Becky Johnson
Under normal circumstances, Mike Murray would be thrilled to pass out raises to the hard-working teachers in Jackson County.
Maggie Valley town leaders hope to create a new tone and tenor for town meetings, with “civility” being the operative word.
Who knows what Anita Vestal saw in Jeffrey Miles, or why she sprang him from jail and ran away with him, or how she justified leaving her husband and four young children behind, possibly forever.
At just 28 years old, Derek Roland might be the youngest county manager Macon County has ever seen, but what he lacks in age he makes up for in passion, enthusiasm, charisma, diplomacy, confidence and smarts — all the attributes of a natural leader.
The mother lode of charity operations was less than 24 hours away, and the daunting punch list should have had Johnny Strickland sweating bullets.
Last weekend, I sat down with a calendar and began sifting through all the fabulous Christmas-related events happening this month.
As I plotted out which ones we could try to squeeze in — Christmas parades, Christmas concerts, Christmas plays, live nativity scenes, town tree lightings, Santa visits, and nighttime holiday festivities in our downtowns — I had a flashback to last year’s Disney preparations.
Waynesville leaders last week voted to loosen the town’s sign rules at the behest of some business owners, but stopped short of allowing giant, blow-up inflatable characters.
The jury deciding the fate of a former Swain County jailer who helped a murderer escape and then ran away with him to California began deliberating Tuesday morning (Dec. 3).
To Jean Parris, the drug bust in Haywood County last month wasn’t just a matter of locking up suspected drug dealers.
It was about saving lives.
An undercover investigation in Haywood County targeting alleged drug dealers culminated in a sweeping roundup last month, netting 31 suspects with 114 charges in all.
The sale of the hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties to Duke LifePoint Healthcare next year will bring an unexpected windfall for local coffers come tax time.
Supporters of the stalled merger of Lake Junaluska with the town of Waynesville hope to get it back on the docket of the N.C. General Assembly in the spring.
I was caught flat-footed last year when my oldest daughter began questioning the myriad Santa spottings of the Christmas season.
Santa’s peripatetic ways just didn’t compute.
Maggie Valley’s interim town manager has only been on the job for a few weeks, but already has been offered the role on a more permanent basis — sort of.
It was a fairly simple inside job in the end, one easily borrowed from the playbook of any Hollywood jailbreak.
Anita Vestal was just a novice jailer, with less than six months on the job at the Swain County jail. But she single-handedly sprang an inmate charged in a bloodbath of a double murder.
The jury trial of a Swain County jailer accused of springing a murderer from jail more than four years ago will conclude next week with a certain guilty verdict.
Swain County leaders were relieved this month when the state gave them the go ahead to tap $382,000 in interest from the North Shore Road settlement trust fund.
Assistant District Attorney Ashley Welch, a Republican from Macon County, announced this week she will be running for district attorney next year.
A plan to move the Haywood County Economic Development Commission under the umbrella of the Haywood County Chamber of Commerce is moving forward.
A young male elk in Cataloochee Valley was put down by park rangers last week for repeatedly rushing and taunting visitors.
A love of junk food led the elk to lose its leeriness of humans. Despite a barrage of rubber bullets and pepper spray by park rangers in recent weeks, the elk couldn’t be convinced to leave people alone.
A parade of community leaders, doctors, nurses and hospital supporters voiced overwhelming support for the sale of Haywood Regional Medical Center to Duke LifePoint during a public hearing on Nov. 12.
Some Jackson County commissioners expressed trepidation this week over changing the way the county’s seven volunteer fire departments are funded.
Dear Pottery Barn photographers,
Please consider hiring a consultant who actually has kids before you shoot your next product magazine. Otherwise, your catalogs will be reclassified and shelved in the comedy section.
From, Been-there-done-that-and-it-sure-didn’t-look-like-that.
People who live and work in Cullowhee are being invited to share their opinions on growth and planning with a task force that is trying to crystallize a collective vision for the college-centric community.
The Sylva town board will appoint a new leader to an empty seat on the board in coming weeks — the fourth time the town board has gone through this in as many years.
When a “for sale” sign went up on the hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties earlier this year, it was chalked up as inevitable, a sad but unavoidable trajectory faced by small, independent hospitals everywhere.
SEE ALSO: HRMC votes ‘yes’ to Duke LifePoint, outpouring of public support
At best, the safe harbor of a big hospital network would bring practical perks — be it regulatory expertise, doctor recruiting prowess, leverage haggling with insurance companies or buying power for medical supplies.
I don’t buy the theory that texting has fueled an explosion in writing among kids.
The claim is texting is like a “gateway drug.” Kids who normally wouldn’t read or write very much now do so prolifically, albeit in truncated words and cryptic acronyms. But any writing is better than no writing — the notion goes — and once hooked there’s no holding back the inner reader and writer within.
The race for Sylva town board was won by only a hair on Election Day.
The results show Mary Kelley Gelbaugh edging Danny Allen off the town board by a mere four votes. Allen has been on the town board on and off through the years, with a total of 10 years in office if you add it all up.
Despite a crowded field in the Franklin election — a dozen candidates in all — a handful of victors emerged as clear frontrunners ahead of the pack.
Most of the winning candidates for aldermen and mayor reflect a public desire for change.
The trio of MedWest hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties could be sold by next spring to Duke LifePoint Healthcare, joining a network of 60 community hospitals nationwide.
The aggressive timeline is contingent on due diligence by both sides and further negotiations to refine exactly what the sale would look like. Persistent financial struggles prompted the hospitals to put themselves up for sale in the spring. They advertised to prospective buyers and last week announced their top pick was Duke LifePoint.
Jackson County commissioners questioned the wisdom of a last-ditch effort to find more customers for the Whittier sewer system at a county meeting Monday.
Commissioner also signaled reluctance to put up county money for a plan they saw as less than ideal.
A rural sewer system in Jackson County is headed toward bankruptcy unless it can drum up 200 customers in the sparsely populated Whittier area.
It’s a tough sell though, witnessed by the paltry 40 customers along the sewer line now.
Jackson County is hoping the third time’s the charm as it aims to jumpstart its floundering economic development efforts.
After years of thrashing and political setbacks, Jackson County once more has a board of economic development advisors in place and has hired a full-time economic development director — a position that has mostly been vacant for the past eight years.
Business owners and merchants in Waynesville angling for bigger, flashier attention-grabbing devices have piloted a rewrite of the town’s sign ordinance, which will be considered by the board of aldermen this month.
If you can eek out the time for a trip to Asheville, here’s a great excursion for the last lingering weeks of fall sunshine before winter puts a damper on outside activities.
Giant LEGO sculptures have put down roots on the grounds of the N.C. Arboretum. An 8-foot tall hummingbird, a 5-foot tall butterfly, a bison, a dragonfly — 27 sculptures in all, made from 500,000 LEGO pieces.
The MedWest system forged by the hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain County three-and-a-years ago will dissolve, ending a short-lived partnership that was rocky almost from the start.
When N.C. GOP Director Todd Poole emailed a list of state job openings — some 300 vacant positions in all — to dozens of Republican operatives asking them to spread the word to party friendlies, some political fallout was to be expected.
Some mainstream Republicans in Haywood County fear their local party is being hijacked by a far-right faction with extreme views on what limited government should look like.
The ascension of what some deem the radical right into leadership positions on the party’s executive committee is steering the party into uncharted activist territory, threatening to veer the party off course, they say.
An uptick in building permits in Jackson County has prompted the county to hire an additional office clerk to keep up with the load.
A decline in building permits in the wake of the housing bust had led to a reduction in both building inspectors and clerical staff in recent years. But as the number of building permits rebounds, the county needs to replace some of the staff it lost.
An expansion of Jackson County’s court facilities could be in the cards, pending a $30,000 analysis of what some in the legal system have dubbed a space shortage.
The county has hired an architectural firm to study space needs of the court system in coming months. The likely outcome: a reshuffling of space in the county government complex to make more room for court functions, possibly edging out other county offices in the process.
Jackson County commissioners may start broadcasting their meetings, bringing to the masses the nitty gritty of local government — tax collection reports, committee appointments, budget shuffling of low-level line items, and the not-to-be missed community proclamations, like the one in honor of Firefighter’s Week that passed nothing short of unanimously in September.
Giant blow-up gorillas, bouquets of balloons, plastic banners strung from awnings or poles and billowing fabric figures piped full of air — these previously banned forms of attention-grabbing signage could soon be gracing Waynesville’s businesses under a proposed slate of sign ordinance changes.
Schools are bracing for a precipitous drop in student test scores coming down the pike next month — the result of a new, more rigorous curriculum and testing standards implemented statewide last year.
We’re in the Halloween homestretch, but I’d wager at least half of you are still riding the costume rollercoaster, days away from closing in on what your kid wants to be.
Back in the days before Amazon.com — when we actually had to make our own costumes — if you weren’t in the early throes of gathering your wardrobe supplies by this stage in the game, chances were a white sheet with two eye holes was in your forecast.
I always end up with too many pumpkins by Halloween, a trajectory I am headed down once again despite telling myself to abort mission.
As a kid, everything in my house stopped for the Olympics. From the opening to the closing ceremony, any semblance of normal life was put on hold, and we spent day upon day glued to the games — a big treat since our weekly TV time was otherwise limited to the Cosby Show, Family Ties and Knight Rider.
Waynesville Alderman Gary Caldwell was the man of the hour, or perhaps the man of the decade, during the official ribbon cutting of the Waynesville Skate Park last Friday.
A Swain County High School junior varsity football player was suspended from school for 10 days and kicked off the team for racially derogatory comments made to a member of the Cherokee JV football team.
District Attorney Mike Bonfoey publicly announced plans to retire next year when his current term of office expires. Bonfoey has been the lead prosecutor for the seven western counties for 10 years, directing a team of 10 assistant district attorneys.
As Brent Martin stared down the barrel of an impending tug-of-war over WNC’s national forests, he dreaded yet another round in the same old fight that’s played out time and time again in his decades as an environmental advocate.
Loggers versus wilderness lovers. Horseback riders versus hikers. Hunters versus environmentalists.
