Waynesville mayor: Pick one

Mayor Gavin Brown, 64, attorney. Mayor for four years, town alderman for eight

Every morning Mayor Gavin Brown dons his town of Waynesville pin on his suit lapel before heading out the door to his law office. If he forgets, his wife never fails to remind him.

Brown makes a habit of strolling Main Street almost every day. He sticks his head in businesses to say “hello.” If he sees tourists taking pictures, he offers to step behind the camera so the whole family can be in the photo. If he sees men loitering on benches while their wives shop, he stops and hands out his mayor’s business card.

“I say ‘I have a few minutes, I’m the mayor, what do you want to know?’” Brown said. In exchange, he queries them on where they’re from and why they chose to visit Waynesville.

“It’s fun for me to do that,” Brown said. “I am nondiscriminatory … I talk to anybody.”

Those who know him wouldn’t doubt it. He even carries a list of all the downtown eateries to offer tourists wondering where they should eat.

Earlier this summer he noticed an elderly lady on Main Street who was feeling faint. He helped her inside the nearest business, LN Davis Insurance agency. He asked the employees to get her some water and offered to call her a medic.

“I really feel that my job is to be the head cheerleader for the people of Waynesville,” Brown said.

Brown’s four years of mayor have been devoid of controversy, scandal or dissent, giving him a clear leg up against his challenger.

Low voter turnout is a fear among the incumbents, however. If voters happy with the direction of the town feel the current leaders are a shoe-in and stay home on Election Day, a minority of voters with an ax to grind could swing the race.

Hugh Phillips, 50, co-manager at Bi-Lo grocery

Hugh Phillips ran unsuccessfully for mayor four years ago, but undeterred, he is back for another bid. Phillips said that people might not have taken him seriously last time. After all, he jumped right into politics for the first time in the mayor’s ring, rather than wading in as a town board candidate first. But there’s a reason, he said.

“If I ran for alderman and got elected, I don’t know if I could get along with the rest of the people on there. I think we would have butting heads,” Phillips said.

Of course, even as mayor, Phillips would still have to sit shoulder to shoulder with the other board members in meetings, and his vote doesn’t count any more than their votes on the issues. But he thinks he would get to control discussion more, he said.

“I said if I was going to do this, I was determined to make a difference, so that’s why I am running for mayor and not alderman,” Phillips said.

Phillips said he has been to one or two town board meetings, and none since signing up to run for election.

As a manager of Bi-Lo, customers are constantly bending Phillip’s ear, and not just about what aisle the bread is on.

“People tell me the town board is not approachable. They aren’t in touch for the citizens of Waynesville,” Phillips said. “If you are elected to office you should be working for the people. That’s my first and foremost.

“People’s got to be able to talk to you. It’s who you work for is the people of Waynesville,” Phillips said.

Phillips said the biggest thing that motivated him to run is the town’s development standards, which he said are too strict and are deterring new business.

Phillips was not aware that the town board relaxed some of the standards earlier this year in response to complaints from the business community.

Waynesville town board: Pick four

Alderman Wells Greeley, 59, president and owner of Wells Funeral Homes and Cremation Services. Alderman for three years

Wells Greeley was appointed to the town board to fill a vacancy left when former Alderman Kenneth Moore died three years ago. It wasn’t exactly new to him, however. He’d been on the town board in Canton for four years in the early 1980s. Both his father and grandfather were town aldermen as well.

Greeley said serving on the Waynesville town board has been an “enjoyable and rewarding experience.” The board is professional, courteous and thoughtful. The board is devoid from petty politics that plague some small towns. There are no entrenched camps, no staking out of sides before meetings.

“Everybody is an individual,” Greeley said. “It was a pleasant surprise to me to know that everybody’s voice was really heard. We didn’t always agree, but at the end of the day, we came away with a respect.

“I was fortunate to come on board and inherit such a good team. I want to try to continue the great work we are doing,” he said.

Greeley credits the board’s demeanor, in part, to Town Manager Lee Galloway. It’s why finding the right replacement for him when he retires next year is what Greeley calls “Job One.”

“That is going to be the most critical issue that the new elected town board will face,” Greeley said.

The town has hired a consultant to aid with the search. A glutton for public input processes, the town has asked the consultants to include community leaders in crafting a vision for what skills and traits the next town manager should possess.

Greeley believes he is well suited to the important task. He was on the UNC-Asheville board of trustees when it conducted a search for a new chancellor. And as a business owner with 15 full-time and 20 part-time employees on the payroll, he is no stranger to hiring.

Leroy Roberson, 67, owner of Haywood Optometric Care. Alderman for four years

Leroy Roberson has been an eye doctor on Main Street for 35 years and remembers all too well the days when downtown wasn’t the vibrant place it is now. More than a quarter of the storefronts were shuttered, and buildings had fallen into disrepair.

“Slowly but surely with the efforts of the Downtown Waynesville Association, it has come back and it has become a model for other downtowns. Statewide people know Waynesville,” Roberson said. “It has shown us what can be done when there is a public and private synergy. The amount of money the town has put in to streetscapes is small compared to the private investment, and the result is you have some very viable businesses.”

Roberson considers the town’s investment in downtown “less than a drop in bucket” compared to the benefits it has reaped.

The success story shapes Roberson’s philosophy for the town now. Take pride in the town, invest in it, make it attractive, and prosperity will follow.

“You can take pride in Waynesville now because of what’s been done,” Roberson said.

Roberson, who previously served on the Waynesville town board in the 1990s, has also learned the worth of local business owners who are vested in their community. While some opponents in the race complain the town’s development standards don’t accommodate chain store style architecture, Roberson places a higher value on local businesses anyway.

“If you spend $100 in a local restaurant, $68 of the revenue will be circulated through the community. If you go to a chain like Cracker Barrel or Sonic or anything like that, $45 recirculates through the community. Which would you rather have? For me it is a no brainer,” Roberson said.

Roberson said an important goal for the next four years is creating a vision and plan for South Main Street, the corridor around Super Wal-Mart. He doesn’t want it to become another Russ Avenue, but instead wants the town to lay the groundwork for a pedestrian-friendly, aesthetically pleasing mixed-use district.

Gary Caldwell, 58, production manager at Cornerstone Printing. Alderman for 12 years

When Gary Caldwell first ran for office 12 years ago, his platform was recreation, namely pushing through a town recreation center.

Little has changed, at least as far as his platform is concerned. The recreation center, a crown jewel for Waynesville, is now built. But Caldwell’s got other projects he’s pushing for. He’s the chief advocate behind a skateboard park currently under development. The town has put in $80,000, and gotten $80,000 in grants. That’s only half what’s needed, however, and Caldwell is working on fundraising.

Caldwell also wants to nurture recreation offerings at the Waynesville Armory, which has blossomed lately as a senior recreation center, from bridge games to the new Brain Gym.

“The big thing down there now is pickle ball,” Caldwell said. “You can’t hardly get a parking space.”

Caldwell wants the town to buy a neighboring vacant lot to create more parking for the Armory, and then build sidewalks and plant trees along the street leading to the Armory from Frog Level.

This ties in with his other pet project: revitalizing Frog Level. Caldwell works in Frog Level, and has been active in forging a path from the forgotten side of the tracks to a flavorful downtown business district.

“They call me the mayor of Frog Level,” Caldwell said.

He is brokering a deal now among Frog Level merchants and the town to install street lamps in Frog Level, borrowing from a similar project on Main Street years ago. Businesses raised money for the lampposts, while the town streets and utility workers provided the labor to install them. Caldwell remembers the lamppost project on Main Street nearly failed.

“We just kept bearing down on it,” Caldwell said. And that is his motto for the next four years.

“We just got to keep going on the same track that we are going,” Caldwell said.

Mary Ann Enloe, 70, retired Dayco senior purchasing agent

Mary Ann Enloe is a well-known local politician. She was a county commissioner for eight years and the mayor of Hazelwood for 12 years, its own town prior to merging with Waynesville.

Her heart is in town government, she said. She grew up immersed in it: her father was mayor in Hazelwood for 27 years.

“I have the experience. I have the interest. I have the time,” Enloe said. “If I have a platform, it’s common sense. My daddy taught me that. If all else fails common sense will carry you through.”

Enloe also believes she can bring representation to the Hazelwood area and west side of town.

“Historically people look to me to be their voice when they think they don’t have a voice,” she said when asked who her constituents in politics have been.

Enloe won’t say anything negative about the current town board, however. She has had a bird’s eye view of town government for the past year as a correspondent covering the town for The Mountaineer newspaper.

She quit being a correspondent for the paper after announcing plans to run, given the obvious conflict of interest. But she kept right on going to the twice-a-month town meetings all the same.

That, coupled with her years in town and county government, means she won’t have a learning curve if elected, she said.

She knows the town’s tax rate to the 100th of a penny — 40.82 cents. She can recite how much profit the town made selling electricity last year — $1.2 million. She knows how much debt the town has now, how much will be paid off this year, how much a penny on the property tax rate raises.

“I have a lot to offer,” Enloe said.

As for her view of elected leaders?

“We work for close to 10,000 people,” Enloe said of the town’s population. “We have 10,000 bosses.”

Sam Edwards, 57, substitute teacher and GED instructor

Sam Edwards is conservative by any standard. He believes in not just small, but extremely small government. He believes in only the bare minimum of regulations, preferring for government to get out of the way of business.

Edwards helped start a group called the Waynesville-Haywood Concerned Citizens, which shares many of the ideas and philosophies of the Tea Party.

“There is cross fertilization,” Edwards said of his group and local Tea party followers. The concerned citizens group has registered as a Political Action Committee to donate to town board candidates and take out political ads for candidates.

A web site created by the group blames the town for driving away new businesses with its too-strict development guidelines — guidelines that mandate sidewalks, require so many trees in parking lots, limit the height of signs, and lay out architectural standards.

Edwards said government shouldn’t intervene in such things. If a business wants to build, don’t tell them where or how. Business sense should dictate they build something that looks decent.

“I do not think a responsible business is going to trash the neighborhood they are moving into because they know it is bad for business,” Edwards said.

Edwards admits the metal warehouse design of new Dollar General’s cropping up in the county or the cinderblock architecture that was a hallmark of Walmart in days-gone-by wasn’t particularly pleasing. Nonetheless, he doesn’t like government intervention when it comes to what gets built on private property.

“You have to trust people to make decisions that are good decisions and allow them to be adults and occasionally make mistakes and fail,” Edwards said.

Edwards said government can’t be the problem solver for everything. If kids need a skate park, then private enterprise, not the town, should step up to the plate.

Julia Boyd-Freeman, 44, director of REACH, a domestic violence nonprofit

Julia Boyd-Freeman made an important choice when she moved back to her hometown of Waynesville in her mid-20s.

“The people make the town. It has such a personality of its own that is unique in a way that you don’t see in many areas, and the natural beauty is just incredible.”

That same passion for Waynesville has motivated her to seek a seat on the town board.

“I have a fresh perspective that I think could bring some positive solutions to the challenges we are going to be facing and opportunities coming down the pipeline,” Freeman said.

Freeman was working as an interior designer when she landed the role of REACH director 15 years ago. The organization was between directors, and Freeman, who was on the board, stepped in to serve as an interim but never left.

Freeman is billing herself as a pro-business candidate.

Freeman is one of three challengers in the race criticizing the town’s development standards as too strict. Despite an overhaul of the standards over the past year, a process driven by a blue-ribbon committee comprised mostly of businessmen, Freeman believes the town’s ordinances need to be loosened even more to remove “undue burdens” on business.

“I think it is a priority to start that review process again,” Freeman said.

Freeman is one of three candidates being supported by the conservative group Waynesville-Haywood Concerned Citizens. Freeman, a Republican, does not share all their views, however. She does not believe the town’s new fire and police department are extravagant, nor does she believe the town has been wasteful in spending.

As part of her pro-business platform, Freeman also wants to develop a new road plan for South Main Street that will make the corridor more fertile for business growth. She is concerned about the ability of the town’s aging sewer lines to serve business expansion and wants to perform an assessment of the system.

Coming next week: Did Cracker Barrel really walk away from Waynesville?

Waynesville’s elected leaders believe the town is on a progressive track, one that has made Waynesville one of the most prosperous and desirable towns in Western North Carolina for business and tourists.

The town has been a magnet for development despite the recession, from giant chains such as Best Buy, Staples and PetSmart, to local entrepreneurs opening upscale restaurants, microbreweries and art galleries.

But opponents claim that town leaders have been unfriendly to business, imposing costly development standards. Aimed at improving the aesthetics of commercial districts, the town standards are too arduous and have deterred business from locating here, they say.

The Smoky Mountain News will investigate the truth behind these claims next week.

Just beyond the large glass doors and computer paper “Coming Soon” signs, Clark Williams is filling kegs with his flagship brews.

“Getting open is the challenge right now,” Williams said, who is anxious to see people socializing at Frog Level Brewing Company in Waynesville.

Although it is technically a bar, Williams said he wants the brewery to be more — a family friendly establishment. In addition to beer, Frog Level will sell kids’ drinks such as root beer. Since the brewery will not sell food, Williams suggests ordering a pizza for delivery or picking up some Happy Meals to eat while both adults and kids enjoy their drinks.

The brewery also plans to have music Fridays and Saturdays and offer indoor corn hole.

There is no definitive opening date, but when it does open in the next few weeks, Frog Level will be the first brew house in Haywood County — one of three west of Asheville and one of 51 breweries in the state, according to the North Carolina Brewers Guild.

“I am trying to saturate the restaurants (with kegs) first, and that’s proved to be quite hard to do,” Williams said.

The brewery began selling kegs to local restaurants, including Bourbon Barrel Beef and Ale in Hazelwood and The Gateway Club in Waynesville in mid-October. A week later, the brewery had already sold 32 kegs.

Williams said he loves seeing people purchasing his beer. No one is forcing them to drink it or giving them free samples; they drink it because they like what he has to offer.

“That’s a part of this I never thought of,” he said. “It’s damn satisfying.”

For about a year, Williams sampled his various brews at The Gateway Club before settling on three beers — Lily’s Cream Boy, Catcher in the Rye and the Tadpole Porter. Tasters filled out anonymous comment cards that Williams used to figure out which of his concoctions consumers liked best.

Williams’ wife, Jenny, named the beers. Catcher in the Rye, also the name of a famous novel by J.D. Salinger, is brewed with rye, making it lighter than a traditional IPA.

“Ours is so not standard that I hesitate to call it an IPA,” Williams said.

The Tadpole Porter is an English-style ale made with sorghum from Buncombe County, and its name is an obvious reference to the business’ frog-theme.

The third brew has a more personal name. Lily is the mother of Fuzzy, a cream-colored hairless cat owned by the Williams’, hence the name Lily’s Cream Boy. The lightest of its three beers, it is brewed with flaked corn.

“It’s a microbrewery’s answer to a lager,” Williams said.

A beer takes four hours to brew, 14 to 20 days to ferment and another two or three days to carbonate in the kegs. With the exception of the grain, which is currently not grown in North Carolina, all of Frog Level’s beers are made solely with ingredients from within the state or even the county. The brewery buys its hops from Winding River Hops in Clyde.

“I don’t want to be the next Sam Adams,” Williams said. “I want to be the Haywood County brewery.”

In addition to its three regular brews, Williams plans to brew rare kegs throughout

the year. He will sell three rare kegs to area restaurants and one will be available on tap at Frog Level. Possible rare kegs include a banana wheat beer; Autumn Harvest, made with apples, honey and cinnamon; and Bug-eyed Stout, with of espresso beans from Panacea Coffee Company.

Kegs cost $75, while a glass of beer will cost $4. For the same price as a glass, customers can try four 4-ounce samples of Frog Level’s brews.

For now, the bar will only have four frog leg-shaped taps —three for the flagship beers and one for rare brews — but Williams hope to add a fifth “guest” tap that will feature beer from other North Carolina breweries.

Pulling from his surroundings — a creek and its tree-covered banks out back — Williams brings that same earthy, rustic feel inside his brewery.

A painted river runs along the floor, flowing into a giant pool. The walls are red brick or red-painted plaster, featuring pieces for sale from Ridge Runners Naturals. The bar itself is about four feet tall with a wood top and corrugated sheet metal around the base.

Behind the bar, Williams’ office door reads “Dawg,” a nickname his wife calls him.

Through green, glass doors a wood porch with picnic seating affords a view of Richland Creek that runs through Frog Level.

“Look at this place. Why wouldn’t you want to brew beer here?” Williams said, calling Frog Level the local underdog. His goal is to bring more life to the area, he said.

During the day, Williams, 37, works at down the street at Giles Chemical. Nights and weekends, he spends at the brewery, making beer and prepping for its imminent opening. The retired Marine has lived in the area his entire life and brewed beer for the last four or five years.

His vacations have always included breweries, Williams said, but it wasn’t until his visit to New Mexico that he decided to open one of his own.

“I want to get up early and love to come to work,” he said.

Hours:

Monday thru Wednesday 2 to 6:30 p.m.

Thursday thru Saturday 2 to 8:30 p.m.

Other stops on the microbrewery trail west of Asheville

• Heinzelmannchen Brewery, Sylva on Mill Street

• Nantahala Brewing Company, Bryson City on Depot Street

From no breweries to three:

Two other breweries are planning to open in Waynesville in the next year.

• HeadWaters Brewing Company

• Tipping Point Tavern

The Waynesville town board has hired a search firm to help with its hunt for a new town manager.

The board hired Developmental Associates LLC to coordinate the search, which will cost between $15,000 and $20,000.

Town Manager Lee Galloway will officially retire in April, but will stay on until summer so that he can train his successor and help steer the town through the critical spring budget process.

In mid-November, Stephen Straus, president of Developmental Associates, will visit Waynesville to meet with the board, residents and stakeholders. Straus will gather a list of traits and skills that applicants for the town manager position should possess.

The town manager oversees all of Waynesville’s departments, including the police, utilities and finance offices. Although his decisions are subject to approval by the Board of Alderman, he hires all town personnel, directs much of the day-to-day operations and is an opinion leader within the town. He must work with a variety of people, as the make-up of many local committees and boards change.

Because the town manager plays such a vital role, the board made the decision to hire a search firm and solicit public opinion.

“This is not like somebody sitting in a downtown office in Charlotte,” said Alderwoman Libba Feichter. “We are all neighbors here.”

The search firm will advertise the position nationally, though most applications will come from people who live in the state.

Galloway will be hard to replace, however.

“I think we need to realize that we will not find another Lee Galloway,” said Feichter, who has served on the town board for about 12 years.

The town will need to find someone with his or her own special talent, someone who will be a part of the community, she said.

Galloway has served as the town manager for 17 years. He could see advancing economic trouble and was able to lead the town and the board through tough financial times, Feichter said.

He also has the ability to find the perfect person who fits a job, she said, calling it one of his “most phenomenal” skills. Galloway has hired several notable local officials, including Waynesville Police Chief Bill Hollingsed and Electric Superintendent Philip Wyatt.

“You can look at who that person hired and figured out what type of person they are,” Feichter said. “He has been a phenomenal source of strength and understanding.”

Once the applicants have been narrowed down to fewer than 10, the remaining will undergo tests intended to reveal strengths and weaknesses. The three or four individuals with the highest scores will complete case studies, and the pool will again be narrowed. The board will then interview the finalists.

The board hopes to hire a new town manager by March, said Galloway.

All five seats on the town board are up for election in November. Feicther is not running for re-election, so there will be at least one new member on the board by the time it makes a decision.

Efforts are well under way in both Sylva and Franklin to build dog parks, places where folks’ canine companions can run off-leash in safely fenced, assigned areas.

If the two communities do build dog parks, they’ll be joining their neighbors to the east: the town of Waynesville already has two fenced romping grounds for dogs along Richland Creek Greenway. The town of Highlands in Macon County also has a half-acre dog park, complete with a five-foot-tall fence. Highlands is roughly a 40-minute drive from Franklin, however, putting it out of reach for regular use by Franklin’s dog owners.

Friends of the Greenway in Franklin has been talking about building a dog park for about six months, according to Doris Munday, a member of the nonprofit support arm for the greenway along the Little Tennessee River. Her dog “uses the mountains” as its dog park, Munday said, but that hasn’t blinded her from seeing the needs of others.

Dog owners, if their pooches are leashed and they cleanup waste deposited by their animals, can use the nearly five-mile paved greenway path in Franklin. But the dogs are not allowed off-leash along the popular trail, where upwards of 20,000 people a month can be found during the summer months. Munday said there have been some problems with “neighborhood dogs” trotting about the greenway unleashed and uninvited and apparently illiterate, too; these rowdy dogs are brazen in ignoring rules about leashes and cleanup that are posted along Franklin’s greenway.

Plans this week call for the Friends group to check in with the Macon County Board of Commissioners to make sure the county doesn’t have any objections to a dog park.

In this case, asking permission seemed optimal to begging forgiveness: Munday said no one is exactly sure whether commissioners’ permission is needed for the project to move forward, but that the group decided it seemed proper to find out.

Assuming everyone is OK with the idea, private funds would be solicited to purchase fencing. The hope is to enclose the dog park this winter. Later, if people want to donate more money, the dog park could be enhanced with additional doggie attractions, Munday said.

Some dog parks have separate areas for small and large dogs. Other parks even offer such amenities as dog-agility courses. One standard feature, which would be included if a dog park is built in Franklin, are baggie dispensers so that dog owners can easily cleanup any canine deposits.

Other than the upfront cost of fencing, maintenance on dog parks is relatively minor. In Waynesville, the Haywood Animal Welfare Association buys non-toxic flea control and volunteers regularly sprinkle it on the grass.

In Jackson County, an ad hoc group of dog owners in Sylva requested via a letter sent to the county that they be allowed to use a portion of Mark Watson Park on West Main Street. The Sylva Dog Park Advocates noted in the letter, sent to county officials last month, that it believes a dog park would be “a low cost yet high benefit” addition to Jackson County.

The letter is signed by Stacy Knotts, who serves as a town council member but isn’t acting in that official capacity on this particular project.

She wrote that the group of dog owners believes 10-acre Mark Watson Park, a county-owned facility, would be the best place for a dog park because it is centrally located in Sylva on the county’s (unfinished) greenway; there is open space in the park; there are already pet-owner education classes and the “Bark in the Park” festival taking place in Mark Watson, and such a park would encourage Jackson County’s residents “from letting pets run free on the ball fields, particularly the newly designed fields in the park.”

County Manager Chuck Wooten said the request is being reviewed.

It doesn’t take much of an artist’s eye to appreciate the newest piece of public art planned for the streets of downtown Waynesville.

By this time next year, a replica of a historic arch — boasting Waynesville as the “Eastern Entrance” to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park — will once again crown Main Street.

The original arch spanning Main Street dates to the mid-1930s and remained up for four decades. Mention the arch to locals, and nostalgia is quick to set in. The arch was larger than life, omnipresent in old memories of downtown.

For Buffy Phillips, it was marching under it during parades, banging away on a snare drum with the high school marching band.

“It was just part of Main Street,” said Phillips, now the director of the Downtown Waynesville Association. “It would have been great if we could have brought that back.”

Indeed, the town tried to resurrect the actual arch in all its glory, soaring over the street once more. But Main Street doubles as a state highway, and erecting an overhead arch didn’t pass muster with the N.C. Department of Transportation.

“We’d have to go through an act of Congress to do it,” said Mayor Gavin Brown. “It just wasn’t going to work.”

Instead, a replica of the arch will grace the entrance to a mini-park at the intersection of Main and Depot streets near the historic courthouse.

The arch will hopefully draw attention to the mini-park, which gets little use now. It is easily missed, or mistaken as a private space for the adjacent office building. The arch over its entrance will change that.

“I feel like it will be inviting people to make use of that park and chill out for a little bit,” said Ed Kelley, a member of the Waynesville Public Art Commission spearheading the effort.

Bringing back the arch will also rekindle Waynesville’s connection to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has slipped since those early decades after the park’s creation.

“I want Waynesville and North Carolina to have a better tie to the national park. I think we have let an asset go to waste over the years,” Brown said.

When the original arch went up, newfangled national parks were all the rage, and the region was beside itself over having one to call its own. The Smokies was the first national park in the East, joining the ranks of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon — and Waynesville was quick to hitch its wagon to that train.

After all, you couldn’t get to the Smokies without coming through Waynesville back then, so why not declare itself the “Eastern Entrance?”

There is some debate, albeit mild in nature, over how many different signs there were over the years.

“The consensus is there were three,” Brown said.

But not according to local historian Bruce Briggs, who counts only two. Briggs has an unfair advantage when it comes to arch trivia: his father built the original one back in 1936.

Briggs said the actual arch — bearing the words “Great Smoky Mountains National Park” — never changed. But a smaller sign beneath it did. Originally, an arrow-shaped sign hung from the arch baring the words “Eastern Entrance” and pointing down Depot Street, out of town, through Maggie Valley and eventually to the park, albeit 30 miles away.

The arrow was replaced at some point with a plaque listing the mileage to certain place names, like Black Camp Gap.

“The one giving the distances was put up later when Waynesville couldn’t exactly claim to be the eastern entrance anymore,” Briggs said.

New roads through the region meant traffic bound for the Smokies no longer had to pass through Waynesville’s doorstep.

Briggs was only 10 when his father built the arch while serving as superintendent of lights and water for the town. Oscar Briggs made the sign at the town maintenance garage, but Briggs believes the materials were paid for by the chamber of commerce.

Business leaders were a driving force behind the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, hoping to boost the tourism economy of the region. So it makes sense the chamber of commerce would commission the arch to draw attention to Waynesville’s proximity to the new destination.   

The arch finally started to show its age, however, and was taken down sometime around 1970.

“It was getting in bad shape,” said long-time former mayor Henry Foy, who grew up on Main Street in the 1930s.

No one knows for sure where that old arch is today, but Foy has little doubt it ended up on the scrap heap somewhere.

Foy remembers it laying in the yard outside the town’s maintenance shed after being taken down, getting more and more corroded.

Tribute to the Smokies

The arch replica is just one piece of art that will commemorate the Great Smoky Mountains. There will eventually be a trifecta of public art pieces in the mini-park to represent the Smokies.

One is already in place: a hand-forged metal railing with subtle references to the Smokies, including mountain peaks and salamanders.

The final art piece for the mini-park will be a series of metal panels mounted on the wall of the office building beside the park. In an odd bit of real estate lore, the wall of the office building is town property. While the rest of the building is owned by Jeff Norris’ law firm, the town-owned wall is fair game for sporting town-sanctioned art.

“The mini park is a strategic part of our Main Street,” said Jan Griffin, chair of the public art commission. “It will be a great place for people to sit and relax.”

The art commission still has to raise money for the piece, which Kelley estimates could be around $6,000. But he thinks fundraising will come easily.

“It is a commemorative piece. So many people remember the arch and will support bringing back that element of Waynesville that has been missing for a long time,” Kelley said.

As for what words to put on the replica? The public art commission has gone with an approximation. Instead of “Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Eastern Entrance” the arch will say “Gateway to the Smokies: Waynesville, North Carolina.”

“History and art and commercial endeavors all come into play,” Brown said. “A lot of people want to see the name Waynesville in the sign.”

Brown figures the arch will become the most photographed spot downtown, and there’s no better publicity than tourists posing under it and posting photos of themselves to Facebook with the town’s name in them.

When new bikers show up for his weekly ride in Waynesville, Cecil Yount pulls out all the stops: a riveting trip through town to Super Wal-Mart and back.

While lacking in scenery, Yount is sending a message to the cyclists — look how easy it is to bike to the store.

Yount’s regular jaunts down South Main Street give him a rare insight on traffic, one he hopes to impart as the town crafts a vision for a South Main makeover. Namely, Yount doesn’t think the street needs to be much wider than it already is.

“I have yet to see the need for four lanes of traffic,” Yount said. “There have been fairly minimal times I have spent sitting waiting on a light. I just don’t see it.”

Yount, the chair of Bicycle Haywood NC, plans to be front and center at a road design workshop next Tuesday when the town will collect input on South Main from the community.

Perhaps it’s no surprise a cyclist wants a quainter road, one with slower traffic, wide sidewalks, shady trees, and not as many lanes for cars.

But even development interests aren’t necessarily clamoring for more lanes, even though South Main sports the ultimate magnet for commercial sprawl. Property owners raced to put their lots on the market when Super Wal-Mart came to town three years ago. They are still waiting for the boon, although real estate experts claim it will come to fruition sooner or later and has merely been sidelined by the recession.

Brian Noland, a Realtor with RE/MAX Mountain Realty, represents half a dozen sellers marketing their property for commercial development along South Main. His office sits on South Main, making Noland another authority when it comes to sizing up traffic needs on the road.

His verdict: three lanes would do nicely, perhaps even with roundabouts instead of the standard stoplights.

When asked whether South Main seems congested, Noland paused, then answered, “I don’t think it is.”

To be sure, he wheeled around and asked his coworkers in the office. Not congested, they concurred.

Noland believes South Main will eventually be home to a row of fast-food restaurants, drug stores and retail. But he wants to keep “our hometown image.”

But Noland is also trying to protect the lots he’s marketing. More lanes will eat into the property fronting South Main and make the lots harder to develop, he said.

That’s also why he’s a fan of roundabouts. Traffic lights equal turn lanes for stacks of cars to pile up while waiting for their signal. Those turn lanes add to the road’s width and encroach on precious commercial lots.

Roundabouts, on the other hand, keep traffic moving and don’t need turn lanes for cars to queue up in, Noland said.

Waynesville has two roundabouts, which were initially met with skepticism but in practice have been well received.

“I didn’t like them immediately when I moved here because they were new, but they really move the traffic through,” Noland said.

Road designers with the N.C. Department of Transportation are conducting their own feasibility study of South Main concurrently with the town, and have proposed a large four-lane road with a center median.

“I think everyone has been assuming that is what will happen there, that it will be four lanes,” said Paul Benson, Waynesville’s town planner.

But Benson said the DOT plan is too big and too wide for the town’s tastes. Town leaders want a more tailored vision, designed in keeping with smart growth principles and walkable community ideals.

“DOT strictly stuck with just a road and trying to get people through the area as fast as efficiently as they could,” said Mark Teague, a private traffic engineer consultant in Waynesville.

That’s largely what led the town to pursue a feasibility study of its own. The independent feasibility study will cost $55,000, with 80 percent of the cost paid for with a federal planning grant.

Yount is pleased the town is rejecting the DOT’s feasibility study and doing one of its own.

“I think the DOT study is going to do nothing more than create another Russ Avenue and that’s the last thing this town needs,” Yount said. “The philosophy needs to change from ‘Let’s move cars as quickly as we can’ to ‘Let’s have smart transportation alternatives and livable streets.’ We may need to de-emphasize moving a single car from one point to another.”

To most, anything will be better than the status quo. South Main doesn’t exactly look the part of a booming commercial district. It is pockmarked by boarded-up windows, weed-engulfed parking lots, cracked pavement — even concertina wire around one windowless cinder block building.

“That is not what Waynesville is all about,” said Ron Reid, the owner of Andon-Reid Bed and Breakfast. “That corridor just needs help. It needs to be cleaned up.”

Reid winces to think about tourists coming to Waynesville for the first time via South Main.

Reid, also a member of the town’s planning board, wants the usual pedestrian-friendly features of street trees, sidewalks, perhaps a planted median.

“I really envision something halfway between what Russ Avenue is and what our downtown district is,” Reid said.

Bull by the horns

Fred Baker, the town’s public works director, said the DOT’s feasibility study doesn’t live up to the town’s design standards.

For example, the town requires a row of street trees in between the sidewalk and road, while the DOT plan puts the trees on the far side of the sidewalk. The rationale: so swerving cars don’t run into the trees. But surely that’s better than hitting pedestrians, Baker said.

It might seem like a small detail, but whether street trees go between the sidewalk and road rather than the far side of the sidewalk speaks volumes to the road’s character.

“It gives you that sense of security on the sidewalk that you could relax,” Baker said.

There’s several points like this where the DOT’s proposed design diverges from the town’s street standards.

Waynesville’s standards call for bike lanes, but the DOT left them out, instead making the outside car lane a couple of feet wider so bicycles can “share the road.”

Another incongruity: Waynesville’s standards call for ?-feet-wide sidewalk but the DOT’s plan called for only ? feet.

Baker said he will lobby hard for the town’s higher standards.

But the DOT may ask the town to foot the bill for these as perks. When the town wanted a multi-use path included in the widening of Howell Mill Road a few years ago, hoping to fill in a missing gap of the Richland Creek greenway, the DOT told the town it would have to pick up the tab for the extra right-of-way required for a multiuse path. It was half a million the town didn’t have, Baker said.

“Ultimately when DOT starts buying right-of-way, it charges the town for the extra width for all these things,” Baker said.

Baker hopes that will change by the time a South Main makeover becomes a reality, citing the complete streets movement that is infiltrating the DOT.

More lanes will make it harder to also squeeze in the town’s desired bike lanes, wider sidewalks, a planting strip with street trees

“It would be nice if we could get away with three lanes,” Benson said.

All in the numbers

But ultimately, whatever plan the town comes up with will need DOT buy-in, since the DOT holds the road-building purse strings.

DOT will have to be convinced that the road is wide enough to handle projected traffic, Benson said. Benson is anxious to get a look at the latest traffic counts for South Main, being conducted as part of the town’s process.

Those traffic counts — data on not just the number of cars moving along the road, but also where they are turning in and out — will be used to predict future traffic, which in turn will make or break the number of lanes.

Mark Teague, a traffic engineer consultant who used to work for the DOT, has been conducting counts up and the down the road for weeks in preparation for the public design workshop next week.

The real heavy lifting, however, will be coming up with a road design that amalgamates everyone’s visions.

“We are serving a lot of different groups, the residents who live and work on the road, the people who drive on it, bikes and pedestrians. We have a lot of different groups of people who are unrelated,” Teague said. “It is a balance.”

Share your vision

A community brainstorming session to gather ideas and visions for South Main Street in Waynesville will be held on Tuesday, Sept. 20.

“Residents all throughout Waynesville use this space,” said Rodney Porter, a consultant with La Quatra Bonci, facilitating the town’s new street plan for South Main. “When the public is in charge of what they want to see their roads look like, the outcome is a little bit better.”

Drop in anytime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to explore maps and road images and offer comments during an open charette-style planning session. Porter will give a presentation on the project starting at 8:30 a.m., and at 9:30 a.m. there will be a design workshop to kick off the charette session.

Held at the West Waynesville Campus of Haywood Community College on South Main (the old Dayco Union Hall across the street from the Verizon Wireless store.)

828.456.2004 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The Waynesville Gallery Association will present Art After Dark from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 2, in downtown Waynesville.

Art After Dark takes place the first Friday of each month, May through December. Patrons can stroll through working studios and galleries on Main Street, Depot Street and in Historic Frog Level. Art After Dark flags denote participating galleries. Steve Whiddon will provide music on the street.

Haywood County Arts Council’s Gallery 86 is hosting its newest exhibition, “Donna Rhodes: All Over The Map” celebrating the wide artistic range and whimsy of artist and Tuscola High art teacher, Donna Rhodes.

Twigs and Leaves Gallery will be featuring clay jewelry artist, Jody Funk. Funk will be demonstrating her work in clay.

Gallery 262 is showing the works of Jere Smith and Dan Wright. Smith is a woodworker and furniture maker and Wright is a stained glass artist.

828.452.9284 or www.waynesvillegalleryassociation.com.

Artist draws on lifetime of experience for new show

An exhibition of artist Donna Rhodes’ work called All Over the Map will run through Sept. 17 at the Haywood County Arts Council’s Gallery 86 in downtown Waynesville. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. on Sept. 2.

The show is a visual journey that criss-crosses the multi-media landscape Rhodes’ unique view of the world.

She holds a degree in music in addition to being a professional artist and art instructor at Tuscola High School, a writer and photographer and a staff writer for The Laurel Magazine in Highlands. She is currently working on three children’s books.

For more information, call 828.452.0593 or visit www.haywoodarts.org.

Electric car owners rejoice. Haywood County may soon be home to two electric car charging stations for the sustainably inclined.

The idea is still in its infancy, but the town of Waynesville hopes to house two of 25 charging stations being set up in the five-county Asheville metro area, a project partially funded through a grant from the state Energy Office. Clean Vehicles Coalition and Advanced Energy are coordinating the grant and are in the process of deciding which locations in the region will get the public charging stations.

If approved, the grant would offer 50 percent of costs for the new technology, up to $6,000 per charging station.

The public parking deck in downtown Waynesville would be an ideal spot for electric car charging stations, according to Waynesville’s Assistant Town Manager Alison Melnikova.

Drivers would be able to charge their cars free of charge — helpful both to tourists traveling in electric vehicles or commuters who want to juice up. The stations also would be available for local governments, should they decide to go electric with fleets in the future.

The N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles expects nearly 12,000 electric vehicles to be on the state’s roads by 2015, with 10 percent of those in the Asheville metro area.

The idea to house charging stations in the parking deck still faces a couple of hurdles.

County commissioners, as the owners of the parking deck, must agree to the location. The town plans to approach commissioners at their meeting next week.

Waynesville and the county have already agreed to share the local portion of the project, including the cost of the match, with each government pitching in half, according to information presented to the Waynesville Town Board last week.

Advance Energy said that decisions on applications would be made by Sept. 9, and if approved, the new stations could be up as early as December.

Melnikova said that final prices haven’t yet been worked out, so just how much the town and county would have to lay down is unclear.

The stations will power cars such as the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf. They’re not inexpensive — the Volt will set you back between $33,000 and $41,000, while the Leaf has a price tag of around $37,000 — but their makers tout the significant fuel savings the cars could provide.

The Leaf takes about $1.50 a day to run, says Nissan. And with complimentary charging stations, that cost could decrease.

There are already charging stations at the Biltmore Town Square in south Asheville, built by Eaton Corp., a company in Arden that produces the stations.

Waynesville has one chance to get South Main Street right, or live with the consequences for decades to come. And the town isn’t taking any chances. The N.C. Department of Transportation had barely gotten started on a feasibility study for a street makeover when the town began hunting for grants to do its own independent yet simultaneous feasibility study.

The community has to speak up on the front end to let DOT know what it wants, said Mayor Gavin Brown.

“There is a default button over there and they will hit it,” Brown said. “That’s what I want to avoid. I want to make sure we have input into the process when DOT finally gets around to doing something.”

There’s a lot riding on a South Main makeover. It will dictate what Waynesville’s west side becomes. Will West Waynesville become the next West Asheville, transforming into a hip walkable community, albeit three decades from now? Or will it follow in the footsteps of Russ Avenue, a high-traffic commercial hotbed?

“We want to create a place that is a destination — a place that can be called a place and not just a street or a bypass,” said Rodney Porter, a consultant hired by the town to steer the feasibility study. “It is nice to look at public streets as public spaces. When we do that, we really can sort of revive a community based on a streetscape.”

But as a key gateway into town, South Main currently leaves a lot to be desired, said Porter, an urban designer with LaQuatra Bonci in Asheville.

“I don’t know if South Main right now is the character of Waynesville,” Porter said. “I think we can really change the voice of what this street is saying.”

Paul Benson, Waynesville’s town planner, didn’t put it quite so tactfully.

“It is so blighted right now, it is like a third-world country,” Benson said.

The street is pocked by vacant buildings with boarded up windows, and a crop of litter-strewn, weed-speckled parking lots.

Porter said it’s not terribly difficult to transform the status quo, however. A few tricks of the trade can make a big impact: trees edging the street, sidewalks and bike lanes, a planted median, clusters of benches — simply marked crosswalks would be a start.

“A strong design will give a sense of place on the street,” Porter said.

But all these niceties add up, with the street’s footprint inching wider and wider all the while. There’s five feet for each bike lane, six for each sidewalk, five for a planted tree strip, at least 17 feet for a median. The road quickly balloons to a 100-foot swath, and that’s where the rubber will likely meet the road, Benson said.

The wider the footprint, the more property gets gobbled up. In some cases, when it comes to the dilapidated buildings and vagrant parking lots, seeing them go might not be such a bad thing.

But South Main is also home to long-standing businesses that could be wiped out if the new street gets too wide.

“Does it sacrifice those of us who are in that route to get there?” asked David Blevins, owner of the gas station across from Super Wal-Mart. “There are people who do make a living from those rundown gas stations and I was curious how they will reconcile that.”

South Main is also the lifeblood for nearby neighborhoods: the upscale Waynesville Country Club, middle-class Auburn Park, and the many tightly packed, working class neighborhoods that radiate through West Waynesville, testament to its bustling mill village days when factories dominated the blue-collar side of town.

A wider road will push commercial development back and up against the edge of these neighborhoods.

“I don’t want to impact that community more adversely than it has to,” said Waynesville Mayor Gavin Brown. “My preference would be smaller so it wouldn’t impact the neighborhoods.”

Benson said middle ground might actually be simple. Usually, commercial interests are the chief lobby for wider roads. But in this case, the businessmen fear the front of their lots being lopped off too much.

“The people who want the widest road are also the people who don’t want as much of their property taken,” Benson said. “I think it will be easy to find middle ground on this project. It is so bad right now that anyone will welcome any kind of improvement.”

But there will be choices to make. It might not be possible to add lanes, plus a planted median, street trees, bike lines and sidewalks on both sides. Which make the cut will likely be the subject of debate as the planning process plays out.

Plus, the DOT has some flexibility to narrow lanes and narrow the median, making them smaller than the standard — deviating from that default that Mayor Brown referred to. But those are mere kinks, and not the purpose of the feasibility study.

“You can make those choices later,” said Derek Lewis, DOT road planner in Raleigh overseeing the DOT’s South Main feasibility study. “We don’t get that deep into the weeds in the feasibility study. A feasibility study is at a 40,000 foot level shooting down while still being as context sensitive as we can.”

Input wanted

The town kicked-off the planning process for South Main three weeks ago with a community meeting.

Property owners along South Main and existing business owners dominated the table. But Porter wants regular folks in the mix, too.

“Not just business owners but residents all throughout Waynesville use this space,” Porter said. “We want to make sure we are doing the right thing for this corridor as a whole and not just particular individuals. We want a strong public process.”

Nancy Felder, a resident who travels South Main everyday, sees a street makeover as the key to a better community.

“We’re interested in seeing things revitalized in this area,” Felder said.

The nearby Waynesville Country Club is among the players vested in South Main’s makeover.

“This South Main Street traffic flow is totally critical to our business,” said David Stubbs, co-owner of the Waynesville Country Club.

The independent feasibility study will cost $55,000, with 80 percent of the cost paid for with a federal planning grant.

When looking for the right consultant, town leaders wanted a firm that understood new urbanism and valued multimodal streets, incorporating pedestrian and bikes.

“We wanted a progressive plan,” Benson said.

Porter said his firm would take a holistic view of the street makeover.

Primed for growth?

Even before Super Wal-Mart opened in 2008, property owners eagerly erected For Sale signs accompanied by staggering asking prices.

But the commercial boom the community was both hoping for and bracing for has yet to materialize.

While property in the Super Wal-Mart development itself has moved — a Verizon, Best Buy, car wash, beauty supply store, and soon a Belk’s, Pet Smart and Michael’s — the rest of the property owners along South Main found they weren’t sitting on quite the goldmine they thought.

Commercial property values only rose 8 percent along South Main Street since the Super Wal-Mart came in, according to the recent property reappraisal conducted by the county.

Benson said the recession has merely delayed inevitable commercial growth on South Main, not sidelined it permanently.

“I think the national economy right now is what is going to keep that area from developing more,” Benson said.

For at least 15 years, a South Main makeover has been at the top of Waynesville’s road wish list. But it was the coming of Super Wal-Mart gave South Main a needed push to get the DOT’s attention.

A makeover was no longer a purely aesthetic undertaking, but the promise of commercial growth would mean more cars, and the element of traffic congestion now warranted an examination by the DOT.

The DOT in 2009 launched a feasibility study of the street. When exactly DOT will get around to redoing South Main isn’t clear. For now, it’s not in the DOT’s 10-year plan.

And while congestion is becoming a problem, until it gets worse, the project may not be considered a priority by the DOT.

How congested does it have to get before DOT will tackle the makeover?

“That is the $64,000 question,” said Benson. “As congestion get worse it will rank higher and become a higher priority to build.”

Yet without a street makeover, commercial growth might not materialize as quickly, posing a chicken and egg conundrum. Porter said a nicer street, if built, would help attract commercial development and investment.

“If we improve the street life will we have changes in development?” Porter asked. “That is what we are looking for: how can we re-energize this street.”

Mayor Brown believes that commercial growth will come regardless of whether the makeover happens now or later.

“The business people will go wherever they can to make dollars. If they see an opportunity to make money, they will do it whether there is a new road or not,” Brown said.

But, the town will soon have a plan on paper at least, giving prospective developers an idea of what they can expect to happen one day, Brown said, even if it might be a long time off.

“Once a businessman knows that, he will build accordingly,” Brown said.

Which is why Brown wanted to hire a consultant to come up with a makeover plan, even if it will be a decade or more before it earns a spot at the top of the DOT’s build list.

“Is it an exercise in futility?” Brown asked. “No, it will benefit the community as a whole.”

Meanwhile, the DOT has put the final version of its feasibility study on hold to see what the town and its consultant come up with.

Waynesville and Sylva are at a crossroads, ones that will irrevocably shape the character of their communities.

Both towns are clamoring for a makeover of their commercial avenues — South Main Street in Waynesville and N.C. 107 in Sylva — but neither likes the plans that the N.C. Department of Transportation came up with.

Instead, both communities want to do their own street plans, drawing from new urbanist philosophies that use street design as a springboard for creating vibrant and lively shopping districts where not only cars but people feel at home.

But traffic is a fact of life, and whether the communities can marry the needs of the thoroughfares with their lofty visions remains to be seen.

Read more:

• Waynesville primed for makeover of South Main

• Fast for cars or pleasing for people? Tug of war rages over 107

• The advent of the boulevard, the death of the five-lane

• A look in the rearview at N.C. 107