Prayers, Pledges, Public Comments, and Cameras

Intro voiceover:

On August 3rd, this past Monday, I attended my very first County Commissioners’ Board meeting. It was very interesting!

This piece is long and I will record in sections so folks listening can also jump around if they wish to. I’ve shared a table of contents just below the Historic Courthouse photo.

I highly recommend that anyone living in Henderson County, NC check out the website for the County Board of Commissioners. You can watch past, archived meetings at this link and you can currently find the video from the most recent meeting at the “Live Streaming of Broadcast” link at the top of this page because it hasn’t been archived yet. Here is the agenda from Monday’s meeting.

At some point, I expect the video of Monday’s meeting will be located at the archived videos link and I’m really hoping it stays at this vimeo link, for simplicity.

Don’t just take my word for anything! Please watch the video of Monday’s meeting if you’d like to see exactly what was said and what happened. I’m going to focus in this piece on my impressions of what happened along with a summary of the things folks said or did that stood out to me. This is not intended to be a full accounting of the meeting, but rather to give a summary and a feel for how it went.

If any local folks feel more comfortable or confident attending in person or watching (either live or later) future meetings because they read this piece, I will be so happy!

The more often regular folks get involved with local government, the more say we have in how our community functions.

The next County Commissioners’ Board Meeting will be on Thursday, August 6th at 9:30am. It is a “special called meeting” to discuss a farmland preservation obligation bond referendum. Here is the agenda.

The meeting after is scheduled for Wednesday, August 19th at 9:30am and does not have an agenda yet.

Youth Opportunity Info voiceover:

(you may scroll down just past the historic courthouse image to skip this section and find the table of contents)

Before I write about the meeting, I want to encourage every interested reader who has (or IS) a teenager under the age of 18, to please look into the requirements for serving on the County’s Juvenile Crime Prevention Council. There are 26 appointed positions on that advisory board and some of them (including two chairs that are currently vacant) are reserved to be filled by residents under the age of 18.

As someone who’s quite passionate about prison abolition (or at least massive reforms of our “criminal justice system”), I also believe that under our current system, youths need to be sitting at the table where decisions are being made about themselves and their peers.

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that our County wants teenagers at the table; but I’ve been less pleased with the lack of quick and easy information I’ve managed to uncover about the duties and requirements of these positions, even as one commissioner said they are always looking for under-18s to serve on this advisory board.

Additionally, the monthly meeting is the fourth Thursday of every month at 8:30am, which strikes me as an inconvenient time for high schoolers who care about their academics.

I know the stereotype is that teenagers will do anything to skip school, but I have one child currently in public high school locally and they do not ever want to miss their classes for any reason. Their older sibling was the same way before graduating. They both have chosen to take challenging classes and might have been interested in this sort of opportunity, but… the timing of meetings is literally during school hours.

Those are my immediate thoughts as a parent who just learned about this and did a quick glance-through their website for more information.

Table of contents voiceover:

Monday, August 3rd 2026 — Hendersonville, NC Historic Main Street Courthouse; Henderson County Board of Commissioners’ Meeting

Table of Contents Summary: I’m beginning with an account of my arrival, hoping to demystify the process of attending these County Commissioner Meetings and make it more comfortable for more folks to attend in future. Then I’m doing a separate heading for each agenda item as found here.

Feel free to scroll past any sections that are not of interest, of course!

• My Arrival

• Invocation/Prayer

• Pledge of Allegiance to the US Flag

• Informal Public Comments

  • Carl Sandburg Home

  • Flock Cameras

  • Farmland Preservation

  • John Delk Road Paving/Safety Concerns

• Agenda Discussions

  • A: NCACC 2026-2027 Legislative Goals

  • B: General Obligation Bonds — Farmland Preservation

• Nominations and Appointments

• Very Brief Final Thoughts

My Arrival voiceover:

I arrived around 5:25pm and it was thankfully simple to get into the 5:30 meeting. I went up the main front Courthouse steps, and followed some other folks through the door. There was a closed sign on the door, but that sign is for the museum, I expect.

So, if you attend in future, just ignore that closed sign and walk right in!

If you have any bags, the officer inside the door will look through them to make sure you don’t have any weapons, and then you’ll follow his directions into the boardroom. There are stairs involved (plus the front stairs too) and I’m not sure if the room is accessible to folks with mobility issues. I forgot to look and see if they had elevators. If not, you can also watch future meetings live at the livestreaming link found here.

The room has a good amount of seating and I forgot to note how many folks were present in the audience, but I think it was around two to three dozen. I have no idea how many were watching online.

Invocation/Prayer voiceover:

On the Agenda, directly after “call to order/welcome” was an invocation or prayer. It’s always interesting to me when governmental agencies include prayer as part of their proceedings. I was raised by a parent who studied history, is a (no longer practicing) lawyer, and is also a Baptist pastor.

As you may imagine, I was taught very clearly from a young age that the separation of church and state is incredibly important. Not just for the state, but for the church. That perspective has evolved over the years and lost favor in the decades since 9/11, but it’s still a foundational belief for me.

The ACLU lists local legislative and board meetings as one exception where religious prayer is allowed as part of the official process. Here’s more from the ACLU:

Legislative invocations may not “denigrate non-believers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” and they must remain consistent with the purported purpose of such invocations—to solemnize and lend gravity to the occasion.

The prayer was Christian, of course, no surprise there. Ended in the name of Jesus Christ, asked for God to watch over the meeting, and didn’t violate any of the above requirements as far as I can remember.

However, even such a prayer may make it less comfortable for someone who is non-Christian to attend the Commissioners’ meetings. I think folks who are in a majority, especially a majority that is as mainstream as Christianity is, have a responsibility to truly consider the experiences of folks who are in minorities that are less mainstream or accepted in our society.

Whether thoughtless of diverse beliefs or purposeful to cause discomfort, the result is potentially the same: that fewer people may feel welcome to participate or attend.

Pledge of Allegiance voiceover:

As a Quaker, I am very uncomfortable with any pledge of allegiance as participating in pledges and oaths goes against my deeply held religious beliefs. But also, thankfully, I am legally protected from having to say them so I stood respectfully and listened to everyone else recite the pledge.

This was my first time being in a situation where I was expected to say the pledge in the 13 years since I became a regular attendee of Friends (Quaker) Meetings, so it was a huge relief to remember that I need not feel any pressure to participate.

Informal Public Comments voiceover — all topics included:

• Carl Sandburg Home

• Flock Cameras

• Farmland Preservation

• John Delk Road Paving/Safety Concerns

The first person who spoke was eloquent and allowed to go past her allotted time in order to finish her statements, for which I was thankful. I did not catch her name, but she spoke about the history of the Carl Sandburg Home and how the National Historic Site benefits our local community, in part by bringing folks from out of town or state to visit.

She brought with her a petition asking for commissioner action on some National Parks Service restoration funding, approved before Hurricane Helene hit our area.

In 2022, as many of us are already aware, the bridge leading up to the Carl Sandburg Home Historic Site failed. What had previously been a quick visit to the goats with my children became an hour-long hike around the lake before we could head up the hill.

That hike simply is not accessible to nearly as many folks and the speaker pointed out that non-locals coming out to Flat Rock specifically to visit the Carl Sandburg Home have also been confronted with these barriers to visiting, as well as witnessing the general state of disrepair the home has fallen into over the years.

She asked that the board of commissioners request accountability and for the funding to be restored so our tax dollars can be used as intended.

One of the board members responded, *after stating that usually the Commissioners do not respond immediately to public comments, that she will be heading to DC in September and is planning to discuss the issue then/there.

*NOTE: The only concern the Commissioners did not respond to immediately in the moment this evening was represented by the next two speakers. Whether intentional or not, whether the above statement about not usually responding immediately to comments was true or not… the difference was very noticeable.

This issue is the main reason I attended the meeting. Along with every other liberty-minded Henderson County resident, I am very concerned about the increasing number of surveillance cameras popping up all over the county.

The first person to speak about Flock cameras was Austin Rhodes. He asked that the Flock cameras be removed altogether. We are a small town and so much of our culture is based on trust in our neighbors. Surveilling innocent neighbors doesn’t bring much benefit (he had stats to back up this statement! Go watch the video starting around 13:38 to hear all of what he had to say) and it decreases our small town trust.

He asked directly why police need these cameras now. After all, LEOs used to solve crimes and catch criminals without them. Yet now, instead of our police force doing detective work and instead of the County using our tax dollars responsibly to invest in our own community and local law enforcement, we are sending money to out of town big tech companies. The very definition of fiscal irresponsibility.

Austin ended by asking the Commissioners to protect our God-given right to privacy and asked whether it’s 2026 or 1984.

Tiernan Turner spoke next on this topic, bringing up the fact that Flock cameras are part of an ai-powered mass surveillance system run by extremely wealthy venture capitalists. One such venture capitalist is billionaire Peter Thiel, whose data-mining company Palantir is explicitly named after the fictional objects in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. I was very happy to hear the Lord of the Rings reference and so forgot to take complete notes of this part. I again refer you to the video.

Last year Palantir was chosen by the Trump regime to compile data for the federal government on people in the United States. In the Lord of the Rings, a Palantir is a powerful magical scrying/spying device, the use of which doesn’t generally end well for the user.

Tiernan continued, speaking about how many police officers are being investigated or have lost their positions due to their abuses of the data from Flock camera systems. He talked about how this technology can be used to oppress the populace and restrict people’s first amendment rights as many folks have been targeted by law enforcement officers for attending protests or even attending gun shows — issues that should concern folks on nearly all sides of the political spectrum.

He ended by quoting Benjamin Franklin about those who would give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither and pointed out that freedom is much easier to lose than to protect. “How much are you willing to lose?”

A local 13-year old, his first name Bruce, stood and spoke next. He spoke about his history of being in and helping run various local sports and farming clubs. He comes from a farming family and entreated the Commissioners to think of the future for the sake of his generation. Losing farmland hurts the next generation of farmers and he knows many young people, like himself, who want to farm and would like to have opportunities that seem to be disappearing. Please support farmland preservation.

On behalf of everyone in the county who likes to eat food that comes from farmers, I wholeheartedly support this young man in his plea!

The Commissioners directed our young resident to a special called meeting that will occur on Thursday morning, August 6th, to specifically discuss a referendum for bonds to fund farmland preservation.

The next four folks who spoke live on the John Delk Road out between Edneyville and Dana. They were also concerned about a dangerous intersection where John Delk meets Sugarloaf Mountain Road, Gilliam Mountain Road, and Lamb Mountain Road.

John Delk Road looks to be over a mile long, has ~40 homes along the road, and it is unpaved.

Residents have been asking for this road to be paved since 1996 and there’s never been funding to get it paved, even as the many freeway construction projects have managed to find funding.

As the community and traffic volume (including school busses, directly affecting the lung health of the school-aged children who ride the busses) along John Delk Road has grown, so have residents’ concerns about the effect of all the dust on their health. A local apple farmer along the road has struggled to keep the apples clean and dust-free, negatively affecting at least one vital local business.

Three of the folks who spoke brought up the dangerous intersection, asking for a four-way stop or at the very least one of the “coming traffic” warning lights as we used to have at the intersection of North Allen Rd. and Dana Rd. before the three-way stop was added.

A Commissioner thanked everyone for bringing their concerns about the road and assured folks that the issue would get some attention in the next few weeks.

Most folks left at this point in the meeting and the Commissioners went on to the next part of the agenda. I noted that there was a lot of talking from the folks leaving the meeting and I wished I could hear it more clearly, but unfortunately I could not.

Agenda Discussions voiceover:

There were two discussion points on the agenda after the Commissioners approved the consent agenda, as found here. I will do my best to summarize my understanding of each discussion point.

NCACC stands for the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners. This association receives legislative goals every *two years from every participating county in the state of NC. The NCACC then takes the goals from each county and chooses the top 25 from the state and makes those their legislative goals. You can find the current goals at this link.

*The timing of the goals aligns with the state’s 2-year (biennium) budget.

So the Commissioners took a look at our county’s previous two years’ goals from 2024 and talked about any progress surrounding them. You can find this discussion at 35:15 in the video of the meeting. There were seven goals to begin with and we ended with five.

The things that stood out to me:

There has been progress with getting more NC produce into public schools, which was one of the more interesting (to me) legislative goals. One Commissioner mentioned (positively) that RFK Jr. has been going around to encourage local schools and prisons and other institutions to use more local produce.

Anyhow, I recommend watching the video if you’d like to know more about what goals our County Commissioners are planning to send to the state Commissioner organization.

This discussion begins at 50:55 in the video.

This topic is basically what will be discussed at the currently upcoming meeting on the morning of Thursday, August 6th. The commissioners discussed the ins and outs of what the process would be if they adopt a proposed general obligation farmland preservation bond referendum.

If adopted, the referendum would be on the ballot in November for all citizen residents of Henderson County to vote on. I took notes, but I’m only going to parse through them and summarize if it ends up being on the ballot.

Nominations and Appointments voiceover:

During this portion of the meeting, the commissioners looked through the openings on the various boards and committees that local folks can be appointed to serve on. Most vacancies were filled through a process of asking for nominations, one person being nominated, and then a unanimous agreement to appoint the person to the position.

There wasn’t a lot of discussion about candidates, but presumably those discussions have either been held and/or each commissioner has looked through the applications so they’d be familiar with the candidates.

The Juvenile Crime Prevention Council, beginning with 6 vacancies, was the most interesting part of this portion of the meeting to me. If you skipped my section at the beginning about the Youth Opportunity Info then you may want to go back and skim through it. But, in short, the County Commissioners are always looking for young people under the age of 18 to serve on this advisory board and these youth-specific positions tend to be difficult to fill.

The public portion of the meeting ended early (so I gathered from the responses) at 6:41pm.

Final Thoughts voiceover:

I’m glad I attended. I hope more people will attend in future.

The prayer followed by the pledge of allegiance was weird to me.

There were plenty of empty seats, it would be lovely to see them all filled!

Thank you for reading, thank you for caring!

~BarefootBetsy

No generative ai was used in the writing of this piece or any of my others. All human, all the time!

Please bring any factual corrections to my attention by emailing historychatshvl@gmail.com

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Anyhow, have a great evening, all my readers!