Polk Lore

Taking the good things in life for granted is never a good idea, but that’s what happening in some corners of this country when it comes to the value of public libraries. In Georgia, legislation that would require all public libraries to sever ties with the American Library Association just passed the state senate. Over in South Carolina, the Greenville County Library system did just that years ago. You might think that no would consider an association dedicated to promoting literacy and supporting libraries and librarians to be a hotbed of radicalism and socialist propaganda, but you would be wrong.

The good news is Polk Country’s Public Library seems to have avoided falling into the trap set by the culture warriors. Our little county has not one but two library branches — the main one in Columbus and another in Saluda, and there doesn't seem to be any threat to its mission. In fact, as you’ll hear in this interview with the library’s director, Marcie Dowling, the list of services it provides is only growing, far beyond just providing free access to books.

Resources:

This year’s elections are going to be a fair bit different, even if you’re veteran at casting ballots. For one thing, you're going to need photographic proof of your identify. And that not the only change that the state legislature has foisted on us. In fact, Polk County has been singled out for several additional changes to way we vote, and the way we’re represented, at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels. So I asked our county’s director of elections, Cliff Marr, to go over them with me, and he graciously agreed. I’m willing to bet you’ll learn a few things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Useful resources:

Why does Polk Lore devote so much attention to education? Because it’s one of the few things that just about everyone in the county, no matter their political persuasion, agrees is a source of pride. Polk Schools isn’t a perfect institution, of course. But overall, our little school system’s teachers, staff, and board warrant the widespread support they get from the public, from our County Commission, and from the folks who rate schools. There’s a reason why most everyone objects to the recent move by the state legislature to shove the square peg of partisan elections into the round hole of Polk Schools. As I asked State Representative Jake Johnson a few weeks ago on this podcast: why fix something that ain’t broke?

I think that was a fair question. Just look at the low interest in replacing the incumbents on the board. Cindy Allen has been on that board since she was appointed to fill the White Oak seat in 2001, and as you’ll find out, she had no trouble finding enough signatures to get herself on the November ballot, despite the pressure to run within the party system. We talked about that decision, her overall vision for the schools, and what to do about smartphones in the classroom, at the Feagan Law offices in Columbus, where she works as a paralegal, on Groundhog Day.

Mentioned in this episode

Polk County, along with Henderson and Transylvania, are lumped together in what is now called Court District 42. Judicial elections are partisan affairs around here, but I’ve always thought that was a particularly bad idea — for what I hope are obvious reasons — so I was pleased to discover that one of Polk County’s veteran lawyers, a woman who was appointed last year to fill a vacancy on the district court, is running to stay on the bench as an unaffiliated candidate, which is not an easy thing to do in this hyper-polarized country of ours.

Judges aren’t allowed to say much of anything that might attract media attention, so you’d probably think inviting her onto Polk Lore would a waste of time. But my conversation with Lora T. Baker was anything but. She even said a few things that might be considered a quasi-political, in a very limited and reasonable sense. We talked at the county courthouse in late January.

A couple of days before Christmas, one of the Facebook pages devoted to issues of community concern in the county reproduced a letter to the editor of the Tryon Daily Bulletin warning us all to “speak out and take Polk County off the list of potential locations for a nuclear waste disposal facility.”

Not too surprisingly, the post drew dozens of comments, mostly from those who were angry to learn that Polk County was being considered as a possible home for the country’s high-level radioactive waste. So problematic was the post — and the letter that started it all — that County Manager Marche Pittman felt compelled to weigh in and point out that Polk County is on no such list.

Because Marche Pittman usually has better things to do than  police misinformed Facebook posts, I asked him to talk about the bigger picture of misinformation in a time when more people get their news from social media than old-fashioned news outlets, and whether the county has any role in doing anything about the problem. We talked in the Womack Building on January 9.

Just before Halloween, I found myself in the pews of the Tryon Presbyterian Church listening to some of the most challenging music I’ve heard in the last 20 years. The musician was Drew Banzhoff, a Gen Zer hired this spring to serve as the church’s musical director. The instrument was the organ, which was no surprise given that the venue was a church.  

But it didn’t take long for the playlist to stray into less-familiar territory. Drew even warned us that we were about to head into "difficult" territory, which isn’t something you hear from your typical church organist. By the time the echoes of the final chords of the concert’s closing piece, the premier of a new composition by our host, had faded from rafters of the church, I knew I wanted to talk to Drew about his pushing-the-envelope, literally pulling-out-all-the-stops approach to music.

If you have any musical training, this is the episode for you. If you don't, then maybe it will change your mind about how you should be thinking about music.

FURTHER LISTENING

Frankenstops Concert (Oct. 29, 2023):

Polk County has taken it on the chin this year when it comes to democracy.

Beginning next year, elections for seats on the Polk County Board of Education will be partisan affairs. Anyone who wants to run for one of the three seats up for grabs has to choose between publicly embracing one of the two main parties, or fighting to get on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. Which isn’t all that easy to do. 

Polk County also lost its off-year elections, which meant that the municipal elections scheduled for this fall were put off until next year. And every term of office at the local level will be four years long from now on.

And the county got split in two as part of Congressional re-districting. Come 2024, the Saluda and Cooper’s Gap precincts will stay in NC 11, while the rest of county will be moved to NC 14. Some of the folks in the White Oak and Mill Springs area will have to check out the board of elections website to find out which side of the dividing line they live on.

Our state representative, Jake Johnson, supported all of these changes. And over the next hour, I ask him why. I also ask him why he had funding for the Saluda Grade Rails to Trails project pulled off the budget negotiating table— at the 11th hour — threatening the whole project, only to reverse course soon after.

Does that sound a little confrontational? Maybe, but we’re now officially into the campaign season, so the questions are only going to get tougher. Our representative had answers prepared for all them. I’ll let you judge whether those answers are up to snuff. He and I talked in the conference room above the House of Flags Museum in Columbus on December 4, which happened to be opening day of candidate-filing for Election 2024. 

Further Reading:

The consequences of partisan school boards:

Overseeing a rural hospital isn’t exactly a soft landing as you prepare for the retirement phase of your career. But that's the path Bill Miller has chosen for himself. More than a hundred and ninety rural hospitals in the U.S. have closed since two thousand five. According to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, thirty percent of the ones that are still accepting patients are at risk of closing.

Usually, the problem comes down to simple math: most of the revenue at rural hospitals comes from government insurance – Medicaid for low-income patients and Medicare for the elderly. But it often costs more to provide that health care than what the hospitals receive in reimbursements from the states.

Making matters worse is the reputation that many small hospitals far from the big cities have acquired. But St. Luke’s is not about to shut down, it’s not having troubling finding qualified staff, and it isn’t facing a major funding shortfall. In fact, its accounting department is probably going to have even more flexibility in the years ahead thanks to North Carolina’s decision to finally expand Medicaid eligibility to another 600,000 residents.

The nuts and bolts of running a 25-bed hospital, even one with a 50-million-dollar budget, don’t usually get much attention — unless one threatens to close, of course. But I thought it would be good idea to ask some questions now, while things at our non-profit, community-owned hospital are going well. My guest agreed, so we sat down for a chat at the end of September in his old stomping grounds at the Stearns Education Building in Columbus.

Further reading

There are only four big cities in the U.S. where buying a house makes more economic sense than renting. Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Houston. Everywhere else, investing in a home is way out of reach for just about everyone who doesn’t make most of their money from surfing the stock market.

I’ve been planning an episode devoted to the affordable housing problem since I began this podcast, but I couldn’t figure out a new angle. There are plenty of people working on the problem, of course. Here in Polk County, we have Outreach, which has built four rental homes in Green Creek, and there’s a new 70-unit affordable apartment building going up at the junction of the 74 and 108. Meanwhile, the Housing Assistance non-profit corporation of Henderson County has just expanded to serve Polk County. There are good stories there, I’m sure. But I wanted to talk about the bigger picture.

It may seem a little odd for a real estate agent, whose income is directly proportional to the value of the deals they broker, to be promoting affordable housing. But if you know Amy Wood, and we’ve been friends for the better part of two decades, it’s not really all that surprising. And if you stick around for the next 40 minutes, you’ll find out why. We talked on her porch in Saluda.

Further reading:

The big news on the education front in Polk County is the end of non-partisan elections for the school board. In a move that almost no one in the county thought was an even marginally bright idea, the state legislature voted this summer to make elections for seats on the Board of Education partisan races. Like it not changes are on the way for Polk Schools.

So, I thought it would be a good time to check in once again with Polk Schools Superintendent Aaron Greene to see how things stand this year and establish a baseline against which future change can be gauged.

He’s not in a position to speak about the merits, or lack thereof, of introducing party politics to our schools, but he can talk about things like the extra short summer break our students just had, the situation with bus drivers, and what his staff is going to do with all the bonus tax revenue that County Commissioners approved for the schools in this year’s budget. We talked in his office in Columbus at the end of the first week of class.

Further reading:

Things could be a lot worse:

More than 50 years ago, on Christmas Eve of 1968, as Apollo 8 rounded the far side of the moon, astronaut William Anders grabbed a camera and snapped a picture of the Earth as it slipped into view. That photograph, “Earth Rise,” is one of the most influential images ever created. It changed the way we thought about our place in the universe and helped launch the modern environmental movement.

But a hundred years before that, a select group of artists hauled their painting gear across America to capture somewhat-more-close-up scenes of the natural world. Their illustrations were published as wood and steel engravings in a series of coffee-table journals called Picturesque America. Those images were also hugely influential. In fact, the idea of the national park system can, at least in part, be traced to that project. 

Of course, the mission of preserving nature is a never-ending one. Because the threats never go away. 

In this episode, we meet one of the modern champions of the power of art to inspire environmental protection. Scott Varn recently moved his national non-profit organization, Preserving a Picturesque America, to Polk County – Saluda, to be precise.  

What exactly his non-profit does will takes some explaining, but the short story is he’s working with today’s artists to raise money to protect the places first captured by their nineteenth-century predecessors. We talked in early July at his new digs in Saluda, where you can find much of that art,  on display earlier this month.

Talia Petoia, who had just turned 27, was shot and killed, reportedly by her boyfriend, 21-year-old Tyler Laughter, on March 10, in Mill Spring. Within a few days, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office announced that the killing was accidental — an unintentional discharge while handling a gun. Three months later, following a grand jury hearing, the district attorney indicted Talia’s boyfriend with involuntary manslaughter. His trial, assuming he doesn’t plead guilty, is scheduled for Aug. 15.

Dozens of people in Polk County and neighboring communities have collectively put up about $20,000 to help Talia’s family hire a lawyer and a private investigator to second-guess the findings of the Sheriff’s office, the grand jury, and the DA.

I reached out to someone who is familiar with some of the people behind the “Justice for Talia” campaign, and she put in me in touch with a woman who had been a friend of Talia’s for most of their lives. Emily Shanahan and I talked at Harmon Field on July 3.

More information

Mass shooting as a share of gun deaths:

There’s new non-profit community-minded organization in your part of the world dedicated to improving your life and those of the people around you. The new organization is called “On Track Saluda.” Its mission is to raise the quality of life in Saluda — and hopefully set an example for the rest of the county — by supplying guidance on how and what we eat, how much we get outside and play, and how much time we spend connecting with each other. The details are drawn from something called the Blue Zones Project, which has its academic origins in a 2004 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Experimental Gerontology about why so many people on the Italian island of Sardinia were reaching the age of 100. 

It's turns out that almost 17% of Sardinians were at least 100 years old. Which is kind of crazy if you consider that the comparable percentage in the US is less than 1%. But more important, many of those ultra-old Sardinians were still in great shape. 

 An endurance cyclist named Dan Buettner wrote a story for the National Geographic magazine the next year about what the scientists were calling “blue zones” — places around the world where people are living longer, healthier lives. Those zones included communities in Greece, Japan, and Costa Rica. Then he set up pilot projects in three California communities to see if he could replicate the lifestyle factors that were responsible for the long, healthy lives. A viral TED talk and 13 years later, and the Blue Zones concept seems to be catching on. And why not? As our population ages, staying healthy into our 80s, 90s and even 100s, is not just a nice idea, it’s going to essential to our economy. 

Brevard is now officially a “Certified Blue Zone Community” and a group of folks in Saluda recently decided to follow suit. On Track Saluda is being led by Saluda Living in Place (SLIP), which is devoted to making life easier for our elderly folk. I spoke with one the chief organizers, former Saluda City Commissioner Lynn Cass at her home in Saluda.  

Further reading

One of my favorite pieces of wisdom comes from Garrett Hardin, an American ecologist who wrote “you cannot do only one thing." What he meant is that everything is connected with everything else, and that anything we do will have unintended consequences. He was writing first and foremost about the environment, but I like the line because it really a rule for understanding how we organize society in general.

I was reminded of Hardin’s rule while editing my conversation with Nena Butterfield,  an experimental psychiatrist at Pavilion, a substance abuse rehabilitation center up in the northern corner of the county. She agreed to help me explore the state of mental health in Polk County. But it wasn’t easy to stay on topic, to focus on mental health problems without talking about addiction, loneliness, suicide, politics, kids and schools, seniors, covid-19, social media, screen-time… to just name a few of the issues we just couldn’t avoid.

Ordinarily this would be frustrating, but in retrospect it made a lot of sense. Our state of mental health has far-reaching implications that make it difficult for one government department, or one group, to manage. And we’ve all been affected by mental health problems. Dr. Butterfield and I talked in her office at the Pavilion complex in Cooper’s Gap.

Further reading

For as long as I can remember, Polk County has wanted its own YMCA. There’s one in Hendersonville, and Asheville, Greenville, and Spartanburg all have at least one branch. There’s even Ys in Black Mountain and Marion. The Spartanburg Y runs some programs here, and Camp Skyuka dates back to the 1950s. But what people really want is an indoor pool. Of the 3,000-odd people who filled out a survey last year, 84 per cent wanted a place to swim year-round.

But indoor pools are expensive. And until recently, the cost seemed to be out of reach for a county as small as ours. Then, two years ago, something that looked suspiciously like an plea from a Nigerian prince landed in the inbox of Spartanburg Y CEO Rick Callebs. That email turned out be an offer to make a $2 million donation. And now, assuming everything comes together as planned, it’s going to be built at the intersection of Highway 74 and Highway 108.

Rick has been part of the Y movement for more than 40 years, and he’s run Ys both large and small. We met at the Womack building in Columbus at the end of March to talk about what it’s going to take to make sure Polk County doesn’t miss out on the best chance to see the project come to fruition.

Further reading

It’s only just the beginning of spring, but if you consider yourself an engaged member of the Saluda community, it’s never too early to start thinking about Coon Dog Day, which is held each year on the first Saturday after July 4.

There was a time when Coon Dog Day was kind of like the third rail of politics in Saluda. No one was going to touch it — let alone challenge its very existence. Over the years, though, what was once the biggest celebration in the county started to lose its lustre. After the city ended the prohibition on the sale of alcohol back in 2005, some folks started complaining about drunken partiers ruining the wholesome nature of the festival, particularly the square-dancing at the tail end of the day’s events. For some reason, the elaborate floats that made the Coon Dog Day parade such a draw for thousands of visitors — and residents —stopped being quite so elaborate. And where were all the racoon hounds? Then covid hit in 2020, and the whole thing had to be cancelled for two years.

That gave citizens the chance to mull over whether Coon Dog Day was really worth the effort and the money. Someone has to pay for the police presence — unless all the officers agree to volunteer their time. There’s golf carts and shuttle buses to rent, and hassle of shutting down Highway 176 for a day. It turns out that not everyone in Saluda loves Coon Dog Day, particularly those shops and businesses on Main Street who find it more of a expense than an opportunity.

 Saluda’s Board of Commissioners recently held a public hearing to consider the future of Coon Dog Day. The consensus was that this summer’s version would be a scaled-back event, a lot like last year’s, which was much quieter than pre-covid days. Everyone seems to still like the 5 K run, which has been a part of the day’s schedule for years, but gone are the carnival amusement-park rides and over-sized food trucks. And, as you’ll hear in my talk with Saluda Mayor Tangie Morgan, who headed the Coon Dog Day committee long before she was elected in 2021, there are the inevitable problems that come with trying to celebrate a history that isn’t always squeaky clean.

Future reading:

One of the best parts of producing a podcast is learning that someone is actually listening. And more importantly listening closely enough that they have a good grasp of what you’re actually trying to accomplish. This episode is the product of some feedback from one listener who really does get it.

I was asked: Why don’t I do something about foster kids in Polk County? Apparently, there’s a new project based in Saluda and it really deserves some attention. 

Kim Wilson, who is the Senior Social Work Service Manager for the county has a long list of items in her job description. Among them is overseeing the care of foster children — those kids for whom family life hasn’t worked out very well. 

Like most parents, I mostly focus on my own family and generally ssume that anyone’s else’s child is the responsibility of other parents. But there’s a good reason the old African proverb of “it takes a village” to raise to a child is so popular. There are more than a few reasons why a parent, or parents, might not be up to the task of providing the care that every boy or girl needs. Drug addiction, a history of prior violence, mental health problems, financial pressures — they all can mean that children don’t receive the love and attention that we all want them to have.

Of course, removing a child, against a parent’s wishes, from the home, should always be a last resort. But sometimes it’s necessary, and as Kim told me, the entire community needs to be involved if that kind of intervention is going to have a chance of doing any good.

Further reading

When my wife I and were thinking about moving to Saluda, about 19 years ago, my  first thought was: Sound great. But does it have high-speed internet?

Fortunately, a few seconds on my current internet connection was all it took to find out that yes, Saluda did have high-speed service. Not everyone in Polk County is so lucky. My Facebook feed includes almost daily complaints from someone somewhere whose service is either too slow or too unreliable. And as our experience during the first year and a half of the COVID pandemic proves, there are a lot of families from who the commercial internet providers have not come through because they don’t like to run lines to lightly populated areas where the return on investment is marginal.

Elections are funny things. They can suck up all the oxygen for weeks at a time, only to evaporate the moment the votes are counted. If you’re a political junky, you can probably find a few podcasts and cable news programs that will agonize over the outcomes of all the big races for a few days, but most of us waste no time getting back to worrying about the price of eggs or whatever it is the Department of Transportation wants to do to our highways.

Here in Polk County, the 2022 mid-term elections were a relatively sedate affair. No one was challenging our state house representative. The race for NC 11 in the US House was a foregone conclusion, and incumbents pretty much ran the show up and down the ballot — even in the most interesting races for the Board of Education — just as they’ve done pretty much since 2010. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be fallout from the choices we just made. Every election has consequences, even if nothing much seems to have changed at first glance.

Now that we’ve all had a month to think about the results, I thought it would be a good idea to go over what did and didn’t happen back in November. I asked Doug Clark, a retired North Carolina journalist and an astute observer of all things political now living in Tryon. We talked about which races produced the most interesting results, what the lack of local political news coverage means when it comes to democracy, and why it is that Democrats can’t seem to get a break around these parts.

Further reading

Facebook. 

Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it. Rarely does a day go by that it’s not tempting to conclude the world would be better off without the soul-sucking, time-wasting, black hole that is social media.

From a recent edition of Wired magazine:

But if you’re living in a news desert — as we in Polk County do — where else are you going to turn for some sense of what’s going on in local affairs? Here’s an observation from a recent edition of The Atlantic:

Olivia Whiteside isn’t one of the Facebook administrators that The Atlantic reporter consulted, but she might as well have been. She’s one of the main moderators of the Polk County Concerned Citizens Facebook group, which has approximately 1,400 members, making it one of the main internet forums for discussions of local politics and community concerns.

The page was started a few years ago when it became clear the new Tryon International Equestrian Center was going to have a big impact on Polk County, but today the allowed topics of discussion are much broader. Basically, anything that might have once made into the local newspaper is fair game. There are other Facebook pages out there devoted to county affairs, but Polk County Concerned Citizens is easily the most relevant.

Only members can post, and even then, posts have to approved by a moderator, which means that Olivia and her fellow admins sometimes have their work cut out for them. She sat down with me at the Polk Library in Columbus just before Thanksgiving to talk about just what that entails, and what it’s meant for place in both the online and real worlds.

Further reading

Near as I can figure, there are two ways to make it big in the music business. You can either drop everything else in your life — family, financial security, stability, you name it — and hit the road with whatever instrument you think you’re good at as soon as you’re old enough to leave home, playing tiny venues and begging for opportunities to open for established names until, if you’re very lucky, someone with connections notices you …  in Nashville, New York, or LA.

Or … you can plug away at your craft quietly, writing songs, practicing whenever you have a chance, and slowly, over many years, convert a hobby into something that begins to threaten your day job.

Aaron Burdett did not spend the last 20 years knocking on doors in Nashville. Instead, he stayed close to his home in Saluda, where he got married, started a family, and built a successful construction business. The seven new homes coming together on Greenville Street in Saluda are his work.

But along the way he also managed to become one of the region’s best singer-songwriters. He’s won awards from Merlefest, the USA Songwriting Competition, Mountain Stage, the North Carolina Songwriters Co-op – the list goes on. None of that posed any threat to his day job, though.

But then, this summer, someone with real  connections finally noticed him. When the Steep Canyon Rangers — one of the country’s best known bluegrass and Americana bands — lost their guitarist, Woody Platt, they reached out to Aaron. A few weeks ago, he officially joined the group. And things just got a whole lot more interesting, for both him, and his family. And somehow, one of the most successful musicians ever to come out of Polk County found the time to drop by and talk with me about his music, his childhood in Saluda, and what joining the Rangers will really mean.

The NDOT has already spent millions of dollars surveying and studying the highway. They have concluded that it’s not safe in its current form,  and the project is now so far along, that it may not be easy to put the brakes on it. In face of growing pressure from the community, the Commissioners held a special meeting on October 10 to approve a letter making a “NO BUILD request to the Foothills Regional Commission’s Rural Planning Organization, or R P O, which is the agency responsible for representing the county’s needs – and wishes – when it comes to DOT projects.

It's not the first time that the DOT has come to the county with a scheme to widen an important route. They tried it a few years ago with Highway 108 between Columbus and Tryon. Back then, just like today, the folks who live on the highway were none too keen on the idea.

The NCDOT has already spent millions of dollars surveying and studying the highway. They have concluded that it’s not safe in its current form,  and the project is now so far along, that it may not be easy to put the brakes on it. In the face of growing pressure from the community, the Commissioners held a special meeting on Oct. 10 to approve a letter making a “NO BUILD" request to the Foothills Regional Commission’s Rural Planning Organization (RPO), which is the agency responsible for representing the county’s needs – and wishes – when it comes to DOT projects.

So, it looks like the commissioners were responding — better late than never — to the citizens who have the most to lose, both in terms of land, and peace and quiet. But if you read the letter all the way to the end, a different story emerges. The last paragraph asks the RPO to stop considering Highway 9 north and Highway 9 south for any modernizations in the future, with the exception of turn lanes at Polk Central Elementary school “or other life safety issues on this route.”

Given that the widening project was first proposed by the DOT as a safety measure, doesn’t that suggest the county’s “no build” letter actually endorses the project?

I reached out to the DOT’s lead engineer on the project, Wanda Austin, but haven’t received a response. But I did sit down with Karen Pack, one of the lead organizers of the community opposition to widening highway 9, on which she has lived for decades. We met at her mother’s house, also right along Highway 9, of course, two days after that board meeting, to talk about the history of the project, what it has meant for her personally, and what the political implications might be.

Resources

Three seats on the Polk County Board of Commissioners expire this year. All three are currently held by Republicans, and all three of them are running for re-election. Only two Democrats are in the race, so, there’s no chance that Democrats will achieve take control of the Board. It wasn’t so long ago that they did have control, however, so it’s entirely conceivable that the next Board could be a quite a bit different from the outgoing one. Or it could be exactly the same. In the previous episode of Polk Lore, I talked with Ray Gasperson, one of the two Democratuic challengers. In this episode I talk with the other, Andy Millard. Before I introduce Andy, a quick explanation of why they are the only candidates I expect will appear on this podcast.

I asked all five to sit for an interview. Andy and Ray both agreed without hesitation. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. We all know each other well as Ray is a former commissioner, Andy used to run the Polk County Democratic Party, and I used to serve as the Saluda chair for the same organization. That might also explain why Tommy Melton, Paul Beiler, and David Moore all declined to accept my invitation. To be fair, each offered entirely different reasons. Tommy Melton said he wasn’t confident a podcast conservation would offer the "clarity and accuracy" required to explain his positions. Paul Beiler said he was not in the right frame of mind due to some nightmarish bureaucratic problems he’s having with the State Department, and David Moore said he didn’t think enough people listen to this podcast to make it worthwhile. For the record, Polk Lore has attracted more than 270 listeners to date.

All three offered to supply written responses to my questions. But I don’t think that reading those responses, without a chance to explore the ideas they raise, would work well on a podcast. And it wouldn’t be fair to those who did agree to sit down for a chat. I hope the holdouts change their minds after listening to this episode. But I understand why that’s probably not going to happen.

Andy Millard is a financial planner, a former high school principal — Polk County High’s first — and has long history of political activism. He ran for congress in 2016, cycling around the entire district. We talked at his home in Columbus, earlier this month.

All politics is local. How many times have you heard that old saw? It's probably time we retired it, as even a cursory review of recent history clearly shows that, at best, politics is now a battle between those who would like to keep their campaigns local, and those who defer to the national stage. In some parts of America, local issues are entirely irrelevant.

In a desperate attempt to swim against that current. I’ve invited all five candidates for the three Polk County Board of Commissioner seats up for grabs this fall to sit down for an interview to explore just much national issues have taken over and give them a chance to prove they haven't. Only two have accepted so far, but this episode was recorded more than a month before the election, so there’s still time for the holdouts to change their minds. I hope this talk with Ray Gasperson helps nudge the GOP candidates (Tommy Melton, Paul Beiler, and David Moore) in that direction.

Although Ray’s not an incumbent, he has 12 years of experience on the board, more than any of the current members. He was first elected way back in 2008, as part of a Democrat wave, but the the 2020 election left him without a seat. No candidate for commissioner that year got more than 27 per cent of the vote, but Ray only managed 22 per cent, and that wasn’t enough to keep him on the board. He wants back in, and he’s one of just two Democratic Party candidates on the ballot. Andy Millard is the other.

I sat down earlier this month with Ray in a house that his son is building next door to the farm Ray has been running in Green Creek for 20 years.

Further reading

Almost since the day the last coal train rolled down the Saluda Grade 21 years ago, the idea of converting the rail bed to a bicycle and hiking trail has captured the imagination of Polk County’s leading citizens. At first, the scheme wasn’t much more than a fantasy. The railroad, Norfolk Southern, repeatedly insisted that it had no intention of abandoning its right of way, and there were others who would have liked to see the grade turned into a seasonal excursion line for tourists, like the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad over in Bryson City.

When I first heard such talk, I thought a  a service that hauled cyclists up the 1500 feet of elevation gain to Saluda so they could cruise back down was not a bad idea. Not everyone’s in good enough shape to ride all the way up. But that was a long time ago. Although Norfolk Southern made $11 billion  in revenue — and $4.5 billion in profits — last year, and although the company was supposed to take care of the tracks in return for its right of way, none of that money went back into maintaining the Saluda Grade. Substantial portions of the line are in now such poor shape that even if the anyone wanted to bring back the trains, their accounting department would have a fit.

All of a sudden, though, there’s a very real possibility that the rails-to-tra ils vision for the Grade will actually come about. This summer, we learned that Norfolk Southern has finally agreed to sit down and talk with an interested buyer. That buyer is a group of three nonprofits — Conserving Carolina, Upstate Forever, and Spartanburg-based PAL. If they can reach a deal, the 31 miles of track from Inman, South Carolina, to Zirconia, North Carolina, will be ripped up, hauled away and replaced by a trail for cyclists and hikers.

Sounds great. But not everyone is convinced. Rails to trails are popular all over North America, especially in places like Polk County, which doen't have enough people for a commuter rail line. But each project is unique. The Thermal Belt trail in Rutherford County is very different from the Swamp Rabbit Trail between Travelers Rest and Greenville. Some people aren’t comfortable with the idea of getting a flat tire on certain sections of the Thermal Belt trail. And then there’s the fact that not all of the Saluda Grade is all that flat, which could make sharing the path a bit tricky.

So there are questions. If you want answers from someone close to the source in Polk County, that would be Mark Byington, who has long been a director of Conserving Carolina. I joined him on his porch at his home near Tryon earlier this month.

Further reading

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with candidates for the Polk Schools Board of Education. If you haven’t already listened to the first interview, with Mike Ashworth, I’d recommend you run through at least the first few minutes, as I supply an overview of the elections, which seats are up for grabs, and an explanation of why I am interviewing some candidates and not others.

In this episode I talk with Dee O’Brien, who is running for the Cooper’s Gap seat. We recorded the interview early in September at the Columbus library.

This is the third in a series of interviews with candidates for the Polk Schools Board of Education. If you haven’t already listened to the first interview, with Mike Ashworth, I’d recommend you run through at least the first few minutes, as I supply an overview of the elections, which seats are up for grabs, and and explanation of why I am interviewing some candidates and not others. Of course, I hope you listen to the entire interview, and the other episodes in the series.

In this episode I talk with Brittany Klimstra, who is running for the Green Creek seat. We recorded the interview early in September at her apple orchard in Green Creek.

This is the second in a series of interviews with candidates for the Polk Schools Board of Education. If you haven’t already listened to the first interview, with Mike Ashworth, I’d recommend you run through at least the first few minutes, as I supply an overview of the elections, which seats are up for grabs, and why I chose to interview who I did. Of course, I hope you listen to the entire interview, and the other episodes in the series.

In this episode I talk with Rob Parsons, the current Saluda representative on the board, and the pastor of Saluda’s United Methodist Church. We recorded the interview early in September among the pews of his church in Saluda.

This is the first a series of interviews with candidates who want to serve  — or continue to serve — the county as members of the Polk Schools Board of Education. It’s been a long time since so many people have been willing to do what is essentially a thankless job. In the past, acclamation has been the rule, or, if a seat opens does open up, the departing member finds a replacement, who is elected without competition. When’s the last time you saw a campaign sign for a school board candidate? Well, they’re out there now.

School board elections in Polk County, have become very big deals, as they have across the country. Conservatives have discovered the electoral power of cultural trigger issues, like how we should teach our kids about history — specifically the history of racism — how we deal with the needs of the tiny number of trans students who sit in our classrooms, and what do with books that explore with those kinds of issues a little more directly that some folks are used to. Progressives, meanwhile, are waking up to the need to protect public schools from those who, whether they realize it or now, are working to dismantle the entire system. Those forces are very much in evidence in Polk County.

This year five seats on the Board of Education are up for. Four of those seats — for Columbus, Tryon, Green Creek and Coopers Gap — are regular elections for expiring terms. The Saluda seat is open because the current member, Rob Parsons, was appointed by the board early this year to replace Sara Bell, who resigned before her term was up to take over the Polk County Community Foundation. Sara was only on the board briefly. She won a special 2020 election after being appointed to replace Rhonda Corley, who resigned when she left Polk County. 

However, only four of the five seats are being contested. Danielle Gibbs, who represents Columbus, has no challenger. That leaves Coopers Gap, Green Creek, Tryon, and Saluda with actual races, but here’s the really interesting bit: Each voter gets to cast a vote for a candidate in each race. So it makes sense to get at least at little familiar with everyone’s who running. I’m going to do my best to interview as many of the candidates as I can, but as in many elections, not everyone is what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, a “serious” candidate, and I’m going to use my judgment, based on 20 years of working in community newsrooms, to make that call.

First up is certified financial planner Mike Ashworth, who represents Tryon and currently chairs the board. Rick Covil and  Mike traded the chair and vice-chair positions recently, but Mike is a board veteran, with two children in Polk Schools. We talked at his office in Tryon at the end of August.

One of the other hats I wear is that of chair of the Saluda Planning Board. It’s just an appointed position that pays nothing and requires you to stay awake and engaged for hours at a time discussing municipal zoning, housing density, sign ordinances, and a whole bunch of other topics that most people wouldn’t touch with a proverbial 10-foot pole.

Betsy Burdette is not one of those people. As the driving force behind the Saluda Community Land Trust, she lives, eats and breathes that kind of stuff. A land trust is what you go to when you’ve got a bunch land that the government wants to tax, but you and your family aren’t so keen on paying the taxes. You also don’t want to sell out and find your back yard turned into a subdivision of cookie-cutter homes. In these parts, she’s the one who will set you straight about how have your cake and eat it too.

Land conservancies can buy development rights but leave the land itself in the original owner’s hands. The owner loses the ability to build a subdivision, but gets a tax bill that's a fraction of what the  assessors could otherwise charge. The conservancy then extinguishes the development rights — forever — and replaces them with what’s called a conservation easement. For families who are land rich and cash poor this is often the only way to make everybody happy.

We all love the idea of preserving the rural character of Polk County. But if we preserve too much land, where are we going to build all that affordable housing that we all know we need to build if instead we’re all setting up conservation easements?

Believe it nor, Betsy and the land trust have an answer for that. So this Labor Day, I headed over to her house just outside of Saluda on Puzzle Gully Road to find out how this can be possible. We also talked about the sleazy real estate deals of the 70s, the hazards of poor record keeping, and why land-owners should pay a lot more attention to the boring parts of the real estate business and municipal planning.

The Green River Tavern. Green River Frame Shop and Gallery .Green River Cove Tubing. The Green River Brew Depot. Green River Barbeque. Green River Adventures. Green River Well and Pump.

Everyone one of those businesses is trading on the good name of the Green River. Some literally depend on its waters to pay their bills. Take the river out of the county, and there’d be a big hole to fill, not just on the map, but in our economy. It doesn’t just keep a few river guides employed, its trout attract fly-fishing aficionados from far and wide, and  turbines at two dams along its course make a decent little contribution to our electrical grid. The Green River is clean, it’s well protected, (thanks to the state game lands), and it’s an essential feature of Polk County’s identity. When someone in Henderson County wants to build an asphalt plant in the Green River watershed, you can count on a fair bit of opposition from Polk County. There’s a good reason there’s a thin blue swoosh in front of the mountains on the logo for Polk Lore.

But in between public controversies over problematic development proposals, how often are the Green River’s ecological, cultural, and economic significance raised in public conversations? There’s no Environmental Protection Agency for Polk County, and none of our municipalities sit right along its banks.

Fortunately, there are people who are paid to worry about such things. One of them is Erica Shanks, who this month took over as the Green Riverkeeper. She works for Mountain True, which is a regional environmental non-profit that, among a long list of other things, monitors the health of the Green River, and looks out for potential threats. She also happens to live in Saluda, just a few blocks from me. Even though she’s new to the job, she agreed to sit down for an interview, outside, in her yard, early this month.

Further reading

If you haven’t had COVID by now, you almost certainly know at least a couple of people who have suffered through it. You may even have a lost a close family member or a friend, although that seems to be relatively rare – for the moment. Aside from the threat that this new coronavirus poses to our health, it’s also taken a big toll on the economy. It’s upended careers, shortening some and derailed or redirected others. Not every business made it through. And if you were a teacher, a student, or a parent over the last couple of years, you know that things are going to take a long time to get back to where they were. Something about COVID opened a floodgate of frustration with our schools, and if you haven’t listened to the first three episodes of this podcast, cue them up after this one.

It was tough on everyone, but no one had it as bad as the front-line health-care workers. At some point, I want to sit down have a long talk with some of them. But first, it seemed like a good idea to review Polk County’s COVID experience with Josh Kennedy. As head of the county’s health and human services agency, he was responsible for overseeing local efforts to respond to the pandemic. I joined him at the Womack Building in Columbus to discuss what went wrong, what went right — hey, the news isn’t all bad — and how we can deal with the next one. Because there will be another pandemic at some point. And because there is no global or national  response plan in place, it will again be up to each county — and county staff — to figure out what to do.

Further Reading:

Last month, a few hours after the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its  1973 ruling that had granted American women the right to terminate a pregnancy, about 70 Polk County residents gathered on the lawn of the county courthouse. Which is a pretty impressive turnout for 4 p.m. on a workday with no advertising or advance notice. They were there to object to the decision and to share some stories about what losing the right to abortion could mean.

My guest is someone with a very personal perspective on the ramifications of letting states decide whether woman should be able to choose to end an pregnancy. Like more than 70,000 other American women each year, Kelly Hanlon turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF) to have a child because she wasn’t able to have them without the assistance of modern medical science.

Science isn’t perfect, though, and IVF usually involves the fertilization of several eggs; for every embryo that is successfully implanted, others have to be discarded. And because it involves the inevitable destruction of embryos, even if they are only hours old, IVF could soon be illegal in many states. I talked with Kelly about that scenario at her home a few days ago.

Further reading:

So far in this series on education in Polk County, we’ve heard from a teacher and student. But right from the start it was clear that this series wasn’t going to be complete without a talk with Aaron Greene, the superintendent of Polk Schools. Before taking over the top job six years ago, he was assistant superintendent, and before that principal at Polk High. It’s probably safe to say if anyone has their hand on the pulse of public education in the county, it’s Aaron Greene.

But these days school administrators have a lot more on their plate than just managing teachers and developing lesson plans. Schools aren’t just places students go to learn the things society has determined they need to know. They’re also a source of nutrition for kids whose families are having trouble putting food on table, and safe place for those whose home lives are not as safe as they should be. Polk Schools, like so many other school districts in this country, are a vital part of the entire social fabric. Right or wrong, that’s been true for years, and those kind of issues are now part and parcel of the job.

And then came COVID-19.

North Carolina handed the job of deciding how to respond to the pandemic to each school district. Polk Schools’ Board of Education, which wasn’t used to analyzing epidemiology data and weighing the risks and benefits of masks, vaccines, ventilation, and remote instruction had to rely on administrative staff to figure it all out. It was, to put it mildly, a difficult couple of years, and the board wasn’t always willing to take the superintendent’s advice. But Aaron Greene survived, which is more than you can say about a fair number of superintendents across this country. We talked in his office a few weeks ago.

Further reading:

Charlotte-Mecklenberg superintendent fired