The Highlands Board of Commissioners enjoyed a relatively light agenda for its January meeting last week.
The first topic of discussion was one that has been in the board’s foreground for roughly a year – a lease for the Chamber of Commerce office and visitor’s center.
“We recently had a good meeting with the leadership of the Chamber and we presented them with a few items in the town budget that are related to tourism and we feel like should be funded by tourist-related tax,” Highlands Mayor Patrick Taylor said. “They are going to review those items, take them to their board, and come back to us at a later meeting with their recommendations. I know we are tired of talking about this, and we shared a laugh with them because they are tired of talking about it too.”
For the past several years the Chamber has operated out of the visitors center at the corner of Main Street and NC106. The property is owned by the town but was leased to the Chamber for tourism development purposes for $1 per year.
In early 2024, the town requested the Chamber begin paying monthly rent to the town since the town was doing monthly maintenance work maintaining the public bathrooms at Wright Square and Kelsey-Hutchinson Founders Park, which are used primarily by visitors to Highlands. Over the course of several months, the discussion around what rental rate was appropriate, and if the Chamber was allowed to use occupancy tax funds to pay rent to the town, were at times hotly debated.
In December 2024, the town board accepted a proposal to allow the Chamber to continue operating in its current location under an extended five-year lease.
Town manager Josh Ward noted that the terms regarding what tourism-related expenses the Chamber will be responsible for will be written into a lease that has been prepared by town attorney Bob Hagemann and that the complete document will hopefully be ready for approval at the town’s February meeting.
Mayor’s Report
Taylor used his time during the mayor’s report to address recent cold weather and the impact on the town.
“I think some of our new residents and new visitors may have been surprised that we got four to five inches of snow in places last week, but those of us who have lived here for some time know it wasn’t our first major winter event,” Taylor said. “Our town crews did great work keeping the power on and restoring service in areas where it did go out, and our maintenance folks worked hard throughout the snow, along with our police and firefighters.”
Taylor noted that the recent snow was the first major snow event in roughly three years, and the current month is on pace to be the coldest on record in at least the last decade. Temperatures were in the single digits three consecutive days this week, Jan. 20-22.
“We did have one bad luck situation during the last snow where a gust of wind struck a white pine adjacent to Duke Energy’s main transmission line and took the line down,” Taylor said. “That knocked power out to the town, and it took some time to restore. We had some folks who were upset that the town wasn’t doing updates regarding the outage, or taking to long to do them, and I understand that. We are looking at rebuilding our website currently and that ability is something that will be part of improving our ability to update the public.”
Town manager Josh Ward noted that representatives from Duke Energy have notified the town of several “dangerous trees” near the transmission line that need to come down. In order to do that work, power will need to be shut down to the Town of Highlands for a day.
“We don’t have a date for that work yet, but it will be in the next six weeks or so,” Ward said. “They can’t cut the trees they need to at night, so it will require a scheduled outage during the day. We are working with Duke to figure out a day that the outage can happen with as much notice and as little disruption as possible.”
Highlands Playground
Commissioner Brian Stiehler updated the board regarding fundraising for the new playground that is planned for the Highlands Rec Park.
“I spoke with an individual this week that is going to wait to see how much grant funding we receive, if any, and he is pledging as much as $200,000 to the project,” Stiehler said. “We have applied for the parks and recreation grant through the state, and we should hear about that in June. With this pledge we have exceeded our local fundraising amount that we were asked to get together.”
Stiehler and commissioner Jeff Weller were tasked with spearheading the playground replacement project in 2024. The current playground has aged past its useful life and the plan to replace it calls for an all-inclusive playground for children of all ages and physical ability levels to be built on the same site.
“I was just at a municipalities conference and one of the topics was the importance of parks and playgrounds, and what those facilities bring to towns,” Taylor said. “It’s something we need for our young people and young families, and I know a lot of folks are looking forward to the project coming to fruition.”