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ASHEVILLE - Buncombe County will build a $5 million training facility to prepare hundreds of workers for a Pratt & Whitney airplane engine parts factory, now under construction in the Bent Creek area.
The county s Board of Commissioners voted unanimously May 18 to fund the construction despite protests by some members of the public who said the company, a subsidiary of Raytheon, is a war profiteer.
The facility will be financed and paid for through sales tax designated for the capital needs of A-B Tech. The community college will handle the training for the company expected to finish construction on the $650 million 1.2 million square foot plant and start production in earnest by the second half of 2022.
Long-time Asheville racial justice activist Oralene Simmons said it was only recently that she believed the prominent monument that has appeared on postcards of the city could ever come down. But in light of the time and all of the things we have seen happening lately, and with other cities and states taking down monuments and statutes, I just felt that we were in line to go that way.
Simmons, who is Black, co-chaired the Asheville-Buncombe County Vance Monument Task Force, formed after the spring protests.
Members were charged with deciding whether to repurpose the monument or tear it down. The task force ultimately voted 11-1 on Nov. 19 to remove it.
Asheville Police said a man in critical condition after a shooting near the River Arts District around 9:50 a.m. April 15 has died, becoming the city s first homicide victim of 2021.
At 3:19 p.m., Christina Hallingse, public information officer with APD, released a statement that the victim died. APD will release the name of the victim pending notification of the family..
After a shooting on Southern Street this morning, a male whose name has not been released, was transported to Mission Hospital with serious life-threatening injuries, according to Hallingse.
This incident is under investigation.
Asheville has seen a spike in gun crimes this year, as reported by the Citizen Times. Six people have been shot in Asheville this year, according to Hallingse.
WEAVERVILLE - Though the end result of Madison High School s football game against North Buncombe was not the one the team desired, the final score belied the spirit the Patriots showed in battling back to make the game competitive in the second half.
The Patriots halftime deficit of 53-14 doomed them in the end as they eventually lost 53-27 March 5, falling to 0-2 on the season.
First-year head coach Jamie Extine said while he was disappointed with the early turnovers, he saw some encouraging signs he hopes his team can build on moving forward. Our kids fought really hard, he said. They started figuring out what we re actually trying to do, and we had some success. That s where it starts, that foundation, and then (we hope to) build on up from week to week.
North Carolina added more than 12,000 new COVID-19 cases Feb. 3, thanks to a backlog of cases from December and January that previously went unreported.
The state Department of Health and Human Services dashboard shows an addition of 12,079 new cases Feb. 3, which would be the most one-day addition ever, beating 11,581 on Jan. 9.
But a note says that 7,912 of those were from tests performed at FastMed Urgent Care clinics during December 2020 and January 2021 that had not been previously reported to NCDHHS.
Accounting for those, the new cases Feb. 3 come to 4,167.
The addition increased the total in the state to 776,307 since the start of the pandemic.