Polk Lore

The first campaign speech by Chris Jones the prospective politician was delivered at a county GOP gathering. Aside from one throwaway reference to Boiling Springs as the kind of place we don’t want to turn into, his four-and-a-half-minute speech made no mention of anything or anyone locally specific. It’s as if he was reading a boiler-plate speech that could be written for a candidate for any government post in any Polk county in the country, of which there are several, and not someone who wanted to be one of our Polk County commissioners.

 That’s not usually the way you introduce yourself to a local crowd, especially if you’ve only been living here for five years and need to convince voters that you understand what their  home  is all about. But it turns out that Chris chooses his words very carefully — not too surprising, I suppose, for a V.P of a company that installs security systems — and that first speech was no exception. 

As you’ll find out by listening to our talk.

Why does Polk Lore devote so much attention to education? Because it’s one of the few things that just about everyone in the county, no matter their political persuasion, agrees is a source of pride. Polk Schools isn’t a perfect institution, of course. But overall, our little school system’s teachers, staff, and board warrant the widespread support they get from the public, from our County Commission, and from the folks who rate schools. There’s a reason why most everyone objects to the recent move by the state legislature to shove the square peg of partisan elections into the round hole of Polk Schools. As I asked State Representative Jake Johnson a few weeks ago on this podcast: why fix something that ain’t broke?

I think that was a fair question. Just look at the low interest in replacing the incumbents on the board. Cindy Allen has been on that board since she was appointed to fill the White Oak seat in 2001, and as you’ll find out, she had no trouble finding enough signatures to get herself on the November ballot, despite the pressure to run within the party system. We talked about that decision, her overall vision for the schools, and what to do about smartphones in the classroom, at the Feagan Law offices in Columbus, where she works as a paralegal, on Groundhog Day.

Mentioned in this episode

Polk Schools post-COVID performance

Polk County, along with Henderson and Transylvania, are lumped together in what is now called Court District 42. Judicial elections are partisan affairs around here, but I’ve always thought that was a particularly bad idea — for what I hope are obvious reasons — so I was pleased to discover that one of Polk County’s veteran lawyers, a woman who was appointed last year to fill a vacancy on the district court, is running to stay on the bench as an unaffiliated candidate, which is not an easy thing to do in this hyper-polarized country of ours.

Judges aren’t allowed to say much of anything that might attract media attention, so you’d probably think inviting her onto Polk Lore would a waste of time. But my conversation with Lora T. Baker was anything but. She even said a few things that might be considered a quasi-political, in a very limited and reasonable sense. We talked at the county courthouse in late January.

Links:
Lora T. Baker campaign Facebook page

Polk County Elections

A couple of days before Christmas, one of the Facebook pages devoted to issues of community concern in the county reproduced a letter to the editor of the Tryon Daily Bulletin warning us all to “speak out and take Polk County off the list of potential locations for a nuclear waste disposal facility.”

Not too surprisingly, the post drew dozens of comments, mostly from those who were angry to learn that Polk County was being considered as a possible home for the country’s high-level radioactive waste. So problematic was the post — and the letter that started it all — that County Manager Marche Pittman felt compelled to weigh in and point out that Polk County is on no such list.

Because Marche Pittman usually has better things to do than  police misinformed Facebook posts, I asked him to talk about the bigger picture of misinformation in a time when more people get their news from social media than old-fashioned news outlets, and whether the county has any role in doing anything about the problem. We talked in the Womack Building on January 9.

Further reading:Pacific Northwest National LaboratoryPolk County government website

Just before Halloween, I found myself in the pews of the Tryon Presbyterian Church listening to some of the most challenging music I’ve heard in the last 20 years. The musician was Drew Banzhoff, a Gen Zer hired this spring to serve as the church’s musical director. The instrument was the organ, which was no surprise given that the venue was a church.  

But it didn’t take long for the playlist to stray into less-familiar territory. Drew even warned us that we were about to head into "difficult" territory, which isn’t something you hear from your typical church organist. By the time the echoes of the final chords of the concert’s closing piece, the premier of a new composition by our host, had faded from rafters of the church, I knew I wanted to talk to Drew about his pushing-the-envelope, literally pulling-out-all-the-stops approach to music.

If you have any musical training, this is the episode for you. If you don't, then maybe it will change your mind about how you should be thinking about music.

FURTHER LISTENING

Frankenstops Concert (Oct. 29, 2023):

https://vimeo.com/879456903

 Video Killed the Radio Star (with Ham Zimmer):
https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/hans-zimmer-was-in-the-first-ever-video-aired-on-mtv-the-buggles-video-killed-the-radio-star.html

Polk County has taken it on the chin this year when it comes to democracy.

Beginning next year, elections for seats on the Polk County Board of Education will be partisan affairs. Anyone who wants to run for one of the three seats up for grabs has to choose between publicly embracing one of the two main parties, or fighting to get on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. Which isn’t all that easy to do. 

Polk County also lost its off-year elections, which meant that the municipal elections scheduled for this fall were put off until next year. And every term of office at the local level will be four years long from now on.

And the county got split in two as part of Congressional re-districting. Come 2024, the Saluda and Cooper’s Gap precincts will stay in NC 11, while the rest of county will be moved to NC 14. Some of the folks in the White Oak and Mill Springs area will have to check out the board of elections website to find out which side of the dividing line they live on.

Our state representative, Jake Johnson, supported all of these changes. And over the next hour, I ask him why. I also ask him why he had funding for the Saluda Grade Rails to Trails project pulled off the budget negotiating table— at the 11th hour — threatening the whole project, only to reverse course soon after.

Does that sound a little confrontational? Maybe, but we’re now officially into the campaign season, so the questions are only going to get tougher. Our representative had answers prepared for all them. I’ll let you judge whether those answers are up to snuff. He and I talked in the conference room above the House of Flags Museum in Columbus on December 4, which happened to be opening day of candidate-filing for Election 2024. 

Further Reading:

The consequences of partisan school boards:

—https://www.thecharlottepost.com/news/2023/03/16/local-state/partisan-school-boards-grow-in-nc-gop-candidates-win/

Gerrymandering:

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4293643-how-democracy-dies-right-here-in-america/

Public School Forum report:

https://www.ncforum.org/roadmap/

Niche.com

NC Legislature bills

https://www.ncleg.gov/Legislation

Independent State Legislature rejected by US Supreme Court:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/independent-state-legislature-theory-explained

Shane Varndore has been a tree guy for pretty much his entire life. But he doesn’t just saw them down and it’s not fair to reduce what he does for a living to just getting rid of inconvenient vegetation. I wouldn’t have asked him to be part of Polk Lore if that was the case. We’ve known each for quite a while, and I guess he’s learned to trust me enough to sit down for an honest talk about trees, our relationship with them, and some things that we’re doing with them and to them that we probably shouldn’t be doing. 

If this episode sounds a little different, that’s on purpose. I set up my recording gear on some logs in his yard in Saluda on one of those gorgeous September mornings that reminds us all why we live where we do. Our conversation was a little more free-ranging than what you might expect. But I think it holds together, largely because Shane has clearly been studying and thinking long and hard about what trees mean at both the ecological and community level. 

Overseeing a rural hospital isn’t exactly a soft landing as you prepare for the retirement phase of your career. But that's the path Bill Miller has chosen for himself. More than a hundred and ninety rural hospitals in the U.S. have closed since two thousand five. According to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, thirty percent of the ones that are still accepting patients are at risk of closing.

Usually, the problem comes down to simple math: most of the revenue at rural hospitals comes from government insurance – Medicaid for low-income patients and Medicare for the elderly. But it often costs more to provide that health care than what the hospitals receive in reimbursements from the states.

Making matters worse is the reputation that many small hospitals far from the big cities have acquired. But St. Luke’s is not about to shut down, it’s not having troubling finding qualified staff, and it isn’t facing a major funding shortfall. In fact, its accounting department is probably going to have even more flexibility in the years ahead thanks to North Carolina’s decision to finally expand Medicaid eligibility to another 600,000 residents.

The nuts and bolts of running a 25-bed hospital, even one with a 50-million-dollar budget, don’t usually get much attention — unless one threatens to close, of course. But I thought it would be good idea to ask some questions now, while things at our non-profit, community-owned hospital are going well. My guest agreed, so we sat down for a chat at the end of September in his old stomping grounds at the Stearns Education Building in Columbus.

Further reading

Rural hospital reputations:
https://www.kff.org/report-section/a-look-at-rural-hospital-closures-and-implications-for-access-to-care-three-case-studies-issue-brief/

Closings:
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org

https://www.aha.org/infographics/2021-05-24-fast-facts-us-rural-hospitals-infographic

https://nursejournal.org/articles/rural-hospital-closures/

There are only four big cities in the U.S. where buying a house makes more economic sense than renting. Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Houston. Everywhere else, investing in a home is way out of reach for just about everyone who doesn’t make most of their money from surfing the stock market.

I’ve been planning an episode devoted to the affordable housing problem since I began this podcast, but I couldn’t figure out a new angle. There are plenty of people working on the problem, of course. Here in Polk County, we have Outreach, which has built four rental homes in Green Creek, and there’s a new 70-unit affordable apartment building going up at the junction of the 74 and 108. Meanwhile, the Housing Assistance non-profit corporation of Henderson County has just expanded to serve Polk County. There are good stories there, I’m sure. But I wanted to talk about the bigger picture.

It may seem a little odd for a real estate agent, whose income is directly proportional to the value of the deals they broker, to be promoting affordable housing. But if you know Amy Wood, and we’ve been friends for the better part of two decades, it’s not really all that surprising. And if you stick around for the next 40 minutes, you’ll find out why. We talked on her porch in Saluda.

Further reading:

High cost of housing nationwide:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-estate-cheaper-to-buy-than-rent-four-cities-home-prices-mortgage-rates/

Housing Assistance Corp.
https://www.housing-assistance.com

The big news on the education front in Polk County is the end of non-partisan elections for the school board. In a move that almost no one in the county thought was an even marginally bright idea, the state legislature voted this summer to make elections for seats on the Board of Education partisan races. Like it not changes are on the way for Polk Schools.

So, I thought it would be a good time to check in once again with Polk Schools Superintendent Aaron Greene to see how things stand this year and establish a baseline against which future change can be gauged.

He’s not in a position to speak about the merits, or lack thereof, of introducing party politics to our schools, but he can talk about things like the extra short summer break our students just had, the situation with bus drivers, and what his staff is going to do with all the bonus tax revenue that County Commissioners approved for the schools in this year’s budget. We talked in his office in Columbus at the end of the first week of class.

Further reading:

Things could be a lot worse:

https://www.them.us/story/idaho-teacher-of-the-year-flees-rightwing-attacks

Partisans school boards are a growing trend:

https://www.wfae.org/education/2023-03-14/will-partisan-school-board-elections-keep-growing-in-nc

https://my.aasa.org/AASA/Resources/SAMag/2018/Jun18/Board-Savvy.aspx

https://www.wunc.org/education/2023-06-07/nc-senate-passes-changes-school-board-elections-buncombe-county