While Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers has seen several budgets during his previous stint as an alderman, he appears to be pleased with his first as Mayor. 

As they prepare for the annual budgeting process, Swain County commissioners are considering placing a quarter-cent sales tax increase on the November ballot. 

With the 2018-19 preliminary budget in hand, Franklin Town Council will have a week to review it before the board’s May 15 budget workshop. 

It was a good day for Interim Haywood County Manager Joel Mashburn, and will probably go down as a good day for Haywood County taxpayers as well. 

Sylva residents won’t see a tax increase this year, but despite the proposed budget’s 15 percent spending increase over 2018-2019, purse strings will remain tight. 

Two years after the Sylva town board enacted a 42 percent increase in the city’s property tax rate, budget time has found the town without any extra cash to work with. In fact, Sylva will have to take $236,000 from its reserves in order to cover needed expenditures. 

Although it’s still early in the budget process, Interim Haywood County Manager Joel Mashburn told commissioners that requests for the FY 2018-19 budget already total more than $3 million over projected revenues. 

Haywood County’s high-performing public schools will see a small budget increase for the FY 2018-19 school year, but at the same time takes care of some critical needs, including teacher supplement pay that helps attract and retain the best instructors. 

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget calls on Congress to fund the overdue remaining balance of $39.2 million owed to Swain County from the North Shore Road settlement agreement made with the federal government back in 2010. 

Drawing more than 300 million visitors each year, the National Park Service is both a reservoir of natural beauty and an economic anchor for the communities surrounding its lands — and many of those communities are now banding together to demand that Congress address the parks’ $11.3 billion maintenance backlog.

“To know what this means to us — the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park — and for us to have to ask them for some sustainable revenue to keep these parks going, it’s almost like asking somebody to take care of their baby,” Jackson County Commissioner Boyce Dietz said before the board unanimously passed a resolution in favor of sustained funding Dec. 18, 2017.