Diverse or Just Plain Crass?

Kicking myself for pointing fingers, I am recalling a rap presentation recorded and presented before Asheville City Council. A few kids wanted to promote recycling, so they performed a rap. Sweet little girls were emulating the gangsta-tough speech and belly thrusts of today’s teen idols. In school, kids learn of diversity and anger management, and have counselors to help them cope with broken homes and violent neighborhoods.

It therefore feels like stepping into a time warp to read that the National League of Junior Cotillions will be setting up a chapter in Watauga County to teach etiquette, character, courtesies, honor, respect, ethics, sportsmanship, and tons of other nice things that went out of style around the time of the Civil War. They also teach formal dance.

If you or somebody you know would like to have a child grow up to be pleasant and helpful – rather than pierced and moping around the mall in black clothing studded with symbols of death, you can follow the leads from the article in the Mountain Times.

Pleasure Wheel Still Spins

Maggie Valley’s Ghost Town in the Sky is now just a ghost town, thanks to an economy that did away with many families’ discretionary spending accounts. Losses from the tourist trade have hurt the town. The town also suffered when the census revealed the state had overestimated its population. As a result, Maggie Valley will now be getting a smaller portion of sales tax redistributions. Contributing to the town’s resources was BB&T’s payment of back taxes owed by the ghost town, which it now owns. The town gladly accepted and used the funds to subsidize the American Roots and Beer Festival and Red, White and Boom; promote the festival grounds director to fulltime employment; and in so doing only withdraw $54,522 from the fund balance.

Tax Departments Undercompensated?

Any attempt to achieve equity with broad brushstrokes is likely to be deemed unfair. So it is with Haywood County, which opted to perform a reval in the crushed housing market. Many other counties, if they could, postponed what they knew would be controversial.

As it turned out, property values for the proverbial McMansions on the hill went down when those for Joe the Plumber’s castle went up (in part because foreclosures don’t count in market analyses). Citizens have been hounding the commissioners:

Eddie Cabe who lives in Canton says he is one of those people. His $67,000 home in Canton went up to $125,000. But it is a 90-year-old “box” house as he calls it, lacking proper floor joists, no insulation in the walls, and pull strings for light switches.

Many others have been telling the commissioners there is a conspiracy of one kind or another:

At a county commissioner meeting two weeks ago, the repeated criticism and conspiracy theories proved too much and [Tax Department Head David] Francis shot back after particularly insulting comments by Monroe Miller, the county’s chief critic who even has a web site dedicated to his fulltime hobby of attacking county government officials.