Asheville Watchdog

Vivian O’Hannon steers clear of Maple Crest Apartments’ impromptu street parties like the one on July 5 that ended with a nonfatal shooting. She tells her son, daughter and grandson, who live with her in the complex, to do the same. O’Hannon owns a handgun for self-defense, she said, but her wariness is due more to her history of losing family members to gun violence than a fear of her neighbors.

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers: Question: I just read your article on property tax and sales tax funding the Asheville Business Improvement District. There is $1.4 million funding the BID (technically called the Asheville Downtown Improvement District). I am very interested in the expenses related to each service this is funding for business owners in the district. What is the overhead for the BID — office rent, salaries, administrative costs, etc.?

Nearly two years after floodwaters from Tropical Storm Helene pulled thousands of PVC pipes into the French Broad River, creating an ongoing environmental crisis and safety hazard, the corporate owner of a riverside plastics manufacturer has emerged from a period of silence with promises to improve how it stores its goods.

More than a million times a year, a U.S. surgeon slices open a knee, strips out worn cartilage, caps the leg bones with metal, and drops in a plastic spacer to allow the new joint to glide. While knee replacement procedures have become standard, however, the prices charged have not.

State Rep. Jennifer Balkcom of Henderson County, a self-described farm girl with “mountain values,” easily won the Republican nomination in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District to replace incumbent Chuck Edwards, who quit his reelection campaign facing House censure and disgrace. Party leaders from the District’s 16 counties needed only one ballot Monday night to pick Balkcom, a two-term legislator, from the field of five candidates.

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers: Question: I noticed in a recent Answer Man column that you mentioned the 50-meter pool at Rec Park, and that there are plans to replace the pool. Both of the 50-meter pools in the area, the other being Patton Park in Hendersonville, were destroyed by Tropical Storm Helene. My understanding is that FEMA provided funds to replace the Patton Park pool.

Monday’s NC-11 vote will do more than determine who replaces Chuck Edwards on the Republican ticket. Depending on whom district Republicans select, the decision could also reshape western North Carolina’s representation in Raleigh and trigger additional nomination contests across the region. If the 11th Congressional District Republican Executive Committee chooses a sitting state legislator, that person would leave the General Assembly ballot.

I’m no developer, but the recent news about an Atlanta outfit proposing 524 apartments on Swannanoa River Road struck me as a bit, well, cray-cray. I mean, they’re talking about building them where a row of old commercial and industrial buildings still sit vacant and dilapidated from Tropical Storm Helene’s furious flooding nearly two years ago.

At a Buncombe County Commission workshop in April, Asheville City Schools Superintendent Maggie Fehrman asked for an increase in the local tax that supplements the district. What she got was a broadside from County Commissioner Al Whitesides. “We’re treating our African American students like we were in 1935,” said Whitesides, 81, a former member of the ACS Board of Education.

This is another of The Watchdog’s continuing series taking a detailed look at how our region’s major candidates are raising campaign money ahead of the Nov. 3 elections, where they get it and how they spend it. Among the federally regulated businesses that provided major backing for Rep. Chuck Edwards’s now-abandoned reelection campaign, one segment stood out: the industry that puts on carnivals, fairs and circuses around the country.