Less than a year after opening a new visitor center in downtown Waynesville, the Haywood County Chamber of Commerce learned last week that its funding for the site is on the chopping block by the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority.

The county tourism agency plans to open its own visitor center downtown and end its subsidy for the one run by the chamber.

The tourism agency is better positioned to operate a one-stop shop for tourists looking for things to do and see in the county, according to TDA Director Lynn Collins.

“Our sole purpose in life is to market Harwood County as a destination,” Collins said.

It makes sense for the TDA, which is in charge of branding and marketing the county, to run its own visitor center for tourists to provide a seamless message rather than contract the role out to the chamber.

“This is a good time for us to take control of our program and tell our story the way we want to tell it,” Collins said.

The chamber received $30,000 from the TDA to run a visitor center. Losing that revenue will not be easy and could mean the loss of staff, according to CeCe Hipps, the Haywood chamber’s executive director.

“Anytime an organization gets that big of a budget cut, we will have to look at how we do our day-to-day operations,” Hipps said.

The chamber says it will not shut down its visitor center, however, despite the loss of funding. A visitor center is still central to the chamber’s mission, Hipps said.

“Chambers are considered a trusted and established source of information,” Hipps said. “Regardless of the outcome of this we will maintain our visibility and maintain our visitor center. Nothing will change for us from that aspect.”

The result: two visitor centers less than three blocks apart in downtown Waynesville.

The turn of events comes as the Tourism Development Authority grapples with budget shortfalls of its own. The TDA raises money with a 4 percent tax on overnight lodging, bringing in close to $1 million a year. That money is pumped back into tourism promotions, from national advertising campaigns to mini-grants for local festivals.

As tourism has dropped with the recession, however, the TDA has seen its budget shrink by more than $200,000 in three years. This year alone, the TDA has come up $115,000 short of what it anticipated, leaving the agency struggling to make mid-year budget cuts.

“We didn’t just wake up one morning and say ‘Let’s go take the chamber’s funding away from it.’ There is a quite a bit of planning and pros and cons and up and down that when into this,” said Ken Stahl, TDA finance chair.

However, the chamber learned only last week that its visitor center funding is in jeopardy with the start of the new fiscal year come July. Such short notice will make it hard to adjust, Hipps said.

Key members of the chamber board and TDA board met last week to discuss the issue. Ron Leatherwood, the incoming president of the chamber board, said the TDA might be willing to phase out the visitor center funding over two years rather than doing it all at once. That would certainly soften the blow, he said.

The visitor center funding is more than 10 percent of the chamber’s annual budget, and it will be a challenge to make up the difference, Leatherwood said.

But Leatherwood said he understands why the TDA, which is in the tourism business after all, wants its own visitor center. If they can serve the number of visitors they hope to — 40,000 a year — it will surely be a good thing for the county, Leatherwood said.

“Hopefully it will be successful for all of us. A rising tide lifts all boats,” Leatherwood said.

A full-service visitor center

The TDA envisions a full-service visitor center, where tourists will be awed by an endless list of things to do in Haywood County, from crafts to fly-fishing to motorcycle rides. Not to mention a clearinghouse for all the special events going on any given weekend, something that doesn’t exist now.

“We hope to achieve a little bit of synergism here,” said Stahl.

And since the TDA lives and breathes tourism, it can best disseminate that information, Collins said.

“We have a very good handle on what is going on in the county,” Collins said.

Collins also wants their visitor center to be open seven days a week, compared to the chamber’s visitor center, which is only open on weekdays.

The TDA is negotiating a lease to house the visitor center and its administrative offices in a storefront on Main Street across from Mast General store — in the thick of the downtown action. It’s a better spot for snagging foot traffic than the chamber’s location, Stahl said.

Stahl hopes a new visitor center will catch 40,000 visitors a year compared to the 6,000 seen at the chamber’s visitor center.

“When the foot traffic is in the thousands up there on Main Street, it is an opportunity for us to reach out and touch a lot more people than what we have been for essentially the same amount of money,” Stahl said.

The chamber’s visitor center is past the courthouse in a historic home a block beyond the main shopping district. To Hipps, the location is ideal: at the corner where Russ Avenue, a main corridor into downtown, feeds into Main Street.

The chamber just moved into the building last June. It had been without a permanent home for much of the past decade, bopping from one location to another every few years. A visible spot for the visitor center was the top consideration in the quest for a permanent site.

“That was our main driver. We wanted to have a gateway into the downtown area,” Hipps said.

The chamber’s physical quarters are impressive and inviting. The stately historic brick home has a wide front porch decked out in rocking chairs. The lobby has a grand double staircase and features include hardwood floors and black-and-white checked bathroom tiles. Its interior décor is appointed with comfy sofas and lush ferns. The front lawn is crowned by stately oaks with views down Main Street.

“We wanted something that would give people a really good first impression,” Hipps said.

The chamber made a sizeable investment when signing a three-year lease on the building.

Hipps said tourists quickly make themselves at home there.

“Finding the perfect home for a visitor center was so key. Had we known this a year ago we probably would have looked at other options,” Hipps said.

Move in the cards

Until now, the TDA has been holed up in an obscure county office building carrying out a mostly administrative role. Few in the county could tell you where the agency was headquartered, despite its very showy mission of broadcasting Haywood’s tourism accolades to the world.

Despite a sweetheart deal — the county charged the TDA only $250 a month in rent — the TDA had been contemplating a move to new offices for a couple of years.

But it was spurred recently into action by a massive reshuffling of county office space — one that might leave the TDA with no home at all.

Most of the occupants housed in the same office building as TDA are moving to an abandoned Wal-Mart being remodeled for various county departments. The project was motivated by the need to replace the antiquated quarters of the Department of Social Services but has led to musical chairs for other county offices as well.

The county hasn’t decided yet whether TDA can stay where it is, whether it might give the space to different county departments, or whether it will sell the building.

While it’s not certain TDA will get the boot, it was enough to get the TDA’s attention.

“They have not said definitively we have to move any certain time. Their exact words from the county manager were it would be prudent for you to start looking,” Collins said.

It seemed like a good time to pull the trigger on something they wanted to do anyway.

“We don’t want to wait until the music stops and not have a chair,” Stahl said.

If the TDA is going to fork out substantially more in rent, it will cut into its already tight budget. To make it work financially, the TDA will take visitor center funding away from the chamber to cover the rent, bringing visitor enter operations in-house in the process.

“If we are going to move we want to move into something that totally completes our mission,” said Alice Aumen, chair of the TDA board.

Part of that mission is to bring the TDA to the next level as an agency.

Since the TDA’s creation 25 years ago, it has funded visitor centers run by both the Haywood chamber and Maggie Valley chamber.

While it made sense for the TDA to outsource visitor center operations in its infancy — in the early days it had no staff of its own let alone an office — it has grown into a major marketing force for tourism and needs to take a leading role in serving tourists once they arrive.

There’s another advantage to running its own visitor center: to advance marketing research, Collins said. Currently, TDA staff responsible for marketing the county don’t interface directly with the traveling public on a daily basis. Collins wants to survey visitors and find out what brought them here, where they are from, how much they are spending, who’s in the traveling party, and what they like to do.

“It helps us get to know our visitors better. We can conduct all kinds of market research to build our marketing program appropriately,” Collins said. “If you don’t have research you are flying by the seat of your pants.”

The days of shotgun advertising is over, said Aumen.

“This is a huge opportunity for us to do research on who the actual visitor is,” Aumen said.

Plus, TDA can capture the email addresses of visitors, which are worth their weight in gold for direct marketing through social media like Facebook.

While the TDA is in the business of luring visitors to the county, there’s still an advantage to engaging those who are already here.

“Even though they are already here, we can get information in their hands that would make them want to extend their stay or come back for a visit at another point in the year,” Collins said.

Fulfilling a mission

Before moving in to its new office last year, the chamber invited the TDA to share the space. The two entities could run a joint visitor center and share overhead expenses, Hipps suggested.

Talk of co-locating the chamber and TDA have surfaced on and off over the years, but this marked the first formal invitation to the TDA to move in together.

“We wanted to continue and strengthen our partnership and to continue to work together and collaborate,” Hipps said.

Hipps said the two entities have the same common goal, namely “to promote Haywood County.”

It’s common for chambers of commerce and county tourism agencies to share offices and staff while maintaining separate budgets. It’s done in Asheville to the east and Jackson County to the west.

But co-locating with the chamber did not fit the TDA’s mission.

While tourism is the TDA’s only focus, the chamber recruits new businesses, promotes commerce, supports entrepreneurs and engages in economic development.

“A visitor center is not their primary mission,” Stahl said.

But Hipps said tourism is integral to the county’s economy, and thus integral to the chamber’s mission.

“Our model has always been everyone in this county is connected to tourism,” Hipps said. “We can’t dissect and separate the chamber from tourism.”

That said, the chamber’s visitor center does serve as a point of contact for people moving to Haywood County, buying a second home, relocating their business, starting a new business — all of whom may have started out as just a tourist at one time.

“We are so connected with the big picture that the overall economic impact is much greater than the numbers for foot traffic that comes through the door,” Hipps said. “Our business model is all inclusive.”

The chamber’s visitor center is critical a point of contact for business inquiries, said Leatherwood. You never know when a “lone eagle” will stroll into the visitor center, for example. That term refers to a mobile professional who can do their job online from anywhere and may be seeking a new place to move, Leatherwood said.

A county of many visitor centers

The visitor center run by the Haywood Chamber is one of four funded by the TDA.

“We are probably the only TDA in the state that funds four visitor centers,” Stahl said.

One in Maggie Valley run by the Maggie Valley Chamber of Commerce gets $30,000 a year from the TDA. The other two — one at the highway rest area in Balsam and one off the interstate in Canton — are staffed by the TDA at a cost of $25,000 each.

The Canton visitor center was opened only three years ago, but tourist traffic there has not panned out. A cinderblock car wash beside a gas station was converted into a visitor center.

Faced with a budget shortfall last spring, the TDA shut the Canton visitor center for six weeks. Traffic had fallen sharply anyway due to a rockslide that shut down I-40. But even once I-40 opened again, numbers remained low. In the fall, hours were scaled back, and in January it was shut completely. The TDA plans to turn it over to volunteers with the Canton merchant association.

The visitor centers in Maggie Valley and at Balsam draw higher numbers of visitors (see chart). Neither is on the chopping block for now.

The TDA will continue funding the visitor centers that perform better, but could not justify funding those that saw such a small number of visitors, Stahl said.

Hipps said the chamber is grateful for TDA support all these years and believes the two entities will continue to work together.

“We have a very successful business model here. TDA has been a part of that success by helping to fund that part of what we do,” Hipps said.

The health care bills rolling into the Haywood County jail for inmate care might now be slashed by up to 25 percent after the sheriff’s office contracted with a company who will ferret out discounts on the county’s behalf.

Currently, the county pays full sticker price for all health care given to inmates, and since they’re legally obliged to foot the bill for any inmate treatment, it can get pricey.

Sherriff Bobby Suttles told county commissioners that $20,000 a year was on the low end of what they might expect to pay. In a year when an inmate needs major medical care, such as open-heart surgery, costs can skyrocket to more than $100,000.

What the company, Correctional Risk Services out of Brentwood, Tenn., would do is comb through the bills looking for mistakes, such as being billed for a higher priced procedure or more treatment than an inmate actually received.

A company spokesman said that they save counties an average of 20 to 25 percent. They work solely on commission, keeping 30 percent of any savings that are found.

In addition to checking the bills for accuracy, the company will also be able to save the county from shelling out for full-price procedures by bringing them into a PPO — preferred provider organization — which would give the county the same kind of discounts private citizens can get by being under a medical insurance plan.

If the county sees savings from the contract, the majority would be from such markdowns.

Suttles characterized this as a win-win situation for the county. If no reductions are found, they lose nothing, and whatever savings they do glean will be a big help to the sheriff’s healthcare budget, which is, he said, notoriously hard to manage.

“Right now, we’re holding $8,000 worth of bills,” said Suttles. “It’s just hard to budget for the unknown.”

Haywood County Schools is currently without a finance director, after long-time finance officer Larry Smith stepped down amid an investigation into accounting irregularities involving one of his employees.

Payroll Administrator Sheila Nix, who had been with the district for more than 20 years, was fired as part of the investigation into policy violations in the bookkeeping department. Smith, who had been with the school for 10 years, resigned.

Assistant Superintendent Bill Nolte said that while he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the open investigation, they’ve brought in an outside auditing firm to pore over the system’s financial records, scanning for further irregularities or signs of misuse.

While Nolte said they were certain some fairly major policy violations had occurred, they were, as yet, unclear about whether any laws were broken in the process. Local law enforcement and state officials, he said, are waiting on standby for the results of the audit.

Meanwhile, the school district is now left without someone to direct their finances, at a time when schools across the state are facing one of the toughest budget years on record — Gov. Beverly Perdue has warned schools to brace for 10 percent funding cuts, on top of the millions in cuts they’ve suffered in recent years — it’s a tough time to lose an experienced finance director.

However, Nolte said the support they’ve received from the community and other school districts in the region has been encouraging. Local citizens with experience in the field have offered their expertise, while other districts have said they can lend a hand and possibly a few staff until the dust settles and a new director is named.

Nolte said Smith himself has even been in touch to ensure a smooth transition, though he wouldn’t comment on Smith’s exact reasons for parting ways with the school system.

“People resign for different reasons and when people resign it’s their reason, not ours. But he [Larry] is a good fellow and he has been very helpful to us in transitioning to a new finance director,” Nolte said.

While the investigation has no specific timeline, Nolte said he’s confident that suspected violations don’t extend outside the bookkeeping department. But when there are questions of taxpayer money, the best response, he said, is a quick one.

“There are some things where you can go, ‘Let’s look at that next week,’ but you don’t do that with taxpayer money,” said Nolte. “You look at it immediately.”

The Haywood County Fairgrounds are on the way to being back in business after a scare that shuttered the covered arena for code-compliance violations.

An infusion of cash by Haywood County commissioners saved the fairgrounds from cancelling upcoming events at the arena, which would have hurt the local economy and killed off the fairground’s main revenue stream.

The arena lacks permanent bathrooms and instead uses port-a-potties during events. As a result, the arena has been operating with a temporary building permit for the past five years.

ALSO: County’s leading critic stirs up trouble for fairground arena

The temporary permit has expired, however, forcing the covered arena to shut down, and in turn canceled upcoming events for the year unless someone came up with $400,000 for restrooms.

The Haywood Agricultural and Activities Board, which operates the fairgrounds, didn’t have the cash.

With the fate of the facility on the line, the fair board again appealed county commissioners for financial help. At their meeting this week, several members of the community spoke to how vital the place is to the county, its economy and its heritage.

“The fairgrounds are an important part of our agricultural heritage in Western North Carolina. It’s a big reason why people like and visit here in Haywood County. It’s part of who we are,” said Bruce Johnson, president of the Greater Haywood Chamber of Commerce, at Monday’s commission meeting.

He, like other supporters, expressed concern that once events left the arena, it would be increasingly challenging to court them back.

It marks the second time in a year the county has put up a cash infusion to save the arena and fairgrounds. The fairground arena was nearly lost to foreclosure last year after defaulting on a loan dating to its construction.

The fairgrounds once received an annual contribution from the county, which covered the loan payment. But when the recession hit, the county cut its contribution to the fairground, and it was left with no way to pay the loan.

So the county ultimately stepped in and paid off $337,000 left on the loan.

Good use of county money?

Not everyone spoke out in favor of the fairground, however. Some wondered why the facility had failed these 21 years to become self-sustaining, part of its original mission and still one of the current board’s main goals. They asked commissioners to let the fairground succeed or fail on its own, without more county help, especially since it’s not an essential government service.

But commissioners were sympathetic to the fairground’s plight, reminding the audience that the county provided 75 percent of the site’s funding until it was pulled three years ago, thanks to the tanking economy.

How many entities — churches, businesses, individuals — could be expected to survive without help if they lost 75 percent of their revenue, asked Commissioner Kevin Ensley.

Commissioner Kirk Kirkpatrick also stepped in to defend the county’s support of the fairground as important, even if it is non-essential.

“This is not necessarily an essential government function, but there’s a lot of things that government does that are not an essential government functions. It’s more a quality of life issue,” said Kirkpatrick, to applause from the audience.

The county has spent over $1.7 million on the fairground since 1990, including paying off the loan last year, according to County Finance Director Julie Davis.

And while members of the fairground board say they’re looking at every possible revenue stream outside county coffers, it’s not exactly the best time to go on a money hunt.

Their most promising lead is a federal loan, but it hasn’t panned out — the loan agency won’t have funds to lend until the federal government has a budget in place, which may still take weeks or months. So the board is looking to other ideas to get the fairground back on its feet.

“We are looking at grant opportunities and other possible loan opportunities, we’re looking at the possibility of corporate sponsorships, we’re trying to look in as many places as we can come up with to make this work,” said Fair Board Member Nancy Davis, who also heads up the dog show slated to appear this June, one of the major events in jeopardy because of the closure.

Davis said the board didn’t know that the temporary occupancy permit would, or could, be a problem, and they were surprised by the arena’s closure.

But, she said they’ve been working hard on ideas that will push the facility into self-sufficiency, and they’re trying to take the place that’s been kept alive by the sweat and toil of volunteers on to the next level.

Working toward solvency

Enter Aaron Mabry. Mabry is a Haywood County native who has been brought on to beef up the fairgrounds offerings and schedule, to pitch it, full-time, to any event he can find.

He’s excited about the possibilities for the site, and sees self-sufficiency within three to four years as an extremely attainable goal.

“You’ve got car shows, you’ve got cook-off’s, you’ve got other types of fair events that we’ve never done before,” Mabry rattled off confidently. “It’s really unlimited as to what you can do, it’s just a matter of taking the time and the resources you have.”

The site has long been agriculturally focused — most of the events held here have an agrarian connection in some form or another. And while Mabry doesn’t see this as a bad thing — the heritage and lifeblood of Haywood County is, after all, farming and the fairground facilities lend themselves to agricultural events — he’s keen to widen the field on what kind of events and clients come to the fairground. And it’s safe to say he’s ambitious about the prospects, given that he’s now able to dedicate his efforts to selling the fairground full-time.

When asked how many events he’d like to see there annually, he’s quick to answer: “365.”

“Up to now, it’s really just been marketed for the weekend,” said Mabry. “I’d like to have an event here every single day, that’s my goal, to bring in consistent weekly revenue that’s dependable.”

The first step in getting there, though, he said, is getting the arena back open, getting its bathrooms up to par.  

According to Haywood County Facilities Director Dale Burris, the place should be completed and ready for inspection by June 15, just in time to accommodate the June 18-19 dog show.

And as for the county, County Manager Marty Stamey said the county is not over-extending itself. For now, money will be pulled from the county’s fund balance, but they’ll seek a short construction loan with the approval of the Local Government Commission to repay the fund balance, then hopefully recoup that with the sale of one of the county’s currently or  soon-to-be vacant buildings. Those properties promise to bring in upwards of $3 million, when sold.

They’ll also draft an agreement between the county and the fairground, making sure that if the fairground becomes profitable, they’ll try to pay the money back.

The former CEO of Haywood Regional Medical Center will get $150,000 from the hospital after settling a lawsuit claiming he was wrongfully fired.

David Rice was at the helm during a near meltdown of the hospital in 2008. At the time, Rice publicly said he resigned, but in a lawsuit filed two years later he claims he was forced out.

Settling the suit was a business decision, according to the current CEO Mike Poore.

“We felt that it was best not to spend any more money on attorneys and complete that chapter,” Poore said.

In his suit, Rice demanded 20 months of his salary, back pay for accrued vacation and sick time, bonuses he had been promised and lost benefits. While Rice’s salary was $199,000, benefits included a car and health insurance, extra bonuses and other perks.

Although Rice left in the spring of 2008, he claims the hospital board verbally promised him his salary and benefits through the end of 2009 when his contract expired. In exchange, they asked him to publicly announce that he resigned instead of labeling it a termination.

Rice claims he was tricked, however, and that the hospital board had no intention of keeping its verbal promise. Rice had been the CEO for 15 years.

Many in the community blamed Rice for the hospital crisis back in 2008. The hospital failed federal inspections causing it to lose its Medicare and Medicaid status, triggering an exodus of private insurers as well. The hospital essentially shut its doors for five months except for the most essential services.

Rice kept the brewing crisis a secret, attempting to quietly fix the underlying issues, but it eventually imploded. Observers believe that Rice’s failure to address the citations early on led inspectors to make an example out of Haywood, pointing to other hospitals with more egregious problems that didn’t get shut down.

Regardless, hospital board members and community leaders said they were blindsided and condemned Rice for failing to keep them in the loop.

The hospital leveled a countersuit against Rice. Even though the hospital maintained that Rice resigned, the countersuit claimed there was good cause to fire Rice had that not been the case.

The countersuit claims Rice failed to “communicate with the board, medical staff and administration in an effective and timely manner, or otherwise concealing and distorting material facts and circumstances concerning the operation and affairs of HRMC.”

In the countersuit, the hospital claimed Rice’s actions leading to decertification caused “significant loss of HRMCs patients and revenue placing the future operation of the hospital in jeopardy.”

The hospital shutdown had major economic consequences for the community. For starters, the hospital burned through more than $10 million in reserves it had built up over the years.

Doctors lost business when patients went elsewhere. Many of the nurses and staff were put on temporary unemployment. The county saw a substantial increase in ambulance costs for ferrying patients to hospitals in Asheville or Sylva. Patient numbers still have not fully returned to normal.

Last month, a group of emergency room doctors was awarded $1.6 million in a lawsuit against the hospital dating back to Rice’s reign. Haywood Emergency Physicians were wrongfully ousted by the hospital in 2006 and replaced with a corporate physician staffing company. Rice helped orchestrate HEP’s replacement because he saw them as a threat to his insular power structure, according to the doctors involved.

Settling the suit with Rice marks the final chapter in the saga, allowing the hospital to move forward with its mission, Poore said.

“We are moving forward and focusing on our hospital’s mission of providing compassionate, quality and cost-effective healthcare,” Poore said.

The two sides went to mediation in November. The only ones present were Poore, Rice and his wife, and their respective attorneys.

While out-of-court settlements are not publicly filed in the court record, Poore elected to share the information in the interest of transparency.

Motorists beware: a no man’s land at exit 37 on Interstate 40 may not be plowed and salted in bad weather with the same regularity as the rest of the highway.

The stretch in question lies near the Haywood-Buncombe county line, where a few hundred yards of the Interstate are occasionally overlooked. Plows and salt trucks coming from opposite directions — one crew from Haywood and another from Buncombe — use exit 37 as a natural turn-around point before heading back the other way.

“Essentially the county line is within a few hundred feet,” said Ed Green, the Department of Transportation maintenance engineer for Division 13, a seven-county area that includes Buncombe.

But there is a short stretch of Interstate between the exit ramp and the on ramp — including a bridge over the road below — that gets missed.

“Who does the bridge?” Green said in response. “I am not sure about who does that. At some point, some of them overlap, but they may not do it every time depending on how bad conditions are.”

One crew or the other has to overshoot exit 37 to avoid leaving a gap. Since the bridge has no shoulders, going past the exit in order to hit the bridge and then backing up isn’t an option.

“That’s too dangerous,” said Ben Williams, DOT maintenance supervisor in Haywood County. “The only way to do it is run past it.”

But when Haywood’s trucks overshoot exit 37, they have to continue for several miles to the truck weigh station before they can turn around. If Buncombe’s trucks overshoot exit 37, they can’t turn around until exit 33.

And that’s exactly what they do — most of the time that is, according to Chad Bandy, DOT maintenance supervisor in Buncombe County.

“A lot of times what we’ll do is go into Haywood County some, and they come into Buncombe County some,” said Bandy.

But occasionally, it gets skipped.

The territory around exit 37 lies on Buncombe’s side of the county line and is technically Buncombe’s responsibility — not Haywood’s. Plow and salt truck drivers coming from Buncombe decide whether to turn around at exit 37 or keep going to exit 33 “as conditions warrant,” Bandy said.

One Tuesday morning in early February there were two wrecks due to ice on the exit 37 bridge — one on each side of the Interstate, according to accident reports by the N.C. Highway Patrol.

That morning, Buncombe crews plowing and salting the road passed over the bridge only every other trip, Bandy said. The other trips, they turned around at exit 37 and didn’t proceed over the bridge all the way to the county line.

Mary Clayton, who commutes daily to Haywood Regional Medical Center from Buncombe County, said ice on the bridge threw her for a loop that morning.

“I didn’t even realize the weather was bad or the roads were bad. Then I hit the bridge and as soon as I hit the ice, well, I lost it,” Clayton said.

In all fairness, there were other weather-related wrecks on I-40 near exit 37 that morning as well, but not on the section that lies in no man’s land.

“There was one, two, three, four, five, six wrecks near the 37,” said Jennifer Hodge, an office assistant for the North Carolina Highway Patrol in Buncombe County.

Four of those six wrecks were due to icy roads, according to the accident reports. Two were on the bridge, which lies inside the no man’s land, while two were just east of it — indicating that the road was icy in other areas too, and that less-than-diligent plowing of the bridge isn’t necessarily to blame.

I-40 is a priority for Buncombe plow and salt trucks. Two drivers are assigned to the Interstate and make continual passes the duration of a snowstorm.

But there’s no log that shows how often Buncombe’s trucks turn around at exit 37, skipping the bridge in the process, versus continuing on to exit 33.

“We don’t keep a record of every trip the truck makes,” Bandy said.

Highway Patrol lodges concerns

Inconsistent plowing at exit 37 hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Between Haywood and Buncombe is kind of a no-man’s land,” N.C. Highway Patrol Sergeant Henley said. “Buncombe handles one side and Haywood handles the other.”

Motorists who commute regularly have noticed in the past that the stretch between the exit ramp and on ramp can be snowier than the rest of the interstate.

It was such a problem last winter that the Highway Patrol held a meeting with Buncombe County DOT maintenance workers this fall to discuss it before another winter hit.

“It was addressed with them and they assured us it would be taken care of,” Henley said.

Bandy said he remembered the meeting, but not that particular topic.

“I mean, yeah, we talked about, you know, a lot of things with snow and ice,” Bandy said.

But he didn’t remember concerns about exit 37 specifically.

“Not that I recall, but there may have,” Bandy said. “I don’t remember that particular one, but it may have come up.”

Henley recalls it clearly, however. He said the Buncombe DOT workers assured troopers that they had a protocol for dealing with exit 37.

However, that protocol remains difficult to ferret out.

Green, who initially said “I am not sure who is doing what out there” pledged to look into it. A few days later, after talking to Bandy, he reported back.

“I talked to our folks and found out they are treating it. They go all the way to 33. Not every time but most of the time,” Green said. “They assured me it was being taken care of.”

When asked whether the Buncombe and Haywood maintenance units call each other ahead of time to coordinate who will do the bridge, the answer was “no.”

“We don’t,” Bandy said. But, “during the event as conditions warrant, we do talk to each other,” he added.

Ben Williams, the maintenance supervisor in Haywood County, confirmed that the two units don’t call each other to coordinate ahead of time.

“Sometimes it depends on who gets there first. If it is there and it needs pushing we’ll do it,” Williams said. “We are very fluid.”

Bandy and Green said it makes more sense to let the plow drivers make that decision on the ground, since it depends on timing of who arrives there first and how bad the road is.

“They are not really going to know until they get there,” said Green.

However, that’s not the impression Henley was given at the meeting last fall when troopers asked about a protocol for making sure the stretch wasn’t forgotten.

“They kind of assured us they had one,” Henley said.

Henley said it would be preferable for crews to decide prior to a storm who would do it.

Bandy and Williams, the maintenance supervisors in Buncombe and Haywood respectively, both referred to each other as friends, and even talked to each other in between interviews for this article. As friends, it may be one reason they don’t feel an official protocol is necessary.

“Ben and his counterpart in Buncombe are good friends, and I am sure they have it worked out,” said Mark Gibbs, the maintenance engineer for DOT’s Division 14, a 10-county area that includes Haywood County.

It could also explain why Williams would send Haywood County trucks into Buncombe County simply to be a good neighbor, despite struggling with not enough money for snow removal in his own county.

Gibbs said he has never asked Williams how the stretch at exit 37 is handled. He travels the section of I-40 every morning on his commute to Sylva. This is the first winter he has been making the commute, but has never noticed a problem.

“Every time I have been through there, there has been very little transition between the two lines,” Williams said. “The coordination of both counties, even though it is across Division lines, seems to work fairly well.”

Remodelers who don’t want to send their old kitchen cabinets, bathroom sinks or screen doors to the dump will soon have a place to send unwanted wares that seem too good to throw out.

Haywood Habitat for Humanity is opening a ReStore shop in Waynesville that will have all the usual trappings of a thrift store — dishes, lamps, sofas, coffee makers and the like — but will also have an inventory of used building materials.

“So if someone takes their kitchen cabinets out, rather than taking them to the landfill, we can put them in our store sell them,” said Kent Stewart, the ReStore manager and past-president of Haywood Habitat. “The proceeds go to building more houses.”

Haywood Habitat builds two homes a year on average for needy families. The hope is that the ReStore will raise enough money within a couple years completely fund a new home, Stewart said. Some donated items may even find their way into a Habitat house.

Thrift stores catering to remodelers have become a signature of Habitat for Humanity groups across the country. Bargain hunters with remodeling jobs of their own can repurpose the cast-off materials from someone else’s home renovation.

“The idea of buying a used sink, particularly if you are putting it in your shed or workshop, would be preferable to going to Lowe’s and having to spend $100,” Stewart said.

The Haywood Habitat chapter has toyed with the idea of such a thrift store for nearly a decade.

“For years we kicked it back and forth like a volleyball. It was one of those things that was a good idea but no one wanted to do the work to make it happen,” Stewart said. “Somebody finally said ‘OK you go do it.’”

Few would be better suited than Stewart to run such a store. As the former owner of the downtown Waynesville Book Company, Stewart is versed in retail business management. After selling the bookstore, Stewart went to work at Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse in Waynesville for eight years, becoming intimately familiar with building trades and materials.

Stewart and his fellow Habitat board members spent months developing a business plan a year ago and are now seeing the vision become a reality.

The store won’t open until the spring, but is currently seeking donations to fill it up with things to sell. For those with large items unable to haul them to the store, the Habitat folks can do pick ups.

Stewart hopes the site won’t become a dumping ground for junk. He hopes people won’t offload their construction debris and call it a donation, because that just means Habitat volunteers will bear the burden of carting it to the landfill.

The new store will serve the dual benefit of filling a vacant store space downtown. Located at the corner of Montgomery and Miller streets across from the Sweet Onion restaurant and the public town parking lot, the space was formerly the basement of the Furniture Village, or before that the old Belk’s department store.

If you have an item to donate, or can volunteer to sort incoming items, call Stewart at 828.400.5786 or e-mail him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

With a clipboard under one arm and a giant measuring spool under the other, Greg West climbed into a county-marked truck last Wednesday, cranked the engine and consulted a large Waynesville map on the seat beside him.

“Today we’re hitting Blink Bonny,” he said, planting an index finger on street in a traditional middle class suburb.

West would spend the next eight hours slowly cruising Blink Bonny’s neighborhood streets, eyeing each house from the curb or even loitering in the driveway for telltale signs of its worth.

If anyone’s home, they might mistake him for a stalker. But in fact West is part of a team of Haywood County property appraisers tasked with assigning a new dollar value to each home, lot and tract of land — a dollar value which in turn will determine how much you pay in property taxes.

It’s been five years since the last countywide property assessment. In the past, you could count on values to go up with each reval, but it’s a different ballgame this time. The volatile real estate market has made it tougher for West and his compatriots to pin down accurate values.

With fewer homes selling, there’s less of a baseline to go by. And just because a home sold for one price six months ago doesn’t mean that’s still what it is worth today.

The county essentially wrote its own computer program to calculate property values, taking dozens of variables into account before spitting out a number. The finely-customized formula carves the county up into 700 neighborhoods of like homes. It was lot of work on the front end — entering not just the number of bedrooms, square footage and whether a home has a garage — but also the school district, proximity to town parks or mountain views.

West’s property drive-by is now a time of reckoning as the three-year process concludes. West and the rest of his team are laying a pair of human eyes on each house to make sure their computer-generated values are right.

The property appraisers are in the home stretch of that task, having visited nearly all the county’s 50,000 parcels from Crabtree to Cruso, from Balsam to Beaverdam, from Max Patch to Maggie.

The verdict so far?

“It’s been fairly accurate. We put quite a bit of work into it with neighborhood delineation. It gave us a pretty good start,” West said.

Testing the formula is not hard. They visit homes in the neighborhood that have actually sold and compare the actual selling price to the computer-generated value.

In Blink Bonny, West’s first test of their formula was a 3.5-acre tract. The computer pegged its market value at $77,800. It recently sold for $77,500, a mere $300 difference.

“Our formula fell right on the money,” said Ron McCarthy, a property appraisal consultant with RSN Appraisal assisting the county with the revaluation.

McCarthy downplayed any role luck played. They are just that good, he said.

“Luck is the residue of design,” McCarthy quoted.

But to make sure, West pointed his car a couple of streets over where a home had recently sold. The computer formula put the home at $315,000 but it sold in real life for $365,000. Suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy. West set out to uncover the discrepancy.  

He pored over the county’s data sheets for the home and found the culprit. It had been given a quality grade of average — a “C” on a scale from F to A+.

But this three-story house sported stacked stone, beadboard ceilings in a wrap-around porch, octagon attic windows and other classy features. Compared to the brick ranch homes on the rest of the street, a “C” rating was too low.

He changed the quality to a B+. Running the formula again but with the corrected data, it came up within a few thousand dollars of nailing the real selling price.

West was relieved. The formula itself wasn’t wrong — just the data that was plugged into it. With several dozen variables factored into the formula, if any of them are wrong, the value it spits out will likewise be wrong.

And that’s precisely West’s job during the drive-bys: to ensure the underlying data for each house is right.

Does the home have a new garage or deck? Has it fallen into disrepair? Is it junked up with a sofa on the front porch? Has the gravel driveway now been paved?

At one home, West did a double-take after spying a second-story over the garage with curtains and blinds visible inside the window.

“Looks like they added a bonus room,” West said, something his sketch of the home in the county’s records didn’t show.

West recalibrate the home’s square feet, triggering a higher value.

Three doors up, West’s keen eye struck again. A brick patio near the front door seemed in mint condition — no moss stains on the pavers, which you’d expect with a ‘70s era house. Either they had recently invested in a pressure washer or the patio was new.

West lifted his tape measure from the back seat and climbed out of the truck. He rung the bell and met a particularly helpful homeowner who not only confirmed that the front patio was new but volunteered that there was another new patio out back. Both would boost the home’s value.

“He had a keen eye to notice that,” McCarthy said of West’s detective work. “That’s why we do the drive-by.”

McCarthy put his own skills to work at the next house in a just-for-fun blind match-up against the computer formula. He sized up the house from the car window, glanced at the sketch of its footprint and threw out his best guess. He was just a few thousand dollars off from the computer-generated value of $300,000.

That likewise bodes well for the county’s modeling — the computer formula came up with the same value as a seasoned appraiser on the ground.

Yet there’s all sorts of factors that might lead appraisers to tweak your home value during the drive-bys. If the neighborhood is uniform — homes of same quality and condition — it’s an easy day.

“If it’s in-town homes on quarter-acre lots, you can just go bam, bam, bam, bam,” West said.

But there’s usually more variation than that.

New windows and a freshly shingled roof? This could earn you brownie points for your home’s condition, and a slight bump in value. Sagging gutters and mildewed sills could bring you down a notch.

“This is like the quality control,” McCarthy said of their work.

The labor intensive process can seem never ending, and indeed as soon as this reval is finished they county will soon start ramping up for the next one another four or five years away.

Attention Haywood County property owners

Start watching your mailbox in March for a notice from the county reflecting the new and current market value of your home.

In North Carolina, counties are required to reassess property values every few years. The revaluation — or “reval” — is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share come tax day.

Don’t assume that your property taxes will go up or down just because your property values do, however. Haywood County commissioners won’t set the actual tax rate until June. The tax rate is then applied to your property value to determine your tax bill for 2011.

With a clipboard under one arm and a giant measuring spool under the other, Greg West climbed into a county-marked truck last Wednesday, cranked the engine and consulted a large Waynesville map on the seat beside him.

“Today we’re hitting Blink Bonny,” he said, planting an index finger on a traditional middle class suburb.

West would spend the next eight hours slowly cruising their neighborhood streets, eyeing each house from the driveway for tell-tale signs of its worth. If anyone’s inside, they might easily mistake him for a stalker loitering at the curb.

West is part of the team of Haywood County property appraisers tasked with assigning a new dollar value to each home, lot and tract of land — a dollar value which in turn will determine how much you pay in property taxes.

It’s been five years since the last countywide property assessment. In the past, you could count on values to go up, but it’s a different ballgame this time. The volatile real estate market has made it tougher for West and his compatriots to pin down accurate values.

With fewer homes selling, there’s less of a baseline to go by. And just because a home sold for one price six months ago doesn’t mean that’s still what it is worth today.

The county essentially wrote its own computer program to calculate property values, taking dozens of variables into account before spitting out a number. It was lot of work on the front end and involved carving the county up into 700 neighborhoods of like homes.

West’s property drive-by is now a time of reckoning as the three-year process concludes. West is laying a pair of human eyes on each house to make sure their computer-generated value is right.

The property appraisers are in the home stretch of that task, having visited nearly all the county’s 50,000 parcels from Crabtree to Cruso, from Balsam to Beaverdam, from Max Patch to Maggie.

The verdict so far?

“It’s been fairly accurate. We put quite a bit of work into it with neighborhood delineation. It gave us a pretty good start,” West said.

Testing the formula is not hard. The first order of business with each of his daily drive-bys is to visit any homes in the neighborhood that may have actually sold. He compares the computer-generated value with what it actually sold for.

In Blink Bonny, West’s first test of their formula was a 3.5-acre tract. The county had pegged its market value at $77,800. In the real world, it recently sold for $77,500. A mere $300 apart.

“Our formula fell right on the money,” said Ron McCarthy, a property appraisal consultant with RSN Appraisal assisting the county with the revaluation.

McCarthy protested any role luck played. They are just that good, he said.

To make sure, West pointed his car a couple of streets over where a home had recently sold. The computer formula put the home at $315,000 but it sold in real life for $365,000. Suddenly things weren’t looking so rosy. West set out to uncover the discrepancy.  

West pored over the county’s data for the home and found the culprit. It had been given a quality grade of average — a “C” on a scale from F to A+.

But this three-story house sported stacked stone, beadboard ceilings in a wrap-around porch, octagon attic windows and other posh features. Compared to the brick ranch homes on the rest of the street, a “C” rating was too low.

He changed the quality to a B+. Using the same formula, but with the corrected data, it was now within a few thousand dollars.

West was relieved. The formula itself wasn’t wrong — just the data that was plugged into it

With several dozen variables factored into the formula, if any of them are wrong, the value it spits out will likewise be wrong. Thus West’s job during the drive-bys is mostly to ensure the data for each house is right.

Does the home have a new garage or deck? Has it fallen into disrepair? Is it junked up with a sofa on the front porch? Has the gravel driveway now been paved?

At one home, West spotted the telltale sign of a finished bonus room over the family’s garage: curtains and blinds over an upstairs window. The homeowners had added finished square feet, and that updated data triggered a higher value.

Three doors up, West’s keen eye struck again. A brick patio at the side of the house looked remarkably clean and lacked any sign of chipping and cracking you would expect for a patio dating to the home’s construction. Either they had recently invested in a pressure washer or the patio was new.

West lifted the tape measure from the back seat and climbed out. He rung the bell, and a particularly helpful home owner revealed that not only was the front patio new but there was another new patio out back. Both would boost the home’s value.

“He had a keen eye to notice that,” McCarthy said. “That’s why we do the drive-by.”

In a blind match-up between McCarthy and the computer formula, he sized up a house from the car window, glanced at the sketch of its footprint and threw out his best guess. He was just a few thousand off from the computer on a $300,000 house.

That likewise bodes well for the county’s modeling — the computer formula came up with the same value as a seasoned appraiser on the ground.

Yet there’s all sorts of tweaking that might lead West to adjust your home value during the drive-bys. If the neighborhood is uniform — homes of same quality and condition — it’s an easy day.

“If it’s in town homes on quarter-acre lots, you can just go bam, bam, bam, bam,” West said.

But there’s usually more variation than that.

New windows and a freshly shingled roof? This could earn you brownie points for your home’s condition, and a slight bump in value. Sagging gutters and mildew-stained flashing could bring you down a notch.

Views are particularly tricky. When the majority of a neighborhood has mountain views, the view factor is already built in to the baseline of home values.

If you are the lone house without a view, you will see your value reflect that.

Of, if you are the lone house with a view in a  neighborhood that otherwise lacks them, plan on a requisite bump up.

Attention Haywood County property owners

Start watching your mailbox in March for a notice from the county with your new property value reflecting the current market value of your home.

In North Carolina, counties are required to reassess property values every few years. The revaluation — or “reval” — is intended to level the playing field, bringing the county’s assessed value of your property in line with the true market value so everyone is paying their fair share when paying property taxes.

Don’t assume that your taxes will go up or down just because your property values have, however. Haywood County commissioners won’t set the actual tax rate until June.

Haywood County cyclists – and would-be cyclists – will soon be able to breathe a little easier and peddle a bit more freely, thanks to a comprehensive plan in the works to address a range of cycling issues.

The plan, spearheaded by local group Bicycle Haywood N.C., will look at a number of issues facing the area’s cyclists including safety, accessibility and awareness among both cyclists and drivers.

The idea got its genesis when members of the newly formed group decided last year that Haywood was lacking in formal communication among cyclists, the community and local and governmental organizations that could be working with them, like the Department of Transportation and the Haywood County Recreation and Parks department.

So, said George Ivey, the group’s vice chair, they sought out funding and approached the various groups about codifying a bicycle plan for the county, the first in Haywood and one of the few targeted towards the state’s more rural areas.

The plan is founded on what the group calls its five “Es:” engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement and evaluation and planning.

Ivey said that while engineering is an important component — encompassing things like designated bike lanes and racks in downtown areas — educating the public about bike safety while cycling and road awareness is just as vital.

One of the goals of the plan is to educate drivers to get accustomed to bikes on the road, and show residents that cycling can be a viable option for them in a number of different ways, as a commuter, a recreational rider or anything in between.

“I think the plan’s going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” said Ivey. “For some people, it may be a way for their kids to commute to school. For adult commuters, hopefully it will make it a lot easier for people to commute to work or the bank or the post office.”

Haywood County Recreation and Parks Director Claire Carleton agrees. She said that, from a recreational standpoint, the benefits of a bike plan could be brilliant for Haywood County families.

“It would be such an asset for the citizens living in Haywood County, as well as tourists,” said Carleton. “If it connected with local greenway trails and the plans that we have for that, it would provide such a wonderful network for families to take part in.”

And because there are such multi-facted uses and benefits of cycling in Haywood – and because of the challenges presented by the region’s geography and topography – Ivey said his group isn’t trying to get too specific in what they want. Instead, it is working with a plethora of outside groups and citizens to come up with a plan that provides residents with the most flexibility and usability.

Currently, the group is accepting applications for someone to spearhead the planning efforts, which will begin in April. But Ivey said he’s hopeful that the collaboration and cycling interest will continue happening long after the plan is in place.

“None of us expect every single road to have bike lanes, but we do want to have those options nearby,” said Ivey.

And according to Carleton, that meshes beautifully with the comprehensive plan drafted for her department several years ago that highlighted the need to move towards more cycling-friendly planning, both in terms of road building and growth corridors, as well as emphasis on education and increasing cycling use and awareness.

The plan is being funded largely through a grant from the French Broad Metropolitan Planning Organizations, along with matching pledges and a smaller grant from the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina.

Bicycle Haywood N.C. meets to discuss the plan at 6 p.m. on the first Tuesday of each month at the Waynesville Inn at the Waynesville Country Club.

More information can be found at bicyclehaywoodnc.org.