Holly Kays
Shirley Oswalt (pictured above, left, with sister Geraldine Thompson) was named a Beloved Woman of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on Tuesday, Feb. 2, the highest honor that can be given to a Cherokee woman and one that’s held by only two other living people.
Shirley Jackson Oswalt can still remember the first words she said in English.
Her older siblings had prepped her before she headed off to her first day of first grade at the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Snowbird Day School in Robbinsville, and when the teacher came over to greet her, Oswalt knew her line.
Jackson County is hoping that grants will offset the $847,000 cost of extending water and sewer connections to a piece of land being eyed for a new outdoor adventure park in Dillsboro, and last week commissioners gave the county the go-ahead to apply for just such a grant — $50,000 from the N.C. Department of Commerce.
A petition drive is underway in Cherokee aiming to place term limits on Tribal Council members and give tribal members the right to recall elected officials.
Correction: In the March 1 issue, The Smoky Mountain News incorrectly reported that Jackson Neighbors in Need requested funding from the Jackson County Commissioners. The Southwestern Child Development Commission is the entity that requested the funding, as management of Jackson’s homeless shelter has transitioned from Neighbors in Need to the SWCDC. SMN regrets the error.
A 48-unit apartment complex could be built along Savannah Road in Sylva if town commissioners give the green light at their meeting Thursday, March 9.
Kelly Custer has been a lifelong lover of the outdoors, from playing sports as a kid to mountaineering adventures in far-flung regions of Bolivia and Peru as an adult. Now, the Jackson County businessman is hoping to get others exploring Western North Carolina’s outdoor opportunities — specifically, those afforded by the stretch of the Tuckasegee River flowing through Dillsboro.
Last year, Custer formed the company Western North Carolina Outdoor Development with an eye to bid on a piece of property that’s been publicly owned since 2013, when Duke Energy turned it over to Dillsboro following removal of the Dillsboro Dam. Dillsboro sold it to Jackson County for $350,000 in 2014, and ever since the county’s been looking for a way to turn the undeveloped tract into a win for economic development.
Some tribal members are saying their rights were violated after three pieces of legislation that would curtail impeachment proceedings against Principal Chief Patrick Lambert were denied last week in successive votes during which no discussion was allowed.
Tribal Council will proceed with its efforts to impeach Principal Chief Patrick Lambert following votes to overturn Lambert’s veto of the action and to deny two protests filed against the impeachment.
News spread fast last week after the Sylva Police Department removed more than 50 spikes from hiking trails at Pinnacle Park, but a drive by the trailhead two days later showed that the incident hadn’t dampened local enthusiasm for the area. Even at 1 p.m. on a Thursday, the parking area held seven cars whose owners had come to enjoy a sunny afternoon on the trail.
Sylva resident Amy Schmidt, 33, was one of them. She and her German shepherd Greta come to Pinnacle Park regularly, about three times a week, and though she’d heard about the spikes she didn’t think twice about coming back for their regular walk. But the story did give her pause.
An unusual number of building vacancies has peppered downtown Sylva this winter, and as town leaders have scratched their heads to figure out why, the fee structure of the Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority has come under fire as a possible culprit. And that’s led to a larger discussion about whether that fee structure is inhibiting the area’s overall economic development.
Principal Chief Patrick Lambert has issued a veto against Tribal Council’s Feb. 2 resolution to begin impeachment proceedings against him.
The population of folks in need of overnight housing has been increasing in Jackson County, prompting Jackson Neighbors in Need to ask commissioners for $23,400 to help them shelter higher-than-expected numbers of people through the end of March.
The newly hired principal of the newly formed Catamount School in Sylva won’t be new to the environment at Smoky Mountain High School, where the Catamount School is to be located.
When starting the hike, it’s not immediately obvious why the Chimney Tops Trail should be appointed for long-term closure. The brook is babbling, the sun is shining and the trees are towering just as one would expect of a trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the results of a recent trail rehabilitation effort make for exceedingly pleasant walking.
But as the trail nears its terminus at the twin peaks of the Chimney Tops, the reason becomes abundantly clear. Its harbingers are announced with a jumble of burned branches here, an area of blackened ground there, and the sudden realization that, even on a brisk winter day when it’s hard to smell much at all, there’s a faint odor of charcoal in the air.
Sylva is just starting budget planning for 2017-18, but this year’s process promises to be less arduous than last year’s, when revenue uncertainty and the need for a tax rate increase clouded the enterprise.
A technician with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission was out for a routine check of an elk fence installed at the Ralph Ross and Sons Dairy Farm on Jan. 31 when he spotted two young bull elk dead on the property.
Construction on an outdoor adventure park offering everything from rafting to ropes courses could begin in Dillsboro as early as April if the Jackson County Commissioners give final approval to the project following a public hearing at 5:30 p.m. Monday, March 20, at the Jackson County Justice and Administration Building.
Opponents of Principal Chief Patrick Lambert are crying foul over a $5.6 million contract between the Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise and the Cherokee Grand Hotel — which Lambert and his wife own — saying that its existence violates tribal ethics laws.
According to the National Phenology Network, Punxsutawny Phil had it all wrong when he emerged from his hole this month to declare six more weeks of winter — across the Southeastern U.S, the NPN’s data shows, spring 2017 is arriving three weeks earlier than the 1981-2010 average.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is looking for volunteers to help gather the data that will bring such generalizations down to a more local level. Phenology — the ways that plants and animals respond to seasonal changes — has been the subject of increasing interest as discussions about climate change have heated up, and the park is now four years into a volunteer program to collect data for the larger NPN project.
Sylva will have to spend $25,000 on an emergency action plan for Fisher Creek Dam, due to a 2016 state law requiring dams designated as high-hazard to have such a plan in place.
The Jackson County Tourism Development Authority has its first permanent employee following a unanimous vote from the Jackson County Commissioners this month.
Sylva’s leaders have long grappled with how to spur the town’s stagnant residential tax base and get more high-density housing within its limits, but when a proposal for a 136-unit apartment complex made its way before town commissioners last week, the board was less than enthusiastic about the concept.
Plans are crystallizing for a new middle school in Jackson County, but it’s a race against the clock for Western Carolina University and Jackson County Public Schools to meet the deadline for opening set by the General Assembly.
A newly approved expansion project at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort was nearly derailed when a resolution to kill the project was narrowly rejected in Tribal Council this month, with the final vote an even 50-50.
If you’d polled Kimberley Brookshire’s friends a couple years ago, they’d likely have said the chances were slim to none that the Charlotte resident would ever think seriously about leaving it all behind to hike more than 2,000 miles through North Carolina.
“I wasn’t much of an outdoors person,” said Brookshire, 32.
With the recession nearly a decade in the rearview mirror, the real estate market is once more robust in Jackson County — especially in the southern end of the county around Cashiers.
A team of 26 FBI agents descended on Cherokee Feb. 2, filling the Qualla Housing Authority building and wheeling entire filing cabinets, as well as papers and hard drives, into a U-Haul parked to the side of the building.
To the boos of an outspoken audience, the Cherokee Tribal Council voted 9-3 Feb. 2 to begin impeachment proceedings against Principal Chief Patrick Lambert.
Did the fires hurt wildlife?
Prescribed burning is often used as a tool to benefit wildlife by regenerating their habitat, and in the case of the slowly creeping ground fires that accounted for most of the burned area, wildlife are usually able to get out of the way as flames approach.
It’s a warmer-than-average January day, the contours of the mountains visible from the highway beneath a thin covering of leafless tree branches under a half-blue sky. A U.S. Forest Service Jeep travels west on U.S. 74, bypassing Franklin and hanging a right for the winding road that leads to Wayah Bald.
The vehicle pauses for a moment as it traverses a valley framed by Wayah’s upward-reaching face. The slope is mottled with patches of darkness that could almost pass for cloud shadows.
Rumors have been flying on the Qualla Boundary since an investigation into contract awards and human resources actions under Principal Chief Patrick Lambert’s administration was completed last week. The report, a redacted copy of which was posted on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council Facebook page, states that the investigated actions “deviated from the Cherokee Code and other documented policies and processes.”
A blanket freeze on federal hiring is having a local impact as the agencies tasked with managing Western North Carolina’s roughly 1.5 million acres of public land halt the hiring of seasonal employees responsible for keeping the area’s national parks and forests safe, clean and educational for the millions of visitors who seek them out each year.
Land conservation groups across the region found something to celebrate this month when the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced an $8 million allocation for farmland conservation in Western North Carolina — a gargantuan number that the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy calls “unprecedented.”
This type of funding, allocated through the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Regional Conservation Partnership Plan under the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, has been available in the past. But never before has the amount been so large or so specifically targeted to Western North Carolina.
Upgrading the Jackson County Health Department could prove a much less expensive undertaking than originally anticipated, if estimates contained in a recently completed study prove correct.
The town of Sylva took a tentative first step this month toward easing residential zoning restrictions that some credit with hindering growth in the geographically constrained town.
Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort is stepping into its 20th year of operation with plans for a massive expansion that will add 600-800 hotel rooms, a parking deck and a 100,000-square-foot event center to the existing 1,900,000-square-foot complex.
It was around 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5, when the two hikers stepped out of their red Ford Edge and into the parking lot at Big East Fork Trailhead. After the stunning vistas the Blue Ridge Parkway had offered on their drive from Asheville, David Crockett, a 23-year-old UNC Charlotte student, and his friend Sultan Alraddadi wanted to see those mountains up close.
They’d found the hike on AllTrails, an app that outlined an 8.1-mile loop that climbed Chestnut Ridge, continuing west to butt up against the Art Loeb Trail before returning east via the Shining Creek Trail.
The streets of downtown Sylva are newly treeless after town crews excavated the red maples earlier this month, but the condition won’t last for long. A new set of trees — 15 Japanese zelkovas — has been ordered and will likely go in this week.
The Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise’s newest member will be anything but new to the business of casino management when she takes her seat on the board.
According to a recent ranking from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority is one of the nation’s worst-performing hospitals when it comes to rates of patients who acquire infections while staying in the hospital.
Joe Ward’s term on the Tuckasegee Water and Sewer Authority board came to an abrupt end last week when newly elected commissioner Mickey Luker made a motion to remove him during the Jackson County Commissioners’ Jan. 9 meeting. The move prevailed in a party-line vote, three Republicans against two Democrats.
Just north of Cullowhee, at the curvy, gravel terminus of Cane Creek Road, sits the building containing the world’s largest wilderness medicine classroom.
Landmark Learning, a nationally accredited school offering a variety of courses in wilderness medicine, started using the building in May, though there’s still heavy equipment in view as fine-tuning continues. The 8,000-square-foot building contains a 2,400-square-foot classroom, a commercial kitchen, and a student lounge. Up an even steeper hill than the one that leads to the main building is a pair of dorm-style cabins and a terraced camping area, which together can accommodate 36 people.
Recently elected Jackson County Commissioner Mickey Luker has dropped a lawsuit he filed in June contesting a permit denial handed down from the Jackson County Department of Public Health.
Mill Street in Sylva will go from two lanes to one when a 2016 decision from the Sylva Board of Commissioners goes into effect. However, the timeline will depend on the town’s ability to fund the plan in the upcoming budget year.
An unusual number of “for rent” signs have been cropping up in downtown Sylva lately, and the vacancies have town leaders and business owners wondering what this forebodes in the year ahead.
January is universally recognized as the time to make a fresh start, throw away last year’s used-up calendar and dream up a new set of aspirations for the 12 months ahead. And when it comes to New Year’s resolutions aimed at becoming more active in 2017, Western North Carolina offers a dazzling array of options.
Western Carolina University will soon be opening a school serving primary grades — likely in Jackson County — after a state mandate passed this summer goes into effect.
Sylva’s town leaders were so excited to see the number of applications they received from prospective members of a public art committee they’ve spent the last half year working to form that they considered expanding the number of seats available on the committee.
Health services emanating from the Good Samaritan building in Sylva are set to expand this year as Good Sam moves under the umbrella of Hendersonville-based Blue Ridge Community Health Services.
