Larry Griffin
lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com
Tuesday’s Swain County Commission work session saw the commissioners further deliberating over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park parking pass program. In addition, they discussed improvements to county facilities including updates to the Marianna Black Library.
The meeting opened with a recognition of the Swain County High girls’ indoor track team and wrestling team for winning recent state championship events. The athletes introduced themselves to the commissioners and then led the room in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Parking pass problems
Commissioners said they wanted to try and get a resolution to legislators to stop the recently-implemented Park It Forward parking pass program from the National Park Service. The new system was implemented March 1 and now requires visitors to the park pay to park for more than 15 minutes in designated spots.
Commissioner Kenneth Parton said there had been a verbal pact not to make anyone pay to enter the park back when the park was created. However, because no written evidence has been found of this, Park Service officials had gone ahead with the Park It Forward plan.
“They said they can’t find anything written down, therefore probably unlikely,” Parton said. “Written or not written down, verbal agreements are supposed to be held as actual contracts, are they not?”
Parton said after Tuesday’s commission meeting that he believed the fees were mostly a backdoor way to charge admission for the park itself.
The commissioners have drafted a resolution already, though they’ve received little communication on moving forward from various legislators they’ve talked to. Parton noted that U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards said there was nothing to be done, and that the commissioners have tried to speak with state Rep. Mike Clampitt about it as well.
Parton and others said they wanted to make sure there were eyes seeing their proposals to try and nix the parking pass system.
“We want to make sure they have this in their hands,” he said. “We want to somehow get it to them, and talk to them.”
Board chairman Kevin Seagle said they’d talk about the issue at their next workshop meeting, as to how to approach legislators, saying he wanted to “keep on with the lawyers until [they] could find any hard facts or evidence” to support the case.
Disease reports
The commissioners heard an annual presentation early in the meeting from the Swain County Health Department on the number of diseases that were documented over the past year.
According to the Health Department representative, there were 21 gonorrhea cases, down from 38 the previous year. There were 54 chlamydia cases, down from 160 the year prior.
Covid-19 was the most prominent disease in the area as was the case in much of the world. Fifty-eight percent of the county has been vaccinated at least once, and there were 1,418 Covid cases and 10 deaths in 2022.
Library catalog
Seagle brought up some controversy in Macon County, in which there were objections to some library books deemed “sexually explicit.”
“Anyone could check them out,” he said. “They called us and had concerns that our county library had those books. Our library head said no, they do not have those books. So, if anyone asks, we do not have those books.”
Asked about this over email, Swain County Librarian Jeff Delfield said no titles were mentioned when Seagle spoke with him.
“I was approached by Commission Chair, Kevin Seagle, about the issues currently happening in Macon County,” Delfield said by email. “He asked if we are having the same issues here in Swain? I answered that we have not received any complaints about materials at the Marianna Black Library. He was happy to hear that. He then asked if we own the books that were being challenged? I answered that MBL does not. No titles were mentioned during the conversation. This all happened in the dairy aisle at Ingles in less than a few minutes.”
Controversy has been going on for months in Macon County over the presence of LGBTQ+-friendly library displays.
Because of the presence of books that some find inappropriate, some officials in Macon County have talked about removing themselves from the Fontana Library system, of which several counties are under the umbrella.
County manager Kevin S. King said it’s almost time for the periodic reassessment of what books are in the libraries. Officials from the counties in the Fontana Library System meet every three years to discuss that. King said Swain County has “kind of a red-line version” and they’ll be looking to tweak that, which will probably be on the agenda in May or June at some point.
In an email, King said they weren’t pursuing any significant changes to the Marianna Black Library this year.
Maintenance and foster care
King addressed a slew of things in his county manager’s report, saying they had finalized a contract with McGill Associates to engineer the sewer and storm drainage work near the library.
He said there had been gravel put down at the Great Smoky Mountains Event Park to make it a “nice, two-lane road” now, and that they’ll scrape it at some point in the future.
The event park will be host to a few different events in the coming months – a rodeo taking place at the end of April, and then a fundraising event in May to help the agriculture fair later in the year. King said the plan is to bring in “big entertainment” for that event.
In other discussion topics, he said there had been discussions regarding foster care – he said the county wants more local control over their children and family (CAF) plan, contrary to bills that would establish single statewide plans for everyone in North Carolina.
King wrote via email that the bills, SB 156 and HB 340, would force them to change their foster care partner from Vaya Health to Blue Cross Blue Shield, United or Aetna, which don’t have a local presence in Swain County.
“We would be calling a 1-800 number instead of talking to someone local that can respond quicker,” he wrote.
All of it was a timely thing because the issue is still prevalent now, he said.
“We have another kid, we can’t find placement, so he’s living at a local hotel that we have to staff 24/7 for the next 11 days,” King said. “Until we can figure something out.”
The meeting was adjourned by around 11 a.m., with a subsequent meeting at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday where the commissioners talked with the school board about budgetary issues.