Power plant lease approved Worth a thousand words: Julie Brandt used Progress Energy’s illustration to raise questions about Woodfin’s future viewshed. photos by Jonathan Welch An overflow crowd spilled out of the chamber at the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners’ Jan. 16 meeting. Almost all were there to oppose leasing county-owned land to Progress Energy […]

A hatch job: A geotechnical report by Golder Associates includes this map. Town Mountain Cove lots that may not meet county steep-slope regulations are marked with red cross-hatching. A report commissioned by the grassroots group Friends of Town Mountain concludes that the proposed Town Mountain Cove development, formerly known as Bartram’s Walk, “could increase the […]

A state law designed to increase competition among cable-television providers and give customers more choice may bode ill for public-access channels and broadband Internet service in outlying areas. It could even leave some residents with no cable service at all, critics say. The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, “puts at serious risk the possibilities […]

“We need to enforce the ordinances and get the trucks off the street, not micromanage how they do it.” — Council member Robin Cape Deliveries yet to come?: This Maxwell Street sidewalk, damaged by Greenlife delivery vehicles, has now been repaved with 10-inch-thick cement — a possible harbinger of continued truck traffic. photo by Jonathan […]

The greening blues: King Transmission and adjoining small businesses will be forced out to make way for the Wilma Dykeman RiverWay. photo by Jonathan Welch In a meeting characterized as “historic” by more than one resident in attendance, Buncombe County took giant steps toward preserving viewsheds and watersheds on Nov. 21. Most visibly, the commissioners […]

The new badge in Buncombe: Van Duncan. photo by Jonathan Welch Van Duncan swept to victory in the Buncombe County sheriff’s race, outpacing incumbent Sheriff Bobby Medford by 14,651 votes — almost 20 percent of the nearly 77,000 votes cast. Voter turnout for the Nov. 7 election was substantially higher than in 2002, but it […]

When the Buncombe County commissioners passed stricter rules governing development on steep slopes back in March, it triggered an avalanche of proposals by developers. Proposals submitted before July 1 aren’t subject to the new rules, regardless of when the Planning Board actually gets around to evaluating and ruling on them. Among the 23 last-minute submissions […]

“The WNC census data I studied showed that between 1949 and 2001, 72 percent of what was considered farmland was converted to commercial or residential development.” — Phillip Gibson, Environmental Leadership Center Buncombe’s changing face: This sequence of GIS maps, prepared by Neil Thomas of Resource Data Inc., reveals development patterns in the county from […]

Buncombe County sheriff candidates Van Duncan and Bobby Medford met for their first public debate at an Oct. 18 luncheon organized by the Leadership Asheville Forum at the Country Club of Asheville. In his opening statement, before a crowd about 75 people, the Republican incumbent Medford outlined his local roots and said he wasn’t running […]