Ghost Town in the Sky amusement park in Maggie Valley has left a wake of unpaid bills with local companies over the past year, putting some small businesses in a bind during already difficult economic times.

Ghost Town owes around $2.5 million to a wide spectrum of companies: electricians, plumbers, contractors, ride engineers, building supply stores, TV stations and newspapers — more than 220 companies in all. The park’s recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing has left many business owners worried they will never see their money.

Several local businesses say they are disappointed they’ve been left holding the bag on Ghost Town’s debt with no hope of getting paid back any time soon — or ever if the park can’t pull through reorganization and faces foreclosure.

“This was the last thing we needed right now,” said John Mudge, owner of Apple Creek Electric in Waynesville. Apple Creek did extensive work at Ghost Town, revamping nearly all the dated wiring at the park. The company is still owed $4,800, Mudge said.

“I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a small company in a small town, that money they haven’t paid us has ended up coming out of my own pocket,” Mudge said.

Out of his 30 years in the electrical business, this is the worst time he could have been hit with an unpaid bill of this magnitude. As a small business owner, Mudge only makes a modest salary of between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. When Ghost Town fell short on its payment, he still had to cover the salary of the employee who did the work. That led to cash flow problems of his own. Plus, the time he wasted doing work he wasn’t getting paid for could have been spent drumming up real business.

“Partially due to this, it has cost some of our men their jobs,” Mudge said.

Steve Shiver, the president of Ghost Town, said the company was banking on a loan to help pay off the debts. But the recession and credit crunch has made finding a loan short of impossible. Every loan they sought fell through, finally landing the park in bankruptcy.

“I truly feel sorry for all of those who we owe money to,” said Shiver.

Another small business owner on the line is Jackie Shuler at Balsam Equipment Rental.

“It is just killing me,” said Shuler, who’s owed $6,600. “That is a lot of money for a small business like me.”

Shuler has had a steady stream of equipment on loan to Ghost Town: scissors lifts, floor buffers, a demolition hammer, heated pressure washers. Ghost Town would typically let a bill accumulate, then pay it down just enough to keep renting.

“Then it snowballed,” Shuler said.

Burton Edwards, a Maggie Valley contractor who specializes in rock work, says he is still owed $28,000 on a quarter million dollar job. While Ghost Town paid the lion’s share — just enough to cover salaries for his workers, gas for his machinery and materials — there was nothing left over to pay his own salary with.

“I basically did the job for nothing,” Edwards said. “I have three children and that’s hurt my family.”

Suddenly faced with a cash flow problem of his own, he relied on a line of credit to keep going through the winter.

Edwards actually filed a civil suit against Ghost Town last fall demanding payment. Ghost Town managers are disputing the lien, claiming the rock wall he built failed.

A very long line

The small businesses owed money are at the back of a very long line to be paid. Ghost Town owes more $9.5 million to BB&T, which takes precedence before anyone else. While most of that sum stems from the purchase of the property by new owners two years ago, at least $3 million was racked up repairing equipment, upgrading infrastructure and generally renovating the dated amusement park.

Also at the front of the queue is roughly $208,000 in unpaid state sales tax and local property tax.

If the current owners can’t pull out of Chapter 11, the park will be put up for sale, likely to the highest bidder at an auction. It would have to bring nearly $10 million before the small businesses see any of the money they are owed.

“Most of the people who are owed probably won’t get the money if it goes to the courthouse steps,” Edwards said.

Shiver agrees, and says that’s why the people he owes money to need to be supporting him right now.

“The alternative is to close the doors and sell it on the courthouse steps for pennies on the dollar. If we close, we all, including the creditors, lose,” Shiver said. “There two options — get behind it or close the door.”

If the park is liquidated — whether the owners voluntarily throw in the towel or are forced to by the bankruptcy judge — it’s anyone’s guess how much it might sell for in these times. But most likely it would only be enough to cover the big loans from the financial institutions at the front of the line, whose debts are backed by the collateral of the property.

“The small business owner does get caught in the cross fire. They get the short end of the stick,” said attorney Gavin Brown, chairman of the Haywood County Economic Development Commission and Waynesville’s mayor.

An even longer line

While not listed by name on the bankruptcy filing — but caught in the crossfire nonetheless — are several local sales reps for national suppliers and vendors. Take Dick Cabe, a sales rep for apparel companies that provided Ghost Town with everything from T-shirts to ball caps to resell in its gift shops. Cabe’s salary is 100 percent commission based, leaving him holding a great big bag if Ghost Town doesn’t pay for the merchandise it ordered.

“If they don’t get paid I don’t put food on my table,” Cabe said. “Anytime you lose money in this economy it hurts. You never like to lose money.”

Margie Woodward, a sales rep for souvenirs stiffed out of her commission as well, said she is generally very careful about who she sells to on credit.

“Who is going to expect a company like that to file bankruptcy?” said Woodward, who lives in Jackson County.

After seeing the long list of people owed in the bankruptcy filing, Woodward doesn’t hold out much hope for getting paid.

“I have pretty much written it off,” Woodward said.

Ghost Town has similar debts across the country, from $45,000 to a company that makes cap guns in Tennessee to a company owed more than $300,000 for rebuilding the incline railway.

“It’s affected us drastically, extremely,” said Brannon Deal, the owner of Industrial Service Group of Georgia, the company that has been working on the incline railway. “When somebody hits your business for $300,000 and that’s the total amount of money you do in a year, it hit us hard. It’s got us in a financial bind like you can’t imagine.”

Ghost Town is contesting that payment, too, which is the subject of a civil lien filed last fall.

Good faith

Local businesses say they wanted Ghost Town to succeed. Tourist traffic pulled in by the theme park has historically been an economic driver in Maggie Valley.

“Everybody here in Haywood County wanted it to be a go. It would be a fantastic thing,” said Shuler. “The whole community welcomed them with open arms.”

When Shuler is traveling and people ask where she’s from, they typically haven’t heard of Haywood County. But if she says Maggie Valley, it triggers the line people from here know well: “Oh, yeah, Ghost Town!”

“When I was a kid, we had season passes and would go there two and three times a week,” Shuler said. She remembers her uncle being scared to death riding the incline railway up the mountain, and still has pictures of her with the gunfighters.

Cabe, the sales rep for apparel merchandise, lives in Maggie and knows how much it means to the community.

“More than anything I’d love to see them succeed,” Cabe said.

That feeling led several business owners to give Ghost Town the benefit of the doubt as long as they could.

“We continued to work up there under promise of being paid, just because we were sure those guys would come through,” Mudge said. “After a certain point when money wasn’t forthcoming we just quit going.”

Businesses owed money saw Ghost Town start to fall behind on payments last summer, some as early as June, others not until August. When business owners broached the problem with Ghost Town management, they were all told the same thing.

“We’ve been told for months that they were going to pay our bill in a couple weeks. That’s been the story all along,” Mudge said. “Whoever we talk to up there, we get the same story. The bankruptcy came as a surprise in a way, because they kept assuring that wasn’t going to happen.”

At Balsam Rental Equipment, Shuler had a large lift valued at $100,000 on loan to the park that she wasn’t getting payments for.

“They kept saying ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ll get it, you’ll get it,’” Shuler said.

But finally, Shuler went up to the park to take back the equipment.

“We had to get the men down off our big lift and tell them ‘Sorry, no pay, no rent,’” Shuler said.

That was in June. Shuler called every two weeks since then. She said she tried to be nice, hoping that would move her bill to the top of the stack. But it seems it didn’t work.

Edwards believes the Ghost Town management had to see the writing on the wall.

“At a certain point they had to know,” Edwards said. “I don’t hire people I can’t pay.”

Julia Merchant contributed to this article.

Ghost Town in the Sky drew around 2,500 people over Memorial Day weekend, despite the daunting challenges of getting the theme park up and running while grappling with Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

All eyes had been on the park to see if it would open for the season on May 22 as owners predicted, and if so, how many visitors it would rake in.

The Old West theme park opened to mixed reviews from visitors. Those interviewed with young children were delighted by the gunfights playing out in the mock western town and pleased by the line-up of rides, many of which are well suited to young children.

“It was great. We love it,” said Melinda Turner who brought her 9-year-old son and his friend to the park from Cumberland Gap, Tenn. “We love the gun shows especially.”

Families with older children and single couples said they were disappointed by the limited ride offerings, however. The park’s two main thrill rides — a roller coaster and a drop tower — weren’t working for opening weekend. Both hit glitches when being inspected the N.C. Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau in the run-up to opening day.

“We thought it was cool, but if there are going to be rides down, they should give us a discount,” said Jennifer Conley from Ohio, who was visiting without children. “We thought there would be a little more to do up there.”

Conley and her partner heard about the park on a whim, while eating lunch at Sagebrush in Waynesville, and decided to check it out. She said she probably wouldn’t come back.

“Of course, everyone wants the roller coaster to be open,” said Dorene Pauley, owner of Travelowe’s motel. “A lot stems on that roller coaster. They need to get it open.”

The park is now entering its third year without the roller coaster, which has undergone an extensive rehabilitation including brand-new train cars. Park owners say the key ride will be open soon.

Pauley said calls have been rolling in to their motel all week from visitors with questions about the park, most wanting to know if the roller coaster is open yet. Once it does, visitation will take off, attracting roller coaster enthusiasts from all over the country, said Pauley’s husband, Scott.

The Pauleys said tourism in Maggie depends on Ghost Town. When Ghost Town reopened under new ownership in 2007 after a five-year hiatus, it brought a 30 percent increase in business to their hotel, especially among families. Visitors love Ghost Town, they said, witnessed by the children donning cowboy hats, vests and gun belts while re-enacting gunfights in the motel parking lot after visiting the park during the day.

Whether the Old West theme of Ghost Town resonates with today’s youth has been questioned by critics of the park, but that wasn’t the case for Seth Rogers, 9, visiting from Tennessee. Rogers said he has watched Westerns and loved the gunfights, but admitted the chairlift clinging to the side of the mountain was his favorite part of the trip.

Rhonda Chism, who was on an annual vacation in Maggie with her kids and grandkids from south Georgia over Memorial Day, came back to Ghost Town for the second year in a row only to find the coaster still wasn’t working.

“We were disappointed they didn’t have everything going,” Chism said.

Chism said the gun fights and musical performances were very good, however, a theme echoed by several visitors. Several visitors also commented on how well they were treated by the friendly staff.

“Everyone was really, really, really nice, very accommodating,” said Tina Justus, who was visiting with her toddler and pre-schooler from Washington, D.C. The family was staying in Asheville, but ventured to Maggie for the day after Justus found Ghost Town on-line when hunting for kid-friendly attractions in the area.

“It was good for our age kids, but if they were much older they would have been disappointed,” Justus said.

Some visitors opted not to buy a ticket after learning the coaster wasn’t open, including Judy and Keith Parker of Greenville, S.C. The Parkers have a second-home in Maggie and opted to come back another day “once everything is working.”

“We are kind of holding off until then,” Judy said.

The cost of the ticket, with or without a functioning roller coaster, gave pause to one family visiting from Atlanta.

“It’s kind of high,” 13-year-old Nick Farmer said as his family stood in the parking lot discussing whether to go up. The family, who was staying in Cherokee for the week, picked up a brochure and said they might return later in the week.

“We are kind of limited on funds,” said Nick’s mom, Christi Farmer. “It will depend on what else we find that is comparable.”

The park operated at a loss last year, falling behind on its $9.5 million mortgage and racking up a backlog of $2.5 million in unpaid bills. The new owners inherited a host of problems lurking below the surface at the aging park, tapping their financial resources. The recession made loans impossible to get and put a dent in visitation, forcing the park to seeking bankruptcy protection while reorganizing.

The park will be submitting a business plan to the bankruptcy court this summer showing how it plans to get back in the black.

The park hopes to have the roller coaster and drop tower open by this coming weekend, pending the outcome of a second round of inspections this week.

The park had waited until the last minute to call for an inspection by the state. Inspectors were at the park all last week certifying rides up until opening day, including the chairlift that carries visitors to the mountain-top amusement park. The park ramped up its staff just days before the park was slated to open, with some workers reporting for work for the first time just two days before opening day.

The park was seeking a $200,000 loan from the town of Maggie Valley to help cover opening costs, but did not garner enough support among town leaders to pass.

The business community has rallied to help Ghost Town, with several business owners putting up money as investors. Others have offered in-kind services.

Maggie Valley Restaurant, Legends Sports Grill, Smackers Sports Grill and Joey’s Pancake House provided food for the employees over the week leading up to the park opening.

Free landscaping work was provided by Sheppard Landscaping Services and Caldwell Trucking and Excavating. Maggie Valley Excavating made parking lot repairs, filled potholes and cleaned streets for free. Brad Kuykendall provided gravel for roads in the theme town in exchange for a stack of tickets that Kuykendall will donate to the Broyhill Children’s Home.

“We are amazed how the town is really coming together and embracing Ghost Town’s continuing efforts and commitment to tourism and working with us to grow Maggie Valley into a southeast family vacation destination,” said Steve Shiver, President and CEO of Ghost Town. “With their support, we will be able to make it happen.”

By Becky Johnson & Julia Merchant

A surprising turn of events caused the Maggie Valley town board to call off its vote on whether to loan the struggling Ghost Town in the Sky amusement park $200,000.

Moments before aldermen were to cast their votes at a special called meeting Monday (May 18) — and after it became apparent the request was going to be turned down — Ghost Town President Steve Shiver stood up and told the board he didn’t need the town’s money. Shiver said a private business owner in the room, who did not want to be named, had stepped up with an offer of financial aid to help get the park open.

The board then rescinded its motion to vote on the matter.

Prior to Shiver’s announcement, the board had held an hour-long public comment session and was prepared to vote. After the public comment session, each board member stated their position.

Mayor Roger McElroy said he supported loaning the park the money. Alderman Colin Edwards in a last-minute decision asked to be recused from the vote. Alderwoman Saralyn Price said she was not willing to risk taxpayer money to provide the loan, a stance that aldermen Mark DeMeola and Phil Aldridge agreed with.

It became obvious that the loan would not be approved as the majority of the board members stated their positions against it.

Shiver would not speak to The Smoky Mountain News after the meeting. According to previous statements to this newspaper and other media, Ghost Town is still scheduled to open Friday, May 22, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

Public weighs in

The question of whether to loan Ghost Town $200,000 in taxpayer money proved to be a heated issue for residents and business owners in the town.

Two packed public hearings and dozens of written comments submitted to the town preceded the would-be vote.

Those who were against the loan fear Ghost Town will go under and the taxpayers will lose what they put in.

“It is throwing good money after bad,” said Roger Ferguson, who owns a mobile home park in Maggie Valley. “They owe everybody in the county. How do they expect to pay back Maggie Valley?”

Those in favor of the loan claim that Maggie Valley’s tourism economy hinges on Ghost Town’s success.

“Ghost Town has marketed Maggie Valley for years upon years,” said Joanne Martin, a local restaurant owner. “If we lose Ghost Town, what is Maggie Valley’s brand?”

The controversy has pitted the town’s business operators in the tourism trade against average residents, according to those on both sides.

“Please remember your obligation is not just to the businesses in Maggie, but also to its residents,” town resident Candace Way implored to aldermen Monday night.

Business owner Brenda O’Keefe said the “we” and “them” way of thinking isn’t new to Maggie Valley.

“I hope this will not happen over (the loan),” O’Keefe said. “I don’t want it to be the business people versus the local people.”

Shiver had said the amusement park would open its gates for the season regardless of how the town voted.

“We aren’t here to fold up our tent and walk out if we don’t get a loan from Maggie Valley,” Shiver told the town aldermen, acknowledging their difficult position. “We are committed, and we are not going anywhere.”

While Ghost Town billed its request as a loan, several speakers at the public hearing expressed reservations about the park’s ability to repay it.

“This it is a risky move and we shouldn’t be involved in this,” said Jim Casey, a town resident and voter.

Ron DeSimone, who lives in Brannon Forest, questioned the town’s ability to thoroughly evaluate Ghost Town’s business plan and finances to know whether the loan would have been on solid footing.

The town asked Shiver more than once to provide a business plan showing how the loan could be repaid. But the town was told such a business plan isn’t ready yet, Maggie Valley Town Manager Tim Barth said. Ghost Town has to file a reorganization plan with the bankruptcy court later this summer, but until then, Shiver said the park won’t share it, Barth said.

The information Ghost Town has provided are one-page profit-and-loss summaries from 2007 and 2008.

“We asked for detailed information on revenues and expenditures, and that’s what they sent us,” said Barth. “They haven’t really volunteered anything. We had to ask for what we have received.”

Several speakers at the public comment session said the town should not be in the banking business, especially since Ghost Town has been turned down for a loan from financial institutions.

“Why should a local government lend money to a company that has filed banckruptcy?” asked Phyllis McClure, a property owner in Maggie Valley. “Elected and appointed officials are entrusted to be good stewards of public funds. Those funds should be handled more carefully than our personal funds. They are not ours to give away.”

“Your plan to invest tax money in a high-risk venture that most normal banks won’t touch seems to be a little iffy to me,” said resident Jack Ryan.

Tourism driver

Shiver said it is not uncommon for towns and counties to support economic development, whether it is through a revolving loan fund or outright grants to lure industry. In Maggie Valley, where tourism reigns, Ghost Town is proper investment for town tax dollars, he said.

“There is no denying that tourism and vacation home sales are driving your economy,” Shiver said. “There are many hoteliers in the audience and lodging partners that are here that truly depend on that.”

Maggie has a history of investing in its tourism economy, Shiver said, pointing out the town’s purchase in 2002 of the festival grounds. The town has spent more than $500,000 on the purchase, adding amenities and maintenance over the years.

Business owners say Maggie Valley’s tourism economy will wither up without Ghost Town.

“We gotta have it,” said Becky Ramey, owner of Smackers restaurant. “We’ll have a Ghost Town either way — either Ghost Town will open up, or if it doesn’t, Maggie Valley will be a Ghost Town.”

Dave Blankenship, owner of Alamo Motel and Cottages, said his business went up 30 percent in 2007 when Ghost Town reopened after a five-year hiatus.

“If Ghost Town closes, we would risk losing a lot more than ($200,000) for a long time to come,” said Tammy White, owner of the Clarkton Motel. White pointed out that the theme park draws in 130,000 visitors a year who then stay in the hotels and motels in the area. The local lodging facilities would have a hard time pulling in those numbers on their own.

Not on my dime

If Ghost Town is so important to the businesses in the Valley, let them put up the money, some speakers suggested.

“Maybe these businesses could form an alliance and lend the money to Ghost Town,” McClure said. McClure said residential property owners won’t see a direct benefit, yet will shoulder an increased tax burden if the loan isn’t paid back.

Dave Blankenship at the Alamo Motel argued that the money split among the town’s taxpayers doesn’t amount to much. The town has 1,600 individual taxpayers on its rolls. The loan is equivalent to just $125 a person.

“That ain’t nothing. You spend that going out to a good dinner somewhere,” Blankenship said.

Speakers in the “no” camp said the town would be better served to spend its economic development dollars elsewhere.

“If the town wants to increase the climate for business, there are certainly other things you can do that would be much more effective and less risky. I think this is very risky,” said DeSimone.

Roger Ferguson agreed the money could be put to a better use.

“If you have $200,000, put it in a trust fund for the kids of the Valley so they can go to college and don’t have to scratch and claw like a lot of us do,” Ferguson said. “Set up a scholarship fund so those who have the desire can get beyond what we have here.”

Support from within

Employees of Ghost Town joined business owners in speaking up for the loan.

“This is how I feed my family. I think we deserve a chance to prove ourselves,” said Michael Howard, the maintenance manager at the theme park. “You won’t find a group of harder working people in the county. I work my heart out at it every week.”

Howard said the park is on the right road and can pull through.

“We’ve gone through lows and we’ve gone through highs,” said Howard. “We are making strides in any and every way we can to support our community.”

Randy Bryant, an employee of Ghost Town, said he believes in Ghost Town so much he put $250,000 into the park since it filed bankruptcy.

“I took my hard-earned money, my retirement money, and invested it in Ghost Town because I love Maggie Valley,” Bryant said. “I put my money into that park to get it open this year so we can try to get everybody that’s owed that money you are talking about paid back. Without it being open, there is no way those people can ever get paid back.”

A gunfighter at Ghost Town who goes by Preacher said the theme park is a labor of love for many employees.

“There is a great number of us up there who aren’t on the clock,” Preacher said of the push to get the park ready for opening day.

Many local people have invested personal money in Ghost Town. Among them are Austin Pendley of Maggie Mountaineer Crafts, Brenda O’Keefe of Joey’s Pancake House, and Alaska Pressley, according to Shiver.

Verlin Edwards, a speaker in the “no” camp, said the investors should pony up the money themselves.

“I know they can dig a little deeper and come up with their $200,000,” Edwards said.

Shiver has said previously, however, that the investors are tapped out. They have already poured their savings and assets into the park to get it this far.

In the first two weeks after filing bankruptcy, Shiver paid $23,000 to a company he owns, Global Management Services, according to bankruptcy filings. That’s in addition to a salary of $1,600 that went straight to Shiver.

Ghost Town has to file quarterly financial reports with the bankruptcy court. The first quarter filing only contained financial transactions for a two-week period from when the company filed for bankruptcy in mid-March to the end of that month.

Going through the process

The town held two public hearings on the Ghost Town loan, although not by design. The town initially announced it would hold a public hearing on Thursday, May 14. The town had to run a legal notice in the newspaper at least two weeks before a public hearing, per state law.

There was a glitch in the notice being printed in The Mountaineer, forcing the town to push back the date of the “official” public hearing until Monday, May 18. Since May 14 had already been widely circulated among town residents as the date of the hearing, however, the town kept it on the calendar as well — thus the two public hearings.

The first public hearing drew a crowd of about 75, while the second public hearing drew a slightly smaller crowd.

Why the need for a loan?

Ghost Town filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid-March. It has a mortgage of $9.5 million and outstanding bills of $2.5 million. Many locals are among the 200 companies owed money, including electricians, building supply stores, marketing outlets and suppliers of T-shirts and souvenirs.

The iconic park is deeply engrained in the collective memory of Haywood County, both as an economic driver since its debut in the 1960s and a family past-time holding fond memories through the generations.

But when new owners bought the aging park in 2007 from its long-time owner and founder, they inherited a crumbling and jerry-rigged infrastructure. It required far more of a capital investment than they bargained for. Coupled with the economic downturn and credit crunch, the park was forced into bankruptcy, according to Ghost Town CEO Steve Shiver.

Maggie flush with extra cash?

Ghost Town CEO Steve Shiver argued that town has the money readily available for a loan, pointing to its substantial fund balance. Shiver said the town has plenty to spare without affecting residents’ property tax rate.

The fund balance, equivalent to the town’s savings account, is 51 percent of its general budget. Maggie Valley’s fund balance is actually below the state average of 64 percent for towns of its size.

“I am not saying our fund balance is in bad shape, but it is not where the average town is at,” Town Manager Tim Barth said. “Over time, I think we need to work toward getting our fund balance up so we are much closer to the average.”

Shiver said Maggie has far more than the 8 percent fund balance required of local governments by the state. But Barth explained that the 8 percent minimum fund balance is geared toward larger governments.

“If you have a $100 million budget, 8 percent of that is $8 million,” Barth said. But for Maggie, with a general budget of $2.5 million, reserves of 8 percent would be a mere $200,000.

The fund balance is the town’s fall back for emergencies, should a storm wreak havoc, a road collapse or sewer line explode. Any government needs a certain amount of cash on hand to cover such contingencies. The smaller the town, the larger those savings will appear as a percentage of its overall budget.

The state average for towns with a population between 500 and 1,000 is a fund balance of 86 percent, and 112 percent for towns under 500.

“There’s a reason that it is that way,” Barth said. “The Local Government Commission would not wait until we got to 8 percent until they sent letter and made phone calls and said, ‘What are you doing?’”

Ghost Town owes Maggie Valley $30,000 in back property taxes.

Would a water-starved Atlanta ever come after the Little Tennessee River? While it may be a long shot, the prospect — however remote — has made some residents of Macon County uneasy.

The concern has been sparked by forays into the water and sewer business by Rabun County, just over the state line in North Georgia. Part of Rabun County lies in the Little Tennessee watershed, which flows north into Macon County. The rest 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.

The notion was strongly contested by Jim Bleckley, county manager of Rabun County.

“There has always been talk about an interbasin transfer, but that is smoke and mirrors,” Bleckley said. Rabun County is seeking a discharge permit for a sewer treatment plant on the Little Tennessee River. Bleckley said the theory of an interbasin transfer is being “drummed up” by environmental opponents of the discharge permit.

“Anytime there are people opposed to something they will manufacture things to help their cause,” Bleckley said. “There is no danger of the Little Tennessee water going out of the watershed to Atlanta. No rational person would consider that an issue.”

The concerns emanate from more than merely environmental groups, however. Macon County Manger Jack Horton and Franklin Town Manager Sam Greenwood don’t think it is far-fetched that Atlanta one day might set its sights on water from the mountains.

“That is a potential concern,” said Horton.

Greenwood called it a “real possibility.”

“Atlanta is basically drying up,” Greenwood said. “Even with the drought cycle easing up, the major problem is their growth has consumed their water resources. For any more growth or sustainability, they are going to have to have more water.”

Atlanta’s future water woes have nothing to do with Rabun County’s sewer treatment permit now on the table, however, according to Mark Bebee, Georgia state environmental engineer over 18 counties. Bebee said he doesn’t understand why the discharge permit has people worked up about the prospect of an interbasin transfer.

“That is something that is fictitious and speculative. It doesn’t occur right now,” Bebee said. “They are speculating on things that might happen 10, 20, 30 years down the road. I can’t comment on what is happening 20 years down the road.”

Jenny Sanders, director of the Little Tennessee Watershed Association, isn’t content to sit back and wait, however. By the time such a proposition comes to the table, it could be too late.

“We have to be thinking about it now, because somewhere down the line people are going to do something we never thought they would do,” said Sanders said. “I think we need to pay attention before it is a problem.”

Sanders doesn’t think it is irrational, as Bleckley called it.

“Twenty years from now people are going to be doing things that aren’t rational,” Sanders said. “I think our water needs are going to get to a point where people are going to start behaving unreasonably.”

A history of water wars

Georgia has a knack for getting into water disputes with neighboring states. To the south, the ongoing and litigious tri-state water war centered around Atlanta sucking too much water out of the rivers that flow into Alabama and Florida. And to the north, Georgia waged a border dispute with Tennessee in hopes of getting at water in the Tennessee River outside Chattanooga. Georgia reached back nearly two centuries to justify a border re-alignment, that would have extended across lower North Carolina.

“They were claiming the state line would be up somewhere around Otto,” Greenwood said.

It’s enough to plant a seed of suspicion in the minds of many in Macon County not to put anything past Atlanta’s thirst.

If Rabun County ever tried to sell water out of the Little Tennessee, it would have to be approved by Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, however. Interbasin transfers are not taken lightly by the permitting agency.

Another consolation is that the Little Tennessee would be a drop in the bucket compared to Atlanta’s water needs.

“The flow in the Little Tennessee River is so small, it would never be thought of as a financially viable project for Atlanta,” Bebee aid.

Bebee said postulating on an interbasin transfer is akin to asking, “If a meteor hit our planet, what would you do?”

Todd Silliman, an Atlanta attorney with an expertise in water rights, said he wouldn’t go so far as to call the concerns ruminating from Macon County paranoid, but thinks the chances are remote.

“That is really hypothetical,” Silliman said of a water transfer from the Little Tennessee. But, “You never know what could happen years and years down the road. There are situations in the West where water is piped half way across California, so I would never say it would never happen, but I don’t anticipate that in the near term.”

Silliman cited the obvious cost-benefit issues: would the cost in exchange for a relative pittance of water from the Little Tennessee be worth it? It isn’t as crazy as some ideas Silliman has heard, however.

“I have heard about every idea under the sun for Atlanta,” Silliman said, including desalination of ocean water and even transporting frozen water from Alaska.

Silliman was hired by Rabun County to help shepherd its discharge permit along. Silliman said Rabun County’s intent was to provide sewer to prospective industry and development.

Rabun’s industrial needs

Rabun County’s plan calls for converting a former industrial wastewater treatment plant at the closed-down Fruit of the Loom textile mill into a sewage treatment plant. The county hopes an operational sewer treatment plant at the former factory site will lure a new industry to set up shop there.

But neither Rabun nor the Georgia environmental division know what that industry might be or what its discharge would contain. Some industries pollute more than others.

“Our concern is how to tell what the discharge limits should be without any idea of anyone who is going to be in the plant?” Greenwood asked.

The town of Franklin sees the Little Tennessee River as a possible source for drinking water one day, Greenwood said. The town currently gets it water from Cartoogechaye Creek.

Sky Valley Resort has expressed interest in running sewer lines to the plant once it comes on-line, and even agreed to subsidize the cost of the plant. Sky Valley would only use a fraction of the plant’s 2 million gallons a day capacity, however. That leaves plenty for an industry that may or may not come along — or for the county to run sewer lines in the future to serve residential and commercial growth.

“The main idea was to provide jobs for the community. It would depend on the growth in the future whether there was anything much else added,” Bleckley said. “We have no idea 20, 30, 40 years from now what the need would be, but the idea is the permit and capacity would be there to accommodate growth in the county.”

Rabun County leaders thought they were getting a good deal on the old treatment plant, which was being off-loaded since it was no longer in use.

“At the time they said that it was such a good opportunity we can’t let it pass by,” Sanders said.

The county spent $1.8 million to purchase the old Fruit of the Loom facilities. It will take around $4.5 million to get both a water and sewer treatment at the site plant up and running.

Some have questioned whether Sky Valley will be a viable customer after all. The company that owns Sky Valley, Merrill Trust, has landed in financial troubles, according to the Clayton Tribune. The financial issues, including liens filed against Sky Valley by unpaid contractors, caused Rabun County commissioners to question whether Sky Valley would live up to its promise to subsidize the cost of the sewer treatment plant.

A contract between Sky Valley and Rabun County calls for the first contribution by Sky Valley to be made when the plant is successfully permitted; the second portion when the plant comes on line.

“They are entitled to this payment,” Silliman said. “They have spent a lot up front and they are ready to be reimbursed for some of that.”

The county may not have embarked on the project without the commitment from Sky Valley to offset the costs. Without Sky Valley and with no industrial clients on the horizon, the county would have no customers to speak of unless it started running sewer lines.

There’s another threat to Rabun’s payment from Sky Valley coming through. The contract expires if a discharge permit is not secured by a certain date. (Rabun County has not shared a copy of the contract, so the exact date is not know, but is rumored to be early fall.)

The timeline for the discharge permit has been pushed back, however, due to numerous requests from the public for a formal public hearing on the issue — most emanating out of Macon County, including the town of Franklin, Macon County, the Little Tennessee Watershed Association, and WildSouth. It could take a couple months to schedule and hold the hearing, and weeks or months beyond that to process the comments and render a final decision on the permit.

The Georgia environmental division got 15 written public comments on the permit. All expressed concerns. None voiced support, according to Gigi Steele, environmental specialist with the Georgia water quality division.

Bebee, the state environmental engineer, was irritated by the overt environmental interests trying to derail a treatment plant. The discharge permit is needed to spur industry and provided much needed jobs, Bebee said. The former mill employed 900 people, some from Macon County, he said.

“We are all feeling the pinch on the loss of those jobs,” Bebee said.

Bebee also pointed out that the discharge permit sought by Rabun County will have better water quality than the discharges once put in the river, and will be a smaller volume. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the environmental groups.

“They are against a treatment plant period,” Bebee said.

Jesse Webster consulted his GPS and eyed the tangle of rhododendrons stretching out of sight up the mountainside.

Somewhere beyond the gnarled thicket lay a massive grove of old-growth hemlocks — at least that’s what aerial photos suggested. It was Webster’s job to track down the trees and if it wasn’t too late, inoculate them against a deadly pest.

As Webster and his ground crew left the trail and bushwhacked their way forward, Webster wouldn’t know until he got there whether he was too late to save the trees from the reviled hemlock woolly adelgid.

The unchecked marauder, hardly the size of a pinhead, is swiftly undermining the region’s ecosystem. It kills giant hemlocks in as little as five years from first latching onto the tree’s branches.

Webster, a park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is the leader of a tactical team trying to save one grove at a time. He’s horribly crushed when he arrives at a stand only to find it’s too late. The needles have been stripped from the tree, leaving only a grey skeleton of branches. But this time, like every time, he holds out hope.

“Hope springs eternal,” Webster said as he crawled up the mountainside.

Ecosystem anchor

While the park doesn’t have a lot of old growth forest, what it does have is mostly hemlock.

“Back in the days when a lot of the park was logged over the hemlock wasn’t a sought after valuable lumber tree,” Webster said.

The average age of hemlock groves Webster saves date to 1750, with some pushing back 400 and even 500 years.

“Their age alone to me is justification for the work that we do,” Webster said.

But there’s more to it than that. The hemlock is what Webster calls a “keystone” species. Owls and bats nest in them. Bears den in them. Flying squirrels use them as a launch pad. They’re the guardian of their own microclimate — their dense branches the very reason cool moist coves are cool and moist. Even the prized Southern Appalachian brook trout could falter when the shade hemlocks provide along creeks disappears, giving rising to warming water temperatures known to kill off brook trout.

“We are trying to preserve the hemlock forest,” Webster said. “The loss of that is more dramatic than just the collateral damage we see in one small area around a hemlock tree.”

Webster knows of 47 species that live in or on hemlocks — some specific to hemlocks only. There’s a fungus that grows only on hemlocks, and beetles that eat only that fungus. But Webster and his crew can’t help form a bond with the tree in front of them.

“One thing that keeps me going, you literally are saving that tree,” Webster said. “People say save the rain forest, save the whales. But with this you are actually, literally saving that tree.”

So it’s hard when Webster can’t save every one of them, but instead has to walk by those that don’t make the size cut-off.

“It’s the toughest part of the job, deciding what to cut off,” Webster said. “You can’t do all of them, so how do you decide, ‘Well those trees, we aren’t going to be able to work with those.’”

His rule of thumb is a diameter of eight inches and up.

“Sometimes you get suckered in and you want to do a four-inch tree,” Webster said. Which he does, justifying its potential as a future seed bearer.

On a bad day, one with lots of bushwhacking, the crew might treat only 40 trees. On a good day, it’s 150.

‘Land of the hemlocks’

The woods Webster tromped through on one expedition last winter was like a scene from The Lord of the Rings, one of those medieval forests with moss-covered boulders ensnared by twisted, weathered roots. The hemlocks’ girth was so wide four adults holding hands couldn’t reach around the trees.

“You are looking at 200-, 300-year-old trees right here,” Webster said.

As he sidled up to the first hemlock, he cast a glance skyward, first following the trunk then the tracing the branches of the massive canopy until he could no longer keep track of where this hemlock stopped and the next one started.

He was dwarfed by the giant trees, hardly more significant than a mouse scuttling over their roots far below. It was hard to imagine this cathedral crashing down, reduced to a graveyard of slain giants. Yet that’s why Webster was here: to save them.

“These trees are dying,” he said.

He quickly got to work. Kneeling now, he unscrewed the Nalgene water bottle and dropped in a pouch of powder the size of a pack of gum. He shook the bottle until it dissolved.

Meanwhile, his partner Kristine Glover had unfurled a tape measure and was eyeing the girth of the tree.

“Three feet,” she said. That told Webster how many ounces of the solution to use.

As Webster doused the soil around the tree roots, he had no qualms about the impact the chemical could have on nature. It’s the same active ingredient found in flea and tick medicine used on pets. It is harmless to animals, acting on invertebrates only. That could pose a problem for aquatic life, though, so it isn’t used near streams.

The chemical was engineered to bind with organic compounds, so it migrates no more than 3 inches a year through soil. With a half-life of five months, it would be nearly neutralized before it could move that far.

Before the crew moved to the next tree, Glover pulled a can of white spray paint from her hip holster. She blazed the tree with two quick squirts. Someone in her boots years from now would see that blaze and know it had been treated.

Slowly but surely, the crew was working its way through the forests of Cataloochee Valley, a section of the park rife with old-growth hemlock.

“Cataloochee is the land of the hemlocks for sure,” said Troy Evans, part of the ground crew. “There are just so many hemlock stands you can’t get to them all in time.”

But those they do save will one day be the seed bearers that help to reforest the landscape with a new generation of hemlocks.

“I believe by the end of my lifetime, I will see natural regenerating hemlocks in some of these coves where we are working,” said Webster. He’s 38 now.

Worth the effort?

Some see the effort to save hemlocks as a long shot, but those on the ground don’t want to look back years from now and wonder “what if” they’d only tried harder.

“Our goal from the very beginning has been to preserve remnant old-growth forest throughout the park,” said Park Ranger Tom Remaley, the Smokies chief forester.

There’s a lot of reasons: the trees themselves, the species that live in them and under them, people who want to visit a national park and see what a hemlock forest looks like.

But Remaley also talks about the long view of “genetic preservation.”

“If we want to at some point in the future repopulate the park with hemlocks, we need seeds from hemlocks that are native to the Smokies,” Remaley said.

When Remaley came to the park in 2004, the task was daunting. The adelgids had slipped deep into the park already, and ferreting them out wouldn’t be easy.

Thanks to the foresight of the park’s foresters, the first daunting task was already behind him: knowing where the hemlock groves were in the vast and thickly forested park. In the early 1990s, as the adelgids’ steady march down from the north closed in on the Southern Appalachians, the park’s foresters set about mapping every hemlock stand in the half million acres of the park.

They analyzed aerial photos — hundreds of them — spanning every corner of the park. To their luck, the photos were taken in winter exposing the evergreen tops of the hemlocks. But the photo mapping alone wasn’t foolproof.

“Yes, they looked like hemlocks from the photos, but are they really?” Remaley asked. “So we went out and ground truthed them.”

Curious just how old these giants were, the foresters bored into the occasional trunk with a hollow metal tube, penetrating deeper and deeper through the eons of time until they reached the center. Extracting a thin sliver of wood, they could then tick off tree rings like a cross-section of time.

“Hemlocks are some of the oldest trees in the park. It’s common to find trees over 300 years old,” Remaley said. “Some of the trees we couldn’t get to the center of because they were too big.”

The oldest weighed in over 500 years old. A tiny seedling when Christopher Columbus landed on the Americas, those oldest hemlocks were witness to centuries of human occupation in the mountains, from Cherokee hunting parties to the birth of modern towns. They escaped the clearing by early settlers and later the loggers’ axe — presumably saved for good with the park’s creation — only to be brought down by an insect no bigger than a pinhead.

The intensive mapping and dating revealed 1,400 acres of old-growth hemlock forest scattered throughout the park.

“It gave us an idea not only that we have more old growth hemlock than anywhere else, but that hemlocks really reach their peak here in the Southern Appalachians. We were finding the tallest and largest hemlocks anywhere,” Remaley said.

To make the cut as old-growth, the hemlocks had to be at least 150 years old. The plots of hemlock hold-outs ranged from a few acres to a couple of hundred.

Most of that hemlock forest resides on the North Carolina side of the park, with Cataloochee emerging as the bastion of old-growth hemlock.

Once the mapping was complete, the foresters watched and waited. Everyone was on the look out for the telltale sign: the fuzzy white adelgid egg sacks covering the underside of branches like snow. It was first spotted in the area around Fontana Dam, the far southwest corner of the park, in 2002. Within a few months, signs popped up in other far-flung districts of the park as well.

Honing a strategy

Foresters initially tackled the outbreaks the only way they knew how, with an organic solution sprayed on by hand. In hindsight, it was like spitting in the wind. It washes off with the first rain and only kills adelgids it comes in direct contact with — posing a serious the challenge to douse every branch in a 100-foot tree armed with nothing but a backpack sprayer.

But they held out hope that the isolated sightings were a fluke and could be stopped.

“We thought maybe an isolated bird came and landed there and had it on its feet,” Remaley said. “We quickly found that wasn’t the case. It was in a lot of other places.”

The fallacy of spraying giant trees by hand led the park to switch strategies: chemical inoculation sucked up by the tree’s roots. No one knows how long the inoculation lasts. Foresters initially estimated three or four years. But it appears it’s longer than that — possibly even seven years. The longer staying power is allowing the park to cover more ground. Instead of spending their time revisiting hemlock stands for a second dose, foresters can keep hitting new territory.

“I am getting more and more encouraged that once we have the systemic pesticide in the tree that is going to buy us a lot of time,” Remaley said. Not only are the treatments lasting longer, but the price has gone down — dramatically. When the park first started, a packet of chemical cost $24. Now it is around $7. Before, Bayer held a patent on the chemical, but it expired in 2006. An influx of cheaper generics hit the market.

“There is no way we could have treated the number of trees we have treated otherwise,” Remaley said.

Labor is now the most costly part of the project, not chemicals. The hemlock program in the park had a budget of $800,000 last year. Of that, $250,000 was for chemicals.

Of course, foresters can’t keep treating the hemlocks forever. They hope to stave off the adelgid with the treatments long enough for a predator beetle that eats the adelgids to establish itself in the park. Since the adelgid comes from Asia, there’s nothing native to the Smokies that preys on it. So the park service is introducing the predator beetle itself. Two different predator beetles are being bred in laboratories and released into the park where they will hopefully take up residence of their own. A third is in the trial stage. No one knows when the predator beetles will ramp up enough to put a dent in the adelgids.

“It could be 10 to 15 years from now. It could be 20 years from now,” Remaley said.

Until then, the crews have to keep them at bay with the treatments. So far, crews have saved 104,000 hemlocks.

“If we just walked away and never did a thing 99.9 percent of them would be dead,” Webster said. “Now if we just walked away and totally dropped the ball, tens of thousands of trees would still be here 5, 10, 15 years from now.”

Biological balance

A lot rides on the predator beetles. It is more than a grand experiment: the future of a forest, of an entire ecosystem, hinges on their success. The park has released 398,088 predator beetles into the park so far.

Beetle releases occur weekly in the park during late winter and spring. Transported from a beetle-breeding lab on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, thousands of beetles are being distributed into every corner of the park.

While some are simply sprinkled on the branches of infected smaller hemlocks by hand, getting the beetles high up into the canopy of old-growth hemlocks is more of a challenge. The rangers rig a slingshot out of biodegradable rope, aim for the upper branches, then hoist a coconut hull basket teeming with predator beetles into the tree. The rope and hull are left to decompose.

While it’s far too early to tell, the predator strategy appears to be working.

“We know they survive. We know they eat adelgids and we know they are reproducing,” Remaley said. “What we don’t know is how fast they are reproducing in the wild and at what point they will exert a control on the adelgid population — enough control so the trees can still survive.”

Remaley said the park will never be completely rid of adelgids. The goal is simply to keep the adelgids in check.

“The trees can survive with a lower level of adelgids on them,” Remaley said. Just not the great army there is now.

In the northeast, the adelgids are kept in check by harsh winters. That’s not the case in the Southern Appalachians, however, where they breed incessantly up to two times a year.

While known simply as “the predator beetle,” there’s actually more than one species. The park is hedging its bets with a “complex of predator beetles,” Remaley said.

Different beetles attack the adelgid in different ways, or are active at different times of year.

“We hope over time, if we find the right ones, they will control the adelgid and that more intensive effort of using the chemical and ground crews will become less necessary,” George Ivey, a consultant and grant writer for Friends of the Smokies, said.

The beetle-breeding laboratory in Knoxville now cranks out 130,000 to 150,000 beetles a year.

There’s another natural balance coming into play. The onslaught of adelgids that marked the early years has peaked and numbers are now crashing.

“They can’t maintain their numbers because there aren’t as many hemlocks,” Webster said.

Friends to the rescue

Money to combat adelgids was slow to materialize from the park service at first. At times it was hard to tell which fight was more daunting: the one for funding or the one against the adelgids.

Had it not been for Friends of the Smokies, the adelgid’s hold by now would likely be irreversible. When the adelgid first appeared, the park had no money in its budget to tackle the problem.

“Immediately Friends of the Smokies provided seed money of $10,000 or $15,000 to experiment with some treatments,” said Ivey.

Since then, Friends of the Smokies has provided more than $1 million in funding for the hemlock initiative.

“The initial thrust of our work was to try to fill the gap until federal funding could catch up,” Ivey said. “To wait an extra two years to get that lab finished just didn’t seem acceptable. That was the real push, and part of the appeal to donors was not to foot the bill for everything but to be the catalyst to ramp things up as quickly as possible.”

It worked. The federal government is largely footing the bill now, but the Friends of the Smokies had to bridge the gap until the wheels of bureaucracy turned.

“Some government agencies and scientists took a fatalistic approach ‘Well you are going to lose them and that’s just how it is,’” Ivey said. “That’s the way it has been in other parts of the county where an effort wasn’t mobilized. It was thought the problem was too big or the money too small and that’s an attitude we have wrestled with to a certain extent here, too.”

The Smokies continues to fund a special tactical team assigned to the North Carolina side of the park.

Friends of the Smokies garnered support from two crucial allies. One was the Fred and Alice Stanback Foundation, an amazing pair of environmental philanthropists from Salisbury, N.C. The other was the ASLAN Foundation in Tennessee.

The last stand

The Smokies has become a model for how to combat the adelgid. While the playbook is evolving daily, right now, it’s the only one out there.

“No other park has spent the effort and time that we have on this,” Webster said. “This really is a battleground.”

There are still some who argue the effort is a waste of money — a crapshoot at best, fatally flawed at worst. But for those who cherish the tell-tale signs of an old-growth hemlock forest, the gnarled moss-covered roots twisting over the ground and deeply-rutted bark on trunks stretching nearly out of sight, you can’t put a price tag on the hemlocks’ last stand in the Smokies.

“We will probably be the only place where you can go see an old-growth hemlock forest,” Remaley said. “If you want to see an old growth hemlock forest, this is where you are going to come.”

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis, but Frank Varvoutis, a former park ranger who was on the first tactical team treating hemlocks in the park in 2004, believes it is a worthy cause.

“If they could have done something for the chestnuts back then, don’t you think they would have?” Varvoutis asked.

Varvoutis became so enamored with hemlocks, he started his own company called Hemlock Healers committed to helping private landowners save hemlocks in their yards. But his days toiling in the park’s old-growth stands will always be part of his soul.

“They are beautiful trees. Some of them are 400 and 500 years old,” Varvoutis said. “To think you are standing next to something that old, that was around when Columbus came to this country, it blows your mind.

When Steve Woody and Barney Coulter got a mysterious call from Smokies Superintendent Randall Pope in the early 1990s asking to see them in his office, they dutifully, albeit curiously, complied.

Neither were used to taking orders — Coulter as the former chancellor of Western Carolina University nor Woody as the manager of an Asheville-based defense contractor. But they went along out of affinity and respect for the park, and as a good excuse to make the scenic sojourn from their homes in Western North Carolina to park headquarters on the other side of the Smokies.

When they arrived, they assembled around a table with others who had apparently received similar calls. Among them was Judge Gary Wade of Tennessee, who recently hiked to Mount Cammerer only to find the once-glorious Civilian Conservation Corps fire tower crowning the peak on the verge of collapse.

An upset Wade had come to Pope and demanded he fix it, only to learn the park was hamstrung due to a lack of funding. The upshot: the Smokies needed a Friends group.

Hundreds of Friends groups exist today — not just for parks but any special place, be it a historic lighthouse, library, museum or city park. But the concept of dispatching supporters to raise money for an entity supposedly funded by tax dollars was new at the time.

“You drive though and it looks good. What could it possibly need?” Coulter asked.

But in fact, trails were eroding, historic cabins rotting, visitor brochures outdated, ranger programs lacking, campsites growing shabby, environmental threats mounting and the list goes on. With a bare bones budget, the park would diminish in quality over time unless something was done.

“It would not be the great place to visit that it is,” Coulter said. “We could not afford to let the park suffer.”

As they hashed out the idea, Coulter was filled with excitement, yet overwhelmed.

“It sounded like a monumental idea, larger than life. The needs were so great and we thought ‘How do we do this?’” Coulter said.

Pope wanted to lock in commitment on the spot and made a bold pitch to those in the room.

“He said ‘We need some money to get this thing started. Why don’t you each write a check for $1,000,’” Woody recalled. And so they did.

Since that day, Friends of the Smokies has raised $26.3 million for the national park. It is considered one of the most successful Friends organizations in the nation. Their strategy: raise friends, and funds will follow. But it took time to build the critical mass they enjoy today.

“We were pretty much lone rangers out there for a while,” Coulter said. “First we had to develop the story we wanted to tell — why the park is important to all of us, why it is important to the arts and the economy and to nature, why it is important to our collective history.”

In a few short years, the Friends caught on, growing to 4,500 members. Those who depend on the park for tourism, claim it as their heritage or simply relish wilderness all found a reason to support the organization.

“The Friends serve a tremendous purpose in underwriting the goals and aspirations of the park,” said Ken Wilson, a former board member of Friends of the Smokies.

As a newspaper publisher in Waynesville for 20 years, Wilson witnessed the national park’s huge but sometimes subtle footprint. Wilson believes the park defines the community’s collective consciousness.

“I think people who live here, move here and call this place home have a connection with nature in a way that those who live in other parts of the state do not,” said Wilson, who is also a nature photographer. “I think they are here because of that. They are here because that means something to them.”

The Smokies has a disadvantage compared to other major parks. It doesn’t charge an entrance fee, upholding a promise made by park founders when raising money and carving out land for its creation more than 75 years ago. Free entry is surely a Godsend for families or budget backpackers. But the Smokies has less money to work with as a result.

“This park has a bigger hill to climb than the other major national parks,” said Jim Hart, the executive director of Friends of the Smokies.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing the Friends is what to fund every year. Brook trout restoration or elk reintroduction? A crumbling fire tower or new roof for Mingus Mill? School fieldtrips or guided hikes for the public?

Park rangers put their heads together once a year to come up with a wish list that’s presented to the Friends — both of imminent needs and long-range wants. Friends takes the list to heart, but sometimes inserts projects of their own if near and dear to a particular donor.

For example, Toyota donated $1 million over five years to spark students’ interest in science and environmental fields, using the Smokies as a backdrop.

“Parks provide a great place to teach children those building blocks of science,” said George Ivey, a grant writer with Friends of the Smokies. It wasn’t on the park’s list, but was gladly accepted.

And the Aslan Foundation donated $2 million for Trails Forever, an endowment that would permanently fund a third trail crew for the park.

“There was only one trail crew on each side of the park for 800 miles of trails,” Hart said. Crews couldn’t keep up, and the quality of the park’s trails were backsliding.

The National Park Service often gets mired in its own bureaucracy. It takes years for a funding request to lumber its way through the federal budget process. The park can’t react fast when hemlocks come under attack or a windstorm blows shingles off a cabin.

“They have a long and complicated budget process. But we can give money to the park with a quick turnaround,” said Woody, who serves as vice president of the board.

Woody’s role with the Friends is ironic in a way. His grandfather was the last person still living in the park on the North Carolina side, remaining in Cataloochee until 1942 when old age, the war and isolation finally drove him out.

While Woody’s grandfather never forgave the park for taking his farm and homeplace, Woody believes it was the best thing that could have happened to the region and sees the greater good served by his ancestors’ sacrifice.

“It’s an island of peace and serenity where people can go and get away from the frantic lifestyle we’ve developed,” Woody said of the Smokies.

Haywood County’s sediment and erosion control policies are the subject of a bitter legal battle poised to set statewide precedent.

A landowner slapped with a $175,000 fine by the county is fighting back with a lawsuit claiming he is being held hostage by the county’s overbearing enforcement of erosion laws.

The two-and-a-half week court case heard in Haywood County Superior Civil Court concluded last week (May 5). A decision now rests in the hands of Judge Laura Bridges, but will likely not be made for several weeks.

The landowners, Ron and Brian Cameron, built a 1.5-mile road network on a 66-acre tract in the Camp Branch area of Waynesville. They claimed the roads were for logging and were exempt from county erosion laws. The state allows such an exemption, based on the premise that logging reaps a much smaller economic return than development. Should loggers be forced to comply with the more rigorous erosion standards that apply to developers, it would effectively discourage logging.

The county claims the landowners were falsely hiding behind the forestry exemption, however, with no real intention to conduct logging. After building their road network, the Camerons drafted and submitted a development master plan calling for 18 lots, registered a subdivision name with the county and applied for a septic tank evaluation.

The landowners revealed their motives by these forays into development activity, according to the county. The Camerons lost their forestry exemption and were retroactively fined for two years worth of erosion violations dating back to the initial construction of the alleged logging roads.

Both sides in the case argue that a terrible precedent would be set if the other side won. If the county wins, landowners everywhere will shy away from logging, for fear they could never change their mind without their motives being questioned and triggering retroactive fines.

“We believe the county’s actions are discouraging forestry,” Craig Justus, an attorney for the Camerons, said during closing statements in court last week. “Essentially it would make forestry an unsatisfactory option. It would almost force landowners into developing.”

On the other hand, if the county loses, it would provide a road map for developers who want to exploit the forestry loophole.

“Developers will say ‘I’m going to build a big road system and tell them it is for forestry.’ Then four years down the road, they can say ‘You know I don’t want to log this property. Now, I want to develop it,’” countered Reed Hollander, an attorney for the county, during his closing statements. “No logging ever takes place and in the meantime those roads have sat out there eroding and causing damage to the environment, and yet nobody is out there to regulate it because the county’s hands are tied.”

There are three legal challenges pending over the issue. The one heard in court this month was filed by the Camerons in hopes of restoring the forestry exemption and getting them off the hook for compliance with county erosion laws. A second suit against the county is seeking damages and suffering. A third legal appeal is pending in Raleigh over the amount of the fines.

One or the other

When the Camerons began constructing a road system on their property in late 2005, they did not initially seek out the forestry exemption. They simply hired a crew and started grading without applying for permits, either to the county or the state forestry division.

The grader hired by the Camerons realized there wasn’t an erosion control plan being followed and called Marc Pruett, the county erosion control officer, to report it.

Pruett headed out to the Camerons’ property for an inspection. After a couple hours of walking up and down the freshly carved roads, making notes and snapping dozens of photos, he met with Ron Cameron.

Pruett had uncovered several erosion and sediment violations at the site. The exposed soil and steeply graded slopes lacked safeguards to keep erosion out of the streams, he said. Cameron had also failed to file a sediment and erosion control plan, which is a violation in itself.

When Cameron met with Pruett that day, he inquired about the forestry exemption. Pruett explained it was an either-or proposition: forestry or development. Cameron told Pruett during the property inspection he wanted to build a house on the property one day.

“He did tell me that flat footed, eyeball to eyeball standing right there on the ground,” Pruett said during testimony. “He told us he was considering building a house on the property and doing some logging. I explained those are two different things. It really couldn’t be both.”

If Cameron was building the road to reach even one house site, it wouldn’t count as forestry, and Cameron would have to comply with the county’s erosion control laws. If, however, Cameron’s sole intent was logging, he would be exempt, but would have to sign an affidavit to that effect.

“We require the affidavit basically to keep everybody honest,” Pruett said during testimony.

Cameron did not sign the waiver, but instead returned a month later with an erosion control plan and the intention of complying with county ordinances. But a few weeks later, Cameron changed his mind and wanted to go under the forestry exemption after all. In the summer of 2006 Cameron’s roads were officially classified as logging roads by the N.C. Division of Forest Resources.

“At that point, it was off my radar. Once the forest service has got it, we move on to other work,” Pruett said.

Making a master plan

Over the course of the next year, while still operating under the forestry exemption, the Camerons begin setting the stage for developing the site, according to the county.

They hired a development planner to draft a master plan for the tract. The first plan called for 11 lots. The Camerons then hired a second development planner to draft another master plan. Created by Brooks and Medlock Engineering firm in Asheville, it showed 18 lots on the 66-acre tract.

In fall 2007, the Camerons submitted that master plan to the county planning office. When the master plan landed on the desk of County Planner Kris Boyd, it rang a bell. While Boyd isn’t directly involved in sediment and erosion control, he works just down the hall from Pruett. The two regularly keep each other appraised of the plans and permits funneling through their respective offices.

In this case, Boyd remembered Pruett’s past inspection of the Camerons’ property and his pursuit of a forestry exemption. The appearance of a development plan raised a red flag to Boyd, however. He passed word to Pruett, who started investigating the issue.

“We were told this property is for forestry, but here comes a residential development master plan into the office. That calls into question what are the roads for,” Hollander, the county’s attorney, said in court.

The master plan made Pruett wonder whether the roads were ever intended for logging in the first place.

“I scratched my head and tried to figure out what to do,” Pruett said. “I determined at least in my mind when someone walks into a county office and pays fees to have a plan approved for 18 lots on the entire 66 acres, to me that is an intent to create a subdivision.”

In addition to filing the master plan, the Camerons had applied for and conducted a septic evaluation of their property. They also registered a subdivision name with the county.

Also in the interim, the Camerons sold a 3-acre parcel off the larger tracts. The separate parcel was never part of their forestry exemption, but the alleged logging roads happened to lead right past it, making the lot more valuable.

“What do they do under this time they are under a forestry exemption?” Hollander asked. “They’ve hired not one but two companies to do a residential development plan and they’ve sold property for residential purpose. At the same time they are doing no forestry activities whatsoever.”

Hollander pointed out that Brian Cameron is a developer in Atlanta, while his father, Ron, is a real estate broker.

Justus, the Camerons’ attorney, said the septic tank application has nothing to do with whether the roads were constructed for logging.

“My client always said there might be a possibility in the future that he might build a house somewhere on this 66 acres. Then why is it a shock for you to see a septic tank test on the property?” Justus said in court.

Just “exploring options”

In late 2007, Pruett contacted the state forestry division and shared the news of what Pruett viewed as forays into development. The forestry office ultimately pulled the logging exemption, thrusting the property under the jurisdiction of the county erosion control ordinances in January 2008. For the past two years, however, Cameron had dodged county oversight and all the while caused erosion to the streams, Pruett said.

Pruett inspected the property and wrote up a lengthy report on the erosion status of the roads. The county issued a violation notice outlining a litany of erosion control measures that needed to be complied with right away.

The Camerons countered that they should not have lost their forestry exemption. The development master plan was nothing more than an idea they were exploring.

“In a down timber market they were merely exploring options on other uses of the property,” Justus said. “A land owner has a right to explore options without losing forestry exemptions. We should never have been kicked out of forestry based on planning documents.”

The Camerons tried to get their forestry exemption restored. They even withdrew their application for the development master plan. They also signed the county’s affidavit stating their intention was forestry.

But the county claimed it was too late, that the Camerons had already revealed their motives and couldn’t simply duck back under the forestry exemption.

The Camerons filed a lawsuit against the county in protest. When it became clear the Camerons weren’t going to bring the roads into compliance with the erosion law, the county issued its $175,000 fine.

Justus claims the county is trying to make an example of the Camerons, and only slapped them with the fines after the Camerons fought back with their lawsuit.

“Why? Because we didn’t acquiesce. We got whacked because we didn’t capitulate,” Justus said. “There are reasons why we don’t want to be placed into the county’s world until we want to be there by choice.”

Never logged

The Camerons never conducted any logging on the property, a point the county chalks up in its corner.

The Camerons didn’t formally hire a forester until after they were embroiled in a disagreement with the county over their motives. The county claims the belated engagement of a forester was nothing more than the Camerons trying to cover their tracks.

“At that point they can’t unwind the clock,” Hollander said.

The Camerons claim it is inconsequential whether they actually logged anything.

“They county says, ‘Ah-ha! You haven’t cut any timber. You must not have meant the road for that purpose,’” Justus said. But the forestry exemption isn’t contingent on when, if ever, logging is actually conducted. While the Camerons haven’t conducted logging, they likewise haven’t engaged in development activity either, other than on paper.

“There have not been any house sites on that property. There are no driveways placed off the road. A surveyor hasn’t gone out and staked and put pins on every lot, not even one lot,” Justus said.

The Camerons had reasons for not logging right away, namely a depressed timber market, according to forester David McGrew who created the timber plan. McGrew said the Camerons’ roads were built with an eye toward logging — although he wasn’t hired until more than two years after the roads were already built.

The Camerons had talked to a forester in 2003 shortly after the purchase of the property to sign up for forestry property tax breaks. Landowners can get tax breaks by claiming forestry, but to do so requires filing a forestry plan with the county tax office. The Camerons hired a forester in 2003 to write the plan for tax purposes.

That plan revealed there would be no economic return in logging the upper half of the property, particularly because building a road to reach the timber would be difficult.

“This area would be a very sensitive area to harvest due to the soils, rock formations and topography,” according to testimony of William Teague, a forester in Haywood County. “Road construction would be very expensive and difficult due to underlying bedrock. I felt the cost of logging would not have an economical return in portions of (the property) due to access problems.”

Good business sense?

If the Camerons’ motive behind the roads was logging, they are poor businessmen indeed, Hollander argued. They spent $200,000 building roads to access timber worth only half that. Some roads went to tracts that clearly weren’t candidates for logging.

“There has got to be another explanation. It makes no sense if their end goal was forestry,” Hollander said.

When the Camerons hired a grader to start building roads, their only criteria was that it lead to the top of the property.

“He wasn’t told it was for forestry. He wasn’t told, ‘Make sure you get roads to this area because that’s where the better trees are,’” Hollander said. “He’s just told carte blanche go up to the top of the property. He’s giving them weekly invoices and the cost is ticking up and up and up. It makes no sense for two intelligent successful businessmen.”

By the same token, if the Camerons’ aim was to build development roads under the guise of forestry, they didn’t do a very good job of that either. Many of the roads they built wouldn’t work for a development.

“Not only would additional roads have to be constructed in order to implement the subdivision plan, there also would have to be substantial additional work done in order for any of the logging roads to be converted into subdivision roads,” said Kevin Alford, an engineer who provided testimony for the Camerons.

Alford went so far as to say none of the roads appeared to be subdivision roads to him.

When the Camerons hired a development planner to create a master plan, they weren’t adamant about using the existing roads.

“He realized they might not be up to the county codes for subdivision roads, and they might need to be changed,” said Paul Sexton, the development planner.

Ultimately, only half the road network was incorporated into the development master plan. The rest are either too steep or too narrow.

Tim Howell, an officer with the state forestry division, testified that in his opinion, the Camerons’ roads were indeed logging roads. Howell ultimately proved one of the Camerons’ best witnesses. He testified that the roads looked like logging roads, not development roads. He testified that there was nothing unusual about building logging roads to timber tracts that weren’t financially viable. He testified that it was fine to build logging roads and never log, yet remain under the forestry exemption.

Justus asked Howell if he made a mistake by granting the forestry exemption in the first place, and Howell said “no.” A landowner changing their mind down the road or exploring other options doesn’t make the initial designation wrong, he said.

Howell also testified that he would gladly place the roads back under a forestry exemption again, but was held up from doing so until the county relinquishes its enforcement claim over the property.

The county pulled out a heavy-hitter in its camp, too, however. Mel Nevils, the section chief of land quality with the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said the county was justified in assuming erosion enforcement of the property.

Nevils said if a landowner is building a road that theoretically could be used for logging but has the dual purpose of serving development, then it should follow the erosion control standards for development.

“Even though the roads may be used for logging that is not the end purpose for the roads,” Nevils said. “If anything other than forestry is going to happen, those roads come under sediment rules the minute they are put in.”

Nevils said in his opinion, the Camerons’ roads weren’t intended solely for logging. In the Camerons’ case, Ron Cameron admitted from the beginning that he wanted to build a retirement house for himself on the property.

Sediment control

In Pruett’s testimony, he shared albums of photos documenting erosion violations. He cited freshly graded earth bulldozed right up to the creek bank. Slopes lacked silt fences to keep erosion back. Ditches weren’t properly lined with rock to slow the scouring effect of water. Basins intended to trap sediment were clogged up, compromising the ability to catch incoming silt as it washed toward the creek. Shot-gun culverts dumped out in a free-fall fashion, eroding the creek banks below, according to Pruett’s testimony.

Justus wanted to know whether Pruett had any photos of sediment actively running into the stream.

“Show me where there is a plume of sediment leading from any road going into the creek,” Justus said. “You don’t have any photo of sediment physically going off the road into the creek.”

“I don’t have a video of sediment actively washing into the creek,” Pruett admitted. But Pruett said he could put two-and-two together based on mud in the creek below exposed soil and scoured slopes.

“It’s a fair assumption to say water runs downhill,” Pruett said.

Justus countered that creeks and ponds are naturally muddy on the bottom. However, Pruett said that most creeks in the mountains have rocky bottoms and aren’t supposed to be silted up.

Justus said the county exaggerated erosion at the site. In one site inspection, Pruett’s paperwork only classified the erosion as “slight.”

While the Camerons were exempt from the county’s erosion laws, they still had to comply with the lesser standards laid out by the state forest division, which they did.

“Forestry is not an exemption from protecting water quality. It’s just a different set of standards that apply to people who are conducting forestry,” Justus said.

If loggers were treated like developers and made to comply with a more rigorous standard for sediment control, the cost of doing so would effectively deter logging. State lawmakers recognized this in creating the forestry exemption, Justus said.

Justus argued that the Camerons should not be subjected to a $175,000 fine by the county while they were under the forestry exemption.

“That’s very significant to us and one reason this case is important,” Justus said of the fine.

Further, the Camerons should be allowed to stay under the shield of forestry rather than dragged under county jurisdiction, Justus said.

“There are 600 pictures here of what Marc Pruett says is wrong with this property. If we lose this case, that’s the world we are going to be put into,” Justus said. “They are going to hold us responsible for every dirt clod in the stream. We don’t want to do that. We simply don’t.”

When to comply?

Justus claims it is the right of any landowner to ponder possibilities. Drafting and submitting a development master plan was just that: an exploratory move. The Camerons ultimately withdrew the master plan and decided not to go forward.

“As a property owner we can’t get kicked out of forestry merely by pursuing options,” Justus said.

Justus argued that landowners aren’t told that filing a master plan could trigger a loss of their forestry exemption.

“The rules need to apply clear and objective thresholds, so a landowner knows if you go this far, this is the consequence,” Justus said.

The county claimed the Camerons were trying to back-peddle.

“Whether the roads can be used for forestry is not the question. The question is why were they built at the time they were built,” Hollander said, pointing to the development master plan as proof. “They pushed to get those plans done and into the county office and ultimately withdrew them when they realized what the consequences would be.”

Justus said the Camerons were being subjected to the whims of the “rule of man” rather than an objective playbook of laws.

“The rule of man is something that happened in cubicles and behind closed doors,” Justus said. “That’s government officials saying ‘I woke up on this side of the bed and decided this.’”

The county argued that Pruett’s job is to enforce erosion laws, a power granted by the state and the county. Not to do so would be shirking the county’s responsibility to the environment.

“They don’t have a right to pollute. They don’t have a right to put sediment in the creeks,” Hollander said. “All the county ever wanted is to get that site stable to prevent continued erosion.”

A potential clash between downtown Franklin merchants and street vendors was headed off the pass this week.

For years, street vendors have been peddling food and sodas to the large crowds converging downtown every Saturday for the popular Pickin’ on the Square music series. But store owners recently complained that the street vendors were discouraging foot traffic from migrating beyond the square to patronize the rest of Main Street.

For years, most merchants weren’t interested in staying open late on Saturdays. Street vendors selling hot dogs, ice cream, cotton candy and Philly cheese steaks cropped up to fill the void. That was years ago, however, and now merchants want in on the action.

Merchants appeared before the Franklin town board last week to voice their concerns.

The merchants’ primary concern was not so much with the vendors, but how they stationed themselves. Large trailers and trucks set up on the perimeter of the square effectively cordoned off the crowds from the rest of Main Street

One long-time vendor in particular with a large operation blocked the view of Main Street storefronts from the crowd. Mayor Joe Collins and Alderman Bob Scott floated the idea of relocating that particular vendor to a new spot, and it quickly gained traction.

“When we boiled down the issue, it was a line of sight issue,” Scott said of his discussions with all parties involved.

The town agreed to mediate a meeting between merchants and street vendors at the site of Pickin’ on the Square on Monday evening. When Scott and Collins announced the idea that had been percolating in recent days, it was well received.

“The thought process was when you look that way, you don’t see past the stand,” Mayor Joe Collins said, pointing toward Main Street from the square. “We are moving (the vendors) around so there’s not that barrier.”

The town board will still have to officially vote on the solution next week, but it will likely be approved.

“I think it’s a good compromise,” said June Hernandez, owner of Primrose Lane and president of the Streets of Franklin. “This is all we the merchants were asking for. We aren’t trying to get rid of the vendors.”

Scott was proud the community could work together for a solution.

“This was participatory government in action,” Scott said.

Scott said Pickin’ on the Square has become an institution in Franklin.

“I can’t imagine Franklin without it anymore. It’s what I describe as down-home America 50 years ago,” Scott said. People chat, socialize, dance and listen to music as a community.

“There are no strangers at Pickin’,” Scott said.

While Pickin’ on the Square attracts more than 1,000 people some Saturday nights, Betty Merrill, who helped start the series in 1992, remembers its early days. They set up a small 10-foot-by-10-foot tent in front of the courthouse and hung a light from cord strung out of a third-floor window on the courthouse.

When it rained, they forged on, convinced if they appeared consistently every Saturday the event would catch on. It did. They grew the crowd to 50 by the end of the first year, and by the end of the second year it was up to 200 to 300.

“We had so many that came there was a joke that went around town. People would say, ‘I heard they are moving the courthouse to make room for Pickin’,’” Merrill recalled.

Downtown revitalization and drawing in foot traffic for merchants was one of the original intentions of Pickin’ on the Square, said Merrill.

“The punch line is the merchants didn’t stay open,” she said. “For years we urged the merchants to join in and they didn’t. A few did, but the majority wouldn’t stay open. Now some are considering staying open but they want the vendors to step aside.”

Walter Coggins, who runs a concession stand as a fundraiser for the local Shriners Club, questioned whether people will actually wander off down Main Street to shop. Most are there to see their friends and hear the music, he said.

“I think if something is right handy that’s as far as they’d go,” Coggins said. “They can still hear everything and not have to go too far.”

Coggins recalls in the early years when Peoples stayed open an hour later, but the only time they got people in the store was when it rained and everyone ran for cover.

Hernandez is one of the few storeowners downtown who stays open late. Hernandez said she doesn’t judge the benefit solely by the sales she makes that night, as many people will come back the following week after browsing on Saturday night.

“It is always worth staying open Saturday night,” Hernandez said.

With massive logging operations running full tilt in the Smokies in the 1920s, the sanctity of what once seemed like a vast and untouchable forest was being rapidly reduced to a desert of stumps.

While most locals welcomed the money brought in by timber barons, the famed writer Horace Kephart saw the crash waiting on the other side of the short-lived boom, the day when the trees would be gone and the timber companies would move out, leaving the locals not only without jobs once more, but without the forests their subsistence depended on.

Kephart moved to the region in the early 1900s and immersed himself in the culture of backwoods mountaineers, who he later immortalized in his famed Our Southern Highlanders. It was natural that Kephart recoiled to see his old stomping grounds of Hazel Creek in Swain County ripped to shreds and the landscape denuded.

“He was heartbroken about it. He thought it was a rape. It was going on right where he had lived,” said George Ellison, a leading Kephart scholar in Bryson City.

The contempt came out in Kephart’s writing.

“He wrote that their machinery frightened him, it seemed almost animate and alive as it crawled up the mountain destroying everything in its way with grease and smoke and fire,” said Gary Carden, a writer and historian well versed on Kephart. “He said ‘We have to stop it or it is all going to be gone. People I am living with don’t realize that this country is limited and they are using it up and nobody is stopping them.’ So he took on the job of making the world aware of what was happening in Appalachia.”

The idea for a national park had been percolating quietly for more than a decade, but now Kephart seized on it.

“Every moment of his waking life from the mid-1920s to his death (in 1931) was devoted to that cause,” Ellison said. “He had a public persona and he used that to save what he was devoted to.”

Kephart propelled the idea of a national park like no one else could have. He cranked out magazine articles and newspaper columns across the nation. He penned personal letters to politicians and philanthropists. He joined the national park committee and wrote the text of brochures to promote the idea locally.

His writing was eloquent and his pitch was heartfelt, witnessed in this passage from a column that appeared in the Asheville Times.

“When I first came into the Smokies the whole region was one of superb primeval forest. My sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like cathedral roofs. I am not a very religious man, but often when standing alone before my Maker in this house not made with hands I bowed my head with reverence and thanked God for His gift of the greatest forest to one who loved it,” Kephart wrote. “Not long ago, I went to that same place again. It was wrecked, ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand rubbish heaps, utterly vile and mean.”

Kephart likely would have preferred the job of writing behind the scenes, but he was pressed into service to go on the stump as well. Kelly Bennett, whose drug store in Bryson City served as makeshift headquarters for the pro-park movement, bought Kephart a proper suit to wear on a trip to Washington, D.C.

A Kephart critic on other fronts, outdoor writer and Bryson City native Jim Casada finds redemption in Kephart’s role as a “progenitor of the park.”

“His writings carried the concept to the nation. He was doing that in a sense even before the idea of the park’s creation was being bandied about,” Casada said.

Kephart unknowingly laid the groundwork for the park’s creation with Our Southern Highlanders. The book romanticized the region and captured the country’s imagination with a primitive “world apart” within the borders of their own continent.

The national park wouldn’t just preserve the wilderness, but the lifestyle borne from it.

Shaping a strategy

Kephart motivated the nation under the banner of environmental preservation, but his pitch to locals took a different tack: economic prosperity.

“There is a tourist industry coming. Help us save this and you will be the Gateway of the Smokies,” was Kephart’s pitch, says Carden. “Everybody thought they would be the Gateway to the Smokies.”

Carden doesn’t think the tourist industry blossomed as people were promised, at least not in Bryson City, and some held that against Kephart.

It’s impossible to know whether the Smokies would be here today if not for Kephart. Ellison thinks so, but it would have been far more difficult without the famed author as a spokesman.

There are hints that Kephart grew weary of the fight. In a letter to his son before he died, he described the undertaking as “beset with discouragements of all sorts.” The park’s creation was a certainty by then, and Kephart declared victory in the letter. He added that he would “get out” when the work was done.

Exactly what he meant is a mystery to this day, but Ellison believes Kephart wanted to return to a reclusive life filled with camping and woodcraft.

“It must have been exhausting to him to get involved in a project of that sort,” Ellison said.

Kephart had a secret weapon that kept him going, a friend by the name of George Masa, a nature photographer. Together, they fought for the Smokies: Masa through his stunning photos and Kephart through his writing. They went on long camping adventures through the mountains, mapping peaks and valleys as they went.

“Having somebody to work with, it gave him focus,” Ellison said.

Kephart died in 1931 in an automobile accident outside Bryson City. Kephart hired a taxi driver to take him and a visiting novelist, author of Bloody Ground Fiswoode Tarlton, to the home of a moonshiner. The driver, who likely partook in the goods himself, wrecked the car coming home, killing both Kephart and Tarlton.

A peak in the Smokies was named after Kephart, as was a creek at its base called Kephart Prong.

“He died knowing the park would be a reality,” Ellison said.

While the debate over Kephart’s depiction of the mountaineers will never be settled, he’s been forgiven for his role in creating the park.

“Very gradually, what you do have among a certain number of people in Bryson City is a grudging acknowledgement that Horace had done a good thing, that the creation of the park was a good thing, that it was trading a minor tragedy for a greater good,” Carden said. “They lost their land, but Kephart created a park that was there for all posterity. It’s hard to say when it happened to you, but finally a lot would say he was right. He did a good thing.”

As a struggling albeit brilliant writer, Gary Carden never turns down money.

So when an out-of-town man in a rental car appeared on Carden’s front porch offering a $1,000 down payment on the spot to write a play about Horace Kephart, Carden wasn’t about to say no. Carden was curious, however, what led the man to Sylva.

“He said ‘I’m told you are a remarkable playwright.’ Right away I was suspicious,” Carden recounted. When the man went so far as to call Carden “well-thought of,” it sealed that suspicion.

“I knew he was doing a snow job. I am not well thought of. I am eccentric and peculiar, so I said ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’” Carden said.

The man on his porch, Daniel Gore, was part of a growing cult of Kephart followers who have elevated the famed writer to folk hero status for his chronicles of early mountain culture. Gore, a musician, had written a collection of songs, called “Ways That Are Dark,” to accompany Kephart’s popular book, Our Southern Highlanders. Gore thought his CD would be the perfect soundtrack for a play, and he wanted Carden to write it.

Carden — who said he “owed everybody in the county” — took the man’s money and promptly went to town and paid bills and bought groceries. That night, he got to work on the play. An obsessive and incessant writer, Carden quickly churned out an opening scene. He cast aside the idea of fitting the play to the CD, but instead began writing a play about Kephart’s life.

Carden was no stranger to Kephart. As an authentic keeper of mountain culture, Carden has studied Kephart extensively. He finds fault in some of Kephart’s portrayals of mountain people. Carden sees Kephart as an “outlander” — someone who isn’t from the mountains but lays claims as an expert anyway — and proceeded to make that the name of his play.

Carden emailed the opening scene of Outlander to Gore, who soon reappeared on Carden’s porch. The scene simply wouldn’t do, Gore said.

Rather than a hero, Carden’s play portrayed Kephart as a drunken, broken man seeking a refuge from society in the Smoky Mountains, a “back of beyond,” as Kephart himself called in. By all accounts, Carden’s scene is exactly how Kephart arrived in the region. Kephart was famous among locals not for his writing that earned him so many accolades on the national stage, but for being a drunk. Gore wanted no part of that in his play, however.

“I told him ‘You can’t write about Horace Kephart without mentioning he drinks.’ It is the flaw that makes the man admirable. If he was perfect he would be boring as hell,” Carden said. “He was flawed, and it’s what makes people identify with him.”

Gore stood his ground.

“He said, ‘Try again,’ and left another check for $1,000,” Carden said.

After another trip to town for groceries — and a spending spree at the book store — Carden came home and got to work on the next scene. He emailed it to Gore, who once again balked.

“He said Kephart in the play has too many flaws,” Carden said. “I said ‘I am the playwright, you are the musician. I say this is a good play.’”

Carden told Gore if he was looking for was a “candy box” to wrap around the 12 songs of his CD, then Carden wasn’t his man. But Carden didn’t give up on the idea of a play on Kephart.

“I thought. ‘Hell I am going to write that play he didn’t want,’” Carden said.

As Carden toiled over the play, a strange thing happened. He started to like Kephart more and more. Carden once held Kephart in mild disdain. When Kephart fled his former life in St. Louis to hide out in the Smokies, he left a wife and six children behind. Throw in alcoholism and exploiting mountain people for book material, and Carden had plenty to hold against Kephart.

But Carden’s thoughts on Kephart softened as he climbed inside Kephart’s head to write the play.

“I will, just like any true native who lives here, grudgingly give Kephart his due,” Carden said.

Kephart’s tireless fight for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is ultimately what won Carden’s respect. The park’s creation was a long uphill battle, and Kephart’s role as an advocate was integral to its success. Kephart loved the mountains and was willing to fight for them, and Carden saw that.

“He was a catalyst that made things happen. That stubborn persistence that he would get up and go on, get up and go on,” Carden said.

Many people around Bryson City were against a national park that would claim their homes and land. They didn’t take kindly to Kephart’s advocacy for such a thing.

“Common sense tells you it must have hurt him deeply when people turned against him,” Carden said.

Half way through the play, Carden quit writing, however. It wasn’t unusual.

“I have a house full of plays I never finished,” Carden said.

In this case, Carden realized people might not want to face a humanized Kephart, a Kephart who wasn’t a folk hero but a just a man with his share of flaws.

“I realized, ‘Hell people would not let me do this play.’ So I shelved it,” Carden said.

But a couple years ago, Carden decided to resuscitate it.

“The hardest part was the last two pages. They took me six months,” Carden said. As Carden recited the ending from memory — a moving soliloquy beside Kephart’s grave on the hillside above Bryson City — Carden’s eyes misted up a bit.

Carden is still hunting for a home for his Kephart play. He has approached the Smoky Mountain Community Theater in Bryson City and Western Carolina University theater department, as well as several others, but so far has not found any firm takers.

While George and Elizabeth Ellison are fixtures in Bryson City today — Elizabeth as a renowned artist and George as a writer and naturalist — their journey to the region 30 years ago was little more than happenstance.

The Ellisons rode in on the back-to-the-land movement, setting up house and raising a family in a rural cabin lacking running water or electricity. While it was ultimately a lifestyle that fit them perfectly, they landed here initially while on a quest of a different sort.

George Ellison first set foot in Bryson City in 1976, partly on a writing assignment and partly on a personal pilgrimage to the old stomping grounds of Horace Kephart, a famed writer who immersed himself in the culture of backwoods mountaineers a century ago. Kephart’s writing chronicled the distinct mountain culture and dialect and described the wilderness landscape — a rich subject matter than catapulted him onto the national stage as an outdoors adventure writer.

Ellison was commissioned to research the life of Kephart and write an introduction for a reprint of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. While Ellison had long been enamored with Kephart’s writing, he landed the assignment somewhat by luck. Ellison was teaching at Mississippi State University in the mid-19070s when small talk at an English Association meeting arrived on the subject of Kephart.

A visiting scholar from the University of Tennessee Press was in the room, and like Ellison, was a Kephart follower. A reissue of Our Southern Highlanders had been percolating in the background, but hinged on finding someone to write an introduction that would set the stage for the new printing.

“We got to talking and he said, ‘Gosh, I found someone with an interest in Kephart. Can you do the introduction?’” Ellison recalled.

Ellison gladly, but skeptically, accepted. Kephart’s life had largely been an enigma. Little was known about the man before he abruptly appeared in Swain County and settled amongst the people there. Kephart had left few clues of his own.

“I thought it would be a situation where I couldn’t find enough to write an introduction. All I’d found before was a couple book reviews and a little sketch of his life,” Ellison said. “No one had done a coherent depiction of his life before he came here.”

Kephart was a major player in the movement to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so one of Ellison’s first moves was to seek out the park’s historian and archivist, Don DeFoe.

“I walked in and said ‘Does anyone here know anything about Horace Kephart?’ and his eyes lit up. It was like he’d been waiting for me for years,” Ellison said.

DeFoe led Ellison downstairs to the basement of park headquarters outside Gatlinburg, Tenn., and opened the door of a damp storage room.

“There were boxes of Kephart stuff molding away, all this stuff was sitting there rotting away,” Ellison said of the room, which had visible water leaks.

Along with boxes of Kephart’s prized journals, containing meticulous notes on everything from local dialect to plant uses, were many of Kephart’s personal items.

Ellison’s quest to piece together Kephart’s life soon led him to a host of closet Kephart fans, each eager to share what they could.

“I felt like a little Dutch boy running around sticking my finger in the dike,” Ellison said. “It was overwhelming, because I had a project where I didn’t know what I was going to write about and suddenly I had more than enough.”

Ellison’s research ultimately revealed the life and times of Kephart and postulates on the motives that precipitated his move to live among the mountaineers.

“No one knew his story until I put it together, not in that kind of detail and context,” Ellison said.

Ellison’s own writing career was launched on the coattails of Kephart. The introduction earned him instant recognition and esteem with exactly the audience that Ellison was suited for, an audience as enthralled with the mountain landscape and cultural history as Ellison was.

In recent years, Kephart has been transformed from a nearly forgotten historical figure to a folk hero of sorts.

Ellison helped facilitate a transfer of the national park’s Kephart materials to Western Carolina University, which provided a proper archival repository for the valuable historical collection both in the Hunter Library Special Collections and Mountain Heritage Center.

Ellison spent a lot of time in Bryson City researching Kephart, enough to realize the town could give him and his wife, Elizabeth, the lifestyle they were looking for.

“She wanted to paint full time and not be pigeon-holed as a professor’s wife. I always wanted to be a writer,” Ellison said. “I said ‘Bryson City is really a nice little town. Let’s give it a shot.’”

Ellison denies that he set out to be a modern-day Kephart.

“I didn’t come here because I fell in love with Kephart. I came here because I fell in love with the region,” Ellison said.

Whether it’s for fitness, for fun or to save the planet, there’s plenty of reasons to bike to work. There’s also plenty of excuses not to.

This week, The Smoky Mountain News sought out two people who make biking to work part of their lifestyle and asked them how they do it. Turns out, they have a perfectly good solution to excuses laid on by the rest of us — and some extra benefits we hadn’t thought of.

Long-distance commute

Odell Thompson is one of the few bike commuters with long-distance fans.

While sitting in his architect’s office in downtown Sylva last Friday, an email popped up from his parents in Texas who caught a glimpse of Thompson riding into work that morning on a web cam trained on Main Street.

“We saw your yellow bike go by on the web cam,” they wrote.

When Thompson started biking to work almost five years ago, it changed his life in ways he didn’t expect. Initially his impetus was exercise. Thompson’s bike ride from Cullowhee to Sylva takes about 30 minutes, compared to a 10-minute drive. But the extra time on this bike three days a week is what he should be spending on exercise anyway. Thompson likes to think of it as killing two birds with one stone.

“I am getting to work and getting home, and by the way I am getting an hour of exercise a day,” said Thompson, 49.

But what surprised Thompson was how much it added to his outlook on life.

“Riding to work gives me a good way to clear my mind before the day starts. At the end of the day when I need to decompress, riding home gives me the period of time and physical exertion to leave work at work and take care of myself mentally,” Thompson said.

Thompson doesn’t mind riding in the rain or in the cold of winter. It’s all about the right clothing, be it rain gear or warm layers. He carries his work clothes in a satchel on his bike and changes at the office. On hot days, he freshens up by taking a washcloth to his face and neck.

A common excuse among non-bikers is that they need their car during the course of the workday. While it is indeed a deal killer for some, Thompson knows ahead of time what days he has appointments out of the office and what days will be spent at his own desk, and therefore schedules his rides accordingly.

While it’s impossible not to worry about cars when riding a bike, Thompson takes several precautions to reduce the risks.

“My bicycle is very visible. I have yellow bags and yellow fenders and flashing lights all over it. I feel like I am visible enough and the cars will see me, but you are always aware,” Thompson said.

As an added perk, Thompson likes the fact he’s not using fossil fuels, especially last summer when a gas shortage led to long lines and high prices.

“I would pedal by and just look at everyone in line at the gas station and smile,” Thompson said.

Thompson believes he is doing his part for a more sustainable society.

“We need to adjust our thinking about everybody being able to drive everywhere in their own little hermetically sealed capsule, in particular here in the mountains because there is not a lot of flat land to build new roads,” he said.

Thompson said while saving the planet is a worthy cause, exercise remains his top motive.

Thompson’s final piece of advice: commit yourself for at least a month before throwing in the towel.

“The first time your butt will be sore and you will say, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore. That sucks.’ But if you do it religiously two times a week for a month, after that you are hooked,” Thompson said.

“Mast Transit” style

When the Mast General Store launched its “Mast Transit” program last year, offering a bonus of $4 a day to employees who biked to work, the timing couldn’t have been better for Jay Schoon.

Schoon, who works in the outfitters department of the Mast Store in Waynesville, was already contemplating a “bike to work” New Year’s Resolution.

He had a dilemma, however. He lived about 20 miles away from work in the rural Fines Creek countryside. The distance wasn’t an issue, nor a killer climb along the way. Schoon’s problem was the narrow country road with no shoulder during the first part of his ride.

Until a solution dawned on him. Why not drive half way, park his car at a roadside truck stop and bike the rest?

“I was being stubborn about living too far away,” Schoon said. “It just dawned on me I could drive part way.”

Mast compromised and gives Schoon $3 a day instead of $4 since he is still using his car some.

He actually applies the $3 to a life insurance policy that he probably would cut from his monthly budget otherwise.

“It pays for my life insurance in case I do get run over.” said Schoon, who’s 39.

As an added precaution, Schoon has a rearview mirror on his sunglasses to keep an eye on cars behind him.

He also stumbled upon a lovely shortcut that departs from the road and follows a newly created greenway from Lake Junaluska into downtown, making the majority of his ride very pleasant and car free.

“I love my bike ride,” Schoon said.

Schoon would recommend the drive-part-way, bike-part-way solution to anyone facing a similar stumbling block.

“Find a killer route, even if it is not on your way,” he said.

Schoon doesn’t wear special bike attire. Working at an outfitters store, a fleece sweatshirt and hiking pants are accepted work apparel, and ideal for pedaling in to work as well. Schoon is a self-described “lifestyle biker.” He’d always ridden his bike as a preferred mode of transportation — including on his first date with the woman who’s now his wife — and didn’t like giving it up just because he moved to the rural countryside far from town.

The time on his bike in the morning and afternoon has made a world of difference in his life.

“I was missing something. Part of my lifestyle was not quite right,” said Schoon.

Ghost Town in the Sky owners paid themselves nearly $25,000 over two weeks in March despite the company being in bankruptcy.

The Maggie Valley amusement park filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid-March with the aim of reorganizing, opening the park and gradually paying off debts. Ghost Town has a $2.5 million trail of unpaid bills owed to more than 200 companies. Dozens of local businesses are among those owed money. The company also owes around $9.5 million in mortgages.

As part of the bankruptcy process, Ghost Town is required to file a detailed picture of their finances with the bankruptcy court every quarter, showing all revenue and expenses. The filing for the first quarter of this year only contained two weeks, from when Ghost Town filed bankruptcy in mid-March to the end of that same month.

The filings show nearly $25,000 was paid to Ghost Town CEO Steve Shiver and a company that Shiver is president of, Global Management Services. Shiver personally got $1,657 as a salary, while $23,000 was paid to his company. Shiver’s company is billed as a professional services company and dates to Shiver’s former life in the Miami area.

While Ghost Town had launched a campaign to sell advance tickets to the theme park, sales netted only $1,659 for the reporting period, according to the filing.

So far a hunt for a cash infusion to help the park get on its feet has not been successful. Ghost Town has been unable to get traditional bank loans, or strike a deal with last-resort lenders. Appeals to the county economic development and tourism entities have not been fruitful either.

Ghost Town has asked the town of Maggie Valley to provide a loan of $200,000. Town leaders are holding a public hearing on the issue at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 14. The town began accepting written comments on the issue via email last week to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Shiver has rented out the Maggie Valley pavilion from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 12, for a public event presumably intended to rally support for the amusement park’s request. He is also going door to door soliciting public support.Shiver did not return calls seeking comment for this article.

An attorney for Duke Energy gave Jackson County commissioners a “friendly reminder” this week to stop dragging their feet on turning over permits that will pave the way for the demolition of the Dillsboro Dam.

Before Duke can tear down the dam, it must dredge sediment backlogged behind it. Jackson County, which has been at loggerheads with Duke for several years over dam removal, has resisted issuing the permits.

Duke Energy went to court over the issue and won a ruling by Judge Laura Bridges that forces the county to provide the permits, despite appeals over dam removal that are still in play at the federal and state level. Jackson County feared that releasing the permits would hurt its chances in the pending appeals.

Despite the court order, Jackson County has continued to put up resistance. The county agreed to issue a permit, but only with a disclaimer that the county wouldn’t be liable if anything went wrong during dam removal, be it environmental or human safety. Other conditions involved safety parameters.

Duke refused to accept the permit with the disclaimers and conditions and has accused the county of violating the court order. Duke Attorney Molly McIntosh gave the county a last chance to comply this week before going back to the courts.

“I have tried, I think today is the third time I tried, to get the permits without conditions,” McIntosh told the commissioners at their meeting Monday night (May 4). “Mrs. Cable told me she was told to hold the permits until after tonight’s meeting. The order doesn’t say anything about conditions on the permits. If we don’t get the permits we are going to have to move for contempt in violation of the order.”

Commissioners discussed the permit issue in closed session Monday night. The following morning, the county issued the permits without any conditions, but emphasized it was for sediment dredging only.

The commissioners have been split in recent months over their continued opposition to Duke. Commissioner Tom Massie and William Shelton advocate throwing in the towel on the fight, but remain in the minority.

A fix for impending traffic congestion on N.C. 107 in Sylva doesn’t lie solely with a new bypass but will require a redesign of the commercial artery itself, according to the latest traffic projections by the Department of Transportation.

Two sides have emerged in the long-standing debate over whether to build a new highway around Sylva. One camp wants to build a bypass allowing commuters to skirt the commercial mire of N.C. 107. The other wants to redesign N.C. 107 so traffic flows better.

The answer could be both, according to recent DOT traffic projections. The Jackson County Transportation Task Force held a public meeting last week to gather input on both ideas, although participation was very low.

A new bypass would not divert enough cars from the commercial hotbed on N.C. 107 to solve future traffic woes, according to the traffic projections. Back-ups on the stretch largely stem from people coming and going from places along the congested stretch itself, according to Pam Cook, a DOT transportation planner working on a master transportation plan for Jackson County.

Opponents of a new bypass, known as the Southern Loop, have long insisted that it wouldn’t solve congestion. Joel Setzer, head of the DOT for the 10 western counties, said he, too, always knew that a bypass wouldn’t solve all the problems. It’s one reason Setzer called for a separate congestion management study now underway by DOT experts in Raleigh.

Whether the result will be a full-fledged redesign of N.C. 107 or simply tinkering with the timing of stoplights won’t be known for at least a year, likely much longer. The congestion management study is still in its early stages — so early in fact there are no numbers on how much a redesign will help.

Theoretically, a host of congestion management techniques could be implemented, each one ratcheting up the traffic flow and reducing back-ups. Although the DOT engineers haven’t run the specific traffic models to see how much each technique would help, they’ve looked at it enough to say that whatever it is, it won’t be enough.

“Will it be enough to handle all the traffic to make it function well?” asked Cook. “Probably not. That is something we have to determine.”

Why not wait before making a decision in that case, asked Susan Leveille, a member of the Jackson County Smart Roads Alliance.

“I am still a bit confused why we can’t look at congestion management on 107 before we spend hundreds of millions developing a bypass,” said Leveille. “You need to look at the small things you can do. You don’t bulldoze down your house because you need another bathroom.”

Decision pending

The Jackson County Transportation Task Force will be asked to endorse a countywide transportation master plan in the coming months. It not only will address N.C. 107, but span the entire county — from congestion in Cashiers to Main Street in Sylva to the campus of WCU.

The task force is being pushed to put its stamp of approval on a long-range plan — which at the moment calls for the construction of the bypass — before the traffic models for 107 fixes are finished.

Jeanette Evans, a member of Smart Roads and opponent of the by-pass, questioned the wisdom of endorsing a bypass until the task force has a better handle on how much fixes along N.C. 107 will help.

“I would like to be able to play with 107 in some respects to see how it works if we do this or that,” Evans said at a public meeting last week.

Ryan Sherby, a transportation coordinator who serves as a liaison between mountain communities and the DOT, questioned whether that was the task force’s job.

“The task force is a vision body, not an engineer body,” Sherby said.

“If you don’t know what the options are or the consequences of this or that action, how can you vision?” countered Leveille. “It seems to me like we are being asked to make a decision without all the information.”

Cook reiterated that congestion management, while needed, would fall short.

“My opinion at this point is that I don’t think there will be enough with congestion management,” Cook said.

Leveille and Evans said they did not understand why they are being rushed into approving a plan by July. The task force spent 18 months corralling and sifting through population and growth data. It only began the nitty-gritty work of analyzing the different road options two months ago. July is too soon to sign off on a master plan, they said, especially since it addresses everything from widening Main Street on the outskirts of Sylva to widening U.S. 64 in the middle of Cashiers.

“I don’t see how we can come up with a comprehensive plan in a matter of three or four months,” Leveille said.

Initially, the July deadline would allow the DOT to incorporate the task force recommendations into its annual planning process, Sherby said. It could be pushed back a couple months, however, Sherby said.

All the options are predicated on traffic models for 2035, when congestion on some roads will surpass what the DOT considers acceptable. But that model has been called into question.

“Are we planning for 2035 as we have lived in the past?” questioned Myrtle Schrader, who attended the meeting last week. “I don’t hear anything about the future of transportation. We need to look at what our lifestyle can and should be here in the mountains.”

Dr. Cecil Groves, president of Southwestern Community College, said that it is fair and accurate to assume there will be more cars on the road by 2035.

“What we know is if we don’t do anything it only gets significantly worse and more difficult to correct. The population here is going to grow. So we have to make an educated guess the best we can,” Groves said.

Groves advocated for more thought-out land-use planning that would influence commercial growth, rather than figure out how to accommodate it once it has cropped up.

Another question involved the DOT’s definition of congestion. Is the congestion a brief spike during commuter hours, or is it sustained and chronic? Setzer said the congestion was more than a momentary spike, but wasn’t all-day congestion either.

Compromise afoot?

News that the DOT is considering a redesign of N.C. 107 coupled with a bypass — rather than either-or — could signal the beginning of a compromise.

The bypass, formerly known as the Southern Loop, was initially billed as a major freeway through southern Jackson County, looping from U.S. 23-74 north of Sylva to U.S. 441 south of Dillsboro. Somewhere in between it would cross N.C. 107 with a major interchange.

In response to public opposition, the DOT dropped half of the Southern Loop — the part extending to U.S. 441 south of Dillsboro.

The DOT is still seriously contemplating the other half, but the language describing the road has been toned down. Instead of the once-touted four-lane freeway, the DOT shifted gears in the past year to consider a two-lane road instead.

That two-lane road would claim enough right of way to accommodate four lanes one day, said Joel Setzer, head of the DOT for the 10 western counties. It would still be designed for a speed of 55 miles per hour. It would still operate like a freeway in the sense of limited access from driveways or intersecting roads. And where it joined N.C. 107, it would likely have an interchange rather than an intersection with a stoplight, Setzer said. But the two-lane concept is scaled down nonetheless.

The bad economy has finally reaped some dividends for Jackson County taxpayers.

Construction of the new Jackson County library and renovations to the historic courthouse will cost the county roughly $1.5 million less than expected. Bids from construction companies came in well below what architects estimated, likely because contractors are hungry for work.

The county got bids from 15 construction companies. The low bid came from Brantley Construction based in Canton for $6.067 million. The total cost of the project will be around $7.5 million, factoring in architect fees, site work and the dreaded-but-expected cost overruns.

“We did a thorough background check on their history of service and we found it to be almost impeccable,” said County Manager Ken Westmoreland. “So without reservation we recommend Brantley.”

Brantley’s recent projects in Western North Carolina include a multi-million expansion of the Asheville Airport, the $4 million Child Development Center on the campus of Haywood Community College, two new fire stations in Asheville at about $2 million a piece, and renovations to buildings at Western Carolina University.

In the blueprints for the new library and courthouse renovations, the county had identified several small items as extras that could be cut to save money if needed. Since the bid came in lower than expected, county commissioners chose to include all the extras. These include a rear terrace, second floor balcony and soft lighting on the steps leading from the courthouse to Main Street. (The steps are slated for renovation as part of the project.)

One extra gave rise to discussion among commissioners, however. Commissioner Tom Massie questioned the wisdom of a stained-glass skylight, which isn’t a true skylight but instead will be illuminated by electric lights behind the stained glass. The price tag was $96,000.

“The reality is that’s a fake skylight,” Massie said. “I just wonder if we really need that.”

Commissioner William Shelton said that if the stained-glass faux skylight was eliminated, some other type of lighting would be needed in its place. The county wouldn’t realize the full savings of $96,000 by cutting the decorative feature, but only the difference between the two, Shelton said. Commissioner Brian McMahan said the county should spring for the aesthetic touch, especially in light of the fundraising campaign.

“I think a lot of people who have made donations in this charity drive are trying to build something that will be a showcase for Jackson County and something we can be proud of,” McMahan said.

Mary Selzer, chairman of the Friends of the Library fundraising committee, advocated for the stained-glass perk.

“That has been a feature of great interest to the community as we have talked about the building,” Selzer said.

The commissioners voted unanimously to approve the bid with all the extras, for a base construction cost of $6.067 million, not counting contingencies.

The town of Franklin acted appropriately by making public the terms of an out-of-court settlement offer extended to the town by Duke Energy.

The offer was aimed at getting the town of Franklin and Jackson County to drop their opposition to Dillsboro dam removal. Duke Energy hoped the offer would stave off a move by Jackson to use eminent domain to seize the dam and adjacent shoreline for the creation of a park.

Duke Energy insisted its offer should remain confidential, but the town of Franklin disseminated a copy of the offer to the media last week.

“They did it right,” said Mike Tadych, an attorney with the North Carolina Press Association who is an expert in public record and open meeting laws. “It would be illegal to enter into a confidential settlement agreement.”

Franklin leaders voted unanimously to reject Duke’s offer. Jackson County leaders likewise rejected it by a vote of 4 to 1.

Duke Energy said its offer was borne out of court-ordered mediation talks, which are supposed to be confidential.

It’s different when elected bodies are involved, however, Tadych said. Sunshine laws mandate openness by elected government bodies and trump any claim of confidentiality.

Attorney-client privilege entitled the town of Franklin and Jackson County to discuss Duke’s offer behind closed doors — which they both did. But once they formally voted on the offer, attorney-client privilege evaporated.

“As soon as it became water under the bridge, it became a public record,” Tadych said.

Elected leaders cannot keep what they are voting on secret. It would be akin to Congress voting on a bill, but not telling the public what was in it.

“You cannot vote by reference,” Tadych said.

The mountains of Western North Carolina were no stranger to tourism prior to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which today rakes in 9 million visitors and is by far the most visited national park in the country.

Trains loaded with wealthy tourists from Charleston, Atlanta and beyond pulled into the stations in Bryson City and Waynesville daily. Many spent their entire summers in the mountains to escape the Southern heat.

But the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park catapulted the region into a new era of tourism: one centered on the burgeoning automobile.

Initially automobile trips into the Smokies became a lucrative business for those capitalizing on the throngs of summer tourists arriving by train, said Henry Foy, whose mother operated the Herren House in Waynesville.

“We would be in the dining room at dinner and the owner of a taxi company would come down and tell people he was organizing a daytrip to the Smokies if they were interested,” Foy recalled.

As owning cars became commonplace following WWII, the Smokies offered an unrivaled auto touring adventure. Nowhere was the impact of tourism more prevelant than in Cherokee, the final gateway to the park from North Carolina. Traffic would often back up for miles as it inched along Cherokee’s main drag toward the park entrance.

“It was bumper to bumper to bumper for miles,” recalled Bill Gibson, who lived in Bryson City but worked as a short-order cook at a foodstand in Cherokee as a teenager. “I had never been anywhere, so I didn’t relate to where these people were coming from or going back to other than what I saw in a geography book in school. These folks weren’t alien Martians, but I can recall seeing a Florida plate, and it was unusual enough to be something to be proud of.”

License plate spotting was apparently a popular pastime for the region’s youth.

“We played this silly game where we tried to see the most exotic license plate,” said Gary Carden, who whiled away the summer afternoons along the roadside in Cherokee with other children. As they watched the tourists go by in their Henry Js and Studebakers in the 1950s, without fail a carload of tourists would make hand motions like a teepee, prompting the children to mock the silly gestures after the car had passed. Even thought the Cherokee never lived in teepees, historical accuracy was lost on the tourists who held their own notions of what Indians should look like. So the Cherokee soon lined the road with fake teepees, donned headdresses and posed in photos for money.

“With all these people coming through our front yard they said ‘Let’s sell them something.’ They had to pretend to be something they weren’t in order to stimulate the economy,” Carden said. “What they got was a strange new economy based on tourism that was only good for six months. Then you were out of work for six months when the tourist left.”

Bryson City capitalized on the influx of tourists as well. Luke Hyde, 69, remembers the droves that would funnel through the Calhoun House, a large inn in the middle of downtown, where his mother worked as a cook. Hyde would often carry the tourists’ bags in, and remembers the first time someone tipped him a dime. Hyde was confused, and handed it back to the man.

Meanwhile, Leonard Winchester spent his teenage years pumping gas for tourists at his dad’s rural store and roadside motel outside Byrson City.

“There was a dramatic difference in business in the summer,” Winchester said.

Winchester liked the chance to see people from all over the country coming past his doorstep. One tourist from out West had a carload of timberwolf pups and gave one to Winchester. But not all the memories are fond ones.

“Some of them were on the obnoxious side. They were pushy,” Winchester said. “They had stereotypes about this region. They pretty much looked down on us as hicks.”

JC Freeman, 81, of Swain County, also had the feeling that outsiders were here as much to gawk at the local people as they were at the mountains.

“The biggest thing they were hunting for is somebody they could make fun of,” Freeman said, recalling loads of tourists on Packard busses. “They wanted to see old Snuffy Smith and L’il Abner and they did their best to show it to them.”

A master plan for making Waynesville even more pedestrian friendly has been unveiled after a year in the making. The long-range plan lays out priorities for new sidewalks over the next 15 years.

“The basic rationale was to fill in small missing links on main roads first,” said Paul Benson, town planner. In later years, the plan calls for extending sidewalks into residential areas.

Topping the priority list is South Main Street. Despite a new Super Wal-Mart being built within walking distance of hundreds of homes, missing stretches of sidewalk inhibit pedestrians fromwalking to it, Benson said.

Other top priorities are along roads slated for a redesign anyway, which Benson described as the low-hanging fruit since the town can get state funding for sidewalks if they are built in conjunction with road construction. Otherwise, the town only has enough money to tackle 1,000 to 1,500 new feet of sidewalk a year, according to Public Works Director Fred Baker. Since funds are limited, it’s important to have a plan that lays out priorities, he said.

The town got a $20,000 grant from the N.C. Department of Transportation to hire a consultant to create the pedestrian plan. A steering committee was appointed by the town to guide the process.

The town also held a public workshop, conducted surveys and solicited email comments to gather a spectrum of views. Nearly 100 members of the public shared their gripes and wish-list for areas needing pedestrian improvement.

“It gets the public involved in deciding which ones are most important and it gives the town a blueprint to follow when making decisions,” Benson said.

A public workshop on the plan will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 25, at town hall. The town wants to hear from the public about where they want to see sidewalks or what intersections and crossings they consider dangerous for pedestrians. The town will incorporate public comments into the final plan.

For more information, or to view a draft plan, please contact Paul Benson at 828.456.2004.

As Jackson County leaders continue their fight against Duke Energy, an unassuming local lawyer that few have heard of has appeared as the county’s heavy-hitter against the politically powerful and uber-wealthy Fortune 500 utility.

Attorney Gary Miller, 52, a former business lawyer from New Orleans, has been hired to represent the county in its push to seize control of the Dillsboro dam owned by Duke. Jackson leaders plan to use eminent domain to take over the dam and adjacent shoreline and turn it into a river park. The move would thwart Duke’s plan to demolish the dam, achieving the county’s long-standing goal to save the dam.

Miller spent most of his career to date representing the corporate world. His expertise lies not in the courtroom, but in pulling off complex deals and financings rife with legal maneuvering, at times plowing new ground where precedent was lacking. Miller has negotiated deals between mega-corporations like Shell and Union Carbide. He also has represented casinos, developers, financial syndicates and other large organizations, both private and publicly traded.

“Historically I have been a transaction lawyer. I am typically a paper pusher,” Miller said, downplaying his lawyering past.

A paper pusher, perhaps, but mass quantities of extremely complicated, critically worded paper. Hundreds of pages with millions on the line should the other side manage to get a fast one by in the language. Paper with months of legal maneuvering and tedious research lurking behind the ink.

“Yeah, I’m good at that,” Miller said.

Paper pushing, in the world of lawyers, is how things get done. Jackson County Manager Ken Westmoreland said Miller’s background is a good match for “peculiarities” of the eminent domain case against Duke.

“His experience is in corporate law, working both for and against big corporations. Secondly, he specializes in real estate law, and the condemnation is basically a real estate issue,” Westmoreland said.

The most typical work for Miller involved commercial financings: a gigantic loan collateralized by corporate assets scattered across the county.

“They will hire attorneys in each state to give their opinion of the enforceability of the documents or modify them to make them enforceable,” Miller said.

When some of those assets resided in Louisiana — such as a deal involving an oil might putting up its refineries as part of the collateral — Miller was their guy

“It wasn’t the kind of stuff your average lawyer had knowledge about,” Miller said.

One of Miller’s most interesting jobs involved dueling casinos vying for a single gaming license in New Orleans. The state of Louisiana awarded the gaming license to one casino, while the City of New Orleans granted a lease to a different casino operator. Both groups felt they were entitled to the license — seemingly a no-win situation.

“The governor forced the two groups into a shotgun wedding and they formed a partnership to operate and build it,” Miller said. The joint entity that emerged went bankrupt before they finished construction, complicating an already sticky situation. Miller spent the next two years helping to sort out the mess. Skill in sorting out messes will be critical to resolving the bitter fight and test of wills between Duke and Jackson County.

The path that led Miller to Western North Carolina isn’t exactly a pleasant one. Miller is one of the thousands of Hurriane Katrina refuges who left their home city of New Orleans for good in the aftermath of the devastation and struck out for a new life. Miller hung a new shingle in Bryson City, and calls Sylva home.

Ironically, a life-long love of paddling drew him to Western North Carolina during that trying time. The paddling community is an ally in Duke’s plan to demolish the Dillsboro dam, as it would open up a new stretch of free-flowing river. Miller can frequently be found paddling the Tuckasegee in his free time, and until recently, was a member of American Whitewater, a paddling advocacy group that is a stalwart defender of dam demolition. Yet when it comes to tearing down the dam, Miller sides with the county in its fight to save it. Miller could not talk about specifics in the case or the county’s strategy.

The fateful storm

As Hurricane Katrina bore down on Miller’s former city of New Orleans, he sent his wife and two children away. But saddled with an elderly mother on oxygen who refused to leave, Miller, too, was forced to stay behind. Sadly, his mother did not survive the paralyzing power failures that accompanied the storm.

The next day, as Miller tried to make plans to get her body out of the city, his family reached him on his cell phone and warned him of the broken levees and rising water that would soon envelop the already ravaged city. Miller escaped in time, although three weeks would pass before he could finally get his mother’s body out.

While holed up at the home of extended family the next day, Miller got a call from his law firm giving him two choices: transfer to their Houston office or their Baton Rouge office.

“I wasn’t prepared to make a decision to move,” said Miller. “I told them ‘I’ll go off on my own.’”

Miller scrounged to find a rental house for his family in Lake Charles, La., but just as they got settled in, albeit with just a few suitcases between them, a mandatory evacuation was announced for Hurricane Rita.

Miller had given one of the family vehicles to his mother’s caretaker, who had no car of her own and was stranded at a major refugee camp in Dallas. So when the evacuation order came for Rita, he piled his wife, children, mother-in-law, two golden retrievers and a pet guinea pig into their only remaining vehicle and joined the mire of traffic crawling north.

Shortly after Katrina hit, Miller had received an email from John Burton, the then general partner of Nantahala Village Resort, asking if the family was OK. Miller’s family was a regular at the Village, and he had befriended Burton after years of vacationing there. Burton had offered to put them up — an offer Miller initially declined with the intention of continuing his life in New Orleans. But as Miller reflected on his life — no home, no possessions, no job and one family car — Miller contacted Burden to tell him they were on their way.

Burton put them up for free at the Village for six weeks while they figured out what to do.

“Having lived through Katrina and two weeks later being evacuated for Rita, to be honest I was a little gun shy,” Miller said of moving back to New Orleans. “I have lived through many hurricanes, but that was something that was overwhelming.”

Miller had vacationed in WNC as a kid, often to paddle on the Nantahala. He continued the tradition with his own family, and in 1999 he and his wife bought a lot with the intention retiring here one day. They decided to make the move sooner rather than later.

“After Katrina, things and money basically had no meaning to me. My priorities were completely restructured in terms of what was important in life,” Miller said. “When you are working for a Fortune 500 company, you are just helping an officer climb the corporate ladder and make money. I had worked on a lot of ‘sexy ‘things as lawyers call it, but here I can help people. It is more rewarding professionally and emotionally.”

Miller brought a few of his big corporate clients with him, however.

“Clients said, ‘We don’t care where you are as long as you have a phone, a fax and a computer,’” Miller said.

Miller said he hasn’t experienced culture shock. He was tired of the big law firm and city life, despite the big paycheck that go with them. Miller said he paid his dues, from the 3 a.m. phone calls from big money clients who feel like talking and must be humored to missing his kid’s bedtime night after night.

While many may believe Jackson County has little chance of winning against the likes of Duke, there’s little doubt that any settlement that goes the county’s way will have to involve a very complicated game of give and take. Whatever the outcome, Miller will be back in his old element in his new WNC home.

Harrah’s Cherokee Casino has donated $10,000 to Friends of the Smokies in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park this year.

The contribution recognizes the value of having the most visited national park in the country at Cherokee’s doorstep.

“I can remember as a child sitting under an apple tree under the highway watching the traffic go by just bumper to bumper,” said Joyce Dugan, the director of Communications and Relations for Harrah’s.

While Cherokee is a unique tourist draw in its own right, Dugan said the creation of the park instantly catapulted Cherokee into a tourism economy.

“There was a little dabbling in tourism prior to the park opening because there was curiosity about Indians. But being the gateway to the park brought thousands more through,” Dugan said. “There was just one way in and one way out. It really did open up Cherokee.”

Harrah’s sees 3.5 million visitors a year — roughly the same number that the North Carolina side of the Smokies sees every year.

“I think we share some of the same patrons,” Dugan said. “I think we can work hand in hand and promote each other.”

Cherokee has been retooling its tourism image in recent years. A large part of the new image has involved incorporating themes of nature into architecture and town layout, and promoting the Tribe’s various cultural tourism attractions like the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, “Unto These Hills” outdoor drama, and the Oconaluftee Indian Village.

The park means more to the tribe than just tourism, however. The Cherokee have a spiritual connection with the landscape that was preserved by the park’s creation.

“As a tribe in these United States, our role should always be about the protection of the earth,” said Dugan, who previously served as chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “That’s what we stood for: not taking from the earth anything you could not use and always giving back. But we have adopted so many modern ways, we tend to abuse it, too. The park serves as a reminder to us of what preservation is all about.”

Dugan said there is some resentment against the park for the recent loss of gathering rights, which the Cherokee see as their right as native peoples. Cherokee historically were allowed to gather wild plants — mushrooms, berries, ramps, herbs, greens and the like. The park has recently tried to put an end to the special status afforded to the Cherokee people.

“Even though there have been resentments along the way, we know what a wonderful thing it was,” Dugan said of the park. “I think sometimes personally, ‘What if that park had not been designated? What would it look like?’ I just can’t imagine. In that respect, most all of us here who are Cherokee appreciate that.”

Jackson County appears to be on firm footing in its quest to seize the Dillsboro dam from Duke Energy as far as state law goes, but it is unclear whether the county could hit a roadblock from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Jackson County commissioners have voted to pursue condemnation of the Dillsboro dam and adjacent shoreline under the pretext of creating a river park. On the surface, recreation is grounds for condemnation under state law. Eminent domain law in North Carolina is complex to say the least, however, with seemingly endless exceptions and disclaimers written into the statute.

One pitfall Jackson County can cross off the list, though, is the North Carolina Utility Commission.

“I am not aware of any restrictions under North Carolina public utility law,” said Antoinette Wike, chief counsel for the N.C. Utility Commission.

That’s not to say counties can go around condemning any utility operation they please, such as coal plants or nuclear plants, and converting them into parks. Power plants of larger stature operate under a “certificate of public convenience and necessity” from the state. Considered integral to serving the public demand for electricity, those power plants would be protected from any foray into condemnation, Wike said.

But the Dillsboro dam is so old — nearly 100 years — and produces so little power, it never operated under a certificate of public necessity. Further, the power turbines at the dam have been off-line for five years.

“In this instance the Dillsboro dam and powerhouse have not been used for several years so the Utility Commission, as far as I know, doesn’t really have any jurisdiction over this,” Wike said.

Duke’s lack of upkeep on the Dillsboro dam could ultimately work against the utility in the condemnation fight. Maintenance on the dam was already in decline when major flooding on the Tuckasegee River in 2004 sidelined the hydro plant. Duke had already set its sights on demolishing the dam by then and chose not to invest in repairs to get it working again.

Prior to the flood, the two turbines in the powerhouse were capable of churning out just 225 kilowatts of power — although outside hydropower specialists say that the turbines could be retrofitted and additional ones added to make more power.

Had Dillsboro dam been operational, Duke may have been shielded by the state’s eminent domain laws. Statue allows for the condemnation of property owned by a public utility only if “the property is not in actual public use or not necessary to the operation of the business.”

Duke could try to claim that tearing down the dam is necessary to its operation. Tearing down the Dillsboro dam was considered environmental mitigation to continue operating its 10 other dams in the region — or so everyone thought. Special interests, from environmental agencies to paddling groups, supported dam removal following a three-year series of negotiations aimed at developing a mitigation package for the region that would allow Duke to renew its licenses for the other dams.

In a confusing ruling last summer, however, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission disputed the notion that Dillsboro dam removal has anything to do with mitigation for the other hydro operations.

“The Commission is not bound to accept that view, and indeed, as the record demonstrates, we do not,” FERC ruled.

That could frustrate any claims by Duke that the dam’s removal is “necessary to the operation” of its business.

Duke may not be without recourse, however. The utility could turn to its powerful and long-standing ally in the fight against Jackson County: none other than the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC has consistently sided with Duke, from minor tiffs over language to major appeals.

FERC may — or may not — have something to say about Jackson County’s bold move to condemn the dam and halt its demolition.

“It would be premature to speculate on this matter at this point,” said Celeste Miller, spokesperson with FERC.

Miller said it is too early to know what if any sections of the Federal Power Act could come into play in this complicated situation.

A member of the public was escorted from a Haywood County commissioners meeting Monday (June 15) by a deputy after getting into a verbal altercation with Chairman Kirk Kirkpatrick.

Tension has been high at county meetings for the past two months as commissioners wrestled with a budget for the coming fiscal year. The recession has strapped the county, prompting a 1.7 cent property tax hike along with layoffs, furloughs, shortened work weeks and a reduction in benefits for county workers.

Commissioners have faced stiff opposition bordering on belligerence over the proposed property tax increase. So it didn’t take much to ignite the short fuse between commissioners and the public this week.

Commissioners were considering a request from Stephen King, the solid waste director, to lease two new pieces of heavy machinery for landfill operations. King had gotten the OK from commissioners several months ago to hunt for the best deal to replace a bulldozer and excavator that King says are on their last leg.

King found what he considered the best deal out there, but as he began discussing specifications for the equipment, Kenneth Henson piped up from the audience with questions about the undercarriage on one of the pieces. Henson, a grader who is intimately familiar with heavy machinery, challenged King’s knowledge of the equipment, engaging King with questions about the type of undercarriage.

Kirkpatrick told Henson that was enough.

“You don’t want to know?” Henson asked commissioners.

“I do, but I can’t let you talk out in a meeting that way. If I let you do it then I have to let everybody do it,” Kirkpatrick said.

“All I’m trying to do is save the county money,” Henson said.

“I understand,” Kirkpatrick said.

“No, you don’t,” Henson shot back.

“Shut up,” Kirkpatrick said, firmly pointing his finger at Henson.

As the situation seemed poised to escalate further, a sheriff’s deputy who was standing by the doors at the back of the room approached Henson and asked him to leave. As Henson rose, he chastised Kirkpatrick for his method of silencing a public outburst earlier in the meeting.

In that incident, Jonnie Cure, a leader of the group opposing the tax increase, had let out a guffaw while Commissioner Bill Upton was speaking. Those around her chided in with a chorus of “no’s” to express their disapproval at Upton’s comments. Upton had been explaining the difficult decision between even deeper cuts to county staff and services versus a tax increase. Upton said the county’s level of services, whether it’s teachers or law enforcement, is important to residents.

“The reason people move to Haywood County is the services we provide,” Upton said, prompting the outburst.

“Ms. Cure, I don’t believe I have ever interrupted you. In fact I have listened. We learn that in school,” responded Upton, the former superintendent of the school system.

Kirkpatrick stuck up for Upton and told the audience there would be no more outbursts or “talking out loud” during the meeting. Henson apparently resented the way Kirkpatrick had put his foot down with Cure.

“You talked to her like a dog, and you aren’t going to do me that way,” Henson said as he was escorted out.

Henson could be heard grumbling as he moved into the hallway, followed by the deputy saying, “You can’t do that in a public meeting.”

Kirkpatrick apologized to the audience before resuming the meeting.

“It has been a long six months. I apologize for that statement. It is unfortunate and all I can do is say ‘I’m sorry,’” Kirkpatrick told the audience after Henson was escorted out.

Henson remained outside the building talking with other opponents to the tax increase. He was still there nearly an hour later when the commissioners’ meeting concluded and Kirkpatrick emerged.

Kirkpatrick approached Henson, presumably to clear the air, and the two engaged in a 5-minute conversation on the sidewalk about what had transpired during the meeting. County Manager David Cotton stuck close to Kirkpatrick’s side. The deputy who was on hand for the meeting stood a few feet away as well.

Henson said he was legitimately trying to help by educating the county on the specifications for the excavating equipment they were poised to purchase. Henson said he was afraid the county was getting hoodwinked by the promise of special features on the equipment that are unnecessary.

Henson said the county could tap into the glut of used machinery on the market and easily modify it for landfill work. Instead, the county leased two new pieces of machinery billed as having a landfill-rated undercarriage at $20,000 a year for both.

Kirkpatrick said it was his responsibility to maintain order at meetings and he couldn’t allow audience members to pipe up in a confrontational manner throughout the course of the meeting. Kirkpatrick also said the county puts faith in the knowledge of their staff who researched the equipment needs and the best deal.

The two ended their conversation amicably.

Landowners have won a lawsuit against Haywood County claiming they were victims of overbearing enforcement of erosion control laws.

Judge Laura Bridges issued her ruling this week, although the case was heard six weeks ago. Bridges ruled in favor of the landowners, Ron and Brian Cameron, who had sued the county to get out from under its erosion enforcement citing a state forestry exemption.

Landowners engaged in forestry are held to less stringent erosion standards than developers. Ron Cameron thinks the county’s erosion control officer Marc Pruett simply doesn’t like the fact that the state forestry exemption trumps the county’s erosion laws.

“Is his argument really with the forest exemption, and I am really just being used as scapegoat?” Cameron said in an interview this week. “Between our costs and the county’s costs, we have spent half a million so far arguing over whether Marc Pruett should have control over this land or the state forest service should have oversight of this land.”

The Camerons built a 1.5-mile road network on a 66-acre tract in the Camp Branch area of Waynesville, claiming it was for logging.

The county argued that the Camerons were merely hiding behind the logging exemption, however. The county claims the Camerons’ real intention was to develop the property, witnessed by the creation of a development master plan, registering a subdivision name with the county and applying for a septic tank evaluation.

Ron Cameron said he was merely exploring options. At the time he built the roads in question, his only motive was forestry, he said. Cameron points to the four different foresters he hired since buying the property six years ago as proof that he was interested in pursuing forestry. The county counters that he never did any logging other than cutting trees that lay in the path of the roads he built.

Judge Bridges apparently wasn’t comfortable assigning hidden motives to the Camerons.

“The Camerons have not logged the property but neither have they developed the property,” Bridge wrote in her ruling. “There are no signs on the ground that a development is planned. No lots have been surveyed or staked. No subdivision roads have been created.”

Bridges, who toured the property as part of the trial, called the road network built by the Camerons “crudely constructed logging roads and not development roads.”

The county claimed the Camerons needed to bring their roads into compliance with the county’s erosion laws. After the Camerons filed a lawsuit protesting the county’s jurisdiction over their roads, the county responded with a retroactive $175,000 fine against the Camerons for refusing to come into compliance.

“The fine was issued in my opinion as an intimidation technique,” Cameron said in an interview this week.

Cameron is seeking his attorney fees and court costs in the amount of $260,000 to be paid by the county.

“We tried various ways to not let this progress this way,” said Attorney Jeff Norris, who represented the Camerons.

Cameron said he offered to drop the case and not pursue damages or attorney fees if the county would drop its fines and let Cameron return to his forestry exemption. The county would not let the Camerons walk away without bringing the roads up to county standards, however.

It is not yet known whether the county will appeal the ruling, staving off the Camerons’ demand for attorney fees barring a second ruling.

“The county is disappointed,” Chip Killian, the county attorney, said of the ruling. “We are looking at it closely and will have to make a decision whether to appeal or not.”

The county has to file notice of its intent to appeal within 30 days. The county could preserve its right to an appeal by filing notice within the window, buying time to work out the details of its appeal and make a final decision whether to go through one.

Both sides in the case have argued that a terrible precedent would be set if the other side won. If the county wins, landowners everywhere will shy away from logging for fear they could never change their mind without their motives being questioned and triggering retroactive fines. On the other hand, if the county loses, it would provide a road map for developers who want to exploit the forestry exemption.

Gudger Palmer has never forgotten the fond memories of growing up in Cataloochee Valley. At 100 years old, one memory in particular brings a smile to his lips every time he returns to his old one-room school.

“That’s the place where the greatest love letter was ever written,” Palmer said. “I was sitting up front and someone punched me on the side. I reached back and saw it was a tablet. I opened it up, and there it was written with a pencil. I knew who it was from, that little girl sitting in the back. It said ‘I love you as good as apple butter.’”

Palmer was a grown man by the time the Great Smoky Mountains National Park claimed his homeplace in Cataloochee Valley. Palmer’s been asked many times, as have all Cataloochee descendents, what it was like to lose his land. At the annual Cataloochee reunion one year, Palmer asked the others how they respond to the inevitable question.

“I said ‘How can you tell other people just how you felt?’ and they said, ‘No, Gudger, you can’t tell other people,’” Palmer said. “There’s no way of getting across to you the feeling we have of losing Cataloochee.”

For Raymond Caldwell, 86, the hardest part of moving out was seeing how much it hurt his father.

“I think daddy carried that grief with him right on through the years, and he lived to be 92. He thought it was awful to have to give up their home and move out with not much compensation,” Caldwell said. “He loved that valley. He would go over there and stay in the campground by himself and walk on those trails up into his 80s.”

More than 1,200 family farms were bought up for the park’s creation, uprooting roughly 7,000 people and forcing them to start anew. Over the decades, they returned to the spots where their homes once stood, watching as the forest slowly closed in, first claiming the fields and the garden plots. The foot paths they’d worn over time slipped back into the earth. And eventually, their old foundations were obscured by the sprouting wilderness. At least to the casual passerby.

“I always had in my mind a picture and could see where everything was,” said Commodore Casada, 99, who grew up on Deep Creek, a section of the park outside Bryson City, N.C. “I could tell where the barn was and the house and so on and so forth, but no one else could now.”

Even though Hattie Davis was only 6 years old when her family moved out of Cataloochee Valley, her memories are vivid, too.

“It is in my mind completely. I can still see the rail fence and the fat cattle and the fine horses and herds of sheep. The long straight rows of corn,” she said.

Every year since the park was created, Cataloochee families hold a reunion at their old church, the Palmer Chapel, which draws up to 600 descendents today. The reunion was bitter-sweet in the early years.

“They loved being with their family and friends again, but they would see their houses falling down and some would cry,” Davis said.

Davis grew up in the Caldwell house, one of the few buildings that was preserved by the park and offers a glimpse of the past. But when Davis walks through the house, through the kitchen where her mother made biscuits or the room she slept in as a little girl, the nostalgia is sometimes more than she can bear. Davis is even more heartbroken by the growing number of initials carved into the doors and banisters and woodwork of her childhood home.

“I cry when I see where people have put their initials on it,” Davis said, welling up with tears to think of it. “We would have gotten our tails beat good with a paddle if we marked the wall growing up.”

Only time will tell

Every week or so for the past 50 years, Caldwell has returned to Cataloochee, usually to fish. During his working years, he would close up his plumbing store early in downtown Waynesville, set off for Cataloochee and return home with fish to fry by dark. He had a lot of time to reflect on the past, and eventually came to a realization, though he would never admit it to his father.

“The best thing that ever happened to Cataloochee was for the park to come along there,” Caldwell said.

Caldwell’s sentiment was once in the minority. Most old-timers went to their graves harboring a sense of betrayal and resentment. But later generations are making their peace.

“I think to most people now the benefits outweigh the negatives,” said George Ellison, a naturalist and historian in Bryson City. “They may well complain their family got moved out but they go back in and camp and walk and picnic on Deep Creek. It means a lot to them. They ultimately wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Davis said there was a concerted effort by many to hide their bitterness.

“They didn’t want their children to hate people,” Davis said. “The parents were so hurt they didn’t want to recall the hurt they had of giving up their home.”

Steve Woody, a Cataloochee descendent, saw the softening of emotions from one generation to the next play out in his own family. His grandfather, known to all as Uncle Steve, was the last resident of Cataloochee Valley, remaining until 1942. He died within a few months of finally moving at the age of 90.

Just two generations later, Woody is one of the region’s most ardent supporters of the park. He helped found the park boosters organization Friends of the Smokies and is on a first name basis with the park superintendent.

“I think most of my generation doesn’t harbor the same resentment. We see it as a good thing,” Woody said. “We have this great park that’s protected and is an economic driver.”

Woody thinks his father eventually accepted the park as well, though he never asked him outright.

“I think he understood that it was probably the best thing,” Woody said. “He loved to go back there. Later in life he would say, ‘If the park hadn’t come, what would Cataloochee look like now?’”

It’s impossible to know, but one thing is certain. It would not be frozen in time, forever capturing the beauty of early life in the Smokies the way it does now.

“Now it’s hallowed ground,” said Dr. Barney Coulter, former chancellor of Western Carolina University and founding member of Friends of the Smokies. “It is a source of great pride to the people who lived there.”

After months of struggling to solve a $7 million budget shortfall, Haywood County commissioners voted 3 to 2 Monday night (June 15) to raise property taxes by 1.7 cents in lieu of more severe cuts to county workers.

The two commissioners who dissented gave different reasons for their vote: one opposed any tax increase while the other thought taxes might need to be raised even more. Commissioners Mark Swanger, Bill Upton and Kirk Kirkpatrick voted for the budget and associated tax increase. The county’s new tax rate will be 51.4 cents. The increase amounts to an extra $42 a year on a $250,000 home.

Commissioner Kevin Ensley, the lone commissioner opposed to the tax increase, said there was no easy answer to solve the budget shortfall. But ultimately, he believes county government should do what a business does when income dries up.

“In private business we have to cut expenses to the level of operating revenues,” said Ensley, who owns a surveying company and has seen his revenue cut in half by the recession. “As a business owner maybe I am more acclimated to making cuts.”

Ensley suggested furloughs and shortened work weeks for more county employees instead of raising taxes.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Skeeter Curtis voted against the budget because he felt the cuts were too deep and perhaps taxes should be raised more instead.

“Are we increasing the tax enough or are we going to have to hit it harder next year?” Curtis said. “If times continue to go bad, we’ve got no other cuts to make.”

The bare bones operation in the current budget will come back to haunt the county, Curtis said. Whether its deferring the purchase of computer software or replacing roofs on buildings, it will pile up in the laps of future commissioners to deal with, he said. Curtis partly blamed past boards of commissioners for today’s budget crunch. They kept the tax rate artificially low by dipping into the county’s savings, leaving the current board with little options, Curtis said.

Curtis also said county workers are suffering too much of a blow. The county is reducing its workforce by 32 employees. Thanks to early retirement and natural attrition, the county has already eliminated the lion’s share of those jobs, leaving only seven people that actually have to be let go. Another 11 employees will be cut to a 36 hour work week.

Curtis’ larger concern was the decrease to county benefits, namely a suspension of retirement contributions and reduction in health insurance benefits.

County employees will see their deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums skyrocket. Curtis questioned how some county employees will afford it, citing some who earn only $20,000 a year.

“I don’t know how in the world if you are making $20,000 a year you are going to afford an increase in your deductible going up from $900 to $3,000 a year for a family,” Curtis said. “How do these people survive?”

Commissioner Mark Swanger, who voted for the budget, said it went against his principles but had to be done.

“I have always opposed tax increases, but again, circumstances demand in the absence of an acceptable alternative that I vote in a manner that is in the best interest of our county,” Swanger said.

Swanger said the county made many difficult cuts to get this far, from no increase in teacher supplements this year to a total elimination of contributions to non-profits, be it programs for the elderly or Folkmoot.

Commissioner Bill Upton said there were simply no more places to cut.

“We don’t need to go in our budget and find more positions to cut,” Upton said.

The budget process has seen a high level of public input, with many residents turning out to voice their opinions any time commissioners convened. Opponents even pitched in to comb the county budget for more places to cut in lieu of the tax hike.

The county enacted temporary measures over the past six months to make ends meet. Those included a hiring freeze, furloughs, a shortened workweek and suspended benefits. Some employees that have been operating on furloughs and shortened workweeks will return to normal hours with the enactment of the new budget.

Despite the looming threat by Jackson County to win control of the Dillsboro Dam using eminent domain, Duke Energy announced that it will begin preparing for its demolition this week by dredging the backlog of sediment from behind the dam.

It marks yet another interesting twist in the increasingly tit-for-tat saga between Jackson and Duke.

Jackson County commissioners voted 4 to 1 last week to launch eminent domain proceedings against Duke to take ownership the Dillsboro dam and adjacent shoreline for the creation of a riverside park. State law allows for the use of eminent domain for parks and recreation.

The move was a last-ditch effort by Jackson County to stop Duke from tearing down the dam. But Duke seems unfazed. The company sent out a press release this week stating that it would begin prepping for sediment removal in anticipation of dam demolition in early 2010.

State and federal environmental agencies have insisted Duke dredge behind the dam to keep the backlogged sediment from flushing downstream and harming the aquatic ecosystem when the dam is removed. Duke is being required to dredge 70,000 cubic yards of the estimated 100,000 cubic yards behind the dam.

It will take six months to remove the sediment, according to Duke. Dam demolition, if not halted by Jackson’s move to seize the dam, would begin in early 2010.

Prep work to dredge the sediment could begin late this week or early next week. Duke will take precautions to minimize the impacts of the earth-moving operation in the river, according to Fred Alexander, Nantahala District Manager of Duke Energy Carolinas.

“We recognize this will be an environmentally sensitive operation, and we are taking great care to follow all appropriate environmental and regulatory requirements,” Alexander said in a statement.

Duke plans to process the sediment and hopes to find a market for its reuse in the construction industry or other uses.

Earlier this year, Jackson refused to grant Duke the permits it needed to dredge the sediment. Duke turned to the courts to demand the permits and won. Jackson was not only forced to relinquish the permits, but faces the prospect of reimbursing Duke’s legal costs to secure the permits.

For eight-tenths of a mile behind the dam, the Tuckasegee River is a wide, slow-moving backwater. Following dam removal, the area will be restored to natural river conditions, Duke said in a press release.

“There will be a significant environmental benefit once we have removed the dam and powerhouse,” said Alexander.

The free-flowing river will create new paddling and fishing opportunities and allow for natural migration of aquatic species.

John Boaze of Fish and Wildlife Associates has argued that a fish passage around the dam could accommodate migration for some species without removing the dam.

A ceremonial groundbreaking was held this week for a new visitor center at the main North Carolina entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park outside Cherokee.

The new visitor center will showcase the cultural heritage of the region, from the Cherokee to early Appalachian settlers — or the “human side of the park,” as Steve Woody, a founding member of Friends of the Smokies, called it.

A proper visitor center for the North Carolina side of the park has been a long time coming — 75 years to be exact. Since the park’s creation, North Carolina has limped along with a cramped, make-shift visitor center fashioned out of an old ranger station built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The new visitor center could help mend North Carolina’s second-fiddle status to Tennessee by establishing a greater presence on this side of the park.

“You have a huge influx of tourists that need a reason to stop here,” said Tom Massie, Jackson County commissioner and former chairman of the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

Since the Smokies’ creation, a master plan has called for a visitor center showcasing the cultural heritage of the region to be constructed at the N.C. entrance to the park. The $3 million project will finally come to fruition thanks to donations raised by the Friends of the Smokies and proceeds from bookstore and gift shop sales by the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

Bo Taylor, leader of a Cherokee traditional dance troupe, said it is fitting that the new visitor center museum will emphasize Cherokee history on the land. The Cherokee were the first people to call the Smokies home.

“Remember us as you go through this park,” Taylor said. “It is part of the DNA of our people.”

75 years and counting

The groundbreaking of the new visitor center on Monday (June 15) doubled as a 75th anniversary celebration. The Smokies was officially created by an act of Congress on June 15, 1934.

“Today we give special thanks to the families who sacrificed to give us one of the great treasures of the United States,” said Congressman Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, who spoke during the program.

Shuler said the park provides a connection to the collective heritage of the region. It is also a conduit to teach children about nature. Shuler recalled the life lessons imparted to him on hiking and fishing trips with his father. Shuler encouraged the audience to take the young people in their lives on a hike and get them outdoors.

Shuler also lauded the new visitor center and its cultural focus.

“Visitors from across the county will be able to come here and see our heritage,” Shuler said.

Smokies Superintendent Dale Ditmanson thanked the community leaders and visionaries who helped create the park 75 years ago, as well as the families who sacrificed their land for the park’s creation.

The promise of tourism was a driver in the creation of the Smokies, and has indeed held true.

“Tourism really is the engine that fuels our county,” said Glenn Jones, the chairman of Swain County commissioners. The national park is the anchor of that tourism economy, Jones said.

But the preservation of the land has also been important to locals.

“I can take my grandkids into the park and they can take their grandkids,” Jones said. “It will be here forever.”

Jackson County played the ultimate trump card in the drawn-out fight against Duke Energy over the Dillsboro dam this week.

County commissioners voted 4 to 1 Monday (June 8) to use the power of eminent domain to seize the dam and surrounding land along the Tuckasegee River from Duke Energy. The move will effectively stop Duke Energy from tearing down the dam as planned. It could also send Duke back to the drawing board on a mitigation package for the region.

Counties can use eminent domain to seize private property if there is a public purpose in mind. In this case, Jackson County wants the dam and surrounding land for a park.

Recreation is accepted as grounds for eminent domain in North Carolina state law. That doesn’t mean Duke won’t challenge the move, however.

“Duke is in for the duration to remove Dillsboro Dam,” Fred Alexander, Duke’s community relations manager in the region, said in a prepared statement.

There might be little Duke can do, however, other than argue over the amount Jackson is willing to pay for the dam and surrounding property. If Jackson County says the dam and surrounding property is needed for a public park and recreation, the courts won’t get into a judgment call on whether the idea for the park is a good one or bad one, according to Charles Szypszak, an expert in public law with the Institute of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Generally speaking, as long as there is an apparent legitimacy to it, what the courts have said is they don’t look at the details of a taking,” Szypszak said.

Duke could argue that the concept of the park is a ruse, and that Jackson County has an ulterior motive for condemning the dam, however. County commissioners have alternately touted numerous reasons for wanting to keep the dam: as a piece of history, a tourist attraction, its aesthetic value, to provide green power for Dillsboro — even as a way to force Duke to pay up in an ongoing disagreement over what constitutes appropriate mitigation for its hydropower network.

But it is highly unlikely that Duke could prove Jackson’s recreation claims are illegitimate, Szypszak said.

“The court wouldn’t say ‘Well, you say you want it for this but we think you really want it for that,” Szypszak said.

The lack of merit may not stop Duke from trying, however, and potentially burying Jackson County under a mound of litigation. As Fortunate 500 company, Duke could simply outspend Jackson County until commissioners finally grow weary and give up.

Duke has no financial stake in the dam — it hasn’t been maintained and it currently isn’t producing power. When Duke had to cough up mitigation to offset the environmental impacts of its 10 other dams straddling rivers in the region, tearing down the Dillsboro dam and thereby restoring a stretch of free-flowing river was likely seen as an easy out, appeasing the paddling community and environmental agencies.

It has since become apparent just how much the dam means to Jackson County, however. Commissioner William Shelton questioned why Duke doesn’t walk away from its plans to tear it down now that the going has gotten so tough. But it may come down to a test of wills, said Jack Brown, chairman of the Green Island Power Authority in New York. Brown is one of the few that has used eminent domain to wrest ownership of a dam away from another entity and go on to operate it himself.

“Not knowing the mind set of Duke Energy, I don’t know how much they will resist,” Brown said. “They have been unchallenged and pretty much run the show. If they think this is going to be a chink in their armor, that Jackson County is going to come in and take this away from them, they may not want to set the precedent.”

How the vote went down

Duke had caught wind in recent weeks that a move was afoot to start condemnation proceedings. Commissioners were poised to take a vote on the matter last Monday, but Duke staved it off at the last minute with the promise of a counter offer.

Jackson commissioners suspected Duke would make a last-minute bargaining pitch. Just a week earlier, Duke and Jackson County had been brought together for court-ordered mediation in Washington, D.C.

“There was some interesting give and take among the participants and hopefully something positive will come from that,” Chairman Brian McMahan said last week.

Duke’s olive branch apparently fell short of commissioners’ expectations, however. When commissioners reconvened this Monday to consider Duke’s attempt at a settlement, they voted 4 to 1 to reject it.

“It wasn’t for a lack of effort that mediation didn’t work out,” Alexander said. “And I’m certainly sorry it didn’t.”

The terms of Duke’s counter-offer were not made public citing the confidential nature of court-ordered mediation.

After voting to reject Duke’s offer, commissioners had one more order of business before moving on to their big vote of the night. The first step was to formally embrace their desire for a recreational park around the Dillsboro dam. The county recently hired a planning firm, Equinox Environmental, to create a master plan for a park along the shore of the Tuckasegee River in Dillsboro. The dam is a focal point of the design. In hindsight, it’s obvious the county’s intention in drawing up the master plan at a cost of nearly $20,000 was to set the stage for condemnation of the dam and river shore.

A motion to “adopt the major concepts of the Dillsboro Heritage Park” passed with a unanimous vote.

Commissioner Tom Massie, who disagrees with the continued fight against Duke, put aside his dissent to back the conceptual idea for a riverfront park in Dillsboro.

Commissioners then forged ahead with the long-anticipated motion that many in the audience were hoping for.

“I will move that Jackson County institute an eminent domain proceeding to acquire title to the following property for the public purpose of establishing a water front park and recreation facility along the Tuckasegee River and preserving the Dillsboro reservoir,” Chairman Brian McMahan said. McMahan proceeded to list several pieces of property Duke owns along the river shore around the Dillsboro dam, along with the dam itself.

Massie pointed out that the land along the riverbank owned by Duke is already slated to be turned over to the county following dam removal, as Duke would no longer have a use for it once the dam was gone.

The vote to condemn the dam was well orchestrated. Commissioner Joe Cowan made the motion to reject Duke’s counter-offer. Commissioner Mark Jones made the motion to adopt the concepts of the Dillsboro river park. And Commissioner Chairman Brian McMahan made the motion to seize the dam with eminent domain.

The commissioners cited what they call overwhelming support from the people of Jackson County to take this step. Jones cited an online poll by the Crossroad Chronicle newspaper in Cashiers with 78 percent of respondents supporting the county’s fight.

“I’ve heard those same statistics throughout the county as I have worked very hard to ask people their opinion,” Jones said.

Jackson County has proved a tough customer in the fight against Duke Energy. For Commissioner Cowan, standing up to corporate power runs in his blood. His father helped organize the workers at Mead Corporation to form a union decades ago and bring about a fair wage, he said.

Cowan compared his father’s fight to the one against Duke today.

The commissioners have met an untold number of hours in private sessions over the past three years to discuss the drawn-out legal wranglings against Duke. A new face has claimed a seat at the table recently, however. Gary Miller, a Bryson City attorney, has been present at the past three closed sessions. This week, commissioners announced Miller will be their legal counsel on the condemnation proceedings. Paul Nolan, the D.C.-based attorney who specializes in hydropower issues, will continue in a peripheral role as well.

Duke still has two pending legal challenges against Duke. One is an appeal of a state water quality permit that paves the way for dam demolition. Another is an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both of those cases will likely be put on hold as eminent domain plays out.

Whatever it takes?

Jackson County has spent around $250,000 in its opposition to Duke over the past five years. The majority has been on legal fees, but some has been for environmental consultation.

In his lone dissent to condemnation, Massie argued that it is time to stop the bleeding.

Massie advocated continuing down the road of mediation, citing a glimmer of hope in the offer Duke already made.

“While it is not what I would have hoped for, Duke has finally made some movement in our direction,” Massie said. “A bird in the hand is better than a bird in the bush.

We are a whole lot better off taking it now and cutting our losses.”

Massie told Duke it wasn’t too late to make the county a better counter-offer, that there was hope yet the commissioners would back down.

“I sincerely hope the action we have taken here today will encourage Duke to come back to us and negotiate some more so we can avoid going through with this proceeding,” Massie imparted to Duke following the vote Monday.

Commissioner William Shelton said he doesn’t understand why Duke won’t agree to a compromise. If Duke would turn over the dam to the county, it could walk away from the fight.

Shelton said the expense of a potentially protracted legal battle was the only thing that gave him pause in his decision.

“The only reservation is the David and Goliath factor. Can we beat Duke and can we afford to beat Duke? But I choose not to have a defeatist attitude,” Shelton said.

McMahan said the cost of giving up the fight is greater than the cost of continuing. He cited the loss of tourism in Dillsboro, the loss of an historic icon, the loss of a popular fishing hole, the loss of an aquatic ecosystem, the loss of green power. The cost of the fight to save the dam pales in comparison, he said.

“It is a small cost to pay to preserve something that is so precious to us,” said McMahan, who grew up fishing around the dam.

Duke’s new permits could last for 30 years or more before the region has another crack at exacting mitigation from the company. McMahan said the county’s chance is now or never.

John Boaze, owner of Fish and Wildlife Associates, shared the latest generation figures off Duke’s 10 hydropower dams in the region. Boaze estimated Duke brought in $33.7 million in revenue off its hydro operations in WNC, for a profit of $6.8 million.

Last week, commissioners learned that Duke Energy was donating $1 million to study the effect of rising sea levels on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. The donation sent a message to Jackson leaders that Duke, a Fortune 500 company, has money at its disposal to offer Jackson County a better deal than it has.

River park a public good?

Dillsboro merchants and residents have become regulars at Jackson County commissioners meetings over the protracted fight against Duke, appearing to both prod and applaud the commissioners in their effort, often appearing with the most recent stack of signed petitions voicing support for the fight.

Shelton said he had to look at the long haul for Dillsboro. The mountain hamlet of galleries, craft shops and gift stores lost a major source of foot traffic when the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad stopped running trains to the town.

“I see a town that is struggling mightily right now,” Shelton said. “If you look at the long-term investment on this concept, it could be an economic development tool for Dillsboro looking into the future.”

Susan Leveille, an artist and owner of Oaks Gallery in Dillsboro, said the town has taken a hit from the loss of the train coupled with the economy. The river park in Dillsboro and preservation of the dam will provide a much-needed focal point and amenity for the town, she said.

“I think it will serve all of us in the county very well,” Leveille said.

Teresa Dowd, the owner of West Carolina Internet Café in Dillsboro, said a public park anchored by the dam is needed desperately.

“When you go to other towns with waterfront that is being utilized, the park generates so much interest among tourists and the locals. It is economically beneficial,” Dowd said.

Commissioner Joe Cowan said the river park around the dam will set Dillsboro up to prosper.

“If you back off and look at it over the long run, the benefits to Jackson County and Dillsboro specifically call for this action,” Cowan said.

McMahan questioned what the river would look like if the dam was gone. If the dam is torn out, the water level in the slow moving backwater stretching for eight-tenths of a mile behind the dam will drop.

“If they jerk that dam out and leave a big mud flat and Dillsboro looks like a bomb hit it, what’s the cost to our tourism economy?” McMahan said.

When Beverly Easton came to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino for the first time and realized there was no drinking, she wondered how an alcohol-free casino could even exist.

“I think it is a deterrent,” said Easton, who was visiting Harrah’s from Charlotte last Thursday. “You come here to have fun and relax, and having a cocktail is part of it.”

Such an integral part, in fact, that when Linda Moutray tried to orchestrate her five sisters to shift the venue of their annual rendezvous from Las Vegas to Cherokee, it was a deal killer.

“I thought, ‘Let’s all come here instead,’ but they wouldn’t because there’s not alcohol,” said Moutray of Gainesville, Ga.

That’s all about to change, however. Spurred by the promise of bigger revenues, the Cherokee people voted “yes” in a ballot measure last Thursday (June 4) that will allow drink sales at the casino. The casino will become the only place on the Cherokee Reservation, known as the Qualla Boundary, where beer, wine or liquor can be sold or served.

Nearly 50 percent of registered voters turned out to cast ballots in the monumental election. It passed comfortably with a vote of 1,847 to 1,301. The vote was held in conjunction with a primary election for tribal council seats.

Not all casino patrons are chomping at the bit to drink, however. Wanda Thurman, a regular at Harrah’s from North Georgia, said she liked the fact it doesn’t have alcohol.

“I’ve been at ones that drink and ones that don’t, and I’d rather be at one that doesn’t,” Thurman said. It’s irritating to have a drunk player beside you, especially if they keep slumping into you, Thurman said.

Bruce Cramond makes the trip to Harrah’s from Waynesville almost every week to play at the blackjack table, but said he would never drink when gambling.

As for why, “Why do you think?” he said. “If I’m eating, I would like to have a drink with a meal, but not while I’m gambling.”

Cramond knows he’s not the norm, however. He’s taken women to Harrah’s on dates who won’t come back because there’s nothing to drink.

“I do know a lot of people who don’t come here because they can’t drink,” Cramond said. “A lot.”

The casino hopes to roll out alcohol as soon as it can.

“I am hoping within the next six months, but that is a wild guess,” said Norma Moss, director of the Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise.

Many of the casino’s patrons are within a three-hour drive and venture to Cherokee for a daytrip. That could change if alcohol was an option.

“People would stay overnight more,” said Moutray, who often drives home after a day of playing but would stay over if she was drinking.

The casino hotel is frequently booked solid as it is, however. That means the addition of alcohol could be good news for nearby hotels that capture spillover from the casino.

The casino offers complimentary rooms to high rollers and frequent players, but often runs out of room even for them. So the casino books blocks of rooms at partnering hotels, shelling out the cost of rooms to put the players up, albeit off-site. Last year, the casino bought thousands of rooms directly from local hotels to house players, not to mention the business neighboring hotels garner from run-of-the-mill casino traffic.

The need for more hotel rooms has been a major driver of expansions at the casino in recent years. No sooner had the casino built a second hotel tower than it announced plans for a third, which is currently under construction and will double the number of rooms to more than 1,000 hotel rooms.

Money motives

Casino profits have been vulnerable during the recession. Projected casino revenue for the tribe this year is $223 million, down from $244 million last year. One regular player at Harrah’s, Sandra Tankersley from Chatsworth, Ga., said she used to make a daytrip here every week or two, but has cut back to every other month.

“We’ve slowed down,” Tankersley said.

The tribe splits its cut of casino profits into two equal pots. One goes toward tribal government to pay for everything from education to health care to cultural preservation programs. The other pot is paid out to tribal members twice a year in the form of “per capita” checks. Payments amounted to $8,800 each for the tribe’s 13,500 members last year.

The first “per capita” check for 2009 was issued last Monday. It was $500 less than the “per capita” check tribal members got in December. The alcohol vote came just three days later, and the thought of dwindling “per capita” checks was fresh on everyone’s mind. It proved opportune timing for supporters of the measure.

“If people see money, it will pass,” said Chip Climbingbear when asked for his opinion on the vote before ballots came in Thursday.

But clearly not all tribal members were motivated by the prospect of bigger “per capita” checks or more government programs. Elvia Walkingstick, who works as a waitress at a casino restaurant, voted “no” — even though she stands to get bigger tips if alcohol is on the menu.

“It would be nice, but not at that cost,” Walkingstick said. She cited the historical issues with Native Americans and alcohol.

“It’s already a problem to begin with,” Walkingstick said. “It doesn’t make sense to add fuel to the fire.”

The biggest driver among those opposing the measure was religion more so than cultural issues over alcohol.

“My Baptist faith comes before my culture,” said Donna Morgan, a tribal member who voted “no” for the measure at the Yellow Hill precinct.

Alcohol is often a factor in domestic violence, child abuse and child neglect. It causes car accidents, creates performance issues in the workplace and sets the stage for drug addictions.

While alcohol plays an undeniable role in social ills, supporters claim drink sales at the casino won’t have an impact on the local population, however. Locals choosing to imbibe, whether it’s one drink or a dozen, will continue frequenting the liquor store and gas stations in Bryson City or elsewhere to pick up their goods.

Several voters interviewed after exiting the polls Thursday said the only reason they voted for the measure was because it was restricted to the casino. If the vote was over alcohol reservation-wide, they said they would have voted no. The casino will sell drinks to be consumed on casino property only.

Reservation-wide sales?

It could be just a matter of time now until restaurants and stores elsewhere on the reservation begin selling alcohol, however. Being able to serve alcohol gives the casino an advantage over other restaurants and stores, say some. A petition citing the “unfair business competition” is already circulating as potential fodder for a legal challenge calling for alcohol sales to be extended to other businesses.

It would certainly make life easier for Shelly McMillan, a clerk at River Valley Store in Big Cove, if she could sell six packs. Tourists staying at one of several nearby campgrounds often come in to buy beer, only to learn the closest place to do so is a 40-minute round trip into Bryson City.

Last week’s vote landed on the ballot thanks to a petition drive by Cherokee voters. Tribal council was narrowly split on whether to hold a referendum on alcohol and was unable to override a veto of the issue by Chief Michell Hicks. So supporters took matters into their own hands with a petition drive that garnered more than 1,500 signatures, enough to bring the issue to a vote.

Perry Schell, a tribal council member from Big Cove, had supported the vote.

“I think people should have the right to vote,” Shell said. “I’ve lost some support over that but I feel like the tribe will make a decision about what’s best for them.”

How much more?

It has been widely reported that drink sales at the casino, along with a major expansions underway, could lead to an increase of $9,000 a year in per capita payments to tribal members by 2015, according to estimates put out by the Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise. With current per capita payments hovering around $8,000, tribal members widely thought that their payments would more than double.

But that is not the case. The TCGE estimates instead show tribal members would get an additional $9,000 cumulatively over the next six years. The annual increases in per capita payments would average between $1,000 and $1,500 a year, adding up to net gain of $9,000 per tribal member by 2015.

While it’s hard to imagine as one gazes at the vast wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, more than two-thirds of the lush forests were clear-cut by timber companies in a couple of short decades preceding the park’s creation.

Ridge after ridge, the slash operations of the timber giants denuded the mountains, gobbling up massive forests at lightening speed during the 1910s and 1920s.

“Looking at these wonderful mountains with this timber, they couldn’t wait to cut it down,” Duane Oliver said of the timber barons arrival. Oliver grew up in the Swain County portion of the park prior to its creation and recalls their lasting influence.

Large mill towns were born virtually overnight to support the operations. Oliver remembers the hustle and bustle of Proctor, one of the larger logging towns. The once rural area was suddenly home to a movie theater, tennis court and their first resident doctor.

While the lumber camps attracted hundreds of workers from outside the region, the logging operations and their railroads gave rise to a cash-based economy on a scale previously unknown by local people. For many, the desire for a steady paycheck often outweighed their internal conflict over the destruction they were witnessing.

“People were glad to get jobs that paid money,” said Luke Hyde, 69, of Bryson City, whose grandfather on both sides worked as loggers. “Most people in the mountains were subsistence farmers and considered it lucky to get work where they made money. Even when I was a lad people conducted business by barter. Money was in short supply so people would swap things.”

The timber boom wouldn’t last forever, of course. The barons would soon move on, leaving the mountains denuded and thrusting the local people back into poverty — only this time, without their prized forests. The stripped hillsides would no longer be fertile hunting grounds and the creeks once teeming with trout would be decimated by clear-cutting.

In this sense, the park movement entered the stage at just the right time. When talk of a national park in the Smokies began percolating in the early 1920s, local people could see logging would soon go bust. It made it far easier to latch on to the idea of a tourism economy hung on the neck of a national park, even though it was still a foreign concept.

“You’ve got to understand how poor people were. They were looking for anything that might help,” said Claude Douthit, born in 1928 amidst the movement to create the park.

While the lumber companies had brought a short-lived boom, mountain people could see that the jobs would dry up when the lumber companies disappeared. But unlike logging, tourism would be here to stay, park proponents pledged.

“If we use this a magnet to draw tourists, it will be something that will produce forever,” Pierce recounted of their argument. “If we make this a park it will be like the goose laying the golden egg.”

Wresting it away

When the states of North Carolina and Tennessee began buying land for the park in 1927, there were eight large lumber companies operating in what would become the park — among them the well-known Ritter, Norwood, Kitchen, Champion, Suncrest, Whitmer-Parson and Crestmont — as well as a myriad of smaller ones.

Some timber companies had already logged most of the timber and saw a chance to unload the wasteland left behind.

“The lumber companies had come in here and dry-cleaned the whole darn thing,” said Douthit. “They came in and bought the land for nothing, cut the lumber then sold their land to the park.”

The timber companies didn’t exactly go quietly, however. They fought hard for a national forest instead of national park. With a national forest, they could return every few decades to recut what had grown back, but not so with a national park.

Many timber companies balked at the price initially offered for their holdings — in North Carolina it was $10 to $20 an acre — and went to court to get more. The crux of the argument was they needed to be paid not just for the land, but the value of the still standing timber.

While lumber companies had certainly burned through vast tracts of timber already, they weren’t ready to quit while there was still logging to be done, according to Dan Pierce, a UNC-Asheville professor who is an expert on Smokies history.

“Most of these companies still had plenty that had not been logged,” Pierce said.

The timber companies had the deep pockets necessary to fight the land takings in court — and in the meantime continued logging. One of the more storied cases involved Champion, a large timber company with a paper mill in nearby Canton. To demonstrate the cost of logs needed to feed its mill, Champion faked a shipment of specialty spruce from Sweden at a vastly inflated price to flout as evidence of the great cost they would incur through the loss of their timber land.

A jury awarded Champion a generous amount, due in part to the economic tour de force the timber companies were in local communities (although the IRS later discovered a juror in the case got a $15,000 bribe from Champion).

The government appealed Champion’s award — indeed it seemed whichever side lost would have done the same — and the two appeared locked in a dead-end battle.

“Champion recognized this could drag on a long time, and meanwhile they have all these assets tied up,” Pierce said. “Once the Depression hits, Champion realizes ‘If we get this cash, we can do a lot with this.’” So they settled out of court for $2 million — about $20 an acre.

The lengthy court battles with the timber companies pushed the tab for the park’s creation higher than anticipated. Park proponents estimated the raw cost of buying land would be $10 million, and it was.

“What they didn’t figure on were the legal fees and the cost of appraisers to estimate the value of the timber,” Pierce said, “which ran close to $1 million.”

The timber company owners went to their graves claiming they had lost money on the sale of their holdings to the park.

But Margaret Brown, a history professor at Brevard College and the author of a leading book on the park’s creation, The Wild East, thinks otherwise.

“I think they made out like bandits. They made money on the land three ways. They bought it very cheaply, they got everything off it they could, and then got reasonably good prices from the United States government once it was sold,” Brown said. “I think they did just fine for themselves.”

An unlikely ally

Ironically, if it weren’t for the massive logging operations, it is likely the Great Smoky Mountains National Park would not be here. The timber companies made critical contributions to the park movement.

For starters, they played a valuable role sorting out the muddled nature of property deeds in the high mountains, Brown said. When the timber companies arrived in the early 1900s, land ownership often dated back to the first land grants. The boundaries of the original claim, let alone how it had been parceled up through the generations, was fraught with confusion.

When timber companies made their first forays into the Smokies, they often relied on a land speculator to buy up a hodge-podge of tracts and resell them as a block, often landing in court to sort out who held clear title. Unfortunately, a few landowners were out-lawyered and in effect had their land stolen. By the time the park came along two to three decades later, much of the land had been consolidated as large tracts owned by a handful of timber barons.

The timber era also had pushed the region into a cash economy, and it seemed there was no going back to a subsistence lifestyle, Brown said. Addicted to commerce, even if on a rural scale, it made people more willing to accept the idea of tourism as a replacement.

But most importantly, the nation and locals alike saw intrinsic value in the Smokies. Before the timber barons, people couldn’t imagine losing the mountains, so they had no concept of saving them.

“It raised the consciousness of people that it was something they wanted to protect,” Brown said.

Ghost Town CEO Steve Shiver told players in the Haywood County tourism community they need to pull together if they want to effectively market and brand the region.

Shiver invited members of the tourism and business community to a breakfast meeting at the Maggie Valley theme park last week for what he called a tourism rally. Shiver appealed to the community to engage in cross-marketing, partnering and co-branding. Shiver said Ghost Town could use its pull to market the region as a whole, and alluded that other business could help drive traffic to Ghost Town.

Shiver has said visitation will be what gets the park through its Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. If enough people come through the gates, it can make the money it needs to stay open and reorganize. Without Ghost Town, Maggie Valley will lose a major player in tourism and suffer economically, Shiver said.

Shiver said the tourism community has had trouble working collectively in the past.

“Being an outsider and coming in relatively new, looking at the tussle that I have sometimes seen in the past, that does nothing but hurt us all,” Shiver said. Shiver named at least half a dozen tourism entities that all play a role in marketing the region.

“The different groups out there all want the same end results,” Shiver said, but sometimes end up competing.

Shiver came to Haywood County from Florida less than 18 months ago.

The tourism community in Haywood County has been known for its factions over the years. Some tourism entities have historically been at odds, often pitted in a tug of war over the best way to spend tourism promotional dollars.

That division has subsided over the past two years, however. The money tug-of-war was largely solved when Haywood County Tourism Development Authority increased its tax on overnight lodging from 3 percent to 4 percent. That created more money to spread around. The extra money was earmarked for niche tourism initiatives that didn’t fit with the big picture marketing of the countywide tourism authority.

But Shiver questioned whether money could be used more effectively if pooled to make a bigger marketing splash rather than dispersed to myriad smaller entities.

“If we are not on the same page, it dilutes our affect,” Shiver said.

Shiver said Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge continue to claim a bigger piece of the market share “because they had their act together and we were fractionalized,” he said. “If we don’t pool our resources and leverage our resources we are going to lose it.”

Miracle opening

Shiver said he proved hundreds of people wrong by opening the park in the face of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“We have done what many said we could not do,” Shiver said.

Shiver also addressed the question everyone wants to know: when will the roller coaster open?

“Everybody, the roller coaster is on the way,” Shiver said. Shiver said he couldn’t say when, but that it would open one day soon. Shiver has been promising the public that the roller coaster would open soon for over a year now. Many in Maggie Valley feel Ghost Town’s success hinges on whether the roller coaster opens.

Ghost Town is in the midst of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. Shiver said the park is committed to pulling through and paying off its debts, which total some $2.5 million in unpaid bills to businesses, many of them local.

“I apologize on behalf of Ghost Town and its owners. We are going to do everything we can,” Shiver said. “We don’t take it lightly. The position we are in right now we don’t like to be in. But we are going to reorganize and move through.”

Ghost Town was forced into bankruptcy after defaulting on its $9.5 million mortgage. The 1960s-era theme park was rife with major infrastructure problems the owners weren’t privy to when they bought it more than two years ago, Shiver said. The park was also hit by a drop in tourism from the recession. Shiver thinks business will pick back up this year as families look for vacations close to home.

“We heard often Ghost Town is the thing of the past, that if it is not bullets and baggie pants kids don’t want it these days,” Shiver said, referring to the gangster and rap culture of today’s youth.

Shiver said he didn’t agree, however. Shiver said Ghost Town is built on a foundation of family values and that’s just what America needs today. That said, Shiver said the park hopes to expand its rides to increase its appeal for teen-agers. Another goal for next year will be to create an Appalachian heritage village with living history demonstrations.

Shiver has been raising money from investors any way he can to help overhaul the park. Shiver showed that he hasn’t lost his since of humor when thanking Marla Banta, the owner of Jude’s Coffee and Creamery, for giving out free ice cream scoops in exchange for donations to help Ghost Town.

“That million dollars you gave us really helped,” Shiver said.

Five years into a bitter fight over the fate of the Dillsboro Dam, Duke Energy showed its first sign of budging this week.

Following a mediation session in Washington, D.C. Duke pledged to make Jackson County a “counter offer” in the tug-of-war over the dam. Duke wants to tear down the dam, and Jackson County wants to save it. The case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

News of the counter offer came at the end of a lengthy closed meeting on Monday (June 1) between commissioners, two attorneys and a third one on conference call.

Word that the Dillsboro dam would be a topic of discussion at the commissioners meeting had apparently circulated among dam supporters, who turned out around 15 people included Dillsboro town leaders, merchants and residents donning green “save the dam” tags. Several spoke up for saving the dam during the public comment period at the start of the commissioners meeting.

When commissioners retreated into closed session, spectators packed into the small foyer outside the room and loitered about for an hour and a half in anticipation of an announcement by the county.

When the crowd filtered back in, Commissioner Chairman Brian McMahan reported the board would hold off on any action regarding the dam until it had a chance to see Duke’s alleged offer. Jackson County commissioners gave Duke until the end of the day Friday (June 5) to submit their offer. Commissioners will reconvene at 4 p.m. Monday, June 8, to talk about it.

When commissioners stood to adjourn the meeting, McMahan walked over to where Duke’s attorney was sitting in the audience and pointedly said, “If you are serious about this, we need to see that counter offer by 5 p.m. Friday.”

Trump card or bluff?

The mediation between Jackson County and Duke last week was not the first in their five year history. Previous attempts at mediation had not been successful, however.

Duke may have finally been spurred toward cooperation by a looming threat by Jackson County to use its ultimate trump card: condemning the dam under the right of imminent domain. Jackson first broached the idea publicly almost a year and a half ago. It has resurfaced in recent months.

The vote that Jackson County commissioners postponed Monday night was presumably the one to set the wheels of condemnation in motion.

Fred Alexander, a Duke spokesperson, protested the notion that imminent domain was an option.

“There is no legal basis for the condemnation of Dillsboro dam,” Alexander told commissioners. “The county is under a Catch 22. Under the Federal Power Act, the county can only condemn the Dillsboro dam if it plans to maintain it as a hydropower plant. However, North Carolina law only allows the county to condemn for nine specific purposes, none of which include operating a dam.”

Other opinions hold that Jackson County use the right of imminent domain to seize ownership of the dam, and there would be nothing Duke could do about it.

“There are plenty of purposes the county is authorized to use imminent domain for,” said Charles Szypszak with the Institute of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill. “If the purpose is within one of those there is almost no chance of contesting it. There is very little constraint. A challenge is very rarely successful.”

Parks and recreation is one accepted justification behind imminent domain. Coincidentally — or maybe not — the county recently hired a firm to develop a conceptual design for a river park that uses the Dillsboro Dam as a focal point.

Jackson County would have to pay Duke fair market value for the dam. Duke could challenge the offer price in court.

Dillsboro dam supporters were hopeful than Duke may be coming around.

“It sounds to me like the pendulum is swinging,” said Dave Waldrop, who spent his boyhood fishing around the dam. Waldrop said whatever this counter offer is, however, better involve keeping the dam.

A long road

Jackson County has spent more than five years fighting Duke Energy’s plans to tear down the Dillsboro dam. Tearing down the Dillsboro dam is the cornerstone of Duke’s environmental mitigation plan for its network of hydropower operations in the region.

Jackson County commissioners would rather see another form of mitigation that would benefit a larger sector of the population, and have proposed cash payments instead that Jackson County could put toward a greenway along the river or environmental initiatives, along with turning ownership of the dam over to the county.

The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park 75 years ago was nothing short of a miracle. The pitfalls were enormous and often narrowly skirted.

The battle for a park came close to defeat many times, yet park boosters fought and clawed their way to the finish line. It seemed they had fate on their side, delivering a needed push at all the right turning points.

Had the quest for a park come any earlier or later, it would have missed the rare coalescence of events that aligned in the decade leading up to the park’s creation in 1934.

“The odds were so extreme of it happening because of all the things that had to come together,” said Dan Pierce, a history professor at UNC-Asheville and author of The Great Smokies: From Natural History to National Park. “Essentially it couldn’t happen today.”

Park fathers realized early in their quest they would need a suitcase of different strategies depending on who they had to win over. On the national stage, the argument to save the Smokies was largely environmental.

The national parks of the West were in vogue among the elite. The desire to save grand landscapes and set aside natural wonders was not only understood, but proved to be a successful motivator. By the early 1920s, the Eastern politicians even developed a case of national park envy.

“They thought ‘By God they have some big ones out West. We need one, too,’” said George Ellison, a naturalist and historian on the park who lives in Bryson City, N.C.

Another national motivator was the new pleasure of auto touring. A big roads movement was afoot, aimed at the vehicle as a form of recreation, Pierce said. Americans would need somewhere to drive their new cars.

The question quickly became not whether but where to put a national park in the East, Ellison said.

“The mountains were the only place you could do it. The population was too great elsewhere,” Ellison said.

But where in the mountains was another story.

In Western North Carolina, the leading site in the public’s eye was not in fact the Smokies, but Grandfather Mountain. Those inside the park movement, however, realized a park that straddled two states to include Tennessee would give them a stronger position: double the political clout on a national stage and double the fundraising.

Charles Webb, the publisher of the Asheville Citizen newspaper in the 1920s, orchestrated a shift in the region to support the Smoky Mountains instead. Webb would go on to play a critical role in creating the park, from convincing local people of its worth to driving fundraising.

“The paper really becomes a huge advocate for it and provides a publicity barrage,” Pierce said.

But park boosters also had to sway the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission, sanctioned by the Department of Interior to recommend the best site for a park. The Smokies initially wasn’t in the running. Armed with beautiful photos of the Smokies, boosters convinced the commission to at least visit the mountain range.

At the time, they were known simply as the Smoky Mountains. The word Great was slipped in as a clever bit of marketing genius, and possibly helped sway the National Park selection committee to recommend the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1925.

Park boosters still had to convince the nation at large that the Smokies had what it took to be a national park. That was accomplished in part by the photographs of George Masa and the words of Horace Kephart. The two roamed the mountains, capturing their eloquence and presenting it to the nation through brochures and newspaper articles.

Masa’s photos did for the Smokies what Ansel Adams did for the grand parks out West: inspire those who had never seen the mountains to want to save them. Their work even served a similar purpose locally.

“A lot of people had never been into the Smokies themselves, other than seen them from a distance so they didn’t even know what was there in many cases,” Pierce said.

While preservation was an effective motivator on the national stage, at home park boosters needed a different tack. “I think it was the first time they had heard that kind of notion of conservation articulated,” Ellison said.

The pitch to locals hinged on a promise of commerce. Create a park, and an influx of tourists will follow.

“The argument was one of economics, that this would be a huge economic benefit to the region,” Pierce said.

After all, it held true for the parks out West, whose ranks included the famed Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon.

“If you look at the gateway community of essentially every national park, it became like it was touched with a wand of gold,” said Margaret Brown, Brevard College history professor and author of The Wild East, a leading park history.

But there was another hurdle to overcome. The Smokies were home to massive logging operations in the 1920s. The timber barons had bought up vast holdings and were furiously slashing their way up every holler and across every ridge. They were poised to clear-cut the entire Smokies — and nearly did.

Not only were the powerful timber barons a force to contend with for park boosters, but local people had become dependent on the market-based economy ushered in by the logging boom. Park proponents had to convince people that tourism could fill that void.

For park boosters, the creation of the Smokies became a race against time. Every day that passed, more timber fell, and the appeal of the park-to-be was diminished. But the devastation wrought by massive logging also helped rally support to “save the Smokies.”

“The Asheville Citizen did a series showing the contrast of beautiful areas and not very far away where cut-and-run logging practices had pretty much devastated [the landscape],” Pierce said.

Of course, people in the mountains at the time had little point of reference for a national park.

“They didn’t know what a national park was. Nobody did,” said Claude Douthit, 81, of Bryson City.

Only nine existed in the country at the time, and most were out West.

“I guess a lot of people didn’t have any idea what was going to happen,” said J.C. Freeman, 81, who was a boy in Swain County, N.C., at the time. “I had a couple aunts who had been to Yellowstone and came back talkin’ about the mud puddles and geysers a spewin’. I wasn’t sure if that’s what we’d be getting.”

Freeman was disappointed to learn not only would there be no geysers, but the romping and roaming he had enjoyed through the Smokies would actually be curtailed.

“They told us there wouldn’t be any hunting and fishing in the park. So I couldn’t see much advantage to having one,” Freeman said.

The high mountains not only served as a communal hunting and fishing ground, but also were used as an open range for livestock, free to roam and forage on the acorns and chestnuts.

“My grandfather would tell me stories about taking the cattle into the Smokies in the spring, going back a couple times a year to check on them and driving them back down in the fall,” said Bill Gibson, 61, who grew up in the shadow of the Smokies. People notched them and branded them to tell their animals apart.

While the businessmen and political leaders in Bryson City were pushing for the park, average people who relied on the high mountains for sustenance saw it differently.

“The business people were a little more educated and could see further out to where it would be an advantage,” said Commodore Casada, 99, of Bryson City. “People like me, I just felt like there was something being taken away. You could go hunt, fish, camp out anywhere, anytime you wanted with no limit on anything you caught or killed. I had taken that as a right for me, and I saw it as being taken away after the park was established.”

The concept of a national park was especially difficult to grasp for those being kicked off their farms.

“People thought ‘Well that’s foolish. We got this valley all cleared out and raising cattle and crops. Why do they need us to leave to make a place for people to loaf around in?’” said Hattie Caldwell Davis, whose home place and farm in Cataloochee Valley were claimed by the park. “When they made it into a park, everybody thought it was a disgrace.”

While park proponents were busy rallying support and raising money, a looming logistical problem lay ahead: buying up the land. The timber companies would not go quietly. They would want top dollar for their vast holdings and would be quick to turn to the courts.

And of course there were the thousands of rural people who lived in the park-to-be. Sure, the park had its share of rugged outposts and remote log cabins, but there were also well-established communities, replete with churches, stores and schools. Uprooting them would be no small thing.

The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park would have to rely on the power of eminent domain for a novel purpose.

“This was the first time it had been used for recreational purposes, which isn’t an absolute, clear common good the way a road is,” Brown said.

There was a great debate over the boundary for the national park. Most settled areas lay in the valleys, so a park that took in only the high mountains would not be nearly as controversial. Initial maps indeed left out most of the settled valleys, targeting only the sparsely populated uplands dotted by remote cabins and hardscrabble farms.

“People living in marginal land were easier to make offers to, were easier to motivate,” Brown said.

But as the park movement progressed, lines were redrawn to take in a few well-to-do farming communities like Cataloochee in North Carolina and Cades Cove in Tennessee. Park boosters balked initially, but the National Park Service insisted.

“They said, ‘We honestly cannot make a park only on rugged, uphill land. We need to have some beautiful valleys for visitor centers and campgrounds,’” Brown said.

When word circulated that the park line had been expanded to claim Cataloochee, no one believed it, Davis said.

“They thought ‘No it was just a rumor. They will never take us here,’” Davis said. The valley remained in denial until a preacher announced the news in church one Sunday.

By then it was too late to orchestrate a resistance.

“There was already momentum to create a national park,” Brown said. “A lot of people in those communities were taken off guard.”

Whether the bait-and-switch was concerted is unknown. It was nonetheless effective. Had places like Cataloochee and Cades Cove been part of the map all along, rallying support for the park would have been much harder.

“The American people wouldn’t have allowed it to happen,” Brown said. “They would have said ‘These are the Jeffersonian communities that our country was built on.’”

The park service blunted the impact by promising no one would have to leave. While the park would buy the land, hundreds of families living within the park would be allowed to stay on their farms and lease it back from the park, the park service claimed. However, this was not a promise that was ultimately kept.

The logistical challenge to buy land dragged on for 12 years, much longer than park fathers anticipated. By the time they were done, the national park boundary claimed 1,132 small farms and forced the removal of more than 7,000 people.

While so many elements had to coalesce simultaneously, the most critical was money. Without it, no matter how much public or political support boosters could muster, there could be no park. Money, and lots of it, was needed to buy the land for the park. Park proponents estimated it would take $10 million.

The states of North Carolina and Tennessee each pledged $2 million toward the cause in 1927, contingent on the rest of the money being raised from private donors.

“Anyone who had big money at the time was hit up for a donation,” Pierce said.

The one who ultimately came through was the John D. Rockefeller Foundation, without which it is quite likely there would be no Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Rockefeller’s heirs laid down a whopping $5 million, and suddenly the park became possible.

That still left $1 million to raise, and park proponents turned to the public in the towns and cities surrounding the Smokies. An oft-repeated tale that captures the hard-fought nature of the park’s creation is that of local school children collecting spare pennies.

“I remember how the people took their pennies to school to help buy the land for the park,” said Douthit.

Generating enthusiasm for people to open their pockets proved difficult. Fundraising fell so far behind, that the National Park Committee nearly pulled the plug on the Smokies. The big daily newspapers in Asheville and Knoxville regularly browbeat the public into giving more and chastised them whenever fundraising stalled.

In exchange for a donation, people were given a signed National Park Founder’s Certificate, which stated as park founder they were “entitled to the particular respect and gratitude of visitors who through the years and ages will benefit by the vision and generosity of those who have made possible the preservation of the virgin forests and varied flora of the choicest section of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.”

Many of these prized certificates still exist in the mountains, squirreled away with family Bibles and records, passed down from one generation to the next. Joyce Patton, 75, of Canton, N.C., still has the Founder’s Certificate awarded to her mother. A school teacher in Sevierville, Tenn., during the park movement, Patton’s mother gave up a year’s salary for the creation of the park.

“I’m sure mother’s contribution was just a stone in the creek compared to what Rockefeller and others did, but for her it was all she had,” Patton said.

The regional fundraising fell short of its goal, however. Many who made pledges of support during the campaign failed to deliver in full.

“People pledged they would give $10,000 and then the Depression hit and they only gave $1,000,” Pierce said.

Ultimately, people in the mountains put up just $800,000 toward the park’s creation.

“There was more symbolic value than actual monetary value,” Pierce said. “It showed the politicians how people felt, that the park had widespread support by the people in the region and that they really wanted this.”

It also had another important side-effect: it made the Smokies “the people’s” park.

“It does give local people a lot of ownership or feeling of ownership that they helped make this happen,” Pierce said.

When it came time to collect on the promise of $2 million from each state, park proponents hit resistance.

“A lot of lawmakers who voted for it did so because they thought the park would never happen,” Pierce said. “They thought ‘I’ll vote for this and it will make me look good but we’ll never have to pay this money.’ But of course Rockefeller throws them a curve, and the states had to pay up.”

North Carolina Governor Angus McLean tried to backpedal on the funding in the late 1920s, forcing a contingent led by Charles Webb, the Asheville Citizen publisher, to travel to Raleigh and demand the Governor relinquish the money.

At the end of the day, however, park proponents still came up short. The cost of land for the park had exceeded their estimates. Once again, the park was nearly derailed, and once again it was saved. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt announced the government would contribute $1.5 million to finish buying the land.

By the time land purchases came together and Congress passed an act creating the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934, the fight had been so long and so fraught with obstacles, it’s likely park boosters were amazed at their own success.

“We owe a lot to the people at that time who had the foresight and energy to do it,” Ellison said of the fight for the park’s creation. “If they had waited any later it wouldn’t have happened.”

There are so many what-ifs that the propitious intersection of events is hard to imagine. Even harder to imagine is a world without the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Haywood County commissioners grappling with the $4.4 million price tag of a landfill expansion briefly eyed the steep engineering costs as a place to trim this week.

During a county meeting, commissioners questioned the hiring of two separate engineering firms for a total of $345,000 to design and oversee landfill construction. Commissioner Kevin Ensley was the first to broach the subject, asking why the county couldn’t just hire a single engineer rather than contracting with two entire firms.

Stephen King, the director of solid waste, cited the litany of state and federal regulations involved in building a landfill, from geotechnical permits to myriad testing of soil samples by various labs.

“It is very specialized,” King said. “It will take a whole team to get done what needs to be done.”

A engineer can be the county’s best friend in a project of this caliber, serving as both as a liability shield and a taskmaster to keep the contractors on time and on budget.

“I think having a good engineer is critical,” advised Chip Killian, the county attorney.

Ensley questioned a clause in one of the contracts, however, that would bill the county $900 a day for engineering services should the project extend beyond the estimated nine-month time frame.

“If we run into a problem like with the historic courthouse and it goes on and on, that could get expensive,” Ensley said. Ensley said the bid for the job should cover the work, period.

Commissioner Mark Swanger asked whether the county attempted to negotiate the terms. It appeared not. County Attorney Chip Killian said he had not read the contracts yet and couldn’t comment on whether the language was standard or troubling.

“We really need some of these questions answered,” Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick said. “I would also like to know if this is the best price they can come up with. Everybody is having to give a little now. Let’s see if they can, too.”

The contracts were with Asheville-based McGill and Associates for $175,000 and a second contract with Joyce Engineering, landfill specialists based in Maryland, for an additional $170,000.

Killian worked over the two contracts following the meeting. The county was unable to lower the price but altered some of the language.

“Mostly to protect the county against anything, essentially to make sure if they don’t perform their task we aren’t liable for it,” King said of the changes.

As for the heafty $900 a day Joyce was seeking should the project run over schedule, the language was clarified so the contractor, not the county, would be responsible for paying up. Both were approved by commissioners following the rewording.

Although the board of Haywood Regional Medical Center could lose much of its control following its affiliation with WestCare, it will remain a public, county-owned entity nonetheless.

Haywood Regional and WestCare have announced their intention to unite under a newly created umbrella organization. The hospitals would be managed jointly, with just one CEO at the helm and one operating budget. That new organization will be run by a new board, comprised equally of members from both Haywood and WestCare.

“The joint operating company will sit atop the two entities. WestCare will remain its separate entity and Haywood will remain ours,” said Haywood County Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick. “To my knowledge there is nothing about the agreement that would change the public status of Haywood Regional.”

That public status means county commissioners appoint board members, the hospital’s books are open to the public and board meetings can be observed.

“We are under the impression that our hospital will still have a hospital authority with open board meetings,” agreed Pam Kearney, HRMC board member.

But it could be stripped of much of its power. Haywood’s current hospital board will likely no longer have hiring and firing authority over its CEO or autonomy over budget decisions, for example. Those would likely fall under the purview of the new board, which won’t be public. Members of the public and media would not be entitled to attend meetings of the joint entity where most decisions would likely be made.

Mike Poore, CEO of Haywood Regional, said the details of the arrangement are in the early stages to say the least. Exactly what power will remain with Haywood Regional’s existing hospital board and what will be delegated to the new entity will be refined over the lengthy affiliation process.

“There are a thousand things we still have to do,” said Roy Patton, an attorney and HRMC board member. “This whole thing is not a done deal. Whether it is done still depends on an awful lot of due diligence.”

This week, a team from Haywood Regional is at WestCare poring over all its financial ledgers and books.

“And vice versa they will be looking at everything within our organization,” Poore said, calling the two entities “deep into due diligence right now.”

“We are at the very beginning of this,” Kearney added.

Haywood Regional’s hospital board is appointed by county commissioners. How members are appointed to the board of the new joint entity are among the issues to be hammered out.

Poore said it is not unprecedented for a public hospital to come under the umbrella of an entity that’s not public, yet remain public itself.

“I think there are several examples of that within the state,” Poore said.

State statute

Haywood Regional’s status as a public hospital dates to its construction with publicly-backed bonds. The hospital building belongs to the county, and that ownership won’t change. While the daily operations of WestCare and Haywood will be co-mingled, each hospital will keep a separate balance sheet and its assets will remain segregated.

That is largely the reason Haywood Regional will still be considered a public hospital, even if it’s autonomy is siphoned off. State statute specifies a change in status occurs only if a public hospital is sold or leased.

“My understanding is that the ownership of the facility would rest with the county, and it wouldn’t be sold or leased,” said Jeff Horton, the director of N.C. Division of Health Service Regulation.

Another layer in affiliation is a management contract with Carolinas HealthCare System, a network of 23 hospitals based in Charlotte. The initial length of the contract could lock Haywood Regional and WestCare in for up to a decade, but a management contract does not qualify as a sale or lease, and therefore doesn’t trigger the state statutes regarding Haywood’s public status. If it did, the ultimate decision would rest with Haywood County commissioners. It appears commissioners will dodge such a vote, however.

“Right now with the anticipated structure it doesn’t appear there is any need for a change or for us to vote on it,” Kirkpatrick said.

If negotiations start heading in a different direction, however — one that would jeopardize the hospital’s public status and therefore land in the commissioners’ laps — Poore said he would let the commissioners know right away.

The commissioners, at least as a whole, haven’t drawn any lines in the sand about the ultimate structure the hospital takes on.

“I don’t know that it would matter to me as long as the services are better,” said Commissioner Kevin Ensley. “But I would want to listen to the medical community and hear what their consensus would be. I would also want to know what our hospital board thinks. We have appointed some really good people that understand the medical community.”

Patton said the hospital board hasn’t expressed a proclivity one way or the other, but it would be a major step to undo the hospital’s public status and wouldn’t be taken lightly, he said.

“Personally I would have to feel very comfortable if there would be a change like that,” said Patton, an attorney and member of the hospital board. “I would have to feel like that change is for the betterment of healthcare in this county and the area and that it would outweigh the benefits of being a public hospital.”

As a little girl, Teresa Pennington of Waynesville looked forward to Sundays all week. After church, her family would venture into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, often to the banks of the Oconaluftee River, to enjoy a picnic lunch of fried chicken.

“My sister and I would play in the horribly frigid, cold water and build little dams and had the best time,” Pennington said. “When I was 6 years old, I never knew I would have a gallery in Waynesville and be drawing that river.”

Scenes from the park are a centerpiece of Pennington’s signature artwork. A long-time park supporter, Pennington was one of the first artists in the region to create a commemorative piece for the Smokies 75th anniversary being celebrated this year and donate a portion of the proceeds to the Friends of the Smokies.

“I have used the park for my subject matter for such a long time. I really wanted the opportunity to give back,” Pennington said.

The setting for Pennington’s commemorative piece is none other than the Oconaluftee River Valley. It weaves together all the iconic symbols of the park: endless blue ridges, lush green mountain sides, a thin wisp of mist creeping up the valley and two bear cubs scampering up a tree trunk. The title of the piece, “For the Permanent Enjoyment of the People,” harkens back to the legislation that created the national park 75 years ago and set the stage for its mission to preserve the natural wonders of the Smokies unfettered for future generations.

Frolicking along the Oconaluftee River during Sunday picnics is just a small slice of Pennington’s long love affair with the park. The park’s campgrounds were the site of annual family vacations, with all the adventure a little girl could want.

“The best stories are about the bears. They (park rangers) were always trying to catch a bear that was mischievous and getting into trouble,” Pennington said. “When I was a little girl they would let us feed the bears. Of course, they don’t let you do that now.”

The Smokies has shaped who Pennington is as an artist.

“They say do what you love and the money will come. I have done what I loved in being an artist but also in my subject matter. I love the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s where my heart is. I think people can see that,” Pennington said. “There is nothing I would rather do than spend a day in my studio drawing a mountain or a stream or a bear.”

As she sits in her studio envisioning mountain scenes to play out at the tip of her colored pencils, there is no shortage of material to draw from.

“When I sit in my studio I think back to those times as a little girl. I cherish those memories, and it has really brought me to where I am,” she said.

Pennington’s collectible pieces, as well as the 75th anniversary commemorative print “For the Permanent Enjoyment of the People,” can be found in her downtown Waynesville T. Pennington Art Gallery or at www.tpennington.com.

Hints of an up tick in the economy are good news to say the least, but a resulting rise in interest rates came a little too soon for Jackson County taxpayers.

Interest rates jumped almost 0.75 percent on the eve of locking in a construction loan, costing the county $500,000 over the 15-year life of the loan. The county is taking out a $10.295 million loan. The first $7 million will pay for the new library and renovate the historic courthouse, and $3.2 million is slated for construction on the campus of Southwestern Community College.

The county was quoted an interest rate of 3.97 percent on a loan from BB&T. But the county had to wait to lock in the rate until it was within a 45-day window of signing. Just days before the county moved into that 45-day window, the rate went up to 4.63 percent.

The taxpayers are still coming out ahead on the project, however. Construction for the library and renovations to the historic courthouse were roughly $1.5 million less than expected, presumably because contractors hungry for work were offering their best price.

The annual payments on the loan will cost about $1.1 million a year initially, decreasing over time as the principle is paid down and interest decreases.

In addition to the $7 million being put up by the county for the library, Friends of the Library is raising $1.5 million to furnish the interior.

Ask any fisherman what their favorite stretch of stream is and you may as well be asking for directions to the moon.

They might tell you what stream they frequent, but as for an exact spot — well, that’s between them and the trout.

For out-of-town fishermen wanting to snag a mountain trout on their vacation who don’t have hours to hang around a fly fishing shop prying locals to reveal their coveted fishing holes, the new Western North Carolina Fly Fishing Trail Map and Guide is just the answer.

The fly fishing trail spans 15 fishing spots in Jackson County, from wide valley rivers to narrow mountain creeks.

The trail guide was created by the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority and Jackson County Chamber of Commerce — with the help of some knowledgeable fishermen.

The trail guide doesn’t go so far as identifying the best spots on a creek, but does get the fishermen in the right vicinity.

“This way they may discover their own special spots,”

said Alex Bell, one of the authors of the trail map and a fly fishing guide. “We wouldn’t want everyone going to the right side of the creek bank 100 yards up. But as a fly fisherman you are able to read the water and look at the surroundings and you can figure out where the trout are most likely to be hanging out.”

Usually, fishermen just need to know where there is a good roadside pull-offs to access a creek without trespassing on private property. Otherwise, out-of-town fishermen are left studying dozens of blue squiggly lines on a map wondering which ones they could actually reach.

“Even if someone tells you such and such creek, you may have passed by it but they aren’t marked,” Bell said.

The other author behind the fly-fishing trail, Bobby Kilby, is famous in trout fishing circles. He’s caught trout in more than 85 of the named creeks in Jackson County. Kilby’s record makes the 15 spots selected for the fly fishing trail sound like child’s play. But Bell thinks they arrived at a good mix: relatively easy access, a variety of water and a good geographic spread across the county.

Bell, 54, retired as the principal of Smoky Mountain High School two years ago. While he now has all day to loaf around on rivers, during his career he snagged whatever fishing time he could. Thanks to the Tuckasegee running through town, he could steal a few minutes on his way home from work.

“I tell people all the time it was my chief therapy,” Bell said. “I had my stuff in the back of the truck and whenever my day finished I would head to the river. It was a way to decompress and relax.

“With fly casting it is all about rhythm and tempo. They always say there is an art and science to it and the combination of the two is very relaxing,” Bell said.

Alex Bell can’t resist striking up a conversation with fellow fishermen he encounters on the Tuckasegee.

But lately, he’s had a motive behind his friendly banter. As an author of the new WNC Fly Fishing Trail, Bell is eager to know just who is flocking to fish mountain waters.

One day in May, Bell was sitting on the tailgate of his truck having lunch when 14 anglers with a fly fishing club from Florida came clambering up the river bank.

“As we struck up a conversation one thing led to another and I mentioned the fly fishing trail map and one said ‘Yeah, we got it right here’ and pulled it out of their vest,” Bell recounted.

The trail guide was the brainchild of the Jackson County Travel and Tourism Authority, so Bell knew luring tourists was the whole point. But as he calculated the economic impact of 14 people spending three nights in Jackson County who came here just to fish the trail, it sunk in.

“It came full circle just how good this is for everybody,” he said.

The fly fishing trail leads fishermen to 15 different fishing spots in Jackson County, from narrow mountain streams to wide rivers. Julie Spiro, executive director of the Travel and Tourism Authority and Jackson County Chamber of Commerce, said the fly fishing trail has taken off better than she ever imagined.

“I think it has had a good positive affect on tourism here,” Spiro said. “It gets people into Jackson County to fish and spend the night and eat dinner out and enjoy some time here in the mountains.”

A testimony to its success, Spiro keeps running out of the trail map brochures. The first print run of 1,500 were gone in just two months. She ordered a batch of 5,000 in early May, but those were gone by the end of the month. In all, she’s gone through almost 9,000 in just six months.

“We mailed out thousands of maps to interested fisherman,” Spiro said

While it’s hard to know exactly how many of those ultimately make the trip, some stop into the visitor center and announced their arrival, like a man and his buddy on a recent visit from New Burn, N.C.

“He said ‘You mailed me this map and I’m here to fish,’” Spiro recounted.

The fly fishing trail has been featured around the country, from an outdoors radio show in California to a travel article in the New York Times. It’s also landed on the UNC-TV series North Carolina Now twice. Bell, 54, who runs AB’s Fly Fishing Guide Service, has booked several trips for clients who came to Jackson County after discovering the trail guide.

Spiro credits Craig Distl, a public relations specialist with the Jackson chamber, as the instigator behind the trail. Spiro has actively marketed Jackson County as a fishing destination for several years, but Distl suggested they “step it up a notch.”

The idea of a fly fishing trail is a first for the region and positions Jackson as the first county to actively capitalize on the image of a fly fishing destination.

“A lot of people are very interested in fishing all 15 spots on the trail,” Spiro said. “It gives them a sense of accomplishment that they have fished the entire trail.”

Indeed, Bell has encountered fishermen on the water checking off their maps as they go. Some said they plan to fish a few spots each year, making return trips each summer until they finished them all.

The concept of themed-trails are growing in popularity among visitors looking for a more interactive vacation. There are several themed-trails in the region: a Cherokee Heritage Trail, a Craft Heritage Trail, a WNC Farm and Garden Trail, a Birding Trail — and now a fly fishing trail.

While it doesn’t seem like much of a news flash, it has emerged as one of the top concerns in Macon County economic development circles: the workforce is aging.

“It actually is something to be concerned about. It is getting worse,” James McCoy, an economic development consultant for Macon County, told a gathering of local elected leaders last week. “We have a need for a younger, more professional workforce.”

Leaders from Franklin, Highlands, and Macon County held a joint meeting last Thursday (July 23) to hear a progress report on a new economic development strategy for the county. Over the past several months, McCoy and other economic development officials have been systematically meeting with the county’s largest employers to help chart a new path for economic development.

A recurring theme among those interviewed is concern over the aging workforce, McCoy said.

While the number of people over 65 is growing in the county, the number under the age of 44, and particularly under the age of 29, is shrinking.

“The big thing we heard was the age of our community and the age of our workforce,” said Ed Shatley, chairman of the Macon Economic Development Commission. “If we don’t correct this we will become a community of retirees who require many more services than a younger workforce.”

While most of the officials gathered for last week’s meeting at the Mill Creek Country Club were themselves retirees over 60, a new sports bar in downtown Franklin called Mulligan’s was hopping with a young crowd listening to a live band and generally enjoying life in Macon County.

Camped out at a table in the middle of the bar were four young men — a teacher, a banker, a plumber, and an electrical contractor — enjoying a guy’s night out. All of them were 33 years old but had moved to Franklin in their early 20s.

“We grew up in a big city in a not so nice area,” said Ryan Haley, the teacher in the bunch. “Franklin is a nice place to live and raise a family and hang out and not worry about whether your neighbor is a drug dealer.”

Today, they are all married with kids. That wasn’t the case when they moved here as single guys after college, but they all had a life goal of eventually marrying and sought out a good place to start a family.

“We didn’t want to raise our kids in the city,” said Seth Greenley, the electrical contractor.

The four generally enjoy the outdoors, another thing Macon County has going for it. Of course, there are things they miss.

“The movies and restaurants,” said Greenley.

In a perfect world, Greenley envisions sitting at an outdoor café with his wife while people stroll up and down the sidewalks of town.

“Now, it seems the whole county shuts down at 6 p.m.,” Greenley said.

That’s one area of focus McCoy had mentioned as well.

“A vibrant downtown is one of the most important things to attracting young people,” McCoy said. “Downtowns are immeasurably important to quality of life. Communities where downtowns have done really well have consistently seen young people want to stick around.”

Another top amenity in attracting a younger workforce has thankfully been checked off the list recently: approving the sale of beer, wine and liquor drinks in bars and restaurants in Franklin.

Until the vote passed just three years ago, simply buying a beer during a night on the town was not possible.

“That was an important move,” said Jim Bo Ledford, the owner of a plumbing business. “You had to go buy a six-pack of beer and sit around at home. It’s fun to get out and socialize.”

All four guys lament that county voters didn’t approve a $9.4 million recreation bond two years ago. If the county wants more young people to move here, that would have helped. It called for ballfields, an indoor pool, and myriad recreation facilities that younger people, especially those with kids, would find appealing. Yet Macon County’s aging voters didn’t approve the bond.

While salaries in Macon County are lower than the state average — something that troubles the economic development experts — Josh Brant, a banker at Wachovia, said it wasn’t a deal breaker.

“With our generation, it’s not how much money you make. It’s quality of life,” said Brant. “You can have a good quality of life here. The thing lacking is jobs.”

While economic development leaders wrangle with ways to attract a younger workforce, Brant and his friends contend that you need to create jobs first and the workforce will follow. Their generation is more mobile, willing to move where there’s a job in their field if it’s a decent place to live.

A plight often lamented in economic development circles is the out-migration of mountain kids for college who never return home because there aren’t good jobs. When asked which should be recruited first — young workers or jobs for those workers — Shatley responded: “Which is first, the chicken or the egg?”

A Tennessee man claims he was defrauded of $328,000 by the players behind Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts, a planned mega development in Haywood County that is in the preliminary conceptual stages.

Plans for Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts call for a 4,500-acre development in Jonathan Creek. Five years into the project, however, the developers still do not own any land.

They have neither secured financing for the project nor lease agreements from retailers to occupy a massive shopping center. The project remains controversial due to its scale. Locals have expressed skepticism about it ever coming to fruition.

The lawsuit alleges that Dean Moses, a consultant for the project, got an investor to put up money for down payments on land but then diverted the money to other uses, including the personal gain of Moses and his wife, who live in Clyde. It’s not the first time Moses has courted investors for a speculative development in Haywood County. (see “Lawsuit echoes of past business dealings.”)

John Thornton, a developer from Chattanooga, is suing Moses for fraud, conspiracy, and breach of contract for diverting money earmarked for property purchases to other uses.

Thornton was courted by Moses to invest in the project in 2005. He was first introduced to Moses by a Knoxville attorney, Robert Worthington. Worthington was aiding Moses in the pursuit of Cataloochee Resorts and encouraged Thornton to invest in the project. After their introduction, Thornton met with Moses several times in Knoxville to structure the terms of a joint venture agreement.

The two forged a partnership, creating a corporate vehicle to acquire land for the development. Thornton put up $328,000 to be used for down payments on land, stipulating in the joint venture agreement that if the land deals didn’t go through, Thornton would get his money back, according to Thornton’s suit. The money was held in escrow by a title insurance agency, Investors Title.

After putting up the money, Thornton was told in 2005 that the purchase of property was “imminent.”

“Moses continually represented to Thornton that property was being acquired, that loans were being arranged, that contractors were being contacted, that the projects were moving along,” the suit alleges. But nearly a year later, land had still not been purchased.

In June and July of 2006, Moses arranged two separate transfers of Thornton’s money out of escrow and into a new account.

Moses failed to tell Thornton about the transfers, according to the lawsuit. When Thornton learned of the money transfer, Moses refused to tell Thornton how his money had been used, the suit alleges.

Thornton’s money was transferred into an account held by an entity called Cataloochee Companies. The original entity created by Thornton and Moses had been called Cataloochee Corporation.

Thornton claims the creation of a new entity constitutes another violation of the joint venture agreement. To protect his financial stake, Thornton had stipulated that no additional shares could be awarded that would dilute his 50 percent stake in the development, according to the suit. Moses denies agreeing to such a stipulation.

Along with the $328,000 earmarked for land purchases, Thornton loaned another $275,000 to cover operating expenses for the project. The expenditure of those funds are not contested in the lawsuit.

Arms length

Frank Wood, president of Cataloochee Companies, the entity currently pursuing the development, distanced himself from the lawsuit and from Moses.

“We have absolutely nothing to do with that,” Wood said. “I am not a party to it and absolutely don’t care about it.”

Wood said that Moses is “strictly a consultant” on the project.

In his lawsuit, Thornton objects to the characterization of Moses as merely a consultant, as he considers Moses a major player.

Meanwhile, Moses referred to himself as a “manager” of Cataloochee with the “authority to conduct, manage, and control the affairs and business of the company,” according to Moses’s response to the lawsuit. He also described himself as the primary agent for negotiating deals with property owners, arranging leases with retailers, and securing financing.

Wood said that the company Thornton originally invested in is no longer the developer of Cataloochee Resorts.

“That’s an entity that died,” Wood said.

However, Moses’s response to the suit described Cataloochee Companies as the successor to the original entity created by himself and Thornton, Cataloochee Corporation.

Moses responds

In response to the lawsuit, Moses claims that Thornton isn’t entitled to get his money back because the property deals are still pending. Just because the deals haven’t taken place doesn’t mean they fell through; therefore, there is no reason to refund the money.

At one point, Cataloochee developers had property options on just a few tracts. But those have since expired.

Moses claims that Thornton understood the speculative nature of his investment.

“Thornton was aware that Cataloochee owned no real estate and has no assets other than a business plan and the development plan,” Moses’ reply to the lawsuit states. Thornton “was fully aware of the status, nature, and risks associated with the proposed development.”

Further, Moses points out that Thornton’s loans were to be repaid out of excess funds available — of which there aren’t any.

Moses claims he didn’t need Thornton’s permission nor was it necessary to notify him if his money was transferred out of escrow into another account. He states that the funds were used appropriately “to pay debts and obligations of Cataloochee.”

“Moses denies any fraud or deceit in connection with such transfer,” Moses stated in his reply to the suit.

Moses points out the money in escrow was not actually Thornton’s, but belonged to Cataloochee and had merely been placed in escrow to facilitate property deals. Thornton’s original loan was funneled through Cataloochee on its way to escrow, so when it was no longer needed in escrow, it was appropriate to transfer it back to Cataloochee rather than back to Thornton.

Moses has countersued Thornton for breach of contract. Moses alleges Thornton hamstrung the project by failing to put up more money. Thornton also refused to use his personal credit to help guarantee loans or to help raise additional capital, Moses complained.

Moses described Thornton as “unavailable” and “uncooperative” in advancing the project.

“Moses was left with the task of running the day-to-day operations, as well as arranging for and obtaining loan commitments and all other tasks involved in trying to advance the project’s development,” Moses wrote in his countersuit.

Moses also sued Thornton for defamation for a comment made to the Knoxville newspaper about the suit.

Personal gain?

Thornton is also suing Moses’s wife, Colleen. The suit alleges that Colleen withdrew $52,000 of Thornton’s money from the Cataloochee account and deposited it into a personal savings account in her name at a Blue Ridge Savings Bank.

Colleen was listed as a signatory on the Cataloochee account in Knoxville. Thornton discovered that Colleen was writing checks out of the account and depositing them into her personal bank account, thanks to bank records obtained through his lawsuit.

“Substantial other funds were removed from such account for the personal living expenses of Colleen Moses and Dean Moses,” the lawsuit alleges.

Bankruptcy in the midst

Meanwhile, another player in the Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts development has filed for bankruptcy in Knoxville. Robert Worthington, the Knoxville attorney who introduced Thornton to Moses, has accumulated more than $75,000 in credit card debt and a $240,000 bank loan tied to Moses and Cataloochee Companies, according to bankruptcy filings.

Worthington listed more than $75,000 in debt on six credit cards that he claims were jointly used by Moses, who is listed as a co-debtor for the six cards. Worthington is disputing debt on those cards, with a citation in the filing that they were “used by Cataloochee.”

Moses is also listed as a co-debtor on a $240,000 loan from BB&T. Worthington used his name to guarantee the loan for Cataloochee Corporation.

Fraud lawsuit echoes of past business dealings

Does the name Dean Moses, the subject of a financial fraud lawsuit by an investor in Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts, ring a bell?

It should. Moses was the figurehead behind a string of failed business proposals for the closed-down Dayco factory in Waynesville — a saga that spanned several years and eventually ended in bankruptcy court.

Moses and his business partners created one company after another with plans to develop the dormant industrial site. They solicited capital from private investors and lending institutions, racking up debts on company credit cards in the meantime.

When one company hit a financial dead-end, it was dissolved and a new one created.

The third company in the chain actually landed in bankruptcy court. Undeterred, Moses and his partners created yet a fourth company touting an all-too-familiar development plan. They hoped to leave their debt behind in bankruptcy court while walking away with the property intact and trying again under a new entity.

The bankruptcy court balked and instead ended the cycle by foreclosing on the property. The Dayco site eventually became the property of the Haywood Advancement Corporation and is now a shopping center anchored by Super Wal-Mart.

When Art Pohl moved to Jackson County from Florida 10 years ago, he imagined a golden retirement filled with lazy days of playing golf. But after a few years of living the dream life, his wife wondered just how much golf one man could play.

“I was up here playing golf and enjoying myself and my wife said, ‘You are too young to do nothing. Why don’t you do something?’” recalled Pohl, 61.

Pohl, a residential developer and contractor by trade, had certainly come to the right place to dabble in his former profession. As he contemplated a return to the industry, he studied the housing market in Jackson County and saw plenty of gated mountain subdivisions catering to second-home owners and retirees.

What the county lacked, however, was housing geared toward the professional class who want to live close to the amenities of town. Sylva has seen almost zero growth in its housing stock over the past decade, with development instead focused on the surrounding countryside and mountaintops.

When shopping for land, Pohl stumbled onto the perfect setting for a town home development: a 19-acre tract tucked into a hillside close to downtown Sylva and off Savannah Drive. He created a master plan to build 32 townhomes on the tract. Three years later, the first four units of Laurel Ridge Town Homes have been finished and will hit the market this month.

“I’ve done something here that I hope will spark the town into thinking we need more housing to attract professional people to Sylva,” Pohl said. “I am trying to hit a market of people who don’t want to maintain yards, who want granite countertops and nice hardwood floors. They want a step up at an affordable price.”

At $299,000, the townhomes don’t exactly qualify as affordable housing. But they are at least more affordable than much of what’s on the market.

“They can enjoy this,” Pohl said as he spread his arms, “for what you would pay in the upscale developments for just a lot.”

Although the development is a 15-minute walk from downtown, it has the feel of a private mountain retreat. The townhomes overlook a forested hillside with long-range views peaking through the summer tree canopy. Pohl has set aside 11 acres of the 19-acre tract to be permanently protected.

“The open space gives you the big yard, gives you the view, gives you everything you might want with a five-acre lot but with none of the maintenance and none of the cost. All this is free,” Pohl said, gesturing to the protected forested hillside off a back deck.

Pohl is among the growing number of developers capitalizing on the concept of “cluster development.” Rather than slicing and dicing a tract of land into evenly distributed lots, the new paradigm calls for denser housing concentrated in one area with the rest left relatively undisturbed.

The property was originally zoned for one-acre lots. Pohl faced an uphill battle to get town approval of the denser town home development. Given the steep terrain, carving out one-acre lots across the tract would have required a major cut-and-fill operation and a series of retaining walls and new roads.

“It would have decimated the hillside and the lots would have been so expensive,” Pohl said.

The town ultimately viewed a cluster townhome development as the better option and approved his plan, albeit by a split vote of the town board.

“I took a hell of a gamble that I could go to the town and convince them that they needed it,” Pohl said. “I had some sleepless nights.”

During the year-long process, Pohl found an important ally in former town planner Jim Aust, a major advocate for increasing Sylva’s housing stock and for the cluster development concept.

When Pohl embarked on his development plan, the building boom was in full swing. But three years later, as his first four townhomes hit the market, times are different indeed.

“If the economy would have been where it was three years ago, they would be gone by now,” Pohl said.

Nonetheless, between professors at Western Carolina University and Southwestern Community College — not to mention the standard professional fare of doctors, lawyers, and bankers — Pohl sees plenty of demand for the moderately priced yet posh townhomes. Pohl also sees the townhomes appealing to retirees who don’t want to live in a gated subdivision but rather an in-town neighborhood.

Pohl doesn’t plan on starting to build the next units until the current ones are sold, which he thinks will be snatched up in a few months. Despite his wranglings with the town and the economic downturn, Pohl doesn’t regret coming out of retirement.

“I have absolutely loved this and can’t wait to start the second building. It has given me direction and given me a purpose in life again,” Pohl said. “I love building.”

An open house at the Laurel Ridge Town Homes will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 18. laurelridgetownhomes.com or 828.506.6641.

Swain and Graham counties are at odds over who should provide rescue service to the isolated Deals Gap territory, a dispute that could lead to a redrawing of county lines.

The Deal’s Gap area is a satellite territory of Swain County, lying on the other side of Lake Fontana and surrounded by Graham.

Deal’s Gap is home to the infamous Tail of the Dragon, a stretch of U.S. 129 sporting 318 curves in just 11 miles. Motorcyclists and sports car drivers flock to the road from across the country to race the mountain curves. The result is lots of wrecks, requiring rescue service to an otherwise remote area. Until now, Graham has taken on the burden of responding to wrecks since it is so much closer.

“When it started getting popular, what was no more than four or five calls a year at most has turned into a nightmare,” said Steve Odom, the chairman of Graham County commissioners.

Graham County has grown weary of providing rescue, fire and law enforcement to the increasingly popular area and getting nothing in return.

“Graham County is trying to be a good neighbor, but it has gotten to the point where it has exceeded the good neighbor part,” said Lynn Cody, Graham County manager.

Graham is giving Swain County three options: move the county line so that Deal’s Gap is part of Graham, pay an annual fee to Graham County, or station their own rescue personnel and law enforcement in the area.

“If we are going to take care of it, we should just have it part of Graham County,” said Sandra Smith, a Graham County commissioner. Smith proposed petitioning the state legislature to redraw the county line. But they decided to first sit down with Swain County leaders before running to Raleigh.

Graham and Swain county commissioners met on Tuesday (July 28) to discuss the issue.

Swain County will likely fight any attempt by Graham to take over the territory — or the property tax revenue that goes with it. Swain collects $195,000 a year in property taxes from the 1,900-acre territory.

Swain County Commissioner David Monteith said he would rather the county provide emergency services to the area themselves — despite the long distance — than cede territory to Graham County or pay an annual fee.

“Let’s face it. Every county is scrambling for money and their piece of the pie,” said Brad Talbot, owner of Deal’s Gap Motorcycle Resort. Talbot agrees that both counties have legitimate issues to work out, however.

Tit for tat

Graham County leaders claim their residents are bearing the burden of providing services in Swain County and need money — whether it’s the property tax revenue from Deal’s Gap or an annual contribution from Swain — to offset their costs.

“It all boils down to finances,” Odom said.

Graham County responds to an average of 30 wrecks a year on the Swain County portion of the Tail of the Dragon, many of them with serious injuries that tie up medics and ambulances for hours.

Swain County countered that patients are billed for ambulance service, so the county recoups most of their costs. But not all patients pay up, resulting in a net loss, Smith said. And other patients decide to drive to the hospital on their own or are treated by medics at the scene and never taken to the hospital, so the county is unable to bill them at all.

“That’s a lose situation for us because we don’t get paid for it. It is a dead run,” Odom said.

Graham budgeted $890,000 on EMS services last year and only collected $725,000 from patients.

According to David Breedlove, the emergency services director for Swain, no county is able to break even on emergency services.

While Graham County presented charts and dispatch logs showing the number of calls and accidents its people responded to in Deal’s Gap, Swain County countered with some facts and figures of its own. Since Graham County has no hospital, many patients from there are brought to the hospital in Bryson City. Many are then sent on to the larger hospitals in Sylva or Asheville, a service provided by Swain County’s ambulances. Swain County provides transport for an average of 100 Graham County residents a year from the Bryson City hospital to their final destination.

Breedlove said it balances out the services Graham provides in Deal’s Gap.

Swain County commissioners mostly listened during the meeting on Tuesday as Graham County leaders laid out their position. The two boards decided to reconvene at 9 a.m. Monday, Aug. 24, in Robbinsville.

“We got a lot of the plate. We’ve got to digest some if it,” said Glenn Jones, chairman of the Swain County commissioners.

What is Swain doing all the way out there?

The Deal’s Gap territory is technically part of Swain County, even though it lies on the other side of Fontana Lake, isolated from the rest of the county and surrounded by Graham County.

It hasn’t always been that way, however. The convoluted geography dates back to the creation of Lake Fontana. The Little Tennessee River once served as the county line between Swain and Graham. When the river was dammed up and a vast territory along the lakeshore was ceded to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Deal’s Gap area became inaccessible to the rest of Swain County without driving all the way around the lake and through Graham County to get there.

When Heinz Rollman left behind the unrest of Europe and struck out for America in 1939, the fate of his family was riding on his shoulders.

The Nazi regime had seized a successful shoe factory from Rollman’s father in Germany a few years earlier. Forced into bankruptcy, Rollman’s father fled to Belgium with two sons and two nephews in tow. They tried to rebuild, but the entire continent was on the brink of war and the climate was increasingly unfavorable for Jewish businessmen.

So the family dispatched Rollman to America armed with their final asset: a patent on a new method for attaching soles to shoes.

Rollman began courting major rubber manufacturers of the day, hoping to set up shop in the shadows of a company that could make the compound they needed. Rollman’s quest led him to A. L. Friedlander, the head of Dayton Tire and Rubber in Ohio. Friedlander, who was also Jewish, was taken by Rollman’s charisma and wit.

Friedlander was in the market to open a new plant in North Carolina and invited Rollman along on a trip to Charlotte to scout locations. From Charlotte, the two were pointed toward Waynesville where they would find plenty of the top criteria for a plant: cooling water.

Friedlander chose the town for his new rubber factory and leased Rollman his very own wing for a shoe enterprise. Rollman’s brother and cousins joined him in the new venture, which they called Wellco.

The twist of fate that led two sets of Jewish brothers — Heinz and Ernest Rollman and Walter and Curt Kaufman — to start a shoe factory in Waynesville was a fortuitous one indeed. Wellco has provided a living for hundreds of workers spanning three generations, one of the last manufacturing holdouts from the town’s bustling blue-collar days.

The company remained in the family for nearly 70 years. Rolf Kaufman, the son of one of the original founders, joined the company in 1956 and was groomed as a family successor. Rising in the ranks alongside Rolf was Horace Auberry. When it came time to name a new leader, Heinz Rollman called both men into his office.

“He said ‘I want the two of you to be joint officers, but I can’t decide who is going to be number one,’” Rolf recalled. So Rollman flipped a coin.

Kaufman ended up president and Auberry became chairman. The two ran the company in tandem for more than 30 years.

In 2007, new owners came on the scene, however. Wellco had been a publicly traded company since the mid-1960s. Over the years, one buyer had amassed a controlling interest in the company.

“He liked the company and thought it was a good investment and just bought up the stock as it became available,” Rolf said.

The buyer rarely exercised his influence, however. But in 2007, he passed away. His estate sold off the Wellco holdings, which were bought up by a new controlling entity along with all remaining shares as well.

Although Rolf had stepped down as president in 1996, he remained on in a part-time capacity as vice chairman until 2007 when the new owners came along.

It’s hard to say whether Wellco would be ceasing its local operations today if the new controlling entity hadn’t taken over. It’s a fate Rolf had resisted for years, but the economic pressure of imports and growing competition in military boots made it increasingly difficult. Rolf said he wasn’t surprised to hear the news last week.

“It was probably expected by the people who worked there,” Kaufman said.

Ghost Town in the Sky wants more time to prepare its bankruptcy reorganization plan and is seeking an extension.

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. Ghost Town was supposed to submit a reorganization plan in U.S Bankruptcy Court within four months, which would have been early July, but is seeking a three-month extension.

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, from electricians and contractors to marketing agents and souvenir vendors. Those owed money get to vote on whether to accept Ghost Town’s reorganization plan.

The court has not ruled on whether to grant the extension.

Meanwhile, Alaska Pressley, a longtime Maggie Valley resident and business owner, has offered a $250,000 loan to Ghost Town to help the beleaguered theme park on its road to recovery. The loan would be used to help get the incline railway working, according to the bankruptcy filing.

The incline railway was once used to transport visitors up the mountain to the amusement park, but it has not been operational for many years. Ghost Town owners began rebuilding the incline railway when they purchased the park, but ran out of money to finish.

Pressley has been a player in the Maggie tourism industry for more than 50 years and was friends with the founder of Ghost Town, R.B. Coburn. When new owners came on the scene and reopened the park after a five-year hiatus, Pressley was quick to join their side as a stalwart supporter.

Ghost Town proposes to pay back the loan over the course of five years, with $1 per customer this year and $2 per customer for the next four years.

The arrangement would allow Pressley to sidestep others who are owed money by Ghost Town by directly tapping Ghost Town’s revenue stream. BB&T, which holds a $9.5 mortgage on the property, objected to the proposal as it would funnel profits off the park to pay back a select lender. The fate of the loan and payment arrangement will ultimately be up to the bankruptcy judge.

When Swain County opened a new $10 million jail last fall with 109 beds — four times bigger than necessary for its own inmates — it was banking on housing federal prisoners and those from other counties to subsidize the cost.

Instead, the number of inmates housed from outside the county has shrunk dramatically, not grown. As a result, the oversized jail has been a drain on county coffers and proved a source of contention in an on-going feud between the sheriff’s office and county commissioners.

County Manager Kevin King says the onus falls on the sheriff to court inmates from other counties to fill the jail.

“He said it wasn’t his place to get contracts, but it is,” King said. “It is going to take the sheriff talking to the other sheriffs.”

But Sheriff Curtis Cochran says the commissioners should have secured commitments from other counties before embarking on the bigger jail, which was already in the works when Cochran took office in late 2006.

“I believe one thing I would have done was to have contracts in hand,” Cochran said. “I would want to think if I didn’t have contracts in hand I would have thought about a smaller jail.”

The county was supposed to line up commitments as a condition of its federal loan to build the jail. Terms of Swain County’s loan with the U.S. Rural Development program stipulated “the applicant obtain written commitments from the other parties who have verbally committed to wanting access to jail beds.”

That never happened, however. Instead, the sheriff at the time, Bob Ogle, got verbal commitments, King said.

No demand for jail beds

Since Cochran took office, Swain has seen the number of inmates it houses from Graham, Cherokee and Haywood counties, as well as federal prisoners under the custody of the U.S. Marshall Service, all but dry up. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is the only outside entity contracting with Swain for jail space on a significant level.

The reason appears to have little to do with Cochran, however.

Like Swain, both Haywood and Cherokee counties have built new jails and can now handle their own inmate volume in-house. When Swain embarked on a new jail in 2005, it was common knowledge that other counties were doing so as well, but Swain overbuilt anyway.

Graham County is one of the only counties that still faces chronic over-crowding at its jail. But instead of sending inmates to Swain, it now sends almost all of its overflow to the new Cherokee County jail, according to Graham County’s chief jailer.

Cherokee County is closer for Graham, saving time and money on transport. In addition, Cherokee County charges only $40 a night per inmate while Swain charges $50 a night.

Cherokee County’s new jail — sporting 150 beds — is even bigger than Swain’s. It is often only half full, however — even with Graham County’s overflow and federal prisoners that once went Swain’s way — adding to the glut in jail beds the region seems to have these days.

As for the decline in federal prisoners, that trend was under way prior to Cochran taking office in late 2006. The U.S. Marshall Service had come to view Swain’s old jail as inadequate and unsafe. It was riddled with cracks and leaks and plagued by temperamental locks. But the biggest concern was no sprinkler system, the dangers of which came to light when eight people were killed in a fire at the Mitchell County jail.

“After the fire in Mitchell County there were concerns about older facilities without adequate fire suppression,” said Kelly Nesbit, chief deputy with the western district of the U.S. Marshall Service.

Nesbit began pulling federal prisoners out of the Swain jail and housing them elsewhere. Although Swain opened its new jail last fall, federal prisoners have yet to return. Nesbit said they simply got used to using other jails, and it has taken a while to get Swain back on the radar as a viable facility.

“The federal government moves slow. It just take a while for things to turn around,” Nesbit said.

The U.S. Marshall Service has 15 jails west of Interstate 77 that it uses to house prisoners, Nesbit said. But Bryson City is the location of a federal court, so it would be convenient to start housing them there again, he said.

Whose fault?

Cochran blames county leaders for the decline in federal prisoners. He said the county threw away a chance to put in a smoke evacuation system in the old jail that would have satisfied safety concerns and allowed them to keep housing the federal inmates.

The Marshall Service even came through with a $30,000 grant to help pay for the smoke suppression system, but Swain never acted on the grant and it was rescinded.

Cochran said the Marshall Service pulled strings to get the grant for Swain and was perturbed Swain decided they didn’t want it after all.

“The $30,000 allocated for Swain County was only provided after numerous phone calls and letters between myself and headquarters,” U.S. Marshall Gregory Forest wrote in a letter to Sheriff Bob Ogle in December 2003. Forest wrote that he wanted to continue their “long working relationship” with the county, but that the county “must complete this process without delay.”

The Marshall Service perceived it as a snub, Cochran said.

“They seemed to think that Swain County just wasn’t interested in housing their inmates because they wouldn’t accept the money after they went to great lengths to get it to help upgrade the jail,” Cochran said.

King said the county walked away from the grant because it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the system.

“The system would have cost a lot more than $30,000. It would have been around $100,000. That was just not doable,” King said.

Ultimately, the decision cost the county more in lost revenue than it would have spent to install the system. The county would have made its money back on the system in less than two years if federal prisoners had continued to flow Swain’s way at the same volume as years’ past. Instead, the county is now entering its third year without housing federal prisoners.

Cochran wasn’t sheriff during the episode over the sprinkler system and said he didn’t understand why they weren’t getting federal prisoners anymore. Cochran recently called a meeting with the U.S. Marshall Service to figure out what the problem was.

“After I got to investigating it a little bit and talked to the right people as to why we weren’t getting inmates, we started working on it,” Cochran said.

County blames Cochran

County commissioners suggested Cochran is to blame for a declining number of inmates being housed at the Swain jail from outside the county. The theory was vocalized during a county budget workshop in June. Cochran heard about the accusation and challenged King to name the counties that allegedly had a problem with him.

“I said ‘If there is somebody out there let me know so I can make amends,’” Cochran said. Cochran asked for the clarification three times, including twice via email.

King responded that he knew of no entity in particular other than a miscommunication with the Eastern Band last year. The Eastern Band, however, is the only entity that actually houses more prisoners with Swain now than it did three years ago.

Cochran said he is doing what he can to court other counties.

“When we moved into the jail I sent out an email to every sheriff’s office in the state and let them know we were in our new facility and had bed space,” Cochran said.

Cochran also met with the Graham County commissioners in the spring, and recently met with the U.S. Marshall Service.

One cloud hanging over the Swain jail is the escape of a murder suspect earlier this year. The suspect had been slipped a key by a jailer who ran away with the suspect. Cochran said the inside job was not a reflection on the security of the jail itself.

The escape has no bearing on whether to house overflow inmates there, according to Nesbit with the U.S. Marshall Service and the chief jailers from Graham or Cherokee counties.

“That’s happened in federal institutions before,” Nesbit said of escapes. “It is just part of the kind of business we are in.”

Declining inmate nights

Out-of-county inmates housed in the Swain jail have declined drastically under Sheriff Curtis Cochran compared to the last year of former sheriff Bob Ogle’s tenure.

2005-06    8,029 inmate nights from out-of-county

2008-09    3,940 inmate nights from out-of-county

Jimmy and Keith Leatherwood were always glad to see the developers of Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts walk in to their local hangout, the Jonathan Creek Café. It meant free coffee.

The developer would unfurl maps on the table outlining plans for a massive residential and commercial resort spanning 4,500 acres in their rural Haywood community. The maps showed golf courses, a ski resort, lakes, one million square feet of shopping and entertainment, condos, a hotel and hundreds of homes.

“Everybody would gather around because they’d get him to buy them a cup of coffee for listening to him,” Keith said.

“We called him the money man,” Jimmy added.

There was a catch, however. The developers didn’t own a single acre of land.

Jimmy said those who owned land in the path of the development — himself included — were taken aback to see their property penciled in on the plans when no one had ever approached them about purchasing it.

“When they go to moving dirt, I’ll believe it,” Jimmy said.

While the project largely fell off the public radar when the economic crisis hit, the developers say they haven’t gone away.

“People need to know we have not gone away and we are still moving forward,” said Frank Wood, president of Cataloochee Wilderness Resorts, which has an office in Clyde. “We have a lot of work to do yet.”

Wood said the residential phase of the development is on hold pending a rebound of the economy and housing market. But the company is still actively pursuing plans for one million square feet of shopping and entertainment clustered just off Interstate 40 at exit 20.

“The chances of it not happening are pretty slim at this point,” Wood said.

Several pieces have to fall in place simultaneously: financing to buy the land, lease agreements with retailers and property owners willing to sell.

Wood said they are not at liberty to say which retailers are being courted since negotiations are not finalized.

As for financing, Wood said lenders are interested, but he can’t say who.

“They are not ready for us to disclose it until it is all wrapped up with a neat little bow on it,” Wood said. Two pieces of financing are needed — one to buy the land and the other to undertake construction, Wood said.

Property options are still forthcoming as well, Wood said. During their initial foray into the community in 2007, the developers say they secured a few property options here and there but mostly gauged willingness to sell through verbal conversations. The property options they once held have now expired, Wood said.

Mike Sorrells, owner of a service station and convenience store on Jonathan Creek, was among the few who were actually offered signed property options. Sorrells got to keep the money they put down when the option expired.

“They were always aboveboard with me,” Sorrells said. “I understood it may or may not happen.”

Sorrells said the plans were so ambitious that they were likely unrealistic.

“All that was premature, totally out of the box. That was someone’s dream,” Sorrells said. “I think that was a big dream and probably an unrealistic dream. Nobody really believed it.”

Wood disagrees that the grand plan is unrealistic. But he would agree that they went public prematurely.

“This project came into the public light before we were ready for it to come into the public light,” Wood said.

Sorrells believes a retail and commercial development centered around Interstate 40 would be quite viable.

“I think the majority of people would like to see something at that exit one way or another,” Sorrells said.

“Jonathan Creek will grow eventually,” Jimmy Leatherwood agreed. “Whether it is going to be this, I don’t know, but eventually it will grow.”

The new Swain jail costs the county $610,000 a year more than the old jail: $450,000 in debt payments and an additional $160,000 on overhead and staff.

The county hoped to make $500,000 a year housing prisoners from out of the county to offset the cost.

The county’s old jail was unsafe and dilapidated, so a new one was in order anyway. County leaders figured they may as well make it extra big and try to subsidize the cost by housing inmates from out of the county, and end up with a new jail for relatively little of their own money.

But revenue projections fell far short. Over the past 12 months, the county only made $140,000 housing out-of-county prisoners, a far cry from the half million it hoped for, according to County Manager Kevin King.

King said that the jail is not an undue burden for the county, however.

“We are making it just fine,” King said. “We are covering the debt. We are covering the operation. We are covering personnel.”

That said, if the new jail brought in more money, it could bolster the sheriff’s budget — which is a bitter source of contention between the county commissioners and Sheriff Curtis Cochran.

“When he first started as sheriff, I told him all this is done as a business plan,” County Manager Kevin King said. “The more revenue generated the more deputies and law enforcement we are going to be able to fund.”

When the new jail opened last fall, the county added five additional jailers, two new deputies and an extra secretary.

But King said the additional staff was contingent on an influx of inmates, which never materialized.

“It is like McDonald’s or anywhere else. If you aren’t selling hamburgers they are going to lay people off and send them home,” King said.

As the county grappled with a budget shortfall for the new fiscal year, commissioners looked to the jail to make cuts. The county cut four positions that had been added in the past year.

Two of the laid-off staff had been hired as jailers but had since been made deputies after Cochran realized he didn’t need that many jailers. A third layoff targeted one of the two new deputies added over the past year. The fourth layoff targeted the additional secretary position added over the past year.

An ongoing feud

Cochran still has one more deputy and three more jailers than he did a year ago, but has publicly criticized the commissioners’ decision to cut his staff. He accused the county commissioners of jeopardizing the safety of Swain County’s citizens by underfunding his department.

Cochran had increased deputies on the night shift from two to three. Now, he’s back down to two. If both are tied up on calls, residents are left with no backup, he said.

King points out that Cochran’s budget is still bigger than his predecessor’s, former sheriff Bob Ogle.

In reality, the Cochran’s budget comprises the exact same percentage of the total county budget now as it did under Ogle.

For the 2009-2010 fiscal year, the sheriff’s office accounts for 8 percent of the total county budget and the jail accounts for 7 percent of the county’s budget. It’s the exact same percentage as 2005-2006, the last budget allocated by commissioners under the tenure of former sheriff Bob Ogle.

Cochran’s supporters have accused the commissioners of playing politics with his budget. The commissioners are all Democrats, while Cochran is a Republican.

“There is nothing political about this issue,” King countered.

King pointed to the number of new vehicles the county provided Cochran’s office this year. Typically, the county replaces two or three vehicles a year, and sometimes skips a year altogether. This year, the county bought five new vehicles for the sheriff’s office.

Cochran and the commissioners have been warring over the sheriff’s budget since Cochran took office in late 2006. Cochran suffered a major blow to his own salary when the commissioners ended a lucrative arrangement to feed inmates enjoyed by Cochran’s predecessors. When the commissioners decided to end the long-standing practice on the eve of Cochran taking office, it was seen as political retribution.

Cochran has a lawsuit pending against the commissioners, claiming they effectively reduced his salary in violation of state statutes. Commissioner David Monteith has consistently sided with Cochran and against his fellow commissioners on budget issues.

Budget expenses

Swain county budget expenditures by year:

Jail, 2009-2010:    $875,000

Jail, 2006-2007:    $715,000

Percent of total county budget both years:    7%

Sheriff Dept., 2009-2010:    $964,000

Sheriff Dept., 2006-2007:    $796,000

Percent of total county budget both years:    8%

When Jim Lowe strikes out on his twice-monthly foray to check insect traps in the Smokies, he never knows just what is in store.

Lowe runs various and sundry traps — tiny cups sunk in the ground, large mesh nets draped from poles and funnels dangling in the tree canopy. As a volunteer for the All Taxa Biological Inventory, Lowe ambushes moths, spiders, millipedes, bees, flies, beetles and the whole array of insects in the name of science.

During his collection rounds, he often wonders, “Is this a new species?” It is usually months, or even years, until he knows the answer, after taxonomists get their hands on the specimens and cull through them.

But to Lowe, the ATBI is more than the thrill of the hunt, more than a laundry list of new species or bragging rights as the most diverse park.

“We are asking the fundamental question: what do each of these things do? What is their role in the ecosystem?” said Lowe, who lives outside Robbinsville. “The Smokies is a most extraordinary place. There is so much diversity.”

The quest to document every life form in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has rallied researchers from across the globe, inspired by this last frontier of exploration. While cavers probed the park’s limestone depths, climbers harnessed ropes to explore life in the vast canopy of old-growth trees. Teams outfitted in wetsuits and snorkels peered under rocks in the ancient river beds, while others combed the dank underside of logs for mysterious breeds of fungus.

The undertaking is the first of its kind in the world. Ten years and counting, the ATBI still has long way to go. The Smokies is a bastion of biodiversity and ferreting out the estimated 60,000 species hasn’t been easy.

“Some of it’s under the ground, some of it’s on top of the tree canopy, some if it’s out at night when we’re not around,” said Paul Super, a research coordinator for the Smokies who is stationed at the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center in Haywood County, N.C.

Some species are so specialized they appear only when the right conditions align, perhaps every 20 years or more. Super has been waiting for years for a good winter snow pack to reveal rare slime mold species that only emerge under the right spring thaw conditions.

While discovering new species is exhilarating in its own right, it’s not the driver behind the ATBI, Super said.

“We have been charged with protecting this 550,000-acre black box, to take care of all the resources that are in it and make sure they will survive centuries into the future while allowing people to visit and enjoy the park,” Super said “We want to open the black box and see what’s in it so we can protect its biological diversity with a foundation of science and understanding.”

While the ATBI has earned the Smokies bragging rights as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, Park Ranger Keith Langdon says the ATBI is much more than a ledger of species.

“How could it make us be more intelligent stewards of the park forever?” asked Langdon, chief of inventory and monitoring in the park.

Until the ATBI, the park had only a vague idea of what birds lived where, but now they have maps of breeding grounds for different species and the niche microclimates they inhabit, Langdon said.

Todd Witcher, the executive director of Discover Life in America, doesn’t discount the value of sheer knowledge: science for science’s sake.

“People are interested in what’s out there. Anytime you go on a hike, people want to know, ‘What is that? What is this? What’s behind that rock?’” Witcher said. “Sometimes it doesn’t go any further than putting a name to something.”

But the study of individual species is a key to unlocking the secrets of the ecosystem as a whole.

“An ecosystem is made up of all these things that are interdependent. The big stuff wouldn’t be there without the small stuff,” Witcher said. “In general, we are trying to find out what the small stuff is and how it connects to all those bigger things.”

Life on earth hinges on thousands of “cryptic yet important” microorganisms, according to Peter White, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and board member of Discover Life in America.

The ATBI is going a long way to detect those critical links, like the slime mold that decomposes fallen logs and leaves, creating fertile soil for acorns to sprout. The oak from that acorn will one day become a winter den for a black bear giving birth to cubs — all on the backs of the microscopic slime mold that until now no one knew existed.

A worthy cause

At Discover Life in America, Witcher’s job is to convince the public — and people handing out grants — that the ATBI has value beyond an interesting counting exercise. Discover Life in America is the non-profit established to coordinate the operation, from training volunteers to the all-important fundraising.

When pitching the ATBI, the allure of pharmaceutical discoveries or DNA breakthroughs rise to the top. For example, the Smokies has garnered repute for its slime molds, bestowed with the charming title of “Slime Mold Capital of the World.” While slime molds have all sorts of important roles — an anchor at the bottom of the food chain that higher life depends on — medical researchers have latched on to a particular slime mold species from the Smokies as holding a cure for Alzheimer’s.

The ATBI has provided a platform for scientists to collude with the other top experts in their field, such as a fly blitz held a couple of years ago.

“There were 25 brilliant scientist from all over the world to study flies,” Witcher said, ticking off countries like Israel, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea and Peru.

They collected flies and studied specimens by day, and took turns putting on mini-presentations at night. Man’s understanding of the natural world was better off at week’s end than at the beginning.

Even flies have a vital function. They are the top pollinator after bees, and in maggot form they play a vital role in decomposition of dead animals and plants.

The ATBI has captured the imagination of scientists worldwide. More than 700 researchers from 20 countries have flocked to the Smokies to be a part of the ATBI. What started as a scrappy undertaking, even a pipedream, has become the largest sustained natural history inventory in the world.

“Assisted by volunteers and with only a shoestring budget, they have built it into a major enterprise of biological research,” according to famous Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson.

The ATBI has not only enchanted scientists, but it has dropped school children into the woods as first-hand explorers.

“Children are innately curious about the living world and are closer to the ground than we are — and more ready to turn over rocks and logs,” White said.

School children from surrounding communities on fieldtrips in the park have been enlisted in the hunt for everything from moths to salamanders.

Life on a string

One of the scariest tasks staring down the Smokies is protecting species found nowhere else on earth. Known as endemic species, these hyperlocal life forms carved out a niche on the planet so specific that if they disappear from the park, they disappear forever.

“The national park’s mission is to protect what exists in the park,” Witcher said. “If you don’t know what’s there, you don’t know what is disappearing.”

And the threats are daunting.

“There’s air pollution. There’s global warming. There is acid rain. There is urban development jutting right up next to the park. There is overuse, loving our park to death. There are also invasive exotic species,” Witcher said.

So, the ATBI is providing a crucial baseline to measure future changes against, the very diversity of the Smokies serving as a giant canary in the coal mine.

“Ecosystems and species provide for an early warning system for the health of the biosphere and the human habitat,” White said.

The Smokies’ biodiversity is partly due to its array of unique habitats: a combination of warm valleys and frosty peaks, moist rich coves and dry southern slopes, creating hundreds of microclimates and ecosystems. Each niche teems with its own thriving species.

The peak biodiversity is found in mid-range elevations, where the lower and higher altitude species overlap. That’s something the park didn’t realize prior to the ATBI, Langdon said.

The Smokies’ high-elevation ridges host numerous species otherwise found in more northern climes. Isolated from the rest of their species since the last Ice Age, these northern vagabonds trapped on high-elevation islands in the Smokies can evolve on their own track and end up genetically different from their northern cousin.

One such peripheral population marked a major milestone in the ATBI — the 5,000th species discovered in the Park that was not previously known to dwell here.

The Velvet Leaf Blueberry was found during an inventory field day at the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center at Purchase Knob in Haywood County. The thigh-high shrub was first encountered in the Park a few years earlier, but eluded botanists until it was found blooming during an ATBI field day.

Not every species uncovered by the ATBI is cause to celebrate. Take another find from Purchase Knob, a small round beetle found feeding on St. John’s Wort by two volunteers, retired entomologist Dr. Charles Stains and his wife.

Their unfortunate find was the “Klamath Weed Beetle,” an invasive species from Europe and Northern Africa, adding to the depressingly long list of exotics undermining the native ecosystem. Another exotic species unearthed during the inventory is the Chinese jumping worm. It aggressively devours organic matter before it can be synthesized by the soil, severely compromising the nutrient composition.

The worm was likely released inadvertently by fishermen who had purchased the worms from bait shops. Thanks to the ATBI, the species was detected before becoming widespread in the Park and can hopefully be stopped.

How it all began

When the Smokies launched the ATBI in 1998, it was the first of its kind in the world. Despite the many parks and preserves now emulating the research, the Smokies remains at the forefront.

Along the way, the Smokies benefited from a little blind luck. In the early 1990s, a famous and pre-eminent tropical ecologist, Dr. Dan Janzen, began rallying scientists to join him in an inventory of life in Costa Rica. Janzen urged ecologists to take note of the critical crossroads facing the planet today: that we’re losing life faster than we can catalog it.

Janzen raised millions for his project and entrusted it to an agency created to spearhead the Costa Rica project. But it barely got off the ground before the agency recanted, pitching other uses for the money than just the species inventory.

Janzen was furious. He terminated the project, leaving the hordes of scientists geared up for the undertaking not only disappointed but wondering what to do next.

From his corner of the Smokies, biologist Keith Langdon watched the rise and fall of Janzen’s great tropical inventory. Langdon and his fellow park rangers had long held the notion that life here in the Smokies was just as rich — and fragile — as the famed rainforests.

“We, too, are losing things faster than we can catalog it,” Langdon said.

Langdon occasionally finagled small pots of money for tailored inventory work, like the number of crayfish in a particular stream or the trees preferred for breeding by a single endangered bat.

“It would have taken us about 150 years at that rate to finish the inventory of the park,” Langdon said.

So Langdon called the fuming Janzen and pitched the idea of deploying an inventory in the Smokies instead. Janzen was in, but they couldn’t do it without support from the world’s scientists. Unsure if those who’d previously signed on for Costa Rica would invest in the Smokies, Janzen agreed to hold an informal talk in the park to gauge interest.

“We had 120 scientists show up,” Langdon recalled. “He’d gotten the taxonomists all excited. They were looking forward to showing what they could do if they all joined together.”

Langdon still needed a green light from national park bureaucrats, so the lobbying began. In a fitting move, the deputy director of the park service flew down from D.C. on Earth Day (April 20) of 1998.

“He said ‘Yup, let’s do this. We want to try this out and the Smokies will be our pilot. We aren’t going to give you any money, but you can do it,’” Langdon recalled.

Then began the tough job of logistics. Who would run it, where would money come from, where should scientists start counting?

“We knew it was a big deal, a big commitment and a lot of work,” Langdon said. “It’s a big park, it’s diverse and difficult to get around. We knew it wouldn’t be easy.”

The park looked to Friends of the Smokies for help. The Friends agreed to help launch the project, but ultimately planned to spin off a separate non-profit tasked solely with managing the ATBI. Together with the Great Smoky Mountains Association, Friends of the Smokies co-sponsored the creation of Discover Life in America to get the ball rolling.

Trial and error

Now the brass tacks could begin. But the logistics of just how to do this thing proved difficult. In fact, 10 years into the project, Langdon is still sorting out the best approach.

When people hear about the ATBI, they envision a chain of scientists sweeping quadrants of the park, crawling along the ground with a magnifying glass in hand, perhaps a crew leader bellowing through a megaphone for all the critters out there to please stand still for a head count.

But in fact, there will still be vast sections of the park never touched by scientists when the books are eventually closed on the ATBI. Instead, the park will pick sampling sites that theoretically represent every habitat niche.

The past decade has focused on just 11 plots subjected to intensive sampling. A rotating door of experts on spiders, moths, ants, slime molds, fungi, and birds took their turn trapping and tagging at the targeted plots. Teams of volunteers were critical in the sampling, from checking insect traps, wielding nets or toting clipboards for the scientists.

The plots had to be checked and rechecked every two weeks all year long, since many species emerge during certain seasons, whether it is a short-lived wildflower or a bat showing up to nest. For example, the synchronous fireflies, famous for their choreographed light show and found few places other than the Smokies, are only active for a 10-day window. The “when and where” of species is a critical part of the ATBI data.

“If somebody came to me and gave me a list of all the species, it wouldn’t help me. I need to know where they are at, their abundance, the seasonality of it, which ones are rare to keep track of and which ones are common, and something about their ecological role,” Langdon said.

That initial strategy — intensive sampling at 11 sites — wasn’t perfect, however. For starters, the parade of bio blitzes and life quests raked in an unmanageable volume of organisms still queued up waiting for a taxonomist to inspect them, Langdon said. The backlog could take years to clear out, specimens languishing in storerooms for want of scientists to sort them.

Plus, the 11 sites weren’t representative enough of the park’s numerous microhabitats, Langdon’s realized.

“We just missed it with 11 sites,” Langdon said.

Enter the next phase of the ATBI: far more sites, but far less intensive. The park mapped out 150 sampling sites for quick hits, comparatively, by tactical teams. The new strategy will likely define the next decade of the ATBI.

In the Smokies’ footsteps

National parks and private preserves all over the world are tackling similar inventories. Exactly how many isn’t known, but there were nine that cropped up at other national parks in 2008 alone. Top that off with some at state parks, private nature preserves and parks around the world, and there are likely a couple of dozen.

“A lot of people initially said ‘You can’t do that, it is too much,’” Langdon said. “I think we have shown you can make some great strides wading into that. There are a lot of parks following in our footsteps.”

For a national park embarking on a species inventory, their first step is usually calling Todd Witcher at Discover Life in America for advice.

“We are helping the other ATBIs learn from our mistakes and learn from our knowledge,” Witcher said. “We want to share that information even though there will probably be a little competition.”

That competition — whether for grant money or luring researchers — has contributed to a slowdown of the Smokies own ATBI.

Witcher’s top bit of advice: the drudgery of data management. A laundry list of species isn’t useful unless they can be mapped, charted, sorted and searched with computer programs.

“We are still dealing with our backlogged data,” Witcher said.

Discover Life in America is more than an ATBI facilitator. Witcher sees the nonprofit as a scientific arm of the park, coordinating science and research on a host of levels. Discover Life has an annual budget of about $120,000, varying with grants. The nonprofit recruits and coordinates volunteers, raises awareness for science in the park, manages teams of researchers cycling through the project, stores the data and generally makes the ATBI possible.

Friends of the Smokies and the Great Smoky Mountains Association provide the core of Discover Life in America’s budget.

The road ahead

The ATBI will likely continue in some form for decades to come, although it will taper off in intensity. A decision no one relishes is when to declare mission accomplished.

“If we get to 90 percent, is that enough?” Witcher asked. “The last 10 percent is probably really, really rare and hard to find, so do you want to spend a lot of money on something that is going to take a lot of effort and be really difficult to complete?”

But getting to 90 percent is still a long way off. So far, 16,000 species have been identified. Scientists believe the park holds as many as 60,000.

As Phil Francis, a long-time assistant superintendent of the park once remarked, “How many species are there in the Smokies? It reminds me of the question we used to get at Mammoth Cave National Park: How many miles of unexplored cave are there?”

Another challenge is keeping the public excited about yet another slime mold or millipede.

“About half of all the species in the park are believed to be insects and other invertebrates,” Langdon said. Lichen and plants take up another good chunk of the pie. That leaves perhaps just 1 percent for the birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians and mammals that most capture the public’s interest — or at least until now. The ATBI has moved the public’s image of the Smokies beyond the bears and elk and trout.

“The project draws people from the human scale to see the hidden, unknown, and obscure, but often beautiful, intricate, and ecologically important species of natural ecosystems,” White said. “It shows parks as oases, storehouses, and protectors of biological diversity.”