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Former firefighter sent to prison on sexual exploitation charge

Henderson County News

Griffin to run for County Commission

Tim Griffin, who ran a close race for the Henderson County Board of Commissioners four years ago, announced Monday that he will run again in 2018. "I feel strongly that better communication and cooperation is a necessity between Henderson County and all the municipalities within," Griffin said in a news release. "We need to provide for the proper infrastructure to attract the industries that will allow for agriculture to flourish. We need to support the school board and continue to provide the highest quality of education possible for our students. We have to pursue avenues for affordable housing to make it affordable for families to remain in Henderson County. Our budget needs to remain revenue neutral for the foreseeable future with budgeting concerns being approached in a conservative manner." He will run for the Republican nomination for the District 4 seat currently held by Tommy Thompson. "I prefer not to make a commitment one way or the other right now" on his plans, he said. Here is Griffin's announcement: I have called Henderson County home for 52 years. I have fond memories of growing up in Henderson County as I witnessed the county itself grow. I am a graduate of East Henderson High School and attended Western Carolina University. I have completed extensive training and education in the public service sector.During my early teens my parents instilled in me the values of serving and giving back to society. I entered the fire and rescue service over 34 years ago and have served as a firefighter, both volunteer and career, for over 34 years. Basically I have based my entire life on public service and assisting the people of Henderson County. I retired from law enforcement in Henderson County after 30 years of service. I currently hold the positions of reserve police officer with the City of Hendersonville, assistant chief as well as sitting member of the board of directors of Dana Fire and Rescue, and currently am employed full time as a firefighter/engineer with Etowah Fire and Rescue.Faith is an important part of my life. I attend The Bridge Church where I also serve on the Board of Trustees. For many years I have enjoyed raising money to benefit causes that have touched my heart which include the Special Olympics and the Muscular Dystrophy Association.I am married to the tremendous and supportive Paula Caulder Griffin and the proud father of two daughters, Jordan McCarson and Lindsey Griffin. Raising a family in Henderson County has been an extraordinary experience for me. I have been asked by many people to seek the position of commissioner and one of the reasons that I have accepted the challenge is to ensure that the quality of life in Henderson County remains an exceptional place for other families to grow and thrive. As a commissioner I will endeavor to be your voice for the community concerning issues such as education, agriculture, and emergency services. Anyone that knows me realizes that I have never met a stranger and am willing to discuss ideas with anyone. I feel that a commissioner shoulders the responsibility of listening to and acting in the best interests of the citizens of Henderson County. My door will remain open to your concerns.I look forward to hearing your questions and concerns as we move forward. We will be providing more information as we move forward through a website and Facebook page that will be released soon.Thank You For Your Support.       Read Story »

Henderson County News

Local man sentenced to prison for attempted murder

An Oak Grove Road resident, Shaun F. Frisbee, was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, District Attorney Greg Newman announced. Other convictions during an Oct. 9-10 term of Superior Court were: Crystal J. Hernandez, of 123 Halsbury Avenue, Hendersonville, pleaded guilty to felony obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. Andrew C. Harding, of 142 Cypress Estates Lane, Hendersonville, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor cruelty to animals and was sentenced to 120 days in jail. The Honorable Judge Mark E. Powell presided.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Pardee, sheriff's office host pill drop

Pardee UNC Health Care and the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office will host a pill take-back event on Thursday, Oct. 19, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Pardee’s Justice Street upper parking lot near the hospital’s main entrance. The event will provide local residents a convenient and safe way to dispose of old medications, including prescription pills, capsules, ointments, vitamins, liquids in their original containers, inhalers and patches. Radioactive chemotherapy medications as well as sharps, needles and EpiPens will not be accepted. For more information or questions, contact the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office at 828-697-4596 or visit them at 100 North Grove Street. “Dropping off your old medication helps keep other members of the household from taking expired medication that was not prescribed to them,” said David Ellis, M.D., chief medical officer at Pardee. “We also want local residents to avoid flushing medication down the drain, which puts unwanted chemicals into the area’s water supply.” “Through our partnerships with organizations like Pardee UNC Health Care, our county is continuing to reduce the availability of opioids by offering community pill drop events,” said Sheriff Charles McDonald. “Many of the medications being collected at these events are highly addictive. We encourage the community to join us and Pardee to prevent these drugs from falling into the wrong hands.” Since McDonald instituted the drug disposal program in 2013, over 5,575 pounds of medications have been properly disposed of and kept out of the water supply and out of the hands of potential abusers. More than 1,000 pounds have been collected and incinerated in 2017 alone. In addition to the on-site pill collection events, the public can bring their medications to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office lobby, located at 100 North Grove Street every Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pardee UNC Health Care is a not-for-profit community hospital founded in 1953 and is managed by UNC Health Care. The hospital is licensed for 222 acute care beds. Pardee has several locations separate from the main campus, including a comprehensive physician practice network, two urgent care locations and five orthopedic clinics. For more information or to find a physician, visit www.pardeehospital.org.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Partnership makes apartments into homes for Safelight clients

About a year ago, Amy Treece, Sarah Grymes and Tanya Blackford hatched an idea to rehabilitate a vacant apartment building for clients of Safelight, the domestic violence shelter.“Amy contacted me and said we’d like to meet and we’ve got an idea,” said Gary Lambert, chair of the Board of Trustees of First United Methodist Church.“When you get Tanya and Sarah together there’s quite a bit of enthusiasm. There was great synergy from the beginning.”That synergy resulted in a four-way partnership of the church, Safelight, where Blackford is executive director and Treece is a board member, the Community Foundation of Henderson County and Housing Assistance Corp., which Grymes leads.The apartment building “had been struggling” since the church bought it in 1999, Lambert said, and for a while church leaders thought the best use for the property might be a parking lot.“Sarah stepped up with Housing Assistance and said, ‘We could help,’” Lambert said. “Housing Assistance did most of the heavy construction.” Aside from that, “It’s just been a lot of volunteers involved.”The building contains four two-bedroom and four one-bedroom apartments. The property is next to a community garden that grows produce for IAM and Safelight and is open to apartment tenants.All the tenants pay rent, either through their own income or with government assistance.“They are regular units that are for rent and we just help place families that are ready and have been through some aspect of our services,” Blackford said. “They’re paid for either through jobs or they have a Section 8 voucher. Affordable housing is certainly needed in our community. There’s a huge shortfall of units and it makes it really hard for long-term success because of that stability issue. For health and education and children’s wellbeing, being in a safe affordable place is critical.”The four-way partnership is one solution that could be repeated, she added.“Our best way to address our affordable housing issue is through creative partnerships,” she said. “We’ve got some great affordable housing providersalready so what we need now are those partnerships that make that difference.”The clients who have moved in are “everybody that you can imagine, moms with kids, single women, women without children (from) any area of our service,” she said.It’s gratifying to see the units become a home, Lambert and Blackford said.“Our first clients went in in August,” Lambert said. “Tanya was telling me back in March and April that the first four (chosen to move in) have already got some of their boxes packed.”Blackford confirmed the story.“I think it is obvious that they were built with love and the people that are living there are thrilled to be a part of it,” she said. “I pass them every day because they’re on my way home and they’re beautiful, fenced with gardens. It’s totally changed that corner.”First United Methodist Church in partnership with Safelight will celebrate the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apartments at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 17. The “Fifth Avenue Apartment Renovation Project,” a ministry of FUMC, was also supported by Appalachian Restoration and Cleaning, Camp Tekoa campers, Entegra Bank, Holbart Tree Service, Interfaith Assistance Ministry, Morris Broadband, RentWNC.com, Roofing by Joe, Salvation Army, St. James Carpenters Club, St. Vincent’s Ministry, The Garage on 25 andWestern Carolina Community Action.     Read Story »

Henderson County News

Moss column: Tate guided a surge of job creation

For a guy who is paid good money to keep things out of the press, Andrew Tate was always as open as he could be when I asked him questions.You do what you can do this in reporting job. My zeal to know everything first and tell everything first usually pays off. Sometimes you hit a wall. Because I respected Andrew, I usually ended up backing off, at least temporarily, until the fruit got ripe.In interviews with people who worked with Andrew and knew him well, I had tried to get at why he was so effective leading the Henderson County Partnership for Economic Development for the past 10 years. He’s leaving to manage real estate for the North Carolina Railroad, a corporation that’s actually more of an economic development engine than a train operator.Tate comes across in public as anything but a slick salesman. His mastery of the job came from his understanding of the community’s strengths and weaknesses, a steel-trap grasp of facts factory owners want to know, a tireless work ethic and maybe most of all a gift for building relationships.In our exit interview over IPAs at Southern Appalachian Brewery on Monday afternoon, Andrew and I reminisced about what became kind of a joint mission in the summer of 2013 — an effort to tell the epic story of the recruitment of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. The Lightning was only a year old then and many of the sources I spoke with, including the top executives of Sierra Nevada, would never have cooperated without a signal from Andrew that they could trust me. Trust is the currency in his line of work.“He never drew attention to himself,” state Rep. Chuck McGrady told me. “He’s very understated and he’s very much about building relationships so it’s all for the long-term. I’ve talked to enough decision-makers that ultimately decided to move here and they’re all really quick to come back to the relationships they’ve built with him. He also was really good at keeping relationships with people in the community so he could bring other people to the table very very quickly.” ◆ ◆ ◆Before he was a county commissioner, Bill Lapsley was a civil engineer who drew up the site plans and orchestrated the dirt-moving for hundreds of large developments in Henderson County and beyond. He has been involved with industrial recruitment efforts, from the Committee of 100 on, throughout his career.“Oh my,” Lapsley said when I asked him to assess Tate’s service. “He’s just been a great asset to our county. I hate to see him go but I’m not surprised. His talent and abilities are going to lead him to much higher levels in economic development. He just has great ability and I’ve really been pleased we’ve been able to hold him here as long as we have.”If Tate has mastered the soft skills of relationship building, he’s also a quick and agile technocrat.“He has a grasp of the knowledge that he can sit down with power people and water and sewer people and road people and know what questions to ask, what’s critical information and what isn’t,” he said. “It’s been my experience that he can answer quickly by himself without having to hand it off. He’s gathered the information. He knows.”◆ ◆ ◆Sometimes public officials are reluctant to return calls for fear that I’m going to ask the hard question or dig into a behind-the-scenes drama they’d rather not share. But when I left word that I was calling about Andrew Tate, they were glad to step to the plate.County Manager Steve Wyatt recalled what happened when a delegation from the partnership made a visit to his office.“When they came to see me to deliver the bad news they looked like their dog had been run over,” he said. “I knew before they opened their mouth what they were going to tell me. I said, ‘That’s not bad news. Bad news would be, “We’re having to run this guy off because we’re not getting anything done.”’”It was inevitable, he said, that a recruiter with Tate’s record would move up the food chain.“I’ve been doing this for 35 years,” Wyatt said. “In his role, he is as effective as anyone I’ve ever worked with. The results speak for themselves. We have seen an unprecedented period of success in the last 10 years. There are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is Andrew Tate. He brought the right skill set at the right time to the right place. I tell the commissioners, over the last several years, it came together with the right people with the right assets to do those things that were previously unimaginable.”Like what? you ask. Like this: Demmel, Empire Distributors, Legacy Paddlesports, UPM Raflatac Specials, Norafin, the DirtyDancing film production, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Microtech Knives, Raumedic, PMA Tools,Bold Rock Hard Cider, Smart Products, Wingate University, Country Malt Group, GF Linamar. Taxable investment: $796,458,000. Jobs: 2,070.“That’s going to change hundreds of lives,” Wyatt says. “Sierra Nevada, Raflatac, Raumedic, you say those are just businesses. But those businesses are made up of people and those people have lives and these job opportunities allow them to put their kids in school, pay their bills and have lives. Andrew Tate’s impact, his legacy in this community, will play out for generations.” ◆ ◆ ◆We had good hunting hounds before we got Andrew and we’ll have a good hound again. After all, as Tate himself points out, we are selling one of the most desirable places to live in the whole country. But there was a sense from people I’ve spoken with that Tate has done about all he can do. Although he says that’s not why he’s leaving for the job in Raleigh, he acknowledges that the partnership has checked off nearly everything its leaders charted for him 10 years ago. It’s a model of success in economic development, respected and admired around the state.It feels like the partnership and our economic development efforts are at a crossroads and that’s not a bad thing. If they asked me — which they didn’t — I’d tell the Partnership that the next priority should be the recreation/tourism industry, starting with the 45-mile greenway connecting parks.We’re lucky that Andrew Tatehas helped to bring us this far. A high peak does not have to be a point that leads downhill. It can be the place from which we spring to the next level.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Tate looks back on 10 years of selling county to industry

Having led Henderson County’s industrial recruiting efforts since 2007, Andrew Tate agreed to an exit interview with the Hendersonville Lightning at Southern Appalachian Brewing Co.   Read Story »

Laurel Park News

Laurel Park police make arrest in bank robbery

Laurel Park police have arrested a suspect in an Aug. 18 bank robbery of the Wells Fargo Bank during which a robber threatened bank employees with a knife. An intense investigation by the Laurel Park police, making use of video surveillance from multiple sources and witness interviews, led to Marquis Dechane Harrison as a suspect, the town said in a news release. Investigators secured a warrant for Harrison’s arrest on one count of Robbery with a Dangerous Weapon.Chief Bobbie Trotter thanked the FBI, Hendersonville Police Department, Fletcher Police Department, Henderson County Sheriff’s Office and Buncombe County Sheriff’s Officefor their assistance in this case.   Read Story »

Henderson County News

Don't miss this week's Hendersonville Lightning (148)

You won't want to miss this week's Hendersonville Lightning.    Read Story »

Henderson County News

Ask Matt ... where have all the flowers gone

Q. Why did they take out all the yellow lilies and other plants in the median of U.S. 64 near the interstate and replace them with stone? It seems that it’s all about safety. NCDOT is responsible for maintaining the median on U.S. 64 and it was decided that it would be easier and safer for their crews to maintain a median with river rock rather than plants because of the close proximity to passing traffic. Keith Blazer with the state’s highway department said that they had many complaints about the appearance of the plants which were showing some considerable age.The river rocks were placed on permeable fabric to control weeds. Twice a year highway employees will spray the rock beds with a herbicide. This can be done from the safety of trucks. That may be an important factor since the traffic on U.S. 64 near the overpass is 37,000 vehicles per day. I have heard from several citizens who fear that the rocks will become dislodged and present its own safety problem. Also, there is the concern that the median will again become a magnet for cigarette butts, bottles, cans and broken auto parts.The rock bed, approximately, one half mile in length, cost the State $25,000 to install. NCDOT used four different vendors, at least one of which gets their rocks (natural quartzite) from the Pigeon River near Newport, Tennessee. Out of curiosity, I asked geology professor Jackie Langille at UNC-Asheville how long it would take to smooth the stones in the median. She said that there are many varying factors such as the type of rock and the velocity of the stream so the timescale can range from hundreds to even thousands of years.There were some mixed signals regarding the plan according to sources at the city of Hendersonville. It seems that NCDOT’s first choice for the median was not a rock bed at all. Instead they were going to dig out the lilies and install small trees, shrubs, and flowers. Somehow the plan turned to stone. Q. What’s the listing price for the vacant lot directly across from the new courthouse? It would make a great park. It’s actually two lots. The 0.65 acres on the corner of Third Avenue and Grove Street is listed for $1.1 million. If you are interested, call Gwen Bowers with Southeby’s Real Estate. Local businessman Hasan Mansouri acquired the property in 1996. It is listed on the county tax books for $459,900. Mansouri purchased the Woodfield Inn eight years ago, renamed it Mansouri Mansion and made improvements. It has yet to enjoy the level of success that the former historic inn once had.   Read Story »

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