Despite overwhelming opposition from residents, the N.C. Department of Transportation is moving forward with plans to widen Plott Creek Road outside Waynesville.

The Waynesville town board will consider a request to loosen sign regulations for the downtown district for the second time in two years.

Two years ago, the board of aldermen increased the size of signs allowed in the downtown district from pedestrian-scale signage to be among the largest allowed anywhere in the town’s limits. Now, the town board is considering a request to allow internally illuminated signs — signs that have light bulbs inside rather than illuminated external spot lighting, which is considered more subtle.

The sale of the MedWest hospital trio in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties will go through on July 31, in keeping with the transaction date that’s been in the crosshairs for the past few months.

Duke LifePoint HealthCare, a national for-profit hospital network, will take over Aug. 1 at Haywood Regional Medical Center, Harris Regional Hospital and Swain Medical Center. Medical practices under the umbrella of the hospital will come under Duke LifePoint at well.

LifePoint, which has 62 hospitals around the country — soon to be 65 — is no stranger to acquisitions. Little will change about the patient experience, at least initially, with the same doctors, nurses and front line health care workers coming to work Friday morning as they always have.

Some things to watch in coming weeks though are new corporate logos on billing statements and new signs going up at hospital entrances. 

Under MedWest, the hospitals names were all truncated with the prefix MedWest tacked on to the front: MedWest-Haywood, MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain.

The new names never really took with the public, who still referred to the hospitals colloquially by their old names. Under Duke LifePoint, the hospitals will revert to their former full name, with a more simple prefix of DLP tacked on to the front of the name, as in DLP Haywood Regional Medical Center.

— By Becky Johnson, Staff writer

After oscillating on how much money to give Folkmoot USA during annual budget machinations last month, Waynesville town leaders have revisited the issue and upwardly revised their contribution.

Folkmoot historically got $10,000 to help with its general operating costs. But town leaders initially decided to cut that funding — in exchange for a $25,000 grant toward Folkmoot’s goal of transforming its headquarters at the old Hazelwood Elementary School to a year-round community center.

Lake Junaluska homeowners have suspended their push to merge with the town of Waynesville until next year due to political roadblocks in the N.C General Assembly.

The vast majority of homeowners at Lake Junaluska support merging with Waynesville as the most economically viable and sustainable option for the community, according to both a mail survey and petition drive. But garnering the necessary approval from the state legislature has proven elusive.

After a failed effort last year, proponents of the merger tried again this year during the General Assembly’s so-called “short session.”

“We knew that trying in the short session was a long shot, but as long as there was a shot we were going to try to push it,” said Buddy Young, the Lake Junaluska public work’s director and a resident himself.

Lake Junaluska homeowners are now resigned to waiting until next year and trying again when a new legislature convenes.

Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, championed a bill that would bring Lake Junaluska into Waynesville’s town limits, and it passed the Senate with flying colors last year. But the bill must also pass the House, where it languished in committee, despite Davis’ best effort.

Part of the hurdle was simply more important issues on lawmakers’ plate.

“They are still fighting over the budget. We were not a priority,” Young said.

Given the “complex, statewide issues the legislature has been dealing with during this short session,” Davis said the decision to quit trying for now was reasonable.

Last year, a minority of Lake Junaluska homeowners opposed to joining the town of Waynesville created an air of controversy around the proposed merger and caused some state legislators, including Rep. Michele Presnell, R-Burnsville, to view it with suspicion.

Whether that will dog the bill again next year remains to be seen.

The 775-home residential enclave with century-old roots as a summer retreat for wealthy Methodists rings the campus of the Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center. Providing services like trash and security, not to mention repairs to its aging infrastructure, will force homeowners’ annual fees and water and sewer rates to go up if it doesn’t join Waynesville.

“It’s not that we can’t keep going, or that we would have to turn off the water and turn off the lights,” Young said. “The option was do you want to pay for the capital improvements or do you want to go to Waynesville?”

— By Becky Johnson, Staff Writer

A lawsuit casting blame for a massive landslide in Maggie Valley four years ago is headed to a jury trial in Haywood County this week.

A couple whose home was in the path of the landslide have sued a bevy of parties they claim are responsible.

Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel is planning a $254 million expansion and upgrade of its operations, including a third hotel tower, new entertainment venue and overhaul of the casino floor.

A $1.66 million plan to build middle turn lanes on Plott Creek Road from Hazelwood Elementary School to Sulphur Springs Road in the Hazelwood district of Waynesville drew strong opposition from residents at a public hearing last week.

For 12 years, Wanda Childers has brushed off encounters with a mysterious creature lurking around her trailer in the Whittier area near Cherokee.

But last summer, after a particularly harrowing evening, she got on the Internet and realized her experience matched descriptions of Bigfoot encounters.

Stealth is not the preferred modus operandi of the Bigfoot team when they roll into town. Their black suburban, bound to elicit double-takes, is stenciled in large letters along both sides with the team’s name: Searching for Bigfoot.

The team of Bigfoot researchers who came to Cherokee last week to investigate reports of a mysterious creature encounter run the gamut from long-time believers, recent converts and even Bigfoot agnostics.

Haywood County schools could go tobacco free starting in the fall of 2007, banning smoking and chewing not only for students, but also teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers, parents, sports fans, and anyone setting foot on a school campus or attending a school-sponsored event off-campus.

No one knows for sure what motivated Scarlette Heatherly the first time she skimmed a little cash off the top of a customer’s water bill.

But once she figured out she could get away with it, she couldn’t seem to stop. Heatherly stole $210,000 from the Junaluska Sanitary District over a six-year period.

A wall calendar edged with hot-pink swirls seems out of place in the Junaluska Sanitary District, where the back door of the office opens onto a double-bay equipment garage and work boots leave muddy tracks across the concrete floor.

“It’s the cheapest calendar I could find at Staples,” offered Jim Francis, an elected board member for the sanitary district. Saving money, after all, is a point of pride for the scrappy water and sewer system, and it goes hand in hand with keeping rates as low as possible for the 1,850 customers along its lines.

SEE ALSO: The slow leak: Junaluska Sanitary District rocked by embezzlement

A two-year court battle over the ownership of Camp Hope concluded last week when the N.C. Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the property belonged to the town of Canton.

The Haywood County Tourism Development Authority called for the removal of one of its board members, Wade Reece in a 5 to 3 vote last Thursday (Feb. 23).

The request to remove Reece from the board will be up to the Haywood County Board of Commissioners who appoint the TDA board.

Residents opposed to a plan to add a middle-turn lane along sections of Plott Creek Road in Waynesville have garnered new hope that there could be a compromise with the local Department of Transportation over the project.

Some members of the Waynesville board of aldermen are questioning whether Mayor Henry Foy acted in bounds when he wrote a letter of support to the Department of Transportation for the Plott Creek Road project.

The Waynesville Town Board voted unanimously last April to have town officials meet with DOT to explore alternatives to a plan calling for a middle turn lane in several sections of Plott Creek Road from Hazelwood Elementary School to the outskirts of downtown Hazelwood. The vote was in direct response to complaints of residents who live, work and go to church along the road.

The fate of a controversial figure on the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority is still up in the air two weeks after the tourism board voted 5 to 3 to have him ousted.

The decision whether to remove Wade Reece from the tourism board lies with Haywood County commissioners, but commissioners have postponed making a decision pending conflicting opinions from local government experts at the Institute of Government, a department of UNC-Chapel Hill. When County Attorney Chip Killian consulted a local government expert at the Institute of Government last week, he was told the only way to legally get Reece off the board was to disband the whole board and put it back together again minus Reece.

By Becky Johnson and Sarah Kucharski • Staff Writers

A plan to sell off more than 6,500 acres of the national forests in Western North Carolina has galvanized strong opposition in recent weeks, laying the issue at the feet of WNC congressional candidates U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor, R-Brevard, and challenger Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville.

Their response has varied, however. Shuler has condemned the proposal, while Taylor has adopted a non-committal stance.

A metal building recently erected on Main Street in Bryson City has sparked discussion over what can be done to preserve the town’s historic character while still remaining business-friendly.

In light of the growing number of children with food allergies, a new policy has been adopted by Haywood County Schools to help parents navigate the scary terrain of sending a child with a life-threatening food allergy into an uncontrolled environment every day. 

The sale of the MedWest hospital trio in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties will be finalized by the end of July.

Duke LifePoint HealthCare, a national for-profit hospital network, will take over Aug. 1, ending a long legacy of local, independent ownership of the community hospitals.

In two separate incidents, graders in Haywood County bulldozed over wetlands, violating state and federal regulations that protect the environmentally-sensitive areas.

Public concerns over the visual blight of a proposed cell tower in the Cashiers area have prompted Verizon Wireless to alter its design for the tower, namely by disguising it to look like a very tall, very big pine tree.

A major motion picture starring Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig and others will be partly filmed at a Waynesville location in mid-July.

Lake Junaluska’s bid to merge with the town of Waynesville flickered to life in the state legislature last week after languishing in political purgatory for the past year.

To some, they might seem like pet projects, budgetary fat in tough times, or frivolous earmarks.

But Waynesville leaders are defending $100,000 in annual contributions to a slate of 30 nonprofit organizations as a form of economic development, community advancement and social uplift.

The Pigeon Community Center in Waynesville has once again been rescued from the brink.

Haywood County has pledged $47,000 to fix a severely leaky roof and structural problems with the building, in effect saving a suite of programs offered through the community center for minorities and low-income populations.

A Main Street law office without windows is an odd place for a such a good view.

But Waynesville attorney Frank Queen has had a front-row seat to the mountains from here, witnessing thousands of acres trade hands — land with scenic vistas, along creeks, in forests, behind gates, on farms, hugging cliffs and tucked in coves — during the real estate boom of the 2000s.

Saddled by a higher cost of doing business and hits to its bottom line, Waynesville aldermen were poised to pass a three-cent property tax increase this week, the town’s first in over a decade.

Nonetheless, the town’s total budget for the coming year will still shrink slightly — dropping from $30 million to $29.7 million. 

Haywood County commissioners are examining a slope development ordinance that would regulate the safety of cut and fill slopes for home sites and roads in mountainside subdivisions.

Turmoil surrounding the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority has landed the entity a regular slot on the government television station where anyone with cable soon will be able to watch the board’s monthly meetings.

A controversial high-end development along the Nantahala River in the Nantahala Gorge has received the green light for an alternative sewer system that will allow construction of homes to begin on part the property.

The investigation into an off-the-books account kept by the former Haywood County Schools maintenance director at Haywood Builders Supply has shed light on an unspoken creed practiced among many government workers: use it or lose it.

When Danny Wingate agreed five years ago to set up a credit line for the Haywood County Schools maintenance department, he thought he was just doing the school system a favor.

Jerry Smathers is public enemy number one for a ruffed grouse named Gus that lives on the forest bordering Smathers’ pasture in Dutch Cove of Haywood County.

Whenever Smathers boards his all-terrain vehicle to ride from his house to his pasture, he keeps one eye on the edge of the forest for wayward attacks from Gus the Grouse. Gus confuses the idle of Smathers’ ATV with a show of dominance by another male grouse, namely a thumping sound made by beating wings.

When CNN chose John Armor’s web blog as the political site of the day several years ago, coining him an “intellectual redneck” in the process, Armor accepted the tagline proudly.

From his home in Highlands, Armor posts satire columns on the Internet by an invented character, “The (More er Less) Honorable Billybob Congressman” from Western North Carolina. It’s one of many outlets for Armor’s political commentary and humor that floods the journals and digital newsletters of numerous national think tanks, an unwieldy profession that pits Armor as a watchdog of the liberal media one day and a Supreme Court analyst the next.

For the first time in Haywood County, a group of residents has formed a political action committee with the goal of influencing the county commissioners race.

The political action committee, called the Good Governance Legion, is less concerned with the candidates they are supporting than they are the candidates they hope to defeat, namely County Commissioner Chairman Mark Swanger.

When a heavy rain washed into Paul Super’s garage last month, soaking a couple of bags of freshly-purchased mulch in the process, it triggered a dormant slime mold in the mulch to spring to life in a bright yellow ooze, much to the delight of his four-year-old son.

Every four years when a county commissioner election rolls around in Swain County, there’s one question commissioners know they have to answer but that most wish they didn’t: how they feel about the North Shore Road.

Grasping the extent of development sweeping across the Haywood County landscape is not always easy. So Marc Pruett, the county’s erosion control officer, came up with a little anecdote to put things in perspective. He tallied up all the private roads currently permitted for construction across the county — 73 miles worth in all.

For the first time in history, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is running for a seat on the Swain County Board of Commissioners.

Ben Bushyhead lives just outside Bryson City and works for tribal government as the director of community and recreation services, which encompasses social services, seniors service, and youth service to name a few. The budget Bushyhead oversees in his department rivals that of the Swain County government.

A slate of challengers running in the Swain County commissioners race are speaking out against what they claim is decades of control by an elite handful in the inner circle of the Democratic Party known as “the machine.”

Two well-defined political factions emerged early in the Haywood County commissioners primary and have only grown stronger in the countdown to election day on May 2.

On one side is the county commissioner chairman Mark Swanger, who is running for re-election, and Bill Upton, former school superintendent. One the other side is Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick, also running for re-election, Bill Noland, a former commissioner who lost re-election two years ago, and Skeeter Curtis, a state insurance department worker from Canton.

When Cass and Mary Lou Combs attended a conservation celebration along the shore of the Little Tennessee River in Macon County last Friday, their mind occasionally wandered from the speaker at hand to thoughts of a new great-grandchild being born that same day.

For two and a half years, David Erikson at Twigs and Leaves has offered a monthly drawing for a gift certificate as a surreptitious means to compel customers to share their hometown address.

Despite a slate of challengers campaigning for change in the Swain County commissioners race, all but one incumbent running for re-election was ousted by voters.

As artist Ann Vasilik was nearing the home stretch in Quick Draw — an annual event in Waynesville where artists race against the clock to complete a piece of artwork in one hour — the blow-dryer aimed at her watercolor rendition of a Frog Level street scene suddenly quit working.