Bradley George/WUNC Radio A town in northwest North Carolina has won a $1.7 million federal grant to clean up a long-abandoned tannery. The Environmental Protection Agency announced the award to the town of North Wilkesboro Friday, one of 23 projects selected for brownfield cleanup in the southeast. The announcement comes...

Ryley Ober/Asheville Citizen Times A monthslong internal audit of the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office evidence rooms showed over 1,700 missing items and about 4,800 items stored under poor conditions in shipping containers. The issues have gone “unaddressed for decades” throughout multiple sheriff’s administrations, records reveal. In pursuit of accreditation through...

Lisa Sorg/Inside Climate News The North Carolina Division of Emergency Management last week fired a subcontractor that had been founded by top officials at ReBuild NC, the now discredited state agency that botched response efforts after hurricanes Matthew and Florence in 2016 and 2018. The company, PathBuilt, had been hired...

Ben Crosbie/WCHL Chapelboro At a work session on Tuesday, the Carrboro Town Council received a presentation of a draft for the Downtown Area Plan (DAP). The DAP is a priority project within the larger Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan, a wide-ranging plan outlining the town’s goals through 2042. Danny Wilson, an...

Hannah Vinueza McClellan/Education NC Since 2016, the N.C. Community College System (NCCCS) has been implementing a five-phased approach to modernize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for the state’s 58 community colleges and system office. An ERP system refers to the software colleges use that contains data on students, core financial...

Becky Johnson/The (Waynesville) Mountaineer A civil lawsuit involving Shining Rock Classical Academy charter school concluded Tuesday following five days of both tense and emotional testimony, but a verdict could be weeks away as the presiding judge sorts through the mountains of conflicting evidence and testimony. The lawsuit and countersuit center...

Jennifer Berry Hawes/ProPublica In their last phone call before bed, Janicke Glynn tries to reassure her husband. He is away visiting a sick relative, and a Weather Channel forecast of Hurricane Helene’s imminent collision with the North Carolina mountains is leaving him uneasy. The storm, more than 400 miles wide,...

Paige Gross/NC Newsline A footnote in a budget bill U.S. House Republicans are trying to pass before Memorial Day is the first major signal for how Congress may address artificial intelligence legislation, as they seek to create a moratorium on any AI laws at the state level for 10 years....

Will Hofmann/Asheville Citizen Times Estimates indicate eight major transportation corridor projects in Western North Carolina will cost $2.6 billion as the N.C. Department of Transportation seeks to repair roughly 90 miles of road catastrophically damaged by Tropical Storm Helene. The projects were presented during the May 12 Governor’s Recovery Office...

Gerard Albert III/Blue Ridge Public Radio Farmers in Western North Carolina are still hurting after Hurricane Helene. Between debris cleanup and lost crops, small farms throughout western North Carolina are on the hook for an average of $70,000, according to a study published this month. Most farmers had damage to...

Will Atwater/NC Health News People who have been struggling to clean up decades of industrial pollution in the lower Cape Fear River basin are expressing their dismay and anger at a federal delay announced Wednesday on a crackdown on so-called forever chemicals that have fouled their drinking water. That day,...

Liz Bell/EducationNC In the last 18 years, Wilkes County has lost 56 child care programs, 67% of its child care capacity. This year, thanks to a scrappy community effort, local leaders saved the county from losing another. Sharon Phillips and her daughter Katy Hinson, owners of PlayWorks Early Care and...

Max Tendler/WUNC Radio Some 148 acres of multi-use trails in Wake County’s most popular park close permanently June 1 to make way for an entertainment development from the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority. Trail users are devastated. “When I heard that they were closing, I was very upset, very sad,” said Tres...

Jane Winik Sartwell/Carolina Public Press  This summer, 5 million tourists will descend on 200 miles of remote North Carolina coastline. The Outer Banks are idyllic — and popular. But for both those visitors and the area’s 38,000 year-round residents, the vacation paradise has one serious problem: health care access. Dare...

Claire Cranford, Ana Despa & Ishita Vaid/The (Duke) Chronicle Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) sent a letter to President Vincent Price May 14 requesting Duke formally end its joint venture with Wuhan University — Duke Kunshan University. The Chronicle has reviewed several of the claims made...