues to struggle with how it can complete back audits from the years 2001 through 2005 when records from that period are incomplete.

Larry Morris, an EDC member from Cashiers, said the issue is like an albatross around the board’s neck. Yet since the county, not the EDC, is in control of whatever records do exist there is nothing the board can do but wait.

“I hope they can work in all due haste to resolve this. It seems to be a continuing issue that has lingered on for some time for whatever reason,” said Morris.

“There probably has been some feet dragging somewhat, but it has not been by this body,” Cline said. “I don’t even know where the records are for the years we are talking about. I don’t know who has custody of those at the moment. I agree it has been a frustrating, agonizing process.”

During the period in question, EDC records were kept at the office and home of the EDC chairman Tom McClure, who works in development at WCU. He acted as the body’s de facto director, although he was technically a volunteer. When the county grew concerned over a lack of financial oversight, it sent sheriff’s deputies to seize the records from McClure. Despite operating largely on county funds, the county technically had no authority to seize the records since the EDC was a standalone body, and it had to give them back again. But along the way, some disappeared.

“Those records just went missing. They got gone. There is no good explanation for it,” said Jay Coward, an attorney and member of the EDC.

Cline said the EDC has asked the district attorney and sheriff’s office to figure out if wrongdoing occurred.

“If there was anything done wrong, I don’t care whose doorstep it falls on, it needs to fall,” Cline said.

But no one has been willing to investigate, Cline said.

Cline said the only thing the board can do is make sure history is not repeated by making sure there is proper oversight, something that was lacking back then.

“The county and elected officials should have kept a closer check and eye on what’s going on,” Cline said. “If you are elected to take care of the taxpayers money and you allocated it, then you ought to at least know how those funds are being used. I think all of them share equal responsibility.

“It appears to me that everybody sat back until it got to a certain point and said ‘Wait a minute.’ Everybody tried to get in front of it and close the door to the barn after the cow got out,” Cline said. “Quite honestly, I don’t know if you will ever get totally to the bottom of it.”

Jackson County poll workers will contend with write-in ballots from at least two towns on election night this fall. One is Webster, where not enough people have stepped forward to run, leaving the town’s fate up to write-in candidates. The other is in neighboring Forest Hills, where the mayor missed the deadline to file for election and will now wage a write-in campaign.

Forest Hills Mayor James Wallace was hiking in the Swiss Alps in July when the sign-up period for candidates came and went, unbeknownst to him. When Wallace got back in town, he went by the election office only to discover he had missed the filing period and it was too late to get his name on the ballot. He now says he will run as a write-in candidate.

In the meantime, another candidate, Mark Teague, filed to run for mayor at the last minute. Teague was initially planning to run for a regular seat on the Forest Hills town board. He appeared in the Jackson County election office minutes before the filing deadline only to learn no one had signed up to run for mayor yet. So Teague filed to run for mayor instead.

Wallace said he always intended to run and had even told the rest of the town board that he would.

While Teague initially thought he was running unopposed, he said it doesn’t bother him that Wallace will be running after all as a write-in.

“Whatever turns up, turns up,” Teague said. “I was just looking to help out the neighborhood.”

Teague, 45, owns a company called Environmental, Inc., which provides wastewater treatment services. Wallace is a retired Western Carolina University professor.

Forest Hills is a tiny town of less than 350 registered voters. It was incorporated as recently as 1997 with the sole purpose of creating land-use protections that would keep out student apartments, trailer parks and undesirable commercial enterprises.

Forest Hills lacks a town hall. Records were historically kept at the mayor’s home, with the boxes shuffled off between neighbors when a new mayor got elected, along with a special fireproof box for the most important documents. When Wallace became mayor, he didn’t want to become custodian of all those boxes, however. When none of the town board members were willing to take in the boxes either, Wallace suggested renting a storage unit. Instead, the town board chose to have the records digitized with discs placed in a safe deposit box.

Neighbors of a proposed 64-unit apartment building to serve low-income seniors in Waynesville have renewed hope that their fight to stop the project isn’t over yet.

They had opposed the project on the basis of its size: a three-story, 400-foot long apartment building fronting a residential neighborhood. Despite opposition, the Waynesville zoning board of adjustment granted developers a necessary conditional-use permit to move ahead in April. The Richland Hills project then became contingent on financing. To make it viable, developers hoped to land federal tax credits for low-income housing projects.

The developers learned last week their application for the tax credits did not make the cut this year, however. Out of 55 projects that applied for the tax credits in the state, only 24 won approval from the N.C. Housing Finance Agency. The tax credits would have offset the upfront capital needed to undertake the project and in turn allow developers to charge lower rent to tenants and generally make the project viable. The project can apply can next year.

“A lot of times the first go-around you don’t get it,” said Cindy Weeks, manager of community investments for Mountain Housing Opportunities, one of the partners in the development. “We are not deterred by it. It is a really great project, and we really think the need is there.”

If the project is stalled too long, however, it could lose its conditional use permit from the town and would force developers to start over at the Waynesville zoning board of adjustments for an extension. By then, the town could have rewritten its land-use plan rules to be more critical of such large projects, neighbors hope.

“Hopefully, it will buy us enough time,” said Anna Eason, a mother of two who lives near the proposed complex.

Eason said the neighbors opposed the scale of the project.

“It is longer than a football field and three stories tall,” Eason said. “Such a large building was too big for the neighborhood.”

Another resident near the proposed project, Kevin Brock, said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the failed tax credit will derail the project, at least in its current form.

“I don’t think there would be any opposition to low-income senior housing,” Brock said. “The size of the building was the objection.”

Neighbors could have been placated with two-story town homes instead of a giant apartment block, he said.

 

One extension granted

Late last week, Denise Mathis, who is a partner in the project, called Town Planner Paul Benson and asked whether the time period for the conditional use permit could be extended. Initially, the developers had a six-month window to apply for a building permit.

Benson has the power to grant a six-month extension, which he said is par for the course on a project of such magnitude.

“We routinely grant those,” said Benson. “It is a long process to get everything ready for a building permit.”

Mathis did not tell Benson that the project had lost its bid for federal tax credits in her phone call or in a follow-up email formally requesting the six-month extension.

Benson granted Mathis the six-month extension, making April 2010 the new deadline for a building permit. The new deadline is still several months before next year’s cycle of tax credits will be awarded. It is unknown whether the developers would move ahead with the expense of securing building permits prior to securing the tax credits.

Benson told Mathis she could seek vested rights for the project, which would buy her an additional two years. However, it would have to go back before the board of adjustment and require another public hearing, Benson said. Vested rights is a concept set up by the state to prevent developers from being caught in the lurch by shifting zoning requirements mid-stream in a project.

The board of adjustment, a quasi-judicial body, previously ruled that the complex is not out of character for the neighborhood.

However, there is another factor at play: a possible tweaking of the town’s land-use plan and zoning requirements. The town has appointed a blue-ribbon committee tasked with assessing problem areas within the land-use plan and recommending changes. The current land-use plan allows high-density development in the neighborhood, which likely influenced the board of adjustment’s favorable ruling on a conditional use permit.

Competition for the federal tax credits was stiff this year and the pool of available funds smaller than usual, according to Mark Shelburne, Counsel & Policy Coordinator to the N.C. Housing Finance Agency.

Richland Hills’ application for tax credits didn’t score as high in two key areas as other projects proposed across the state. It didn’t get extra points for having secured below-market financing, and it lost points for having higher than normal per unit construction costs.

The developers had sought county support for the project, but did not secure an endorsement from county commissioners, who were concerned endorsing this project this year could knock future low-income housing projects out of the running for the tax credits in future years. Shelburne said that had no direct bearing on the project’s failure to land the tax credits.

Since its creation, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has loomed over Swain County. Its massive peaks flank life itself: as an engine for tourism, a stomping ground for locals, and a refuge for wild things.

The park’s most lasting legacy, however, seems to be the deep and unforgivable wedge it has driven through the mountain people living there. Like every community bordering the Smokies, Swain County suffered a heartbreaking evacuation of farms and home places to make way for the park in the 1930s. Hardly a decade later, the construction of Lake Fontana forced a second relocation, not only for those who lay in the direct path of the rising water but also those who lived in a vast area rendered inaccessible when the only road into their communities was flooded.

Hemmed in by the lake on one side and the park on the other — and with no road in or out — the area was no longer habitable, and the people were forced to move out. The isolated territory was ceded to the national park, but with a written promise from the government that it would rebuild the flooded road on higher ground. While the land would remain part of the park, the hope of a road provided a measure of solace. At the least, descendents believed they could visit their beloved home sites and pay homage to their cemeteries.

It has now been 68 years, and the road is still not built.

The broken promise to rebuild the road has fostered deep-seated distrust of the government and the park in Swain County. The feeling was so universal in years gone by that it was commonly taken up from the pulpit on Sundays, with preachers packing powerful sermons about the injustice perpetrated by the government’s betrayal. The hardships suffered by those visiting graves of loved ones trapped deep inside the park fanned the flames of bitter resentment.

“There was a good period of time in Swain County when the overwhelming view of the county was united that we needed to build this road,” said Leonard Winchester, 59, of Swain County. “Primarily based on the idea that the families from the North Shore had been given a raw deal and the road would give them a way to visit cemeteries.”

In the 1960s, a few miles of the road were actually built. But the rising environmental movement of the era rallied opposition from across the nation. Those forced out to make way for the park countered the false notions of a pristine wilderness. What about the houses and barns, mines and mills, stores and churches, that once riddled the area? But Swain proved no match for the numbers or clout of environmentalists, who not only made a good case against denigrating a well-loved national park but had the backing of environmental laws and the money to go to the mat if needed.

As Swain County fought for the road decade after decade to no avail, it seemed the government saw the mountains as a political backwater that needn’t be heeded. Over the years, however, some began to form a different conclusion. Perhaps the problem lay with the idea itself: a 30-mile road slicing through the largest backcountry territory in the East could never be pulled off.

As this realization sank in, a circle of leaders in the county began postulating: if given another out, would the government make good on its promise? If Swain County dropped its unwavering claim to build the road, then perhaps there was hope for another type of settlement.

The solution was a payoff, more or less: “Give us cash and we’ll settle this once and for all.” At first blush, it sounded like nothing more than a sell-out. Mountain people aren’t known for relinquishing their position once they’ve dug in. The challenge to change minds would be daunting.

The idea for Lake Fontana arose during the grips of World War II, when a large and steady source of electric power was needed for a plant in Tennessee hard at work churning out sheets of aluminum for wartime airplanes. A dam was proposed on the Little Tennessee River to provide hydropower for the Alcoa aluminum plant.

Not only would the lake drive out hundreds of people in the direct path of rising water, but it would flood the only road leading to several communities above the high water mark. Roughly 44,000 acres would be rendered inaccessible, leaving 216 families hemmed in by the lake on one side and the recently created Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the other.

The government could not spare the money to build a new road, so it decided those families would have to move out as well. A deal was crafted to evacuate the people and turn the land over to the national park.

The federal government signed a pact with Swain County to rebuild the flooded road after the war, “as soon as Congress appropriated the money” to do so. Known as the 1943 Agreement, it was signed by Tennessee Valley Authority, the State of North Carolina, Swain County and the Department of Interior on behalf of the national park.

The 1943 Agreement pledging to rebuild the road has lived in infamy ever since. While die-hard road supporters won’t speak to cash advocates even casually in public, there is one point they agree on.

“We felt like they owed Swain County something. We still do,” said Claude Douthit, the leading historian on all things pertaining to the North Shore Road.

The only question is what: a road or a cash settlement?

If there is one man responsible for turning the tide toward a cash settlement, it’s Douthit. Now 81, Douthit knows every court case on the matter, which courtroom it was heard in and the name of the presiding judge. He can quote chapter and verse from the 1943 Agreement.

A room in his house is littered with evidence of his fight for Swain County’s settlement. Files that no longer fit in cabinet drawers form precarious piles on his desk, dog-eared post-it notes protrude from the pages of Congressional transcripts. Maps detailing every tract of land acquired for the park have taken up permanent residence on his dining room table.

“I could tell you every piece of property that was down there and whose it was and how much it was,” Douthit said.

Douthit has all the necessary traits to drive the settlement home: he’s stubborn, cantankerous and a stickler for the facts. The tougher the fight got, the harder he hoed. When others wanted to give up, convinced it was a hopeless cause and their efforts were fruitless, he soldiered on, prodding others to stick with him.

Like many Swain natives, Douthit claims family ties to the area now under the park’s domain. His father worked for one of the big lumber companies as a blade sharpener for the giant saws that ate their way across the landscape in the 1920s.

Douthit spent his own career closely tied to the park. He was the head of the Bryson City office of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had built Fontana Lake. As a lake overseer, Douthit spent many a day patrolling the water.

“I worked up and down this lake, worn out more damn boats than most people have ever seen,” Douthit said.

That’s how his quest for the real history behind the North Shore started.

When Douthit first started with TVA in 1951, the lake was relatively new. He was frequently paid visits by those whose land was claimed in the creation of the lake or the park and became a dumping ground for their gripes. Some claimed they were still owed for their land, others decried the hardship to visit family cemeteries unreachable except by boat.

“I had to learn and understand exactly what happened,” Douthit said.

Douthit wasn’t always a supporter of the cash settlement. Like most, he felt the government should keep its promises to build back the road it flooded.

While slow to start, it seemed the road would eventually come to pass. In 1960, $8 million was appropriated for the road and construction got underway. But in 1968, with just seven miles built, work ceased. For starters, money had run out. But far more ominous, environmentalists had mounted a campaign against the road. And park service engineers issued a report advising against further construction.

While the road progressed in fits and starts those eight years, a second debate was playing out over whether the park should be designated as wilderness. A heated round of public hearings ensued. Environmentalists and park lovers wanted the entire park to be designated as wilderness, forever scuttling the North Shore Road. The people of Swain County fought back, but were outnumbered by the rising environmental movement of the era. While wilderness designation never came to pass, the writing on the wall did not bode well for the fulfillment of a road.

Douthit and others fighting for a settlement of the 1943 Agreement began toying with the idea of a lawsuit against the federal government. In 1974, an entourage from Swain County drove to Asheville and boarded two small planes bound for Raleigh. Their mission was to meet with the N.C. Attorney General Robert Morgan and implore the state for help.

“Whether it was build the road or give money, just to do something,” Douthit said.

They felt the only solution was to sue the federal government.

But they soon uncovered a major flaw in the 1943 Agreement. The agreement contained a hold-harmless clause should the road never come to fruition, stating: “failure on the part of Congress for any reason to make such appropriations shall not constitute a breach or violation of this agreement.”

“Our county lawyers at the time got out- lawyered, so to speak,” Douthit said.

Dejected, Douthit realized there was no ground for a lawsuit.

“If they filed a suit, it would be lost and Swain County would never receive anything. It would be over with. We would get no road, no money, nothing,” Douthit said. “Knowing we couldn’t sue on the 1943 contract, what would we do?”

To Douthit, the fight for a road hit a dead-end.

“Why did I choose to fight for money?” Douthit asked. “We knew we couldn’t get the road. We knew we could never get it.”

And so Douthit began the long, uphill battle to bring the same revelation to the rest of Swain County.

One of the people on Douthit’s list to bring over to the side of a cash settlement was Luke Hyde. Born and raised in Swain County, Hyde went away to law school and entered the world of state politics in Raleigh. He traveled back and forth regularly, and Douthit figured Hyde would be useful to have on their side.

Like Douthit, Hyde, 69, had always supported the road. In the late 1960s, Hyde joined an underground movement of strategists to get the road built. They researched federal laws, studied the politics and plotted the prospects of bringing a lawsuit against the federal government get the road built.

But one day in the mid-1970s, when Hyde was giving a talk for the local Democratic Party in the old Swain County Courthouse, Douthit approached Hyde and shoved a thick stack of papers into his hand. Among the papers was a copy of the 1943 Agreement. Hyde came across the same pesky hold-harmless clause.

“I sat there reading it and my face flushed and I got angry and said ‘Son of a gun,’” Hyde recalled. “It was a marvelous job of lawyering.”

Like Douthit, Hyde realized then there would never be a road. There was only one outlet left. In lawyer’s terms, it’s called a “substitute performance,” but to laymen it would become known as the cash settlement.

It wasn’t an easy stance for Hyde. His own family grew up in the North Shore area and was forced off their land to make way for the lake and the park. Many in his own family remain road supporters to this day.

“We respect and love each other enough not to talk about certain issues,” Hyde said. “We are on good terms, but they think I am wrong for supporting the cash settlement.”

The drama over the North Shore Road heated up through the 1980s. Descendents of the North Shore area sued the government to get the road built, known as the Helen Vance lawsuit. The case was lost, appealed, lost again, appealed again, but denied by the Supreme Court for a hearing.

Meanwhile, Congressmen fought it out in the halls of Washington. Dueling bills were introduced: one that would provide a cash settlement of $9.5 million and one that would build the road.

In Swain County, public hearings on the dueling bills drew crowds in the hundreds, inspiring impassioned, angry and heartbreaking speeches. It was like a replay of the public hearings from 20 years earlier pitting wilderness designation against road construction. Little did people know at that time that the hearings were destined to repeat themselves yet again 20 years later.

Supporters of a cash settlement had won an important and promising ally in the late 1970s: Cecil Andrus, Secretary of the Department of the Interior. Andrus made a trip to Swain County to see for himself the issue at hand. It seemed everyone wanted a shot at lobbying Andrus, so a local entourage rented a bus and piled in for a chance to bend Andrus’ ear.

“We took him up to Calf Pen Gap and let him look across Fontana Lake to the Smokies,” Douthit said. “We wanted to convince him that Swain County was due some money, due something.”

The fieldtrip ended with a catered picnic at Deep Creek in the park. Andrus was apparently convinced and began working to help secure a cash settlement for Swain County. Andrus even appointed a committee to study the issue, which recommended a cash settlement of $9.5 million. A bill was introduced to that effect in Congress.

Although one foot was in the door, the prospect of a cash settlement hit a brick wall. Senator Jesse Helms, with his dueling bill to build the road, proved a formidable opponent. Helms was soon joined in Washington by Congressman Charles Taylor, who took a similar stance in the House of Representatives.

By the ‘90s, the issue had all but stalled. The families suing for the road lost their lawsuit in the federal courts. In Congress, Helms and Taylor were unable to advance the road but were unwilling to take up the cause of a cash settlement.

“We wound up with nothing,” Douthit said.

While hamstrung nationally, supporters of a cash settlement put their down time in the ‘90s to good use, swaying the hearts and minds of locals. In the process, Hyde struck on a commonly held belief.

“If you asked people as a moral question, should the government build the road, the answer would be ‘yes.’ But at the same time 9 out of 10 said there ain’t going to be a road,” Hyde said.

So Hyde stopped asking people whether they thought the road should be built.

“The question instead is ‘since they are not going to build the road, what should we do now? What is an intelligent plan B?’” Hyde said. “That’s been my posture.”

They took their message to what Hyde calls the county’s “influence molders,” one porch at a time and one living room at a time. One of those on their list was a man named Leonard Winchester.

Like many, Winchester was a road supporter. Hyde and Douthit not only swayed him, but convinced him to take a leadership role in their newly formed group to fight for the cause of a cash settlement: the Citizens for the Economic Future of Swain County. While all in the group support the cash settlement, reasons vary.

“Some say since there is not going to be a road, we should pursue a settlement,” said Winchester, 59. “My view is given the choice of a road or a settlement and you can have which ever one you pick, I would still pick the settlement. I think it is a better choice.

“Clearly there would be some level of tourism increase if the road was there, but who would benefit from it,” Winchester said. “The average taxpayers would not get much out of it.”

Winchester, now retired, was the IT director for the school system at the time. Winchester was a Republican, unlike Hyde and Douthit who were Democrats. Winchester would help present their group as bi-partisan.

The Citizens for the Economic Future of Swain County needed a cold, hard dollar amount to ask for to successfully advance the cause of a cash settlement. The group hired an accounting firm, Crisp, Hughes and Evans, to calculate a figure. They had an easy starting place: the monetary value of the old road flooded by the lake. The accounting firm started with that base figure, adjusted for inflation and added 60 years of interest. Their answer became the now-touted $52 million.

To realize a cash settlement, the group had to sway the original four signatories of the 1943 Agreement: Swain County, North Carolina, TVA and the park service. Each would take work to win over, but perhaps the toughest and most critical were the elected leaders of Swain County.

To that end, the Citizens for the Economic Future of Swain County pulled off quite a coup in the county commissioner election in 2002. For the first time, a majority of the candidates elected were in support of the cash settlement. They promptly passed a resolution by a vote of 4 to 1 calling for a $52 million payout in lieu of the road.

In the meantime, however, road supporters were having some luck of their own. Congressman Charles Taylor, a long-time road supporter, had risen in prominence and power in the halls of Washington. Using his seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, he stealthily inserted a line item of $16 million in the federal budget for construction of the road.

It was far from a green light for the road, however, as the National Park Service would first have to undergo a massive study to meet the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The park would spend more than five years coming up with possible solutions and weighing them from every possible angle — even building a giant bridge across Fontana Lake. Once again, controversy reached a fever pitch as Swain County became home to another round of heated public hearings, marking the third such showdown in the history of the road saga.

The park service spent five years and $10 million conducting the assessment, a 552-page report on the pros and cons of building or not building the road. Ultimately, the park came down on the side of a cash settlement.

Ironically, Taylor had single-handedly advanced the cause of a cash settlement more than anyone in history. If not for his $16 million line item to build the road, there would have been no environmental assessment that in turn forced the park service to formally weigh in — for or against — for the first time. Taylor’s little line item had also once more rallied environmental groups and pushed the issue onto a national stage.

“That put them in high gear,” Winchester said.

The environmental movement was the lynch-pin in the fight for a cash settlement, bringing to bear political pressure that the people of Swain County could never have mustered otherwise.

“The conservation community is a large community, and they were willing to help to keep a road from being built through the park,” Douthit said.

In 2007, several key elements fell into place to bring about the cash settlement in lieu of the long-promised road.

One was the election of Heath Shuler, a new congressman for Western North Carolina who was from Swain County and differed from his predecessor’s stance on the road. Shortly after Shuler took office, he got to work on a cash settlement. Just three months into his term, a coalition of 17 Senators and Congressmen from North Carolina and Tennessee joined forces in calling for a cash payoff and signed on to a letter of support.

“We finally had a large number of lawmakers focused on getting a monetary settlement for the folks in Swain County. It was the first time we’d been able to point to such strong support for that approach on Capitol Hill,” Greg Kidd, with the Asheville office of the National Parks Conservation Association, said at the time.

In May of that same year, Douthit got an important call — one that was a long time coming. Dale Ditmanson, the superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, told Douthit the park service finally made a decision on the North Shore Road. It supported a cash settlement.

“I was very pleased,” Douthit said.

Shuler got to work again and appropriated $6 million as a down payment toward an eventual cash settlement in the government’s 2008 fiscal year budget. Another $6 million is left over from the pot of money secured by Taylor for road construction that never came to fruition.

Swain won’t receive any money until final negotiations with the park service over a dollar amount are concluded.

While it seems Swain County is closer than ever to getting something, a new obstacle has arisen. The same park leaders who once embraced Douthit, Hyde and Winchester as allies have suddenly stopped backing a settlement figure of $52 million and are pushing for a lower number, according to those familiar with the issue.

The about-face was not only a surprise but a personal affront to the people of Swain County.

“It is the greatest disappointment I have seen in the last 20 years,” Hyde said. “I don’t know why they are backpedaling, but it is not a nice thing to do. We believe in the mountains in keeping your word. We got into this mess partly because people didn’t keep their word.”

Park Superintendent Dale Ditmanson said he is merely trying to arrive at an equitable figure and determine how the $52 million was calculated.

Hyde said there is a moral and legal obligation for the park service to stay with its position on $52 million. Hyde suspects it may be a negotiating device suggested by the legal counsel for the park service. Whatever the case, “It’s not going to work,” Hyde said.

It seems the government is getting a bargain with $52 million — considering the cost of building the road was pegged at $728 million, he said.

Swain leaders say they won’t settle for anything less. For Douthit, Hyde and Winchester, it would be difficult to face their friends and neighbors if they did. They rallied the community to give up on the road and come together behind a cash settlement of $52 million, and to now produce something less simply isn’t an option for them.

“We are closer than we have ever been, and we are going to prevail. I am convinced we are going to make it work,” Hyde said. “While it has been 66 years, we are going to solve this and Swain County will get $52 million. We have the right combination in Raleigh and Washington.”

A competitive state Senate race appears to be on the horizon once again for Sen. Joe Sam Queen, D-Waynesville.

Andy Webb, a Republican challenger from McDowell County, has gotten a head start by already announcing his candidacy for the 2010 election cycle.

Webb is a three-term county commissioner in McDowell County and has been board chairman for six years.

“I look forward to getting acquainted with the good people of our district in the months to come,” Webb said in a press release last week.

Queen, who is serving his third two-year term in Raleigh, said Webb will have his work cut out for him.

The district spans six mountain counties, sprawling from Haywood County northward as far as Avery and back down to McDowell.

“I can tell you having campaigned in this district, he has a lot of ground to cover,” Queen said. “He may be known in McDowell, but he is unknown elsewhere.”

Queen said he is already established throughout the district as an effective legislator, including Webb’s home turf of McDowell County.

“It is a rare week I’m not in McDowell,” Queen said.

Haywood and McDowell are the two largest counties in the district, and both candidates will be looking to pull down as many votes as possible on their home turf while battling it out in the remaining counties.

Queen narrowly eked out his first victory in 2002. He narrowly lost the seat in 2004, and narrowly won it back in 2006. But in 2008, he won by a comparatively comfortable margin of 54 percent, indicating he had finally begun to establish himself.

The sign-up period for candidates isn’t until early 2010, so it won’t be known for several months whether Webb will face competition in a Republican primary and advance to a final round against Queen. But getting his name out early could help Webb stave off other Republicans thinking of a run.

The past three elections, Queen has faced off with the same candidate, Keith Presnell, R-Burnsville.

Queen said it wasn’t a matter of if there’d be competition, but who the competition would be this year.

“I wasn’t expecting the absence of competition. My district is entirely too competitive to expect that,” Queen said.

Queen spent as much as $800,000 on the race in 2006, making fundraising a significant challenge for what has become one of the most expensive seats in the North Carolina Senate.

Webb said he was deeply concerned about the state’s financial situation.

“Tax and spend budgets year after year; scaring our state and local employees with cuts in critical jobs, starting at the ground level, is unacceptable,” Webb said. “There is more to sound budgeting than growing government through tax increases.”

Queen countered that this year’s budget marks the largest budget reduction in state history. However, Queen acknowledged that there will be plenty of fodder for opponents in this year’s state budget, which not only included budget cuts but tax increases.

“Anybody can pile on in this recession,” Queen said. “I’ll remind Andy which party created this recession. It wasn’t created in North Carolina. It was created from failed national policy, and we are doing the best we can to grow out of this recession and get back to prosperity for all. It will be tough for Republicans to make their case, and he needs to start early.”

Webb criticized what he called “a liberal world view from Raleigh” that is undermining mountain values.

Negotiations over a cash settlement for Swain County have been stalled for more than a year as opposing sides argue over a fair dollar amount.

Swain County officials have met three times with the U.S. Department of the Interior to discuss a dollar figure for the cash settlement, but negotiations were called off last July. The leading reason is a change in Washington administration, from a new president to a new secretary for the Department of the Interior and various players down the line — all of whom must be briefed and educated on the long-standing controversy.

The negotiations also ground to a halt after the U.S. Park Service mentioned a dollar amount for the settlement that is drastically lower than what Swain County expected to hear.

For six years, Swain leaders have operated under the assumption they would get a $52 million cash settlement from the federal government if they gave up their claims to the long-promised North Shore Road. The federal government promised to rebuild the road after flooding the old one during the construction of Lake Fontana in the 1940s. Building a new one would traverse 30 miles of backcountry in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an expensive and environmentally unsound proposal — thus making the cash settlement a more viable alternative.

U.S. Congressman Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, has been fighting for a cash settlement since taking office three years ago and stands by the number of $52 million.

“That number has been pretty consistent. That is the number that has been out there,” Shuler said.

Shuler said he does not know why the park service came up with such a low number in negotiations.

“It may have just been thrown out there to say ‘Let’s see if they’ll take this,’” Shuler surmised. “I think like with any negotiation, one group will start out low and one group will start out high.”

That said, Shuler doesn’t want to bend on $52 million, nor do the Swain County commissioners who will ultimately accept or reject any offer on behalf of the county.

According to those familiar with the negotiations, Great Smoky Mountains National Park Superintendent Dale Ditmanson has been actively pushing for a far lower number. In a response to written questions, Ditmanson countered that claim, however.

Ditmanson said that the park service has not yet made Swain an offer for a monetary settlement. When asked how he would characterize the figure he allegedly brought up during the negotiations, Ditmanson did not respond.

It is unclear how much sway Ditmanson will have over the final number the Department of the Interior puts on the table.

“As superintendent, my primary responsibility is to do due diligence in identifying a justifiable basis for a monetary settlement and briefing the leadership of the National Park Service and the Department of Interior,” Ditmanson said in his written response to questions.

Ditmanson said the purpose of the negotiations right now is to determine exactly how Swain County has calculated the figure of $52 million and whether it is accurate. The premise is that it starts with the value of the road at the time it was flooded and adjusts it for inflation and interest. But exactly what the starting number should be is a matter of debate.

“Determining a basis or calculation for a monetary settlement is a primary purpose of the meetings with the four parties,” Ditmanson said. The basis will be explained in the final agreement, he said.

The sum of $52 million was arrived at by the Citizens for the Economic Future of Swain County, a group that formed to advance the cause of a cash settlement. In 2002, the group hired the accounting and auditing firm of Crisp and Hughes to do the calculations.

Shuler said he has been educating the new guard in Washington about the North Shore Road issue, including a meeting with President Obama’s chief of staff and a breakfast with the Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

“We have to reengage them back into the process,” Shuler said.

As for Ditmanson, he has briefed the assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior and the acting director of the National Park Service. There is no permanent director appointed yet.

The past three negotiation meetings have had a delegation from Swain County, the state, the National Park Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the dam and lake that flooded the road. Ditmanson expects another meeting between the parties to be held this fall.

Shuler said the decision of how much to appropriate for a settlement is ultimately up to Congress, and he will fight for what he calls a “complete settlement.”

Shuler managed to rally support among fellow congressmen and senators for a cash settlement two years ago. But that was when building the road was still on the table and the park service was in the final throes of a major analysis weighing the pros and cons of each option.

During the analysis, the park adopted the figure of $52 million and quoted it extensively as a leading alternative to building the road during a lengthy public input process. That led the public to believe that if the monetary settlement was supported, that’s the amount Swain would be getting.

But Ditmanson now says the figure was used only for “analysis purposes,” largely because it lacked anything more concrete. The $52 million figure had been proposed by Swain’s leaders, so the park ran with it during the analysis.

When the analysis concluded and the park came out with its official stand on a cash settlement instead of the road, the $52 million figure vanished and was replaced with the language “monetary settlement,” with “an equitable method” for arriving at a dollar figure to be determined through negotiations. Ditmanson was appointed as the Department of the Interior’s point man in those negotiations.

Ditmanson said his job is now in the “due diligence” stage.

Shuler said the full settlement of $52 million is needed “to heal some wounds and bring people back together in the community.”

When asked about the public relations crisis the park service would likely encounter by refusing to endorse a settlement of $52 million, Ditmanson said his responsibility is merely to determine an equitable amount.

“I cannot comment on how the public will respond,” Ditmanson said.

Old records of the Jackson County Economic Development Commission are likely too spotty to complete missing audits from the years 2001 through 2005, although the county and EDC board say they will continue their quest to do so.

“The citizens deserve as much answers as can be provided. I don’t know how much can be provided, but I think everybody is committed to providing as much as they can,” said EDC Chairman Joe Cline. However, “It may be tough to pull the records together.”

Meanwhile, a watchdog group called Jackson County Citizens Action Group continues to dog the county and the members of the EDC, accusing them of a financial cover-up and lack of diligence in safeguarding public funds. Indeed, the entity had a pall cast over it when Jackson County leaders withdrew from the body four years ago and seized its records, citing concerns over financial management of tax dollars.

However, today’s members of the EDC are nearly all new, and they are ready to move on.

While it was actually a violation of state statute for the entity not to perform audits, the all-volunteer board didn’t realize it was supposed to be conducting them until the past couple of years.

“There is obviously some mismanagement and expenditure of small amounts that are not accounted for, but the large sums are fully accounted for,” County Manager Ken Westmoreland said of the missing audit years. “We are talking about nickels and dimes.”

Tom McClure, the director of Partnership Development for WCU’s Millenial Initiative, acted as a de facto director of the EDC during the time period. He kept many of the EDC records in his office and largely ran the entity’s financial affairs and managed its business on a daily basis, even though he was only the volunteer chairman of the board and not a paid director.

The past controversy that most haunts the EDC is the revolving loan fund, even though the revolving loan fund was under the auspice of the county and a nonprofit arm of the EDC called the Jackson Development Corporation. Defaults on revolving loans are actually what prompted the county to withdraw from the EDC four years ago and to pull a somewhat hostile takeover of the JDC’s assets and liabilities.

“Not only were some of these loans in default, but many times in the majority of the cases, the loans were not adequately collateralized,” Westmoreland said.

The loans helped prop up small industries and in turn support job creation. While several loans are still behind, all but one is still making payments, according to County Finance Director Darlene Fox.

This has not satisfied critics, who have attempted to trace the path of public dollars from the county, to the EDC, then to the JDC and finally into the hands of private businesses who have failed to keep up with payments. The JDC was dissolved and assumed by the county, so complaints from the public over the defunct entity’s dealings have landed on the EDC board.

The Jackson County Citizens Action Group has railed against both county leaders and the EDC, asking for answers for nearly two years, requesting public records, compiling their own outlines of events, and making pointed presentations on the issue during public meetings.

Marie Leatherwood, a longtime critic of the EDC, called the entity a “dark hole using taxpayer money with no accountability.”

“The tainted history of the EDC and their equally tainted defunct bankrupt property buying arm know as the JDC has totally undermined any confidence in these entities,” Leatherwood told EDC members at their last meeting.

Cline said that people should understand the current EDC members have nothing to do with the past dealings of a dissolved entity.

“I know the JDC is no longer in existence, but really you are complaining to the wrong people,” Cline said.

Most of the nine EDC members have come on board only in the past year, however, and only two were actually on board four years ago.

One of the new members, Dick Sterka of Sylva, said it was difficult to continually be held accountable for what happened before his time.

“I think everybody is ready to throw their hands in if we are going to be abused like this,” Sterka said following 25 minutes of public criticism at their last meeting by two individuals. “Our hands are tied.”

When Sterka was appointed to the EDC, he thought the controversies of the past were behind them. New bylaws were created and mostly new members were appointed, leading Sterka to believe they had started over from scratch.

“That’s what we thought we did,” Sterka said.

But the EDC was never formally disbanded, so today’s entity inherited the liabilities — both real and perceived — of the old board.

It’s one reason that Dorothea Megow-Dowling, the EDC director up until last week, suggests dissolving the EDC and creating a new one.

“My view as an outsider is that really has to be put to bed before anybody can move forward in any way,” said Dowling, who resigned this month after less than a year on the job. “Information will minimize the conspiracy stuff that goes on.”

That said, Dowling doesn’t think the past should be wallowed in. EDC Board Member Chris Matheson agreed.

“I think what we need to look at is what has gone right and what can we do to make the EDC run like it needs to run. There are so many people wanting to point fingers to the past. I think it counterproductive,” Matheson said.

That said, Matheson understands that members in the community are still confused about what transpired during the EDC upheaval.

“I respect their concerns and their desire to have answers,” Matheson said. “There was so much confusion it was difficult for me to get it straight myself.”

Haywood County commissioners have seen their share of hot-button issues this year.

First came the proposed nuisance ordinance, with angry citizens accusing them of communist rule. The momentum rolled over to budget time, when a 1-cent property tax increase once again demoted commissioners to the role of punching bags to blame for today’s economic hardships. Just when it seemed that storm blew over, new fingerpointing arose over the county’s recent propensity for landing itself in lawsuits.

A handful of dedicated county watchdogs seem to have taken up permanent residence at county commissioner meetings, poised and ready to speak out on any topic on the county’s agenda, or to create their own issues when need be.

The local dissidents have converged with a national grassroots movement called the 9-12 Project, which is building steam to change the course of what they see as a misguided country. A loose-knit chapter of the 9-12 Project has formed locally, providing a vehicle for dissatisfaction of all sorts, chief among them the growing national deficit and unresponsive elected leaders beholden to special interests.

“They feel like government is not listening,” said Bruce Gardner, a Haywood County organizer of the 9-12 movement.

The name 9-12 Project aims to conjure the conviction the country shared in the days after the 9-11 tragedy. The movement was spurred by the massive spending on Wall Street bailouts, auto bailouts and the stimulus spending, Gardner said.

“All it does is steal from our kids and grandkids and puts them in financial slavery,” Gardner said.

Gardner thinks the momentum will keep building and says their numbers locally are growing.

“I hear people complaining every day about what is going on,” Gardner said. “The 9-12 Project can put them to work.”

Gardner said the loose-knit group has formed committees that focus on different issues, holding what he refers to as kitchen table meetings at each other’s homes on a weekly basis. Gardner says the group is non-partisan. In fact, they are fed up with both parties, he said.

“You are seeing an awakening of the silent majority right now,” Gardner said.

As for the local county commissioners, they are a captive audience during a public comment period held at the start of their twice a month meetings. The first meeting in August featured a broad range of complaints.

One speaker wanted the county to stop applying for stimulus money, suggesting every community in the country should refuse to take it. Another railed against socialism and called on the commissioners to accept voluntary term limits for themselves. Yet another wanted to know if the county had an emergency plan for an electromagnetic pulse disruption set off in the upper atmosphere by terrorists to knock out wireless communications. And yet another demanded the county prepare a PowerPoint presentation for the public on expenses racked up during renovations to the historic courthouse.

One thing is for sure, it’s keeping commissioners on their toes and the meetings a lot more lively. Stay tuned.

For additional information about the group, go to 9-12projecthaywoodcountync.ning.com or call Gardner at 828.506.5007 or Linda Bennett 828.421.7279.

Jackson County has formally filed a lawsuit against Duke Energy to seize the Dillsboro Dam and surrounding river shore, using eminent domain to create a public park and in the process save the dam from being torn down.

The county is also seeking a preliminary injunction against Duke to keep the utility from demolishing, altering or removing any part of the dam or nearby powerhouse.

“Duke intends to immediately begin preparing the Dillsboro Dam and Powerhouse for demolition and removal,” the lawsuit states. But any forays toward removal would cause “irreparable harm as these historic structures cannot be replaced.”

Jackson County wants to transform the dam and surrounding shoreline of the Tuckasegee into a river park and promenade, replete with walking paths, benches, fishing areas and river access. The dam and powerhouse are intended as focal points in the county’s Dillsboro Heritage Park Plan, and, therefore, must be protected through a preliminary injunction against Duke, Jackson pleads.

The injunction also seeks to allow county officials to come onto Duke’s property. Duke had threatened the county with trespassing charges if it attempted to do so, keeping the county from surveying the property it plans to seize or conduct an appraisal.

The lawsuit claims the county is within its rights to seize the property under a state statue allowing for eminent domain for the purpose of creating, enlarging or improving a park or other recreational facility.

Duke has previously countered that condemnation would interfere with an order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to tear down the dam. Jackson claims that the “order” to tear down the dam is being misrepresented by Duke and that FERC merely granted Duke permission to tear it down. Once Duke no longer owns the dam, the FERC ruling will become moot, Jackson argues.

Jackson points out in the suit that the hydropower operation at the Dillsboro dam has been offline for five years, and therefore isn’t a core part of Duke’s business operation. In addition, Duke no longer has a federal license to operate the dam, having relinquished it in anticipation of demolition.

The county would be required to compensate Duke for the monetary value of the dam if condemnation is successful. At the time of filing the condemnation suit, the county was supposed to deposit the money upfront in an escrow account with the courts.

However, Jackson County only deposited $1. The county argues that by seizing the dam, Duke has been saved the trouble and expense of tearing it down, an undertaking that would have cost more than $1 million. That savings should more than suffice as the monetary compensation Jackson would otherwise owe Duke, the suit argues.

Swain County commissioners expressed their disapproval of an 18 percent hike in electric bills being sought by Duke Energy to pay for construction of a new coal plant.

Most of Jackson, Macon and Swain counties get their power from Duke.

In a resolution passed unanimously last week, commissioners protested the rate hike on the grounds that this region is partially supported by hydropower, a far cheaper form of power.

Duke has 10 hydropower dams straddling five rivers in the region. Swain County commissioners said they had always been told by Duke that the electric rates in the region would be lower than elsewhere because of those hydropower operations.

The water is free, unlike the fuel that powers coal, natural gas or nuclear plants. Duke’s rates are currently 31 percent below the national average. Other than annual adjustments to cover fluctuating fuel costs, there hasn't been an baseline rate increase since 1991.

Swain County forwarded its resolution to the N.C. Public Utility Commission, which holds final say on a rate increase.

As a regulated monopoly, Duke cannot raise power rates without permission from the N.C. Utility Commission. Duke operates under a profit ceiling. However, Duke claims that it needs to raise rates to cover the construction costs of a new $2.4 billion coal plant being built near Hickory and the increased cost of coal. The company has another $2 billion in capital investments in new power lines and pollution controls on plants.

Of the 18 percent hike, 13.5 percent would cover capital costs for projects like the new coal plant while 4.5 percent is intended to cover the increased costs of coal, according to Avram Friedman, director of the Sylva-based Canary Coalition. One theory is that Duke is asking for a bigger rate increase than it expects to get in anticipation of bargaining down.

Friedman proposes an alternative solution: don’t build the new coal plant.

Duke says the new coal plant is needed to meet the future demand for electricity. Friedman says the public should scale back its appetite for power. Instead of building a new coal plant, the money should be invested in energy efficiency programs and renewable energy, Friedman said.

“The Utility Commission must stop allowing Duke Energy to waste customers’ money while risking an environmental and health tragedy,” Friedman said. “North Carolina wants to be part of the national surge toward energy efficiency and clean power that is creating thousands of jobs everywhere.”

A bill passed by the state legislature in 2007 allowed utilities to start billing ratepayers to front money for new plants while still under construction. Previously, utilities couldn’t enact a rate hike tied to a new power plant until that plant came on-line. It forced utilities to secure financing for new plants through the financial markets rather than on the backs of rateplayers. Under the old financing rules, Friedman doubts the coal plant would have been built.

Friedman was among 43 arrested for a peaceable mass demonstration against the coal plant at Duke Energy’s headquarters in Charlotte on Earth Day this April, going down in history as the largest act of nonviolent civil disobedience on climate change in the country.

It’s not an uncommon scene: people rattling a tin can outside Wal-Mart to raise money, whether it’s a cheerleading squad saving up for new uniforms or the Salvation Army bell ringers.

There’s no shortage of good samaritans asking shoppers to ante up for a noble cause here and there, but a group camped out on the Wal-Mart sidewalk in Waynesville last week had a way of stopping people in their tracks.

The Save a Teacher Campaign in Haywood County is aiming to raise enough money to pay the salaries, and thus save the jobs, of the teachers and teacher assistants laid off this summer by Haywood County Schools.

The Haywood County Schools Foundation has already put up enough money from their coffers to save one teacher, and is now challenging the community to save the next one.

“We are looking at this one teacher at a time,” said Steve Brown, the director of the school foundation, a nonprofit that works to support the school system.

Among the donors dipping into their pockets last week was one teacher who herself was laid off.

“Maybe this can help save someone else’s job since I already lost mine,” said Amy Greene, as she pulled a few dollars from her wallet. Greene ran the computer lab at Junaluska Elementary School. She is five months pregnant and has made the decision to stay home rather than find other work, but she feels bad for those who don’t have that luxury.

“I always thought, ‘You know, if I go into this, I will always have a job because there will always be kids to teach,’” Greene said.

Parents, teachers and former teachers were most likely to pitch in during last week’s fund-drive, including Toni Mullany, a former teacher, who is now a social worker. She sees the positive role teachers play in children’s lives.

“When your home life is chaotic, the one stability you have is your teacher,” Mullany said.

Mullany said it is a shame the state is cutting education, but not surprising.

“Children can’t vote. Their voices aren’t heard,” Mullany said.

Parents, of course, do vote and care, said Cynthia Shuford, the president of the PTO at Bethel Elementary. Teachers are a very important influence in her son’s life, she said.

“He is with the teachers as long or longer than he is with us,” Shuford said.

 

Uphill battle

Brown hopes the effort will soften the blow of state budget cuts. But given the loss of 32 teaching positions in Haywood County — coming straight out of the classroom — the campaign has its work cut out to make a dent in the problem.

“We need, as a community, to pull together and do what we can to help,” Brown said.

And as schools in North Carolina face budget cuts of historic proportions, they need all the help they can get. The state plans to cut public school funding by $236 million for the coming year. Lawmakers were initially toying with far deeper cuts that would have drastically altered the classroom landscape. Backlash, and firm resistence by Governor Beverly Perdue to pass such a budget, led to a tax increase in lieu of the deeper cuts to schools.

Nonetheless, it’s the worst budget situation that longtime school administrators like John Sanderson, who spent 17 years as the principal of Central Elementary School, can remember.

“We’ve had tight budgets, but never a situation like this at all,” Sanderson says. “This is the toughest in my memory.”

The more severe budget cuts intially on the table would have increased class sizes for K-3. Sanderson was relieved that did not come to fruition.

“I can say without a doubt when you increase class size, particularly at the elementary school level, it does have a negative impact on the classroom,” Sanderson said.

But with possible cutbacks to personnel, making sure there are enough teachers could present its own challenge to school systems.

“Bottom line is, we don’t really have a choice,” said Dan Moore, director of personnel for Macon County Schools. “We’re not going to put 50 kids in an elementary classroom. If there [are] drastic cuts, we’ll have to look elsewhere.”

 

Last resort

Anne Garrett, superintendent of Haywood County Schools, is well aware of just how tough times are. The Haywood system stands to lose $1.2 million under the proposed state budget. Locally, the system has already faced $1 million in cuts.

“We’ve lost over $2 million, and school hasn’t started,” Garrett says.

The Haywood County school system looked to trim costs everywhere possible — supplies, new buildings, staff development — in order to avoid the most dreaded cuts: staff. It didn’t take long to exhaust every option, since salaries make up the biggest expense to the system.

“It’s hard to squeeze your budget with pens and pencils,” says Dan Moore, finance officer for the neighboring Macon County Schools. “It ends up being people.”

Macon will see a net loss of 14 teachers this school year with a state budget cut of $674,000 and a county budget cut of $200,000. Swain will see a net loss of three positions.

For months, school systems have been in limbo waiting for the state budget to be unveiled. Schools have known they’ll be facing big cuts, but haven’t been certain of exactly how much.

“We’ve heard so many different rumors about the amount, and it’s hard to come up with any concrete plan when there are so many rumors being floated around,” said Moore. “We’re preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.”

The waiting game forced most school system to keep teachers at arms length all summer not knowing if they would have a job come the state of the school year.

In June, Haywood announced it would not renew contracts for 54 teachers. They’ve been able to hire about 40 of those teachers back, however, reducing the number of actual lay-offs. Some teachers were saved when state cuts weren’t as severe as intially thought. Others were able to move into jobs vacated by teachers who were retiring.

 

What’s lost?

The Haywood school system saw a net loss of 32 positions, 23 of which were teacher’s assistants. The blow is a devastating one, particularly to the elementary grades.

Teacher’s assistants play a critical role, providing much of the housekeeping for a classroom — from helping a child find a missing lunchbox to discipline — thus freeing up teachers to focus on learning.

Teaching a roomful of elementary school students with a spectrum of abilities is a difficult task but is more plausible with the help of an assistant, said Toni Mullany, a former elementary school teacher who lives in Haywood County.

“They can say, ‘Let’s go over here in the corner and see if we can work through this math problem,’” Mullany said.

Cynthia Shuford, whose son is going into the second grade, couldn’t imagine his classroom without a teacher’s assistant.

“It would just be too much. Their learning would go down,” said Shuford, the president of the PTO at Bethel Elementary School.

Not all teacher’s assistants serve in a traditional classroom setting. Many work in special settings with children with disabilities or chronic discipline problems, and those who need extra help learning. Rena White, now a fifth grade teacher at Clyde Elementary School, served as a teacher’s assistant for years in a class for special needs students. She did everything from emptying catheters for students in wheelchairs to doing physical therapy.

Donnie and Joyce Bryson, the parents of a special needs student in Haywood County, were devastated when they learned early this summer that their son’s favorite teacher lost her job. She was in fact a teacher’s assistant who had put her nursing degree to work in the schools with special needs students. She had even come to visit the Brysons’ son in the hospital, which he visits frequently.

But as the state refined its budget over the course of the summer and the severity of the cuts lessened, the teacher, Shirley Downey, got to keep her job after all, providing a huge relief to the Brysons.

Amy Greene, who lost her job running the computer lab at Junaluska Elementary, was classified as a teacher’s assistant.

She did computer instruction for every student in the school at least once a week, and twice a week for those in third through fifth grade.

While Greene taught, the teachers reveled in the rare hiatus from students to plan for the next week or grade papers.

Now, teachers will presumably have to do their own instruction in the computer lab, not only adding to the workload but taking away a needed planning session.

At Central Elementary School, the positions for three teacher’s assistants who worked with underperforming students were cut. The school used to have six, but this year will only have three.

“It is going to be very hectic,” said Lynn Medford, a teacher in the program until this year. “They are going to have to do twice the work.”

Medford said the daily small group and one-on-one interaction was important to the students.

“If you work with them everyday you see where their weakness is and can figure out the best way to teach that child,” Medford said.

Medford has been moved to another open position at the school, and therefore, didn’t lose her job. This type of reshuffling went on across the school system, moving teachers who would otherwise be laid-off into positions vacated by those retiring.

 

Cuts far-reaching

Other Western North Carolina school districts are struggling with a drop in personnel, though more discreetly than the Haywood system. As teachers and staff leave through retirement or to take other jobs, the positions are either frozen or existing teachers who would otherwise be laid-off move into the open jobs.

“For the past year and a half, as people have retired or resigned, we have not filled that position unless we have to,” said Gwen Edwards, finance director for Jackson County Schools.

According to Edwards, any elective — like vocational education, for example — is on the chopping block when it comes to having someone to teach it. Also vacant in the Jackson system are three assistant principal spots; a receptionist position in the central office; and a bookkeeper at the high school, to name a few.

While these jobs have been cut, at least temporarily, the responsibilities that come with them remain — and are heaped on the plate of teachers and staff.

“The work is kind of split up between people, so it’s a little more work for everyone,” Edwards says.

Next door, Macon County Schools is dealing with its own share of cuts. Again, actual layoffs were avoided by a hiring freeze over the past year. The freeze applied not just to electives, but positions for required subjects.

“We haven’t filled any positions since January, but we do know time’s running out and there will have to be teachers in those classrooms,” Moore said.

Moore said the system has advertised and is currently hiring. But with every position, there’s a catch. Each contract is equipped with a clause that lets new hires know their position “is contingent upon a favorable budget,” Moore says.

With the budget finally passed and signed last week, administrators have mere days to weigh some heavy options before the school year starts.

“We’re going to have to make decisions that are pretty big, pretty soon, and pretty quick,” Moore said.

“With everything changing so much at the state level, it was really hard to make a budget,” agreed Gwen Edwards, finance director of Jackson County schools.

Adding to the challenge is that much of the budget is discretionary — meaning the state left it up to the local districts to decide what to cut.

“Instead, they’re going to make the local board of education the bad guy. We’re going to decide where to make those cuts,” Moore said.

Homeowners on Buck Knob Island in the middle of Lake Glenville say they are owed fire protection by local volunteer firefighters and have appealed to Jackson County commissioners to settle the conflict.

The homes lie within the 135-square-mile territory covered by the Cashiers/Glenville Fire Department. The volunteer fire department has refused to accept the island as part of its jurisdiction, citing the difficult nature of transporting firefighters and equipment on boats to the island in the case of a fire call.

As a result, the homeowners pay exorbitant insurance rates. One homeowner, Joey Bennett, is paying $14,000 a year for his house insurance. If the island was included in the fire department’s coverage area, it could drop to just $5,000 a year.

A dispute between the property owners and Cashiers Fire Chief Randy Dillard has been brewing for several years. Last month, the homeowners shared their plight at a county commissioners meeting. Bennett said if they don’t get a resolution, they will go to court.

“We do not want to go to court. We do not want to sue Jackson County. We just want our basic right of fire protection,” said Bennett, 48, who maintains a full-time residence in Florida where he is an oncologist.

Fire protection is not provided by the county, but by volunteer fire departments, which function as private entities. The county makes an annual contribution to the fire departments. For the Cashiers district, that contribution amounted to $135,000 out of the fire department’s $450,000 annual budget. The difference is raised through private donations from homeowners. Bennett said he is a loyal contributor to the fire department.

The Cashiers Fire Department has its own nonprofit board of directors that will ultimately make the decision of whether to expand fire protection to the island. Dillard said he would not comment on the issue since the homeowners have threatened legal action.

The county has entered the fray as a mediator.

“We are trying to find a solution to solve both the Cashiers Volunteer Fire Department’s dilemma in terms of liability and to find an affordable way for the homeowners to get the fire service,” County Manager Ken Westmoreland said.

 

Who should pay?

Bennett argues that while separated from shore by water, it is actually quicker to get to the island than many of the remote subdivisions tucked away on mountainsides at the end of long, twisty roads. It is just 250 yards from the shore to the island.

Bennett has a plan to install all of the infrastructure and equipment firefighters would need on the island, other than personal gear. That calls for pumps to draw water from the lake, a system of hydrants, and a large pick-up truck outfitted with a tank and hoses that could tie into the hydrant system. The pump would have a back-up generator if power went out.

Bennett estimates the cost would be $150,000. He would like to see the county pay for it, noting that the taxes paid by property owners on the island each year amount to about $50,000 a year from the island as a whole.

“We get nothing for it. We believe this is something we are entitled to,” Bennett said.

Westmoreland said the island homeowners sought the exclusivity offered by living on an island and doesn’t think the county commissioners will want to foot the bill for special fire service. Westmoreland would like to see a special fee paid by the property owners on the island to fund fire protection. Given the high insurance rates of homeowners, whatever homeowners had to chip in for fire protection would still result in a net savings, Westmoreland said.

Bennett said the property owners would be willing to contribute at some level.

“We will assist in a reasonable fashion,” he said.

But he doesn’t think they should have to.

“I personally pay over $5,000 a year to Jackson County. I don’t live here. My kids don’t go to school here. The one basic service I need, they won’t provide,” Bennett said.

Of course, many property owners don’t have children yet still have to pay taxes to support the education of other children. And there are county services like restaurant inspections by the health department, the library and erosion enforcement that are integral to society.

Bennett said he doesn’t mind paying those taxes, but he also doesn’t expect to get the cold shoulder when it comes to the one service he needs that everyone else seems to get.

“I think any community in the county that was excluded would feel the same,” Bennett said.

However, the island is not the only area in the county with the lowest fire protection rating of a class 10 according to insurance standards.

“They are not the only people at all. There is a lot of the county that is still unprotected,” Dillard said. “A lot of our department’s district is still a class 10. They are basically no different than the island people.”

The closer a home is to a fire station, the better insurance rate they get. The Cashiers/Glenville Volunteer fire department has such a huge territory to cover, it has four stations and 17 trucks, helping more homeowners achieve a better rate thanks to closer proximity, Dillard said.

The fire department responded to 472 fire calls last year with 45 volunteers. The calls don’t include rescue, which is done by a separate volunteer rescue squad.

There is one other island on Lake Glenville with a home on it, and another island that may have homes in the future. Westmoreland would like to see a solution that could be applied to all the islands. A representative from the N.C. Insurance Commission is visiting this week to offer input on the situation.

Despite Bennett’s claims that the county could have a liability case on their hand if someone was hurt in a fire the department refused to respond to, Westmoreland said the county has no legal obligation to provide fire service.

Westmoreland visited the island after homeowners came to the commissioners. Bennett said he appreciated that and thinks Westmoreland will try to broker a deal.

“His statement was this is something that can be done. It is just figuring out how to do it,” Bennett said.

 

Island ins-and-outs

The 19-acre island has 19 lots, all of them sold but only eight have been built on. Every home has a sprinkler system. It is mandated in the homeowners covenants, Bennett said.

As development and lot sales got underway in 2000, Dillard appeared at a county commissioners meeting and asked the island to be dropped from its coverage area on fire protection maps. The homeowners say the developer of the island was never told. Some property owners had already bought lots but were not informed. Those who came later, including Bennett, were never told the lot they were about to buy lacked fire protection.

Bennett claims the failure to notify property owners was illegal and could be ground for a lawsuit against the county.

Property owners finally learned of the situation in 2004, when one lot owner building a house tried to get insurance. The insurance agent writing the policy actually discovered the gap in service.

The island has a simple road network: a single road that circles the island about halfway up. It’s no more than 100 feet from the road down to the homes that ring the lakeshore, and another 100 feet up to lots at the top of the island. The loop road was used by heavy construction vehicles, furniture movers and even concrete haulers who piped concrete to poor house pads and driveways.

A large 80-foot barge is docked on the shore of the lake to carry major loads out to the island, which was necessary during construction, Bennett said.

“It holds concrete trucks and loaded lumber trucks,” Bennett said. But it could hold ambulances and fire trucks, too.

The island is just 250 yards off the mainland, with the barge trip taking only five minutes. Motor boats take a couple of minutes.

The island also owns a fleet of three pontoon boats. The property owners have a caretaker in a lake house on the shore who is on-call 24 hours a day to shuttle people back and forth when necessary, whether it’s dinner guests or medics. Medics responded one night when a visiting guest at one home went into a diabetic coma. From the time they called 911, medics were there in 12 minutes with a stretcher.

In the event the caretaker is not around, the keys are left in the boats at all times. In addition, each property owner owns a boat. Boat ownership is a required by homeowners association covenants, in fact.

Bennett bought his lot on the island in 2004 for $250,000 after coming to Western North Carolina to hunt for lake property for a vacation home. The island has phone and electricity. The only drawback is having to load and unload groceries into a boat when going back and forth, he said.

Jackson County’s economic development director Dorothea Megow-Dowling had been on the job for less than a year when she announced her resignation last week.

She came from a long career in economic development and specialized in strategy and planning processes.

“It is going to be unfortunate to see her leave,” Joe Cline, the chairman of the economic development commission told fellow members of the EDC at their last meeting. “The county and this board owes her a debt of gratitude for the work she has put in it has been tireless to say the least.”

More board members expressed regret after the meeting.

“She was fantastic,” said Dick Sterka, an EDC member appointed by Sylva.

Sterka’s company, Diversified Expo, helps works the trade show circuit, whether it’s hosting the shows or helping companies attend them. Given the circles Sterka runs in, he interacts with businesses regularly that may be interested in moving to a new area or expanding their operation, and as a result, he constantly fed Dowling tips on companies that would be worth courting.

“She was very active. Give her a lead and she was like a bulldog. I hate to lose her,” Sterka said.

Larry Morris, an EDC member appointed by the county, said Dowling excelled in strategy, which had ideally been the next leap the EDC would have been making.

“I was real pleased,” Morris said. “I thought we were making headway in the direction we needed to go. It is really unfortunate.”

Dowling says she has plans to move back to her home region of Michigan.

While some students dread returning to the classroom this time of year, children in Cherokee have been asking for weeks about when they would get to go back to school.

With the unveiling of The Eastern Band of Cherokee’s new school last week, it’s easy to see why. The giant yet graceful building sits on a sprawling campus cradled in a cove by the surrounding Smoky Mountains.

The school will serve 1,300 students in grades K through 12. The school came at a cost of $140 million, including the land acquisition, site prep and design. The construction alone cost $109 million, the lion’s share paid for with revenue from Harrah’s Cherokee Casino. Given the price tag, it makes Cherokee’s school the most expensive per capita endeavor in the region, if not the state.

“It’s gorgeous. When they said we were going to get a new school, this is not what we were expecting,” said Candice Crowe, a member of the Eastern Band, who attended a ribbon-cutting and dedication ceremony last Friday.

In addition to the stunning architecture, the classrooms are outfitted with technology and features found in few college buildings, let alone public school systems.

Samantha Crowe-Hernandez, who is getting her teaching degree at Western Carolina University, is looking forward to doing her student teaching at the new Cherokee school this year.

“It is overwhelming,” she said. “It is more than you could ever imagine. If you could have a dream school, this is it.”

Crowe, who was Miss Cherokee in high school, is also majoring in Cherokee Studies and learning to speak Cherokee. The written and spoken language has been integrated into the Cherokee curriculum for all students. In fact, a wing of the new school is dedicated to Cherokee language learning.

“Everybody is sticking together to keep our language, and I want to be part of that,” Crowe said.

 

New beginnings

The school opening came just days after the appointment of a new superintendent, Joyce Dugan. Dugan served as the superintendent of the school system in the early 1990s, served four years as the chief of the tribe, then worked in upper management at the casino.

During her speech, Dugan thanked the tribal council, the governing body for the tribe, for its long fight to see the school to fruition.

“Thank you for believing in this project and giving it all the financial support that was needed,” Dugan said.

Chief Michell Hicks said he was proud of what the tribe is accomplishing, and the school is a testimony to their progress and priorities.

“When I walk through the hallways, I don’t have to question, ‘Did we do it right?’” Hicks said. “We did.”

Hicks said the school will help their people continue to grow.

“It is all about giving ourselves confidence, motivating our students, motivating our teachers, our administrators,” Hicks said. “This is not the end. It is just the beginning.”

Those in attendance agreed that out of all the positive change that has occurred for the tribe thanks to gaming revenue, the new school ranks at the top.

“The tribe has put aside a lot of money from gaming to pay for this,” said Patrick Lambert, director of the Tribal Gaming Commission. “It will be good for the tribe. It’s a good day.”

Several speakers lauded the approach of the joint campus, which keeps the tribe’s entire student body under one roof, albeit a big roof.

While the old elementary school and combined middle and high school were cramped and outdated, the sprawling new campus seemed a little too big to Aniyah Younce, a third grader, who was concerned that he might get lost. Aside from that, he gave it high marks.

“It has a different playground and it has elevators,” said Aniyah, who attended the dedication last week.

His younger brother, Osti, a first grader, had one word for the new school.

“Ten,” Osti said, as in a scale of one to ten.

The stunning architecture and high-tech classrooms aren’t lost on the older students, however.

“I feel like I am going to a fancy school now,” said Bradley Welch, a freshman. “I think it is really cool.”

Ideally, the fancy school will inspire students to invest in their own education after seeing their tribal leaders invest so much in them, said Martha Humes, a teacher in the middle school.

“The excitement and enthusiasm of a campus that looks like this will funnel into the classroom,” said Humes, who lives in Sylva.

As for getting lost in the halls, Humes is already prepared to swallow her pride and ask the students for help getting around.

“They will have the place mapped out before we do,” Humes said.

The school attempts to integrate computer learning into every classroom, not just computer lab time. What’s known as a “smart board” is mounted in the wall in most classrooms. A futuristic blackboard, it reflects whatever is on the teacher’s computer screen. It also acts like a giant mouse pad, allowing teachers to scroll and click by touching the giant screen.

“They are state of the art,” said R. L. Taylor, a computer lab teacher. The “smart boards” give a big boost to classroom participation, with students vying for a turn at the board, said Taylor.

Congressman Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, was among the speakers at the dedication.

“To your students, work as hard as you possibly can and the sky is the limit,” Shuler said.

Shuler, a pro-football player who got his start at Cherokee’s arch rival Swain County High School, joked about playing football for the “other school down the way.”

“I never would have guessed in 1991 that I would be a guest speaker at a ribbon cutting ceremony for Cherokee’s new high school,” Shuler said.

“Back in 1991, we didn’t ever think we would be inviting you either,” Dugan joked back.

While most national parks serve as conduits for science, the Smokies is a window on history as well. Churches, schools, general stores, lumber camps, grist mills, farms and homes once filled the valleys and hollers that now constitute the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

A program called Parks as Classrooms takes students back to those early days before the park was here, using the backdrop of the recreated farmstead of the Mountain Farm Museum and Mingus Mill, both near the park’s North Carolina entrance outside Cherokee. Their tour guide is often Jay Johnstone, a fun-loving park ranger who’s perfected the art of seeing the park through kids’ eyes.

“The main goal we’re trying to do is connect the kids to the past,” Johnstone said. “Connecting kids with history can be a challenge. History can be a very dull textbook.”

But in the Smokies, where culture and history have been preserved in buildings and artifacts, it comes to life, whether it’s through the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer or creaky floorboards of the old mill.

“Walking in the footsteps, that connects you,” Johnstone said. “It’s not a picture. It’s not two-dimensional. You’re immersed in it. You can’t help but imagine what life would have been like. How would my life be different? How would it be the same?”

Johnstone, who is raising three kids of his own in Waynesville, knows just how to get through to them. As the students play hot potato with a bean bag of corn kernels and thread buttons on strings to make whirly-wigs, he asks them to think about their toys today compared to back then.

“We live in an age where more is better. Christmas isn’t good unless presents are piled to the ceiling,” Johnstone tells the kids.

The kids are particularly taken with an old black-and-white photo of students gathered on the steps of a one-room clapboard schoolhouse from the days before the Smokies became a national park. They press closer to Johnstone, awed by the faces of children their own age, staring back at them from another time but not another place, from right here where they stand today — only a century ago.

The students imagined a school where water was fetched in pails, where older boys chopped wood to feed the stove, where school only lasted six months so to not interrupt harvest and planting, and where some went to school barefoot.

Johnstone broke the spell by asking the students to whistle up their horses, the favored mode of transportation to get from one activity to the next during the field trip.

“Here they come!” Johnstone said, reaching out to grab his imaginary horse. “Now one hand on the saddle, throw your leg over and hi-yah, off we go!”

Johnstone took off down the trail with students galloping after him. When Johnstone finally stopped, breathless students encircled him to hear their next assignment: scavenger hunt through the forest in the days before supermarkets. Suddenly, birch tree twigs doubled as toothbrushes. Dried moss served as Band-aids. Sassafras roots made tea. While a novelty for today’s kids, Johnstone explained it was about necessity back then.

Students protested vehemently when asked why they couldn’t have learned all this back home in their classroom. “It is cooler to just see it for yourself,” said Cecelia Tucker, a second-grader at Clyde Elementary in Haywood County.

The fieldtrips are far from a play day. They are synched with the curriculum for each grade level, augmenting what the students are already learning that year.

 

Learning in action

Parks as Classrooms offers students in middle school a chance to become real scientists. Keith Roden, the principal at Waynesville Middle School, was impressed by what he saw when tagging along with a class of sixth-graders to the Applachian Highlands Science Learning Center in the Haywood County section of the Smokies last fall. As the students probed the woods for insects and put them under a microscope, they quickly fell into friendly competition over who caught the most and whose bugs were cutest.

“They are learning here just like they do in the classroom, but fieldtrips like these stick in their minds. They make an impression. It’s something they can relate to,” Roden said.

Students scrambled to take turns with the insect sucker, a long tube with a bulbous rubber tip akin to a turkey baster, while the rest sifted through leaf litter like they were panning for gold. Before long, they developed a bond with their insects, concerned whether the critters would be turned loose after the microscope session and whether the suctioning injured them.

The creepy crawlies brought the otherwise boring subject of soil to life for the students.

“You really don’t notice all the things in dirt like bugs, but when you take the time to notice them it is really cool,” said Sam Dickson, a sixth-grader at Waynesville Middle School.

The insect exercise was coupled with a battery of soil tests to measure chemical and physical attributes of the soil.

“If you take the fieldtrip the right way, you really see nature and science in a different way,” said Jacob Estrada, also a Waynesville sixth-grader. “Something that you just ignore but when you take the time to explore it, you really see it is the source of life.”

Teachers draw on the exercises in the park all year long, said Park Ranger Susan Sachs, the education coordinator for the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center, a park outpost at Purchase Knob near Maggie Valley.

“The teachers will say ‘Remember when we were in the park and we took pH of the soil?’” Sachs said. “It makes it real for them.”

Students get satisfaction from doing real science, not just duplicating prefab experiments out of a textbook. Whether it’s counting insects at Purchase Knob or measuring wind speed at Clingmans Dome, the students’ results are entered in an online data base. Students can compare their results to those of other classes previous years. It gives them a sense of their contribution to science. Sachs said rangers track changes in the environment based on students’ findings. Called “citizen science,” it’s one of the hallmarks of Parks as Classrooms.

“It makes it more fun and exciting when you are out there doing it,” said Tiffany Dennis. “You are out in nature, so it feels like a real scientist.”

More than 15,000 school children come face-to-face with the wonder of the park every year through Parks as Classrooms.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was one of the first in the nation to launch Parks as Classrooms. The idea arose in 1991, pushed by the National Park Foundation during the 75th anniversary of the National Park Service. The Smokies was selected as a pilot park and set about developing a program that was intrinsic to the Smokies but could provide a model for others.

While successful, the pressure of standardized testing in schools has made it harder for teachers to justify fieldtrips.

“A lot of people feel they need to be in the classroom to teach what is ultimately going to be tested,” said Karen Ballentine, education chief for the park.

That’s where Parks as Classrooms has an edge over other field trips, however.

“I think it helps them academically and puts things in context in terms of real world learning,” Ballentine said. “We can demonstrate to a principal that the time away from the classroom actually enhances their learning and does not detract from it.”

Fieldtrips build knowledge from one year to the next, designed with a natural progression for the lucky students who get to go each year. It also helps build a love for the park.

“As they move along they hopefully start to care about the parks and want to give back at that point,” Ballentine said.

 

A larger mission

While it is not fueled by a conscious ulterior motive, Parks as Classrooms is helping to cultivate that next generation of park supporters.

“Over time, the return on the investment is you end up with adults who are the community’s decision makers with that positive experience with the park in their background,” said George Ivey, former director of development for Friends of the Smokies. “The program resonates with some of our key supporters who also really value kids who understand conservation issues.”

Another fringe benefit to the park is forging a deeper bond with surrounding communities.

“For so many years the park was seen as a burden to local communities,” Ivey said. “Because it was formed out of private land, people had to sacrifice to create the park and did not always see the benefit. These education programs are one of the key ways attitudes have changed.”

Kids who venture to the park for a fieldtrip serve as an unsuspecting ambassador for the park when talking to their families at the dinner table that night.

“It opens their eyes to parks and open spaces,” Ballentine said. “Many of them bring their families back and take them to some of the sights they have seen, whether it is Purchase Knob or Deep Creek or Clingmans Dome.”

When Waynesville middle school Principal Keith Roden tagged along on a field trip to Purchase Knob last year, he picked up on an important value in Parks as Classrooms.

“It’s just good for them to get out and enjoy nature and hopefully want to protect it. A lot of them don’t have parents who take them out hiking and camping,” Roden said.

The Smokies is a conduit for engaging kids with the outdoors and healing the disconnect recently coined “nature deficit disorder.”

Park Ranger Jay Johnstone said nature deficit disorder is not as striking in rural areas as urban. Here, many kids have gardens in their yard, trees to climb and creeks within reach. Nonetheless, he is shocked by the number of kids who haven’t ventured into the Smokies before.

One take-home message rangers impart is that the park belongs to everyone. During a pop quiz at the end of Johnstone’s Mingus Mill fieldtrip, he asked “True or false: you own the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.” Their answer was a resounding “no.”

“Guess what? You’re all wrong,” Johnstone said. “This is your park. You own the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and 390 more.”

The Cherokee faced a long, uphill battle spanning decades to secure the idyllic tract of land now housing a brand new K-12 school for the tribe.

The 143-acre parcel was part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park until a few years ago and required persistence and political maneuvering on the tribe’s part to wrest it away from the park service. Ultimately, the tribe brokered a land swap by giving the park service a 218-acre tract along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Waterrock Knob in exchange.

Leaders of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians had sought the flat, valley-like tract near Big Cove to expand the small stronghold of tribal lands hemmed in by steep mountains and federally-owned land. The Cherokee say they were promised the tract in the 1940s as compensation for construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway cutting through tribal lands. The tribe never received the promised tract and were never compensated for land taken for the parkway construction.

The land swap was pushed through Congress by then-U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, R-Brevard. At a dedication of the new school last week, speaker after speaker recalled the ordeal of the land swap and paid homage to the support from Taylor and credited him with making the land swap a reality. Taylor could not be there but sent his son to speak instead.

To the tribe, however, it wasn’t so much a land swap, as “getting our land back,” said Chief Michell Hicks.

“We had to go back and rebuy it. That describes who we are as a people. We are survivors,” Hicks said. “When you step on this land, you are on sacred ground.”

They came. They saw. And this past Saturday, they — nearly 1,000 volunteers from almost 50 churches — painted, scraped, powerwashed, mulched, planted and repaired the campuses of 14 Haywood County schools.

When First United Methodist in Waynesville put out the call for volunteers, Mary Thomas said she “absolutely” knew why without having to ask.

“When they are having to cut teaching positions, they need all the help they can get,” said Thomas, who was decked out in a wide-brimmed hat and spent her morning pulling weeds and tidying up flower beds at Central Elementary.

The volunteer workday originated as part of the Save the Teacher campaign, which started out with the goal of saving one teacher’s job and has since turned into something much bigger.

The effort was kicked off in June by the Haywood County Schools Foundation following the announcement of the first round of teacher layoffs earlier this summer. The Foundation pledged $30,000 to pay for a teacher’s salary, and asked the community to get involved.

“We can’t just stand by and not do anything. The children are the future of this world,” said Steven Brown, director of the foundation.

The community listened. Neighbors talked to neighbors. Pastors appealed to their congregations. And soon, the idea was born for a hands-on, volunteer workday that would provide the schools with some much needed maitenance — and carry a much bigger message.

“We can show the students we’re going to rally around and support you, and make this a place you can be proud to come to school,” said Matt Wells, president of the Foundation.

Erik Evans, a rising sophomore at Tuscola High School who chipped in with his youth group, viewed the project as mission work in his own backyard.

“I thought it would be fun to come out here and do mission work that’s inside our own community,” said Evans, leaning on his shovel.

Before he could finish, Steve Brown, director of the Haywood Schools Foundation, thundered by performing the role of both task master and pep squad.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, go, go! Just 25 more minutes folks to get this wrapped up,” Brown said.

Elly Cirino, one of the volunteers from Bethel, said the workday was a small sacrifice in her life, but due to the huge turnout, it made a huge difference.

“It is my four hours, his four hours, your four hours that all adds up. It is the little thing that change the world,” Cirino said.

Without the volunteer effort, Cirino doesn’t see how the work could have been accomplished.

“The skeleton crew they have can’t possibly get it all done,” said Cirino.

At Waynesville Middle School, where three churches pitched in to paint metal awnings over the walkways between buildings, the volunteers themselves seemed surprised by the difference their work made. The flaking paint and rusted metal was shabby-looking indeed, but as volunteers leapfrogged their way down the covered walkways with brushes in hand, they left a shiny and new look in their wake.

“I think there are two people on the paint crew for Haywood County Schools. There is no way they could do this in a morning like we have,” said Paula Nichols, a volunteer with First Baptist Church in Waynesville, who is also an elementary school music teacher.

 

A fight that won’t end

Between volunteers turning out in droves for the workday and donors dipping into their pockets to Save a Teacher, the outporing has developed a life of its own. Volunteers have stood in front of Super Wal-Mart in Waynesville to collect money to save teachers’ jobs, gather school supplies for the needy, and raise awareness of the plight of the county’s teachers. Businesses around the county now sell buttons at the register to benefit schools. A bingo night fundraiser is planned Saturday. Aug. 29, at the Haywood County Fairgrounds.

“It’s an example of a negative becoming a positive,” said Bill Upton, a former superintendent in Haywood and now a county commissioner. “In a crisis situation, our people in Haywood County will step up to the plate and do what is necessary to make things better.”

There’s plenty more to be done, said Wells.

“We’re not going to stop on the success of this Saturday,” Wells said. “This is still a cause for concern that we want to make people aware of. The budget problems may not end this year. There’s still handrails that need to be painted and teacher positions we still need to try to save. We want people to continue to rally around the system and continue to show their support, whether it’s a $2 donation or a $2,000 donation, whether its mulching or handrails.”

Upton, a member of the Haywood Schools Foundation, knows the campaign can’t make up for all the cuts in teachers passed down by the state, but it raises awareness of the issue.

“We need to maintain certain levels of staff to still do a top-notch job in eduaction,” Upton said.

 

A gift that keeps giving

While the tangible benefits are important, the symbolic gesture in a community rallying cry for education is invaluable, according to Brown.

He said the efforts are helping the community connect with the schools.

“We want to bring awareness to the community about the needs of the schools,” said Brown. “Now they have a partner. They have someone in the community that is vested in them.”

The effort in Haywood County might send a message to legislators that the public values education.

And it may also pay off when Haywood County courts new teachers to its schools. This year was the first time in ages the county didn’t have to worry about competing for the new pool of teachers in the state since it was laying people off. But one day, the county will be in the position of recruiting teachers again, and pointing to the commnity support of the Save a Teacher campaign will let prospective hires know they are coming somewhere they are valued.

“It makes me feel like they know the importance of our education system,” Rena White, now a fifth-grade teacher in Clyde Elementary School, said of the campaign. “This is awesome.”

Upton said Haywood County residents have historically supported education. Voters approved $26 million to fund school construction five years ago. And Haywood is one of only two counties in the state where voters approved a voluntary quarter-cent sales tax with the understanding it would be dedicated to Haywood Community College.

As for the workday, it sends a message to students.

“I think kids will come and think, ‘They are ready for us. They are welcoming us back,’” said Paula Nichols, who volunteered with First Baptist Church in Waynesville. “I think they will notice. When something is rusted and kind of worn out looking you think, ‘Oh they don’t care.’ But when it is freshly-painted and freshly mulched, everything looks really nice, it will inspire them.”

Jackson County’s Economic Development Commission has again been thrust into turmoil, a near constant state of affairs for the entity in recent years.

The county’s economic development director announced her resignation last week, and along with it, offered her views on what the county should do to kickstart a new day for its economic development efforts. Most notable on the list is to dissolve the economic development commission.

The resignation comes on heels of a somewhat contentious EDC meeting last month, where the mayors of Sylva and Dillsboro charged the county with stripping the EDC board of its power and relegating it to a mere advisory role.

Meanwhile, the EDC members say they can’t figure out exactly what they are supposed to be doing. The board has been preoccupied with their structure — namely whether they have any real authority or are simply an advisory board to county leaders.

The quandary over their role has dominated discussion at their meetings in recent months, distracting them from their ultimate mission of advancing economic development, EDC members say.

The EDC board is a joint venture between Jackson County and the four towns in the county: Sylva, Dillsboro, Webster and Forest Hills. It was created in the late 1990s.

Alleged financial mismanagement by those at the helm and concerns over a lack of oversight for public funds at the disposal of an all-volunteer body led the county to withdraw from the EDC in 2005. The EDC continued to limp along without county participation for 18 months until the county eventually threw its hat back in the ring.

The board was reconstituted with a new set of bylaws, but not without a power struggle between the county and the towns over who would hold the most authority.

It appears the issue was never properly settled and continues to pose problems — thus the still-festering issue over the board’s role and authority today.

Dorothea Megow-Dowling, the EDC director, said the county missed an opportunity by agreeing to reconstitute the board under the same structure rather than dissolving the EDC and creating a new one from scratch.

“Things move on best when there is a very clear cut from a past situation that has been difficult,” Dowling said. “I don’t think that cut was perceived as adequate.”

Of the nine members on the EDC board, the majority have come on within the past year. Only three on the board were there during the past turmoils.

Yet the entity has been unable to shake itself of old baggage in the public light. In addition, it inherited a structure that isn’t working, Dowling said.

Dowling sees another fatal flaw: the lack of a comprehensive economic development strategy. Setting up an EDC structure, appointing members and hiring a director before a clear mission is defined is a backwards approach, Dowling said.

“I believe it would be very effective to let this current structure go and establish a steering committee to oversee an economic development planning process,” Dowling said. “My recommendation is to start with the task, scope the task, then put in place the best teams and resources you can to accomplish the objectives you’ve set. My recommendation is and has been dissolution of the EDC.”

Disbanding the EDC is not an easy proposition, however. It is not solely up to the county, or even to the EDC board members themselves. As so-called forming entities, all four towns in the county have a say on whether the existing structure remains in tact.

“We are stuck with it unless there is some willingness on the part of municipalities to do something different,” County Manager Ken Westmoreland said.

There was a failed attempt to dissolve the EDC board two-and-a-half years ago rather than reconstitute it. It was voted on by elected officials from the county and all four towns and failed by a vote of 15 to 13.

Dowling’s resignation has caused all the old tensions still lurking below the surface to emerge, Westmoreland said.

Joe Cline, chairman of the EDC, is reluctant for EDC members to wade into the fray over whether the board should be dissolved.

“I feel like that rests with the local elected officials,” Cline said. “It is up to the stakeholders and the people who put it together to decide.”

Cline acknowledged that some EDC members would like to weigh in. At the meeting last week, however, he suggested holding off unless the board is asked for its opinion.

“To me it is a moot point. One way or the other we could all be removed tomorrow,” Cline said at the meeting.

The board may be not be able to speak with a unified voice, however. Some members want to assert more authority and hold the decision-making power, while others are fine in an advisory role.

“The advisory board I think is the way we need to go,” said Larry Morris, an EDC member who owns a kitchen and bath cabinetry dealership in Cashiers.

 

What next?

At this point, the county will not rush to replace Dowling, Westmoreland said.

“I think we are going to take some time before we try to re-employ someone in this position to analyze some of these questions,” Westmoreland said. “I think we do need as a community and as a county to come to some general consensus as to what we are going to focus on.”

If an economic development director is preoccupied chasing every elusive job on the block, the county can’t focus its resources on the prospect that are the most probable fit.

“It may be three, four, five, half a dozen things that we can do best, that works with the environment and our labor market and infrastructure,” Westmoreland said. “We can’t just continue to go negotiate with everyone about everything.”

County Commissioner Tom Massie agreed. Massie likes the idea of taking a time-out to create a comprehensive economic development strategy before deciding on a new director or a possible new structure for the EDC board.

“We need to go through a planning process where we bring everyone interested in economic development to the table,” Massie said. “We have to get them all on the same page of the hymn book.”

Massie had hoped that the county could initiate such a process sooner rather than later, and believed Dowling’s skill set was well-suited to move the process forward.

“It is just a shame everything is caught up in this nitpicking,” Massie said. “It has been a source of frustration.”

Westmoreland isn’t sure the existing EDC board is the right vehicle to create a strategic plan. Westmoreland instead favors a special task force or blue ribbon committee to embark on a comprehensive strategy, guided by a professional consultant or facilitator.

“I think that would serve a very useful purpose to explore our strengths and weakness and what we are trying to pursue,” Westmoreland said.

A special task force should be crafted to include those with something to contribute to the discussion of economic development. The same approach should ideally be used when making appoints to the EDC itself, Westmoreland said.

“Those appointments need to have some expertise to assist in working with business prospects,” Westmoreland said. “Just appointing general citizenry with an interest in economic development won’t satisfy that need.”

 

Cart before the horse

Dowling said it would be wise to have an economic development strategy in place before bringing in another director.

“This goes to the crux of the matter that really needs resolution. What person do you want in place for the county and what do you want that person to be doing?” Dowling said.

A strategy should also be in place before a board is created, Dowling said. Instead, the board’s structure was inherited and appointments made to fill the seats before a task was decided on.

Since Larry Morris came on the EDC several months ago, he has seen the issue of the EDC’s role and its structure dominate their agenda.

“A lot of time is taken up by trying to determine what is our role,” Morris said. “We are struggling to define how best we can serve.”

Others shared his characterization of the meetings.

“The discussion tends to revolve around the function of the EDC rather than around the tasks required to help economic development progress,” Dowling said. “When that occurs again and again, for me, I make an observation that there is something not working well structurally. There is frustration all around.”

Morris would rather spend his time working for economic development, but thinks they need a comprehensive strategy and approach, which doesn’t exist now.

“Should we be focusing on studies and research, infrastructure growth, or sitting back and waiting until a prospective business makes an inquiry about moving here?” Morris said.

That’s the issue Morris would like feedback on from the county and towns.

“It is pointless for use to think in one direction if the people we are accountable to are thinking in a different direction,” Morris said.

 

Structural makeup

The EDC board is a joint entity comprised of appointees from each of the towns and the county. But Dowling reports directly to the county manager — not the EDC board. That has bothered some on the EDC board, and the mayors of Sylva and Dillsboro.

Cline countered accusations that the issue is one of a power struggle. “It shouldn’t be an issue of a power struggle,” Cline said.

He said the EDC members merely need clarity.

“There is confusion there with it being a county employee but working for the EDC board,” Cline said. “How can you serve two masters? We all need to be on the same page, but at the end of the day, there can really only be one boss.”

Cline said it has to be one or the other.

“Does the county and municipalities want us to be an advisory board or a totally independent board?” Cline said. “Right now we are operating with one foot in each.”

As a result, the board has been preoccupied with what its role is, Cline said.

The EDC members have drafted a list of questions they want the towns and the county to answer, primarily dealing with what their role is but also what types of economic development projects they should be undertaking. The plan is to present the list of questions in the run-up to a joint meeting held each quarter between all the town boards and the county.

“Our position is we just want to be told by the people that formed this what they want,” Cline said.

It is unclear why the issue has come to a head again. The job description for the economic development director was hashed out during a lengthy round of meetings between the county and towns two-and-a-half years ago and included a clause that gives the county manager hiring and firing authority over the director rather than the board.

Jackson County antes up most of the money for economic development. While the county puts in $105,000. Each town puts in just $1 for each resident, amounting to a few hundred for Dillsboro, Webster and Forest Hills, and $2,500 for Sylva.

The county ultimately shoulders the financial burden of economic development, and therefore argued at the time the economic development director should be a county employee under county control.

“It was never our intention that the only job responsibility for the economic development director was to staff the EDC,” Massie said.

Cline, however, points out that the job description for the EDC director, says he or she will report both to the county manager and the chairman of the EDC board.

“There is no dispute it is a county employee and a county position,” Cline said. “Everybody understood it was a county employee and the hiring and firing of that position would rest with the county manager. But it was also stated they would work for the EDC.”

Whatever the case, the actual role of the EDC remains a source of confusion not only for those on it, but some town leaders, Dowling said, and therefore needs fixing.

“Obviously, it was not clear in their minds. Obviously, everybody did not have the same understanding,” Dowling said.

Westmoreland doesn’t see anything wrong with the EDC serving in a formal advisory role, just as the planning board or any number of county boards are advisory in their capacity.

Massie said the question of whether the EDC should officially be dubbed an advisory-only body is one he can’t answer right now.

“That is a role that will have to be determined at some point in the future. I can’t preconceive what the outcome of that is going to be before we have those discussion,” Massie said.

Cline said regardless of how the seats at the table are divvied up, the EDC will represent the entire county fairly.

“You are not going to say for example if you don’t have a representative from Sylva that there won’t be any economic development in the town of Sylva,” Cline said.

Cline doesn’t think the debate over the board’s structure is a major hurdle.

“Everyone is committed to the economic development of the county and understanding what is the best way to do that,” Cline said.

 

Other focus

Some EDC board members complained at last month’s meeting that Dowling was doing the bidding of the county at the expense of their own board.

“I can understand perhaps why the EDC board feels somewhat neglected,” Westmoreland said. “We have consumed almost all of her time on several significant projects.”

But with good reason. Dowling’s calendar has been filled in recent months with courting several major employers with the prospect of bringing new jobs to the county. One is widely known already: an expansion of the Jackson Paper plant.

To land the jobs, the county promised incentives. While it is not a new tactic, it was for Jackson. Dowling had to craft the incentive deals and legal contracts from scratch.

Westmoreland said the minutia of orchestrating the state and county incentive packages is immense.

“You don’t just touch bases or two times you touch base dozens of times,” Westmoreland said.

Dowling has several similar ventures in play from companies that expressed an interest in setting up shop on the old Tucksegee Mills property and the Whittier Industrial park. Dowling did not brief the EDC board on the prospect employers she was working with, however.

Cline said she should have, since the EDC’s role is presumably to help facilitate new companies moving into the county.

“There was no point in us even meeting once a month with no information about what was even going on,” Cline said.

But Westmoreland said Dowling can’t disclose the prospective companies to the EDC board.

“These prospective business plans are very proprietary,” Westmoreland said.

There are too many people on it from too many different entities to ensure that word wouldn’t leak out, he said.

With most economic development boards in the region, the EDC director does disclose — in private sessions — the companies that are being courted.

Westmoreland said he would rather disclose the prospects to handpicked stakeholders, mainly just those in a position to bring resources to the table.

Dowling said she has also spent time in her initial months on the job meeting with stakeholders and prospective partners.

“I’ve laid some groundwork with people and organizations that might be able to work with the county,” Dowling said. “I am very pleased I have been able to help the county with the things I have become involved with,” Dowling said.

Trevor Dalton, Macon County’s first paid economic development coordinator, is back on his home turf.

Dalton, 24, grew up in Macon County, and majored in business administration at Appalachian State. He worked in the Wilmington, N.C., area in the insurance industry and at a software firm for the past two years. He got his feet wet in the computer industry during high school working in software support for Drake and later for TekTone, a Drake subsidiary that makes intercom and call systems.

Drake, a tax software company that employs more than 325 people, is the largest single driver of Macon’s economy. Dalton’s knowledge of the field likely helped land the job.

In addition, Dalton’s father owns Dalton Construction, further scoring points since the construction industry is another major player in Macon’s economy.

Economic development consultant James McCoy, who is the chief visionary behind the county’s new economic development plan, is grooming Dalton for the job. Given McCoy’s expertise, the economic development board merely needed a coordinator who could implement the strategy McCoy was creating.

“The first day I walked in I had a 90-day plan,” Dalton said. “It said this is what you will do the first month this is what you will do the second month and this is what you will do the third month. I know exactly what I am doing tomorrow.”

Dalton doesn’t harbor vestiges of the old economic development paradigm. His counterparts in years gone by would spend their days courting big manufacturing industries to set up shop in their county, luring them with the promise of free land and tax incentives if they would roll in and provide jobs. But Dalton has internalized the new model that took his older counterparts much longer to come to terms with.

There are two major shifts in focus. One is nurturing small companies just as you would big ones.

“Manufacturing is gone. To create the jobs you have to have the small five, 10, and 15 person companies,” Dalton said.

The other is paying attention to the jobs you already have, he said.

Haywood County is being sued for $2 million by the contractor in charge of renovations to the newly restored historic courthouse.

Haywood County commissioners fired the contractor 18 months into the job, citing serious delays and poor work. The construction company claims it wasn’t their fault, and instead blames the architect for inaccurate blueprints.

The county is meanwhile caught in the middle. If the contractor prevails in its demand for more money, the county would have to pay up then go after the architect to cover the pay-out.

County commissioners have had a rocky relationship with the company, KMD Construction, for much of the project. The county actually fired KMD from the project in May 2008 — 18 months into the job and a month away from the target completion date.

“At that time we had no idea when, how or if they were going to finish this job,” said Bob Menadue, a construction lawyer based in Raleigh who is representing the county in the dispute.

The county had also gotten a tip from a worker on the job that the contractor was cutting corners to save time and money.

“At that point it became a no brainer we had to terminate them,” Meynardie said.

The county had insured the project through a surety bond company, which took over when KMD was fired. The surety company rehired KMD to finish the work, but under a new project manager and with additional oversight by the surety company themselves. Meynardie said it is not unusual for the surety company to bring the same contractor back in.

“They should know the job better than anybody that could be brought in to finish it,” Meynardie said.

 

Tit for tat

The contractor, KMD Construction, is being represented by Steven Smith, an attorney with Smith, Parson and Vickstrom in Charlotte.

Smith said the architect provided poor blueprints that did not accurately reflect what the job would entail.

“He did not go out there and do an adequate investigation of the building,” Smith said.

Plans called for an addition on the back of the courthouse. The addition would be bolted into a large concrete beam supposedly inside the exterior wall of old courthouse.

“When they opened up the wall, guess what? No concrete beam in the wall. That one example crippled this project,” Smith said.

But the examples don’t stop there, Smith said. The architects also failed to realize that large granite blocks around the base of the courthouse were the structural support for the building — not a veneer — and could not easily be punched through.

Another example: the historic courthouse contained jail cells on the fourth and fifth floor. Plans called for ripping out the jail cells. What no one knew is that the bars for the jail cells ran through the ceiling that separated the fourth and fifth floors, so tearing out the cell bars required tearing out the concrete slab between floors, Smith said.

Smith said there were several show stopper issues that paralyzed the project. The contractor could not move forward without revised plans from the architect and new engineering. But the engineer and the architect were uncooperative, Smith said.

“We either got insufficient guidance or they said, ‘You deal with it,’” Smith said.

As the project got more and more behind schedule, the architects blamed the contractor.

“They were telling the county that we were holding things up, that we were responsible for the delays, when really we were without adequate design guidance and the project could not move forward,” Smith said.

Smith questioned whether the architects purposely drug their feet to hold up the project, since they are paid extra if the project goes over schedule.

The contractor is suing the county for $2 million. Of that, $800,000 is what the contractor claims it lost on the job, while $1.2 million is the profit and overhead KMS should have realized but didn’t.

KMD had to pay the fees for the surety company’s point man supervising the project’s completion, footed the bill for work that went beyond the scope of their original bid, and incurred extra expenses when hiring back subcontractors after the job was put on hold and then resumed.

The contractor also alleges they were wrongfully fired from the job.

Meynardie said the county tried to work with KMD to get the project back on track, but found them uncooperative. Meanwhile, KMD claims they were never given fair warning or a chance to address the county’s issue with their performance.

KMD named the architect and project engineer in the lawsuit as well, but the county is the main target since it holds the contract with KMD and the purse strings for the project.

“The architect and engineer are going to get to stand on the sidelines,” Meynardie said.

The architecture firm, Pearce, Brinkley, Cease and Lee, would not comment for this article.

Meynardie admits the blueprints were not 100 percent accurate.

“But that is not unusual in a renovation project,” Meynardie said. “The whole idea is the contractor and designer work together.”

Meynardie said the contractor plowed ahead on their own in some cases, ripping out structural elements of the building without the architect or engineer’s approval.

“There was a period of time when this building was in danger,” Meynardie said.

The county racked up additional expenses of its own during the drawn out project. It had to pay rent on satellite office space during the renovations, had to pay architects for their additional time and faces a big legal bill. The county withheld payments from the contractor to cover some of the extra costs it incurred as a result of the quagmire. Historic courthouse renovations have cost the county $8.2 million — only a slight cost overrun compared to the original budget of $8.038 million. It would have been more, however, if not for withholding a portion of the contractor’s payment.

 

The down and dirty

Tension between architects and contractors often goes with the territory. Contractors get frustrated by architects, whose plans on paper don’t always work on the ground. Architects get frustrated with contractors who can’t follow plans correctly and are constantly angling for change orders.

Change orders are the bane of any major construction project. When a contractor encounters added work not reflected in the plans, they ask for a change order outlining the extra work and adding to the project cost. The result is a constant tug of war between architect and contractor.

When competing for a building project, some contractors will underbid in order to score the job, since jobs go to the lowest bidder. The contractor is banking on pushing up the price tag through change orders over the course of construction, however.

Contractors nitpick the architect’s blueprints, claiming the plans were incomplete and that they are performing extra work outside the scope their original bid and thus need more money. The architect meanwhile insists that the plans are indeed accurate, and that the contractor is responsible for delivering the project for the price they promised.

In the end, contractors can come to blows with a hard-nose architect who holds the line on changes orders.

Jack Patterson, a professor in the construction management program at Western Carolina University and a former contractor by trade, said communication between the contractor and architect is vital, especially in renovations.

“One thing we stress with students to alleviate that problem is good communication skills,” Patterson said. “A lot of times the break down is in communication. Sometimes they get so frustrated that neither side is going to budge and there is no line of communication left to try to resolve that problem.”

Patterson also teaches students to do their own due diligence when bidding on a project to uncover hidden issues an architect may not have realized.

“As a contractor, I tried to find any defects in the blueprint or the building at the very beginning and address it before the bids are let,” Patterson said.

While any project — especially a massive renovation of a historic building — has its share of legitimate change orders, it can be difficult to discern which are legitimate and which are part of the game played by contractors to make more money.

“Animosity can be created through that cycle,” Patterson said. “It can get worse because each starts stonewalling the other and you end up in arbitration and along the way the building ends up not getting done. Somewhere down the line, people have to say this is what has happened and what do we need to do to get it done.”

Smith, of course, claims the change orders requested by the contractors were all legitimate. Meynardie said all legitimate change orders were approved.

But Smith said the contractors eventually quit pursuing change orders and just did the work at a loss, with the intention of settling up when the project was over.

“It got to the point with this job where it was clear where the architect had set up his tent,” Smith said.

Despite public pressure from animal rights activists, including a visit from legendary game show host Bob Barker, Cherokee leaders do not plan to address the living conditions of captive bears at three small zoos in Cherokee.

A campaign to shut down the bear zoos in Cherokee has largely targeted Chief Michell Hicks. Hicks says he supports the bear zoos, however, and disagrees with claims driven by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that the bears’ conditions are inhumane.

While Hicks agreed to meet with Barker and PETA reps last week, he warned them not to protest outside the bear zoos again without permission from tribal officials or they would be kicked off the Cherokee reservation, an option in the tribe’s corner given its status as a sovereign entity.

While Hicks has made his stance clear, the elected tribal council members — not the chief — hold the power to pass new laws and ordinances. Out of the 12 tribal council members, five responded to requests for comment. All five said that tribal council has no plans to shut down the bear zoos or to impose tougher standards.

“We are going to stand with the chief on this issue,” said David Wolfe, a tribal council member from Yellowhill.

B. Ensley, also a council member from Yellowhill, agreed.

“It is dead issue as far as I am concerned,” he said.

Tribal council members say a federal inspection of the bear zoos once a year provides sufficient oversight of the animals’ care and treatment, despite accusations to the contrary.

“I think it has been overblown,” said Perry Shell, a tribal council member from Big Cove. “What (PETA) did was unfair to Cherokee and Western North Carolina.”

The bear zoos are entrenched in the Cherokee tourism scene.

“They have been around forever,” said Abe Wachacha, a tribal council member from Snowbird.

Several tribal council members cited the long-standing presence of the zoos as reason enough to let them continue.

“This has been their way of life and an attraction for Cherokee as long as I remember,” said Angie Kephart, a tribal council member from Cherokee County. “We used to go when we were little.”

Kephart said Barker’s celebrity status has propelled the issue, but is not a reason to shut down the zoos.

“I don’t understand why it is such a big issue,” Kephart said. “Whatever the case may be, I think we have bigger issues to attend to than the bears. We need to be addressing things going on with our tribal members and the reservation as a whole.”

Like Hicks, tribal council members said they were offended by outsiders trying to tell them what to do.

“They come in here harassing people and use their organization PETA to try to do things with numbers and hand out propaganda,” Wolfe said.

While sidewalk picketing is seen as a form of free speech in most places, those protections don’t necessarily apply in Cherokee as a sovereign entity with its own laws.

Kephart said Barker and PETA should have shown more respect and treaded more lightly.

“This is the tribe,” Kephart said. “We are a sovereign nation. We can do what we want to.”

Wachacha said this is not the first time outsiders have complained about the bear zoos.

“Other people have come before the tribe, even back in the 1980s,” Wachacha said.

Cherokee’s style of government allows any member of the tribe to bring proposed legislation before the tribal council. However, complaints about the bears have never come from a tribal member.

“We would consider it if a tribal member wanted to bring that in,” said Perry Shell, a tribal council member from Big Cove. “All our people have that opportunity to address their government.”

Kephart said if the issue does come before tribal council, it would be appropriate to look at the existing codes and make sure they are adequate.

But Wolfe doubts it would go anywhere.

“I don’t see us tightening up or doing anything more than what they are doing,” Wolfe said.

Bob Barker and PETA say they will continue fighting the issue, even taking it to a national stage. Wachacha said he does not think it would hamper tourism or pose an image problem for Cherokee.

Shell said he has actually noticed more cars in the parking lots of one bear zoo since PETA’s campaign grabbed headlines in recent weeks.

Haywood County leaders held a ribbon cutting ceremony Monday on the steps of the newly renovated historic courthouse.

The $8.2 million renovations to the 1932 courthouse have been a long time in the making. The project has been under discussion since the late 1990s, when the county began studying a plan to address cramped and inadequate court facilities. The result was a new justice center to house court functions, with the historic courthouse being remodeled to house county offices.

While the price tag of the projects has been the source of public controversy, county leaders say they made the right decision for the future.

“I hope they will look back and say our forefathers did us right,” said County Commissioner Chairman Kirk Kirkpatrick.

Speakers at the ceremony lauded the restoration for accommodating the modern needs — such as elevators for the handicapped to high-tech computer wiring — while still preserving the historic aspects of the building.

“Haywood County citizens have long been committed to their roots while at the same time cognizant of their future,” said Marlene, an longtime Superior Court Judge who recently retired.

While a newly constructed justice center the new home for trials, records and court functions, it will never take the place in people’s hearts as the “courthouse,” said Glenn Brown, a former district attorney who spoke at the ribbon cutting.

Macon County has hired a full-time economic development coordinator, finally joining the ranks of most counties who employ paid directors tasked with growing jobs and recruiting businesses.

Trevor Dalton, 24, has no economic development experience or training — but the county’s economic development board says that’s just what they were looking for. The Economic Development Commission wanted a young upstart who could be molded and instilled with Macon’s business vision, rather than someone predisposed to an off-the-shelf strategy from elsewhere.

Dalton has gotten a good introduction to the business community in Macon County in his first two months on the job. He jumped into the middle of an on-going strategic planning process that landed him in face-to-face interviews with more than 80 stakeholders in the county, from town and county leaders to major business owners.

“We wanted to go out and get their opinions on where they see Macon’s economy going,” Dalton said.

The input will help shape a new economic development strategy as opposed to the county’s more passive approach to economic development in past years.

Unfortunately, Dalton discovered during his meetings with current business leaders that some don’t feel appreciated.

“We want them to feel welcome in Macon County,” Dalton said.

Others that participated in stakeholder interviews heard the same concern.

“The entities here now are not sure they have government support,” said Macon County Commissioner Jim Davis. “I think we need to put that on the priority list to fix and have a protocol so that doesn’t have the opportunity to rear its head. The first thing we need to do is preserve what we’ve got.”

Part of the problem has been the lack of a go-to person to periodically call on existing companies, since the county relied solely on a volunteer board and had no paid staff.

“A major part of my job is going to be working with our businesses to retain the jobs we currently have in Macon County,” Dalton said.

Ed Shatley, the chairman of the EDC and retired insurance man, said a paid economic development director seemed unnecessary until recently. Macon has always enjoyed relative prosperity in the job market compared to its neighbors, with unemployment often hovering below 4 percent.

“So why did we really need one?” Shatley said of an EDC director.

But when the recession hit, Macon’s unemployment rate reached 13 percent — suddenly worse off job-wise than some of its neighbors. Shatley theorized that Macon’s economy was too dependent on development and real estate.

“It became obvious in the last recession that a high percentage of our jobs were in the construction industry,” Shatley said.

James McCoy, a consultant hired to overhaul the county’s economic development strategy, said adding a paid staff person was a critical move.

“You need someone who gets up every day and thinks about nothing but the future economic health of this community,” McCoy said. “That is something every single community deserves.”

Others involved in the county’s economic development work agree.

“Now we actually have some boots on the ground to carry out some of the ideas we think might work,” said Franklin Mayor Joe Collins.

Mark West, vice-chairman of Macon’s EDC and a former county commissioner, helped push for the hiring of a paid economic development coordinator. Without one, the county wasn’t doing justice to economic development, West said last year. The job of recruiting businesses and nurturing existing ones was not effectively being carried out by the volunteers serving on the EDC board, he said.

 

New strategy

As part of an overhaul to the county’s economic development strategy, the EDC board was reorganized and expanded to 12 members. County commissioners appoint board members and the board functions as a county department.

McCoy was brought on to steer the process in March 2009.

The new EDC strategy has created four committees within the board to focus on target areas: recruiting new businesses, supporting existing ones, nurturing entrepreneurs and retail development.

McCoy recently gave a presentation on the new economic development strategy to elected leaders in the county. McCoy spent most of the presentation highlighting what a great place Macon County is. McCoy talked about the county’s assets: good hospitals, good schools, good quality of life, diverse employment, sense of place, community pride and geographically well-positioned.

“We are in good shape I am proud to say,” McCoy said.

He also shared labor and demographic statistics for the county.

Macon Commissioner Brian McClellan asked McCoy if a more specific strategy would be forthcoming.

“Could we expect some concrete suggestions as to what specifically we can do to further the process?” McClellan asked. “I would be more than willing to listen if you had some concrete ideas of A, B, C for ways we can help move everything forward.”

McCoy said those suggestions would be coming down the pipe in the next few months.

In Macon County’s dream world, it would become a hub of technology development companies. While theoretically far-fetched for a largely rural Appalachian region, Macon County’s proximity to Atlanta and the presence of a major software firm already, Drake Software, makes it plausible. Drake’s main tax software enterprise and several technology and computer subsidiaries under its domain has singled-handedly positioned Macon County to tout itself as a high-tech hotbed in the mountains.

Western North Carolina has steadily lost out on tens of millions in federal highway dollars over the past decade, despite the money being specifically earmarked for the region.

Mountain leaders sent a message to both Raleigh and Washington this week to restore a special pot of money for highway projects in the mountains. The money was being siphoned off by Raleigh and doled out across the entire state rather than going to WNC as intended by federal legislation dating back to 1965.

“This money was set aside to help the far western counties, but over time it got put into the general pool,” said Ronnie Beale, Macon County commissioner chairman.

The special pot of highway money was supposed to improve the lot of Appalachian people. The region historically suffered from higher poverty and unemployment rates. Its isolation and lack of high-speed highways was considered a major culprit.

The interstate system connecting the rest of the country largely bypassed Appalachia, skirting the rugged region when possible due to high costs of road construction in the mountains. To counter the topographic challenges and rectify the isolation brought about by lack of highways, federal lawmakers earmarked a special pot of money each year to fund the Appalachian Development Highway System.

But a minor accounting change that occurred in the mid-1990s kept the money from reaching its intended destination. Instead of arriving as a special appropriation, the money was bundled along with the rest of the federal transportation budget when being sent to the state.

The state claimed it could not unbundle the money. Once bundled in with the rest, the state claimed it was obligated to divvy it up among the entire state as it did the rest of the federal transportation money.

“It wasn’t considered extra money, and North Carolina law says if it is not extra money, it gets caught up in the state’s distribution formula,” said Joel Setzer, head of the N.C. Department of Transportation Division 14, a 10-county mountain region.

“It is my belief that violates the spirit of the Appalachian program. It is a belief shared by many,” Setzer said.

A committee of leaders from six counties that comprise the Southwestern Regional Transportation Planning Organization adopted a resolution this week condemning the practice. The committee includes commissioners from six counties and mayors of several towns.

The resolution calls on the special highway funding to be restored to the region. In particular, it asks the federal government to separate the money from the rest of the state’s transportation budget so the state wouldn’t face the challenge of unbundling it.

The special federal pot designated for WNC is supposed to be $30 million a year. One road project that stands to benefit from the Appalachian highway construction dollars is a missing link of Corridor K (see related article.) The road would blaze a four-lane highway around Robbinsville, relieving a narrow two-lane bottleneck for people traveling to Murphy. It has been in the planning stages for decades, but carries a price tag of nearly $800 million to finish a 17-mile missing link through Graham County.

Setzer suggested that the message would carry even more weight if a similar resolution was adopted by counties and towns across the region. Macon and Graham counties have already done so.

“We have to keep hollering louder and louder and louder,” Beale said.

The state has stockpiled some of the money, with around $150 million accumulated but unspent, Setzer said. Setzer hopes the mountains can draw from the funds once the accounting classification is changed.

Some members of the Jackson County Transportation Task Force feel like the list of road projects bearing their name has not properly been vetted, despite the work of the task force being declared finished.

“I think the task force has satisfied their charge in creating a comprehensive transportation plan,” said Ryan Sherby, community transportation coordinator with the Southwestern Regional Commission.

After a stint before the public for comment later this month, Sherby anticipates shipping the plan along to the county commissioners for approval and then sending it up the chain to guide road building priorities by the N.C. Department of Transportation. At this point, Sherby doesn’t intend the task force will ever formally vote on the plan — even though the plan will bear their name and they will be credited with creating it.

“This isn’t a real rigid process,” Sherby said.

Some task force members were surprised to learn, however, that their work is done. At their most recent meeting, they were never told it would be their last. They also weren’t told that the plan — essentially a list of future road projects — was in its final form and being sent on to county commissioners for a stamp of approval without the task force formally endorsing it.

“From my standpoint, there was no integrity or forthrightness about what was happening at that last meeting,” said Susan Leveille, a member of the task force and of the Smart Roads coalition. “We were being rushed.”

After more than year of poring over growth and traffic projections, the task force spent the past five months coming up with a list of new road projects that would make travel safer and faster.

Rather than vetting the list through discussion, however, task force members were asked to rank each project on a scale of 1 to 5. Task force members were asked to go around the table and verbally call out their score for each project, a process repeated 17 times for each road project on the list. The numbers for each project were tallied to decide which stayed on the list. Only one came off.

Sherby called it a “consensus building exercise.” The format for the meeting came as a surprise, however.

“We knew that we were going to be making some choices,” Leveille said. “But we had no idea what the procedure was going to be. We had no idea there would be a facilitator that was railroading us through this. I expected some thoughtful discussion.”

For some on the task force, the recent episode is indicative of the entire process.

“The task force was not in the driver’s seat,” said Jeanette Evans, another member of the Smart Roads coalition. “It felt steamrolled.”

Another source of confusion is exactly what the rankings were supposed to reflect.

“That’s a good question,” said Don Selzer, a task force member appointed by the county commissioners. “My understanding was that it was a vote to put certain options before the public — not necessarily ones we recommended but these are the options available.”

However, the rankings are apparently being viewed as an endorsement of the road projects on the list by the task force, since there is no plan to bring the list back to the task force for a vote. That is upsetting to Leveille, since she gave a high ranking to the Southern Loop, a controversial bypass around the commercial district of N.C. 107. Leveille is against the project and would have scored it much lower if she understood it was somehow a final vote. But she gave it a high ranking simply because she thought it merited additional discussion.

Sherby said the plan rests with county commissioners now, along with elected town leaders, and it will be their call whether the list goes back to the task force to formally sign off on the plan.

“If the county commissioners want the task force to do that then we will,” Sherby said.

That may be something the commissioners ask for, said County Commissioner William Shelton.

“There is always the possibility the commissioners would have some more questions of the task force before it goes to final approval,” said Shelton, who is on the task force.

Shelton is among those who were surprised that the plan is supposedly complete and the task force wouldn’t be meeting again. Shelton thinks the laundry list of road projects should be assigned a more thoughtful ranking than its current form.

Selzer is also uncomfortable with the lack of finality the last meeting had. He doesn’t think the plan as is can be touted as something the task force has endorsed.

“I would like to see a final list and say ‘yes or no, this is what we want,’” Selzer said. Selzer said he is “not terribly satisfied” with the process the task force used to create a plan.

Developers looking for shortcuts around erosion laws won’t find amnesty in a recent court case between a landowner and Haywood County erosion officials, according to the state authority on erosion enforcement.

The landowner, Ron Cameron, won a lawsuit claiming he was a victim of overbearing erosion enforcement.

While the county settled out of court for $75,000, the county stood a good chance of winning at the state level had they gone forward, according to Mel Nevils, the Land Quality section chief with the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Nevils said state precedent sides with the county, citing at least two similar cases that have been decided by the Court of Appeals and even N.C. Supreme Court.

In the Haywood suit, Cameron claimed he was logging his property and should fall under a laxer set of erosion rules that apply to forestry rather than a more stringent set of rules that apply to developers.

The county questioned the landowner’s true motives, however, citing Cameron’s creation of a development master plan, registering a subdivision name with the county and applying for a septic tank evaluation. The county insisted on holding him to the higher erosion standard, and Cameron sued to get out from under the county’s jurisdiction, ultimately prevailing in a three-week trial in May.

In the state cases, “The basic premise was the same,” Nevils said.

“You had a landowner claiming forestry and we felt that it was not forestry, that it was development,” Nevils said.

Both sides in the Cameron suit argued that a terrible precedent would be set if the other side won. If the county lost, it argued the case would provide a road map for developers who want to exploit the forestry loophole.

Nevils isn’t concerned, however. He said the precedent already on the books in higher court rulings, which sided against the landowners, will trump the Haywood County ruling, which was made by Judge Laura Bridges.

“It is the only time I am aware of this type of ruling has been made,” Nevils said of the Haywood suit.

Meanwhile, Cameron argued that landowners everywhere would shy away from logging, for fear they could never change their mind without their motives being questioned and triggering retroactive enforcement and fines.

Nevils doesn’t foresee that kind of entrapment by erosion officers happening, however.

“Practically, if you are logging now and 20 years down the road you do a development, we are not going to make you do that,” Nevils said. “We look for evidence whether there was intent to develop at the time the road building occurred.”

Nevils, who testified for the county during the trial, said Haywood County’s Erosion Control Officer Marc Pruett was doing his job properly when trying to enforce county erosion laws.

Haywood County initially planned to appeal the ruling, but Cameron was going after damages and hefty attorney’s fees from the county. The county commissioners had already spent $282,000 on attorney fees to defend the case and chose to cut the county’s losses and settle out of court.

Nevils said he doesn’t know if the state law could be clarified to avoid the situation in the future. It might not be possible to clarify it more than it is.

“Technically the way the law is written, it says if you are planning to disturb land, no matter when, if it is for the eventual purpose of residential development you cannot claim forestry,” Nevils said.

A road project known as Corridor K will boast the longest tunnel in the state of North Carolina if built as planned: a 2,807-foot passage through the side of a mountain in the Stecoah area of Graham County.

Construction on a missing section of Corridor K including the tunnel is slated to start in 2014, although the timeline is admittedly “ambitious,” according to Joel Setzer, head of the N.C. Department of Transportation Division 14, a 10-county mountain region.

The highway will be the first four-lane road blazed into Robbinsville. The tiny town and county seat of Graham is currently accessible only by winding two-lane roads no matter how you approach it.

Once finished, Corridor K would also offer a bypass of sorts around the Nantahala Gorge, which currently acts as a two-lane bottleneck when traveling to the Andrews and Murphy area.

The missing link of Corridor K — roughly 17 miles in Graham County — has been held up for years due to funding and environmental challenges, according to Setzer.

The missing section is being tackled in two parts: 10 miles heading north out of Robbinsville along N.C. 143 and 7 miles heading south of Robbinsville that would lead into the Andrews area.

The 10-mile section north of Robbinsville, which includes the tunnel under Stecoah Gap, is nearing the final planning stages. It is estimated at $378 million. Of that, nearly $200 million is for the tunnel.

The 10-mile stretch currently being pursued will severely impact the rural character of Stecoah Valley. It will spill into the Nantahala National Forest, skirt the Appalachian Trail, degrade viewsheds and damage the environment.

Yet the promise of a four-lane highway through territory currently lacking one has been pushed for by leaders in the region.

A public hearing on the route will be held Oct. 29 in Robbinsville, with an open house to preview the plans on Oct. 27 in Cullowhee. More information on the time and place will be posted in later editions.

Two accommodations have been proposed to lessen the environmental impacts. One is the tunnel, which will burrow under the Appalachian Trail so hikers don’t have to across the highway. The other is an elevated bridge 80 feet in the air when passing over Stecoah Creek and the valley floor.

The entire Corridor K highway is a 127-mile route through the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, forging one of the first four-lane highways through rural mountain counties. U.S. 23-74 around Waynesville and continuing past Sylva and on to Bryson City — known to locals as the “bypass” — is part of the original Corridor K vision dating back to the 1970s.