Commissioner Rebecca McCall spearheaded the effort starting in February after she noticed a substantial increase in the amount of roadside trash and larger household discards. There was a box spring and a mattress across from Blue Ridge Community College there was a recliner, she told the Local Government Committee for Cooperative Action last week. So if you needed furniture for your house you were all set. Since then, she said, she s noticed a great improvement.
McCall got a lot of reaction from people who said they, too, had noticed the proliferation of roadside litter. One man called her about a bag of trash someone had collected and left on the roadside near Glenn Marlow Elementary School in Mills River. He said he kept wondering when someone would come pick it up. Then with these words in my head from McCall and her Keep Henderson County Beautiful campaign, I went and picked up the big bag of trash.
“The progress is a little slower than we would like,” park owner Tim J. Manson IV said recently. “I think a lot of residents were stuck in a pretty bad situation with the septic system going on for almost a decade. They seemed to be thrilled that someone is fixing this. I think it’s going to be a good thing.”
Manson’s company, Spartanburg-based MVF Halfway Tree, bought the 18-acre park for $3.3 million last May, agreeing to replace failing septic tanks with sewer service from the city of Hendersonville.
“We’re excited about it,” Manson said on the new acquisition for his company, which owns several other mobile home parks. “The property is fantastic. You’ve got some really cool old mobile homes that are not made anymore, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
A long-running zoning dispute over housing on the Tap Root Dairy property finally came to an end while the land-use fight over an asphalt plant in East Flat Rock fizzled to an uncertain resolution. Downtown could be transformed by hotel and parking deck plans that neared the dirt-turning stage as the year drew to a close. Cloaked over every hour of every day from March 3 on was the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impacts. Covid-19 cases devastated long-term care facilities as the virus swept in. The pandemic claimed the Flat Rock Playhouse and Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra seasons, the North Carolina Apple Festival, prep football and more. Here are number 7, 6, 5 in the Lightning’s annual Top 10 news stories from an unforgettable year.
The new council members, elected unanimously and sworn in via Zoom, are Susan Gregory, a retired FBI agent who is active in Historic Flat Rock, and Pam Tiles, a retired speech pathologist who lives in Kenmure. They replace Paige Posey and Sheryl Jamerson, two of the three remaining council members who voted in favor of the Highland Lake Road project in June 2018, who resigned last month. Although they opposed the Highland Lake Road widening, both Gregory and Tiles described the project as a decided issue that needs to be put in the past.
After the two council members were sworn in, the council elected Coletta vice mayor, replacing Jamerson.