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“Visionary Leadership” sometimes means saying no

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Tuesday, 21 October 2025

Written by Kirk deViere

The deViere Dispatch is a regular communication from Kirk deViere, offering thoughtful perspectives and timely updates on Cumberland County initiatives, decisions, and opportunities for community engagement.
His insights help demystify complex issues and provide candid commentary on government, leadership, and the decisions that shape our daily lives. Mr. deViere currently serves as Chairman of the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners, representing District 2. He previously held office as a North Carolina State Senator for two terms and as a Fayetteville City Councilman for one term.
I strongly encourage our Up & Coming Weekly readers to Google and read CityView’s October 12 article by Tim White, the former editorial page editor of The Fayetteville Observer, titled: Here’s What Would Make Fayetteville a Grand Arts Mecca. In it, White shares his opinion on what “would transform Fayetteville into an unavoidable stop for arts and entertainment in North Carolina.”
Well, in my opinion, Mr. White has forfeited the right to offer such an opinion. Kirk deViere is far too much of a gentleman—and politician—to say this outright, but I’m not. Tim White is an uninformed hypocrite.
His article merely regurgitates the negative talking points of a few disgruntled and misinformed downtown Fayetteville property owners. White has zero credibility when it comes to commenting on city or county matters in which he has no direct involvement or understanding.
It is both foolish and disingenuous for him to claim a deep love for Fayetteville—its arts, culture, dining, and “cheery” downtown experiences. Really? If he “loved” and enjoyed Fayetteville so much, why did he choose to live in Moncure, a town in Chatham County, 40 miles away? Mr. deViere’s Dispatch is spot-on. We need more truth-tellers willing to bring transparency to local government and call out this kind of hypocrisy.
It’s precisely this type of illegitimate commentary that likely led The Assembly to apply bold yellow editorial disclaimers to its content—and why CityView continues to solicit support and donations to the point of ad nauseam. Jus' sayin'!
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly newspaper.
—Bill Bowman, Publisher

The deViere Dispatch, Oct. 14
The recent CityView editorial column paints an appealing picture of downtown Fayetteville as an arts mecca, with the Crown Event Center (originally pitched as a “DPAC-like” Performing Arts Center) as the missing puzzle piece that would complete the vision. It’s easy to understand the nostalgia for lost cultural venues and the desire to see downtown thrive with pre-show dinners and post-show drinks within walking distance.
But there’s something critical that the CityView article glosses over: this wasn’t actually about lacking “visionary leadership” it was about inherited flawed plans masquerading as vision.
The Project That Changed Beyond Recognition
The downtown facility wasn’t killed by commissioners lacking imagination. It was a project that ballooned from $80 million to $178 million (including the parking deck), with costs more than doubling from original estimates. More troubling, this wasn’t even the performing arts center many residents envisioned and had been pitched. It was an event center with a flat floor designed primarily for conventions, yet consistently marketed as something it wasn’t.
When only 28 people from user group workshops essentially designed a multi-million dollar facility, and their own cautionary notes about size and scope were ignored, that’s not visionary planning—that’s a runaway project detached from community input.
What the Community Actually Wanted
Here’s the part that should give downtown advocates pause: the community survey used to justify the downtown location actually showed majority support for renovating the existing Crown Complex before evaluation criteria were weighted to favor downtown. The data existed (https://bit.ly/ECFS2021 - slide 13), but was interpreted to support a predetermined outcome.
The Gateway Argument: Investment vs. Abandonment
The CityView article makes a compelling emotional point about the Crown Complex area: it’s become a “dilapidated landscape” that deters job-seekers arriving at the airport, a once-bustling corridor along US 301 that declined after I-95 diverted traffic. The argument goes: why turn away from this “entertainment asset” and key gateway when it needs investment?
But this framing by the skilled writer presents a false choice. The question isn’t whether to invest in the Crown Complex area or abandon it. It is whether to invest wisely in what exists versus pouring $178 million into a fundamentally flawed project.
In fact, the commissioners’ decision actually directs investment toward the Crown Complex. The board has instructed the county manager to develop a framework to modernize the existing Crown Arena and Theater that will increase use and programming of the facilities. This represents exactly the kind of investment the gateway argument calls for by improving the corridor that first-time visitors see, rather than abandoning those existing facilities.
Consider the math: if renovating and modernizing the Crown Complex was the community’s stated preference in the survey, and if that approach provides more usage days than the downtown facility while addressing the “dilapidated” gateway problem, isn’t that actually more responsive to both community input and the gateway concern?
The article dismisses the Crown Complex location as “the city’s ragged edge” near “shabby old motels,” but you don’t revitalize a struggling corridor by abandoning the anchor institutions that could drive its renewal. You revitalize it by investing in those anchors intelligently, which is precisely what a fiscally responsible Crown Complex renovation and some strategic master planning could accomplish.
The Parking Problem Nobody Solved
The romantic vision of walking from dinner to show to drinks collapses when you realize there was no on-site ADA parking, and the proposed $33 million parking garage (never acknowledged as part of the project by some) was located behind the courthouse without a connection to the facility.
The Real Question About Vision
Yes, Fayetteville needs quality arts venues. Yes, downtown Fayetteville revitalization matters. And yes, the Crown Complex corridor deserves investment as a key gateway. But is it visionary leadership to commit the full debt capacity of Food & Beverage tax revenue to a facility projected to be used only 144 days per year? That’s actually fewer days of use than existing facilities would provide.
Is it visionary to rush a groundbreaking ceremony and rip up a 200-space parking lot with a flawed replacement plan, approving $26 million in spending within two weeks of a new board taking office, leaving no time for value engineering or addressing critical flaws?
The article is right that Fayetteville deserves better than a dilapidated gateway, but the solution isn’t to abandon that gateway for downtown at any cost. The solution is to invest wisely in improving what exists while exploring future development opportunities for the downtown site that don’t require fiscal recklessness.
A Different Kind of Vision
Real visionary leadership sometimes means having the courage to stop a project that’s gone wrong, even when it disappoints people. It means being willing to say: “We can do better than spending $178 million on a misrepresented facility that would sit empty most of the year, with parking we haven’t properly planned, funded entirely by one vulnerable revenue source the state can eliminate at any time.”
It also means recognizing that you can address the gateway problem and practice fiscal responsibility by investing in Crown Complex modernization. This is an approach that the community survey actually supported and that provides more programming flexibility.
The question isn’t whether our community deserves to be an arts mecca with an impressive gateway. The question is whether pursuing that vision requires abandoning fiscal responsibility, ignoring what the community survey actually said they wanted, and turning away from strategic investment in existing entertainment infrastructure.
Perhaps the real missing piece isn’t visionary leadership, it is the willingness to build that vision on a foundation of honest planning, accurate information, and sustainable financial principles that invest in all of the community’s corridors, not just downtown Fayetteville.

(Top Photo: The Crown Event Center location in downtown Fayetteville is currently unoccupied. Bottom Photo: This artist's rendering shows what the original plan for the Crown Event Center entailed. The project cost ballooned from initial estimates.)

Folk school operates a time machine

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Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Written by John Hood

Is time travel possible? Of course! On this matter, you’d be wise to consult not physicists but artists — including the faculty of a certain highland school that once existed in a time all its own.
No, it wasn’t nestled inside Brigadoon. I refer to the John C. Campbell Folk School in beautiful Brasstown, North Carolina, which straddles the boundary between Clay and Cherokee counties.
When the United States was initially divided into four standard time zones in 1883, the far western corner of our state lay within Central Time. Over the ensuing decades, many communities voted to join the rest of North Carolina in observing Eastern Time. Clay County was one of them. Cherokee wasn’t. So the folks in Brasstown decided to split the difference. When it was 4 o’clock in Hayesville and 3 o’clock in Murphy, the clock at Campbell Folk School read 3:30!
Speaking of time, this fall marks the 100th anniversary of the school’s founding. Olive Dame Campbell, the widow of scholar John C. Campbell, incorporated the institution in late 1925 with her friend Marguerite Butler, a Kentucky schoolteacher. Residents of Brasstown and neighboring communities contributed land, labor, and resources to the emerging folk school, a form of education borrowed from Northern Europe that imparts knowledge and skills without conferring grades or credentials.
Campbell Folk School is, in fact, the oldest and largest such institution in the United States, serving thousands of students and tens of thousands of visitors annually with weeklong and weekend classes, longer work-study programs for young people, and hundreds of concerts and dances a year for everyone.
What can you study at the folk school? Here’s a partial list: music, dance, gardening, quilting, photography, weaving, marbling, storytelling, painting, and puppetry. Fair warning, though: don’t expect to spend much of your time in classrooms listening to lectures. Campbell is very much a learn-by-doing school. Its motto? “We sing behind the plow.”
It was, indeed, sound that Olive Campbell used to describe what she had in mind. “We listen to sound of hammer,” she wrote, to “saw and plane in the carpentry room, to the thud of the loom and whirr of spinning wheel in the weaving and sewing room. We watch them at their daily physical training in the gymnasium. We hear them singing — for it is song that welds the group.”
Bethany Chaney, executive director of Campbell Folk School, relishes the opportunity to honor its past while serving new generations.
“We are this anchor here in far western North Carolina,” she told my Carolina Journal colleague Katherine Zender, “and because so few of us who’ve grown up in North Carolina ever get out here, we may not know what an incredibly special, beautiful, vibrant 100-year-old institution we have and how the folk school has changed people’s lives, perspectives, and even vocations.”
The school just completed its Fall Festival and is now preparing to host its Forge After Dark event, which will feature a blacksmithing demonstration and live music on Nov. 7 and a craft auction on Nov. 8.
No, you won’t find a mysterious TARDIS or souped-up DeLorean in Brasstown. Still, the kind of time travel practiced there is no less powerful and exciting.
By teaching the fine arts, agricultural practices, foodways, and traditional culture of the Southern Appalachians, the John C. Campbell Folk School spirits its students and visitors away to a rich and deservedly cherished past.
At the same time, teacher and learner alike are building a bridge to a brighter future, one dedicated to the proposition that, as Olive Campbell put it, “education should not discredit” the “humble tasks of farm, shop and home.” Education should link “the culture of toil and culture of books,” she continued. “It should be enlightened action.”
Now, in our seemingly perpetual winter of discontent and disconnection, it’s a promise that beckons us with convivial warmth and glorious light — both available in ample quantities in Brasstown, at a time of your choosing.
Editors’ note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

(Photo: The Campbell Folk School has classes and hosts events throughout the year to showcase the talents of those who attend. Photo courtesy of the Campbell Folk School Facebook page)

Dealing with Post Tarheel Sisyphus Disorder

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Tuesday, 14 October 2025

Written by Pitt Dickey

Trigger warning, this column is not suitable for UNC football fans, Snowflakes irritated by mangled Greek Mythology, or small house plants. Parental discretion is advised. You would be better off binge-watching pre-season Hallmark Channel Christmas movies rather than wasting your time reading this drivel. I personally witnessed the recent UNC- Clemson football debacle. I am scarred for life as a result of the traumatic events at Kenan Stadium. Unlike what Andy Griffith once said, what it was, was not football. It was Slaughter House 38-10 in Chapel Hill. Andy at least got a big Orange soda at his Tar Heel game. I did not even have the comfort of adult beverages to ease the gridiron pain as I had to drive back home after the game.
To be a Tar Heel football fan is to suffer, to know great pre-season hopes only to see them dashed to bits on the shores of a non-existent defense and an at best mediocre offense. It is to be Charlie Brown hoping that this time Lucy will not snatch the football away at the last minute. It is to understand the depths of Charlie’s anguish as he screams, “AAUGH!” The Heels gave up 28 points to Clemson in the first quarter. There is no Mercy Rule in college football to stop scoring carnage. UNC, like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, must depend upon the kindness of strangers. In this case, the kind strangers wore Clemson orange. If Clemson had not played its second and third strings after the first quarter, the score might have been a Zillion to 3.
Unfortunately, like Humpty Dumpty’s issues, UNC’s Bill Belichick, our $50 million 73-year-old coach, and Jordan, his 24-year-old girlfriend, could not put the Tar Heels back together again. To rationalize why Tar Heel fans still pull for the football team, kindly turn to the story of Sisyphus, the patron saint of Carolina Football. At some point in the past, UNC football must have offended the Greek Gods. We are the Sisyphus of college football. Were you asleep when Sisyphus was discussed in your Greek Mythology class? Allow me to refresh your recollection. Post Tarheel Sisyphus Disorder (PTSD) explains what happens in Kenan Stadium each Autumn.
Sisyphus considered himself smarter than Zeus. He ticked off Zeus by ratting him out about kidnapping the River God’s daughter. It is not wise to aggravate the King of the Gods. Zeus ordered Thanatos the God of Death to chain up Sisyphus. Sisyphus pulled the old switcheroo and chained up Thanatos instead. Because Thanatos was chained up, no humans could die on Earth. This situation frustrated Ares, the God of War, because battles couldn’t result in killing his enemies. Death was stingless while Thanatos was imprisoned. Ares finally captured Sisyphus and unchained Thanatos so people could start dying again.
Sisyphus ended up in the custody of Hades, the God of the Underworld. Being a smooth talker, Sisyphus conned Hades into letting him temporarily go back to the world of the living to remonstrate with his wife. Once above ground, Sisyphus refused to go back to the Underworld until he died of old age. On returning to the Underworld, Hades made Sisyphus push a giant enchanted rock up a hill. When Sisyphus got the rock almost to the top of the hill, the rock would roll back down the hill, forcing Sisyphus to start pushing the rock back up the hill again. This goes on for eternity. Sisyphus is the universal symbol of “useless efforts and unending frustration.”
Speaking of useless efforts and unending frustration, Gentle Reader, now do you see why UNC football fans suffer PTSD every Autumn? Hope springs eternal each pre-season. We dream the impossible dream. We will fight the unbeatable foe. We will bear with unbearable sorrow. We will run where the brave dare not go. This season will be different. The Heels will go all the way. We will push the Enchanted Rock up the hill. Victory will be in sight. Then the month of September arrives. The football-shaped rock rolls back down Chapel Hill, crushing the hopes of the Village Faithful in Kenan Stadium. By October, there is no pressure on Tar Heel football fans. We leave during the 3rd quarter. The season was wrecked during September. We long for the return of basketball season and UNC Women’s Field Hockey.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright/ The band is playing somewhere/ And somewhere hearts are light/ And somewhere men are laughing/ And somewhere children shout/ But there is no joy in Chapel Hill/ Mighty Belichick has struck out.

(Illustration by Pitt Dickey)

Working to reconstruct common ground

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Tuesday, 07 October 2025

Written by Margaret Dickson

My father was a lifelong Fayetteville resident. He, like millions of other American men, was drafted into the United States Army. All were changed by their service with fellow soldiers from vastly different places, with different points of view and different ways of life. My father’s military friends included a businessman from the garment district in New York City, a midwestern corn farmer, and someone from New Orleans whose background I never knew. They would never have crossed paths without shared service, but they nurtured these friendships throughout their lives, with shared experiences and a love of our nation being the glue holding them together.
We are now a divided nation, with few common experiences, military or otherwise. Today, although it does not feel this way in our community, less than 1 percent of Americans are on active military duty, and many Americans do not know anyone serving or who has served. Military service is no longer a common experience.
Both talking heads and everyday Americans see that we are now either red or blue, with only a tad of purple. We all wave the American flag, then take it home, and lock our doors and our minds. We watch programs and read publications that reflect our world views back to us, and we associate with people who think like us and avoid people who do not. People, unlike us, are now “the other,” with all of us spinning off into our own orbits.
Increasingly, I see mandatory national service for young Americans as a way to provide a common experience at the beginning of adulthood, a formative time of life in all societies. It could take many different forms with a year or so of service by all able young Americans, including military, educational, health-care related, environmental, agricultural, social, or cultural. It could include existing organizations like Teach for America, Americorps, and other national, regional, and local organizations. Such service could point young people in career directions. Options are fluid and endless.
The point is not what our young people do but that they do something both for themselves and for their country. The point is that young people pause and think not so much about themselves as about their communities and our nation. The point is that we remix and spread our national glue, creating common experiences and bonds for future generations like the ones my father’s generation treasured.
None of this would be easy, of course.
Critics of the notion cite individual liberty concerns. Some say the burden of service could fall disproportionately on disadvantaged young people, as the draft did when it was the law of the land. And then there is the cost and the bureaucracy required to administer such a large national program. In addition, some fear broad mandatory service could hurt military requirements. Each of these is a valid concern, but 10 European nations already require military service by men, and several encourage women to serve, with others moving toward conscription for women. Nations elsewhere in the world require non-military service, and Great Britain and France are both working on similar programs for teenagers.
In other words, we are a bit late to this party.
Like many other Americans, I fear for the future of our nation and believe to my core that we must find common ground, work for common goals, and see each other for what we are, Americans. This matters less for older Americans, but it matters enormously for our young people.
If we cannot, or if we do not, I fear that poet W. E. Yeats will be right—-that “the centre cannot hold.”