This week’s Haywood County Commission meeting featured over a dozen speakers decrying the board’s decision to not grant the full funding requested by school officials ahead of the budget vote. 

The meeting began with County Manager Bryant Morehead presenting the budget, as he’d done during an earlier meeting. The budget looked almost the exact same as the prior presentation with one exception, an additional $1 million fund balance appropriation to bolster school funding, leaving the county $700,000 short of meeting the $3 million funding increase request. 

Historically, Haywood County Schools has run a tight ship in the face of slim county appropriations. Last year, it pulled from its own fund balance to finance operations; in 2022, it cut 36 positions. 

But for the coming academic year, Superintendent Trevor Putnam made a dire case for additional funding. Any further cuts, he said, would deny HCS students a quality education.

This story was updated Dec. 24 to include a quote from  NC DHHS. 

Between 2017 and 2025, Swain County Law Enforcement Center failed 13 of 16 biannual inspections, according to Disability Rights North Carolina. 

The existence of one or more documented violations requires the sheriff to submit a plan of correction to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services detailing the steps that will be or already have been taken to remediate each issue.

Jackson County Sheriff Doug Farmer gave his annual report to his county commissioners last week, and while overdose deaths have declined dramatically, the agency is facing difficulties housing inmates in a crowded jail. 

Friday, as Roxan Wetzel and her husband, Rook, eagerly anticipated their trip to Washington, D.C. to see Donald Trump become the United States’ 47th president, they were hit with a sudden gut punch — the inauguration was moved indoors. Their ticket was now little more than a souvenir. 

A man initially convicted in a Cherokee Tribal Court for playing a role in a debilitating December 2019 ransomware attack is suing the tribe. 

Cody Long, the tribe’s former lead systems administrator for its Office of Information and Technology, was held in jail for 454 days and was in solitary confinement for the better part of a year following his initial arrest for tampering with public records and obstructing government functions.

After an extensive, yearslong process featuring dozens of public hearings, presentations and private meetings, Haywood County will finally get its badly-needed jail expansion, even though the final step was marred by threats and misinformation from a familiar face. 

To the Editor:

With interest, I read the article “Combating the Opioid Crisis” with interest in the February 22 issue of The Sylva Herald. In the article it was stated that an opioid settlement supplemental agreement awarded Jackson County $3 million to combat opioid use on the local level. 

Haywood County commissioners have taken the final financial step in the long process toward approving a jail expansion, all but assuring the project will move forward after years of delay and doubt. 

With several critical deadlines approaching and the cost of construction only going up, Haywood County commissioners spent more than two hours on Feb. 26 meeting with administrators, architects, builders and sheriff’s office personnel — going over every detail of the long-suffering jail expansion project, its growing price tag and its ultimate future.