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In N.C. Town, Story Sounds Pretty Familiar

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By STEVE OTTO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 13, 2008

TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, N.C. - In lots of ways, Brevard seems the perfect town, almost too good to be true.

Located less than an hour's drive southwest of Asheville, Brevard is a small mountain town best known for its waterfalls and white squirrels, both in abundance in the area. There is a college at the edge of town famous for its music festival. Yo-Yo Ma was in town when we showed up the other day, they did "The Magic Flute" last night, and Keith Lockhart of Boston Pops fame is the conductor-in-residence. The town is surrounded by the Pisgah Forest and you can be up, just beyond Sliding Rock and the Pink Beds, to the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in only minutes.

They even love the Transylvania name. There was a move to change the name of the local hospital to be sophisticated and maybe a little less Draculonian, but it was turned down.

But if you pick up a copy of the Transylvania Times, published twice a week, you wonder just how far you might have gone in your effort to escape Tampa.

The T-Times, as they call it here, is one of those delightful community newspapers that give you a flavor for the people who live here. There are columns about the birds in the surrounding forests and community sections on bake sales and picnics. But there are also stories about the realities of dealing with what some see as progress and others as the road to ruin.

A Bat - Er, Cat In Transylvania

Stella Trapp is the editor and publisher of the Transylvania Times. She closes the door to her office and then asks me if I am allergic to cats. I notice that one is spread out across her desk fiddling with what appears to be a newspaper page layout.

Trapp's paper is doing fine. She doesn't mess with the Internet, and e-mail is a foreign word in her vocabulary. She looks like she could be your grandmother but has a well-earned reputation for her defense of Brevard and sensitive environmental issues, from protecting the French Broad River to urban sprawl.

"You don't want to ruin the very things that make this such a special place," she says.

Battle of Brevard

That is the constant battle of Brevard as the big-box stores open establishments on one of the arteries leading into town. You don't have to squint hard to imagine that road evolving into another Dale Mabry Highway or Fowler Avenue.

I mentioned to Trapp that only that morning I had gone online to see what was happening back in Tampa and that the familiar stories of developers pressuring commissioners and others to relax standards never seemed to stop.

She asked me if I had seen a giant condo-retail project going up across from the college. It had been a long and painful battle, with one side claiming this would be an economic stimulus while others wondered if the project would be a blow to the character and small-town characteristics so important to the community.

The details are different. No one is ever going to confuse this small mountain college town with the sprawling urban and suburban complex of towns and cities that is the Tampa Bay region.

But the issues are the same and forces at work have a striking familiarity as we struggle to determine what is progress and why it is people choose to come to an area to live in the first place.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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