The Southern Highland Reader

2009-12-18: Fans and foes of a controversial youth dance club in Sylva aired their thoughts before the Sylva Town Board Thursday. Opponents of “Club Offspring” provided a petition asking the board to investigate the business and to consider closing it. Proponents said the controversy is overblown, and provided a petition of their own. Either way, said Mayor Maurice Moody, we have no evidence that any laws have been broken, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

The dust-up arose after the club, which doesn’t serve alcohol or admit patrons over the age of 24, circulated a flyer that invited teens to come to the venue “as wasted as you want”.

Asheville television WLOS spent the day in Sylva — seeming a little more breathless than the story deserved — and aired images from the club’s MySpace page that showed scantily-dressed teens. One club-goer’s response, in so many words, was that when you dance for hours at a time you need a way to cool off.

More here from WLOS.
More here from the Asheville Citizen-Times.
More here from the Sylva Herald (link will expire in one week)

Sylva teen club draws ire

A teen and young adult party club doing business in Sylva has raised the ire of parents by circulating sketchy flyers that urge kids to “come as wasted as they want” to the venue, located near the intersection of NC 107 and Business 23 downtown.

“Club Offspring”, which does not serve alcohol, advertises that it allows “no adults”.

The flyers, which made their way into the local high school, also made their way into the hands of a local parent, Brian Bartel, who went to Asheville television WLOS with the story and is circulating a petition that he plans to present to the Sylva town board on Thursday. The petition asks the town to shut the club down.

It’s unlikely that the board will have legal standing to do so, whether or not it has the inclination.

Here’s the story from WLOS, in which the station notes that the club’s 22-year-old owner is in the slammer for statutory rape.

More here from Justin Goble at the Sylva Herald.

Bryson City pub owner cited in underage drinking death

The Asheville Citizen-Times Josh Boatwright writes that Charles Hutchinson, owner of Mickey’s Pub in downtown Bryson City, served numerous drinks to an underage patron on May 17, and that that patron left and promptly drove into a nearby building, killing himself.

Hutchinson faces a criminal citation and the suspension of his liquor license.

GSMNP–According to Asheville’s WLOS TV, President Bush, lacking anything else to fret about these days, is pushing to change National Park Service rules so that individual park superintendents would be able to choose whether they want to allow mountain bikes.

Local bikers argue that bikes would cause no more damage than horses already do, but since horses — on the limited trails they can traverse — cause a large amount of damage, the bikers argument doesn’t seem like a great one.

A Great Smoky Mountains National Park spokesperson told WLOS that in his opinion, even if the rules change goes through, it would be a long shot in the Smokies.

The Charlotte Observer’s Jack Horan has a piece on these regulations here.

BALSAM-This community near the Jackson/Haywood County line at Balsam Gap has a long history, steeped in, among many other things, bear hunting.

The tradition of hunting bears with hounds is as old as the first arrival here of the Scots-Irish, and Balsam, located near the confluence of the Plott Balsam mountains and the Richland Balsams, is adjacent some of the broadest, most rugged expanses of forestland in the region.

It is traditional bear hunting territory.

The hunting of black bear is carefully regulated, though, and as bear populations revive, and as private development concerns continue to encroach on areas that hunters have long considered “theirs”, some hunters have begun to test those regulations.

The NC Wildlife Resources Commission is searching for those responsible for bear poaching recently in the Balsam area, where a bear carcass, minus its head and paws, was recently found dumped alongside a road.

It wasn’t the first such incident.

“To just come and make a trophy out of it leave the rest to rot that’s … wrong isn’t even the word to describe it,” Balsam resident Sonny Bryson told Asheville’s WLOS television.