Three, including two incumbents, seek two Haywood Commission seats
Kevin Ensley and Brandon Rogers, respectively chair and vice chair of the Haywood County Board of Commissioners, both ran for reelection last in 2020 amid unprecedented economic challenges and a contentious national election. It’s little different this time.
They’re no longer dealing with the Coronavirus Pandemic, but in the intervening four years the board, led by the two Republicans, had to address a seemingly unending stream of unusual situations most county governments don’t have to deal with in a hundred years, much less four — now including recent devastation visited upon the region by the second catastrophic flood in three years.
A lone Democrat, Tausha Forney, is hoping to claim a seat on that board, in effect asking voters to fire one of the two men. It’s a tough case to make in a heavily Republican county, but Forney thinks she has at least one reason to encourage voters to do it.
Ensley has served on the board for decades and seen great change in Haywood County.
“I think this last term has probably been the hardest term that I’ve had to serve in because of COVID and the flood and now the mill closure,” he said.
The Coronavirus Pandemic set in around March 2020, but its effects on the county and the country lingered through 2021, the first year of Ensley and Rogers’ current term. With it came not only economic surprises — brief disruptions to small businesses accompanied by a sales tax collections boom — but also misinformation and resistance to common-sense public health policies supported by science.
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Haywood County Board of Commissioners Chairman Kevin Ensley, along with fellow Republican Brandon Rogers, are hoping to retain their seats. Kevin Ensley photo
“We and our staff followed state protocol, and we tried to support them as much as we could, because that was the law, and we had to follow the law,” said Ensley, a land surveyor by trade. “The Constitution is all about rule of law and following the law, and that’s what we did. I know some people got upset with us and wanted us to do other things, but we are a subdivision of the state and we have to follow the law so that’s what we did during that pandemic.”
Rogers, a rising star in the party and co-owner of a tire shop in Canton, is currently serving his second term and has led the ticket in both of his elections, even besting the popular Ensley.
“Dealing with all this stuff in this second term has been pretty much overwhelming,” Rogers said. “But I feel like our county staff and county manager, along with all the towns have worked together exceptionally well to overcome all the obstacles and hurdles that we’ve had with COVID taking place and the flood, and here again, another flood possibly coming up on us.”
Rogers and Ensley both conducted their interviews with The Smoky Mountain news less than 48 hours before Hurricane Helene added new challenges to the coming years. Cleanup and remediation from deadly flooding in August 2021 was still underway until the storm lashed the county on Sept. 27, leaving devastation in its wake.
“Brandon and I went up there some and talked to the people,” Ensley said. “I think the county’s response in trying to help as much as we could, we did as much as we could. I think it’s frustrating for us as commissioners and for the public, for the time it takes for them to get things cleaned up and everything. But of course, when you’re talking about tax money, you have to follow the rules and that’s what we’ve been doing. I’m thankful for the state and the help that they gave us. They’ve been great.”
Current cleanup efforts appear to be proceeding in a similar manner, but there are still years of work ahead that will once again define county government’s efficacy in recovery and mitigation. Although the board is now 5-0 Republican, Ensley and fellow commissioners had to work across the aisle, under a Democratic governor and president and over a Democratic mayor in hard-hit Canton to bring Haywood County to where it is today.
Indeed, that Democratic Mayor, Zeb Smathers, said he believed that the debris cleanup and storm preparation using examples from 2021 helped Canton avoid an even worse fate this time around.
The commission has also worked closely with Smathers on another unusual situation — the completely botched short-notice closing by Pactiv Evergreen of its century-old paper mill in Canton, which left nearly 1,000 workers with a dangerous health care coverage gap and little time to seek other employment.
“Having a relationship with all those folks even on the state and federal level, which I do, has been great. When you have something like a mill closing or flood happening, those are the folks that send the money down,” Rogers said. “To be able to reach across the aisle and work with these folks, just because you got an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ after your last name doesn’t mean we would be on total opposite sides of the fence when it comes to flooding or a plant closing.”
Rogers has been heavily involved on a state and federal level, traveling to Washington, D.C. to lobby officials for flood help and traveling to Raleigh to participate in mediation over a $12 million lawsuit against Pactiv for allegedly violating the terms of a decade-old economic development agreement. When Pactiv pushed a settlement offer for far less than $12 million, Rogers literally pounded the table in frustration.
Of the more pedestrian issues Haywood commissioners — like others similarly situated across the country — have had to address, there’s maybe one that hasn’t exactly gone to plan.
When Sheriff Greg Christopher took over in 2013, he was already advocating for a jail expansion. Commissioners kicked the can down the road for a few years, a stance made easier by Christopher’s vision of what would become Haywood Pathways Center, designed to reduce recidivism. Both Ensley and Rogers agreed that Pathways, which has provided nearly $9 million in food, shelter and individual support services to vulnerable Haywood County residents at almost zero cost to taxpayers since 2014, was largely responsible for allowing the county to make do with the jail it already had. In 2019, Christopher presented a plan for a $16 million jail expansion, however when commissioners finally signed the papers earlier this year, the price tag had ballooned to more than $25 million.
Brandon Rogers. Facebook photo
“Taking on debt with the new jail, we couldn’t be better off as a county. You know, our debt service continues to roll off and our fund balance continues to grow. And not only that, but [former commissioner, Republican Rep. Mark] Pless gave us $5 million to help with the jail project as well,” Rogers said. “So even though it’s $28 million, we’re going to use that $5 million towards the project.”
On the topic of Pathways, a recent fiscal crunch reminded most people of the integral role it plays for unsheltered people, people in recovery and people in poverty. Haywood County is sitting on a heap of money from national opioid lawsuit settlements that has been floated as a more stable funding stream for Pathways, which relies almost solely on donations from Haywood County’s faith community. Here is where Ensley and Rogers disagree.
“As a Christian, I don’t know how you cannot support [Pathways],” Rogers said. “However, for using local taxpayer dollars, I’m not a fan of that. I like supporting it personally or even as a business. I like the way it was set up, with the faith-based programs supporting it and I’d like to see it stay that way. However, I do struggle with local tax dollar support.”
Ensley said he goes back and forth about the issue and is on board with non-financial support, like help with the grant processes, but wants at least some of the opioid settlement money to end up with Pathways.
“The facts are that Pathways has saved the county money in several different ways, and they’ve helped people,” he said. “I can’t point a finger to what program that we would have had to have done if they weren’t here. They are an asset to the county and to the community … but the opioid money, I would like to see a portion of that go to them because I can’t think of another program that we would use for opioid money than what Pathways does that’s in our community.”
While questions about the county’s major issues will linger far longer than the next four years, it’s worth noting how far the county has come in the last four years.
Upon taking office in 2020, commissioners noted that 25% of the county didn’t have broadband. In conjunction with Sen. Kevin Corbin (R-Macon), the county is now on track to reduce that number to 3%.
The North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency helped the county do about as much as any local government can with the affordable housing crisis.
Recovery court, Ensley and Rogers believe, has had a positive effect on recidivism but more importantly on the lives of people battling substance use disorder.
The county proposed and adopted a 1.5-cent tax increase to provide its 15 public schools full coverage by armed school resource officers, with nary a whimper of opposition.
County staff have applied for and received more than $13 million in grants.
Wage increases for county employees have helped the county reduce costly turnover and retain experienced employees.
The new pickleball court at Lake Junaluska and a pump track at Raccoon Creek are a response to citizens increasingly demanding more outdoor recreation offerings.
Of the state’s 100 counties, 70 have higher property tax rates than Haywood County does.
Of the state’s 115 public school districts, five rank higher than Haywood County’s.
Haywood County voters will find three candidates on their ballots — Ensley, Rogers and Tausha Forney. Voters may select two, but don’t have to. Forney wants voters to remember that.
Born and raised in Haywood County’s small Black community, Forney graduated from Tuscola High School in 1998, earned her early childhood education credentials and began working in daycare. From there, it was an associate’s degree at Haywood Community College and a bachelors’ degree in sociology at UNC-Asheville.
Tausha Forney. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Around 2008 her mother, local legend Lyn Forney, let Tausha know that she needed help running the Pigeon Community Multicultural Development Center, which like Pathways is a nonprofit that provides millions each year in free nutrition, education and child enrichment services to a population the free market has never really paid much attention to.
Forney admits that Ensley and Rogers have done a good job with the unusual problems they‘ve had to contend with over the past four years. On the pandemic, she reported their performance as “fair.” On the flood, “well.” On the mill, “pretty well.”
With all that said, she’s still asking for a seat at the table.
“While they have kept a lot of the community in mind, there is a huge portion of the community that I don’t feel is represented by those folks. They represent business owners and land owners, and I definitely understand the importance of that, but that’s not all that our county is,” Forney said Oct. 11. “That’s not all of who we are. And in order to be more inclusive, and to do what I think is the best job for everyone and not just for small groups of folks, I’m asking voters to fire one of them.”
Forney said she didn’t necessarily agree with the whole jail situation — there was early opposition from some who wanted to see the tens of millions spent on prevention, including mental health and substance abuse treatment — but now that ground has been broken and construction is proceeding, she says it’s time to move on from the issue.
Instead, Forney’s focus is on the prison pipeline, much like Pathways. The Pigeon Center, formerly the county’s segregated school for Blacks, provides with its $2 million annual budget an array of educational opportunities for kids that might not get them, especially over the summer.
Aside from very minimal county support, their funding comes largely from private donors and grants. Again, just like Pathways, there’s never enough.
Although Forney says more financial support from the county would be nice, she acknowledges that the possibility is slim; the overwhelming majority of county revenue is spoken for, in the form of mandated services. At the end of the day, there’s no big pot of money laying around, waiting to be dispensed.
“Unless we find other income for the county, like grants, maybe they could help work on some of those things that we don’t have to pay back,” she said. “Nonprofits also are going to have to figure out how to diversify our own incomes, because things just don’t look like they did before.”
Funding Pathways with opioid settlement proceeds, however, is something Forney said she’d like to explore, but has questions.
“It’s a huge chunk of money, right? So my questions are, how much of the chunk would go to administration and how much of it would go to actually funding folks to get out, to go through treatment, to resettle in halfway houses, to help them take those steps,” she said. “I think that it’s a good possibility, because it’s the same people they’re serving who should be receiving these [opioid settlement] funds. If we can help folks get out of that situation and become a part of our community as the community nurtures them and brings them back in, I think that’s a great testament to what we can do as a county, as individual nonprofits and collectively as a whole.”
Conventional wisdom holds that local governments funding nonprofits could be a slippery slope, with many qualified — and unqualified — entities clamoring, “me, too!” but Forney disagrees.
“It is a slippery slope [but one] that we should stay away from? No. If we think about how to spend the money, and we make some real lines and ideas around who is available to ask for the money. History is going to be a huge part of it,” she said. “Some haven’t shown us that they even served the population, or will, or could. It would be for the county to decide very specific guidelines on who can apply for this funding, and then you’re able to control it a little more and you have a better idea on who needs it, because they’ve shown success.”
Getting that point across to the rest of the commission — she would be the lone Democrat on a board with four Republicans — could be a heavy lift, but if history’s any indicator, an idea Forney has about how, exactly, to prioritize the county’s very limited discretionary funds might be a bit easier.
“For me, the first place is the fire departments,” she said, noting that volunteers work for nothing and don’t always have the resources they wish they had — a pertinent point with so many first responders currently working to restore some semblance of normalcy to the county after Helene. “Budgets are terribly tight everywhere and they’re not going to get any better. But through my work at Pigeon, I have seen how to prioritize, how to think about things and make really hard decisions. I’m confident that’s a skill that I already have. It’s just the ability to do it.”
