Grandview Circle residents concerned about property values and crime turned up at the Waynesville Board of Aldermen meeting to get way out in front of an annexation that they suspect soon will become a trailer park.

As the $11.6 million Howell Mill Road project was winding down in late 2015, the Waynesville Planning Board began to take a look at zoning within the burgeoning corridor; what the board found was commercial development encroaching on formerly rural areas and disagreements between neighbors on the future of their community.

There wasn’t an empty seat in the house when the Maggie Valley Board of Aldermen met for its public budget hearing on June 13, but it was a zoning issue that took up 90 percent of the three-plus hour meeting.

Janie Higgins was crushed to learn a week before Christmas that the rolling pastures and fields her family has tilled and grazed for generations will soon be marred by the arrival of a large indoor shooting range and gun store setting up shop in their midst.

A proposed recycling clearinghouse in the Haywood County industrial park outside Canton has been nixed, but a handful of residents haven’t given up their fight.

Driven crazy by the barking dogs of neighbors, Judy West says she is pulling up her life-long stakes in Haywood County and abandoning her farm, but not without sounding a warning to her fellow county residents: it could happen to you one day, too.

Shining Rock Classical Academy was sent back to the drawing board Monday night on its proposed location, continuing a nearly three-month saga on where the new charter school will go.

It’s official: Cullowhee now has zoning standards.

The Franklin Town Board unanimously approved a petition to rezone a small piece of property off Clyde Street at its meeting Oct. 6, but the public comment preceding that decision was far from unanimous.  

“My main concern is if it does become commercial, things may change and some of the improvements we’ve done to our home will start to fade,” Miguel Santos, 15, told the board, “and I would just really appreciate it if it would stay residential for the peace of our neighborhood and our home.”

The Macon County businessman and farmer who stirred up controversy recently by announcing plans to build a dirt-bike racetrack in a residential community said he’s still deciding whether to move forward with the plan.

More than 100 people turned out for a public meeting last month after Herman “Bud” Talley, owner of Nantahala Meats in Franklin and of a 45-acre farm in the Clarks Chapel community, asked the Macon County Board of Adjustment for a variance to the county’s high-impact use law.

A nod of approval would have allowed Talley to build a sanctioned track. He needed a setback exception — reducing a 750-foot buffer zone to about 350 feet — to meet parking and other needs stipulated by the American Motorcyclist Association. Board members appeared poised to reject the request, and Talley backed off in response.

But, as he and his attorney pointed out then, that rejection means he might just move forward with building a legal, but unsanctioned, facility for dirt-bike practice.

The devil is truly in the details on this one. If granted the variance, Talley had promised to build a track that would be used, at most, 16 days a year. Or, he could opt for the smaller practice facility — which would fit within the confines of the setback requirements and therefore doesn’t need a variance — and operate 365 days a year.

Opponents told the Board of Adjustment in December they’d rather gamble on Talley not following through rather than see him open a track under the auspices of county-granted legitimacy.

“I’m in limbo right now,” Talley said this week. “I’m kind of just exploring all my options.”

There’s no particular rush to decide given the harsh winter weather, which has shutdown construction projects across the mountains. Talley has characterized the construction of a dirt-bike racetrack as a last-ditch effort to save his farm.

John Binkley, who lives within earshot of Talley’s property and who has helped organize neighbors to derail the construction of a dirt-bike racetrack, said the loosely affiliated group is monitoring the situation the best they can.

“We’re keeping an eye on it,” he said recently. “No machinery has actually appeared and started digging.”

Binkley added he hopes the situation in Clarks Chapel helps other mountain residents understand why land controls are needed.

“When these kind of things happen, hopefully more and more people catch on,” he said.

Opponents have cited land devaluation and loss of peace and quiet as reasons they don’t want Talley to move forward.