The North Carolina Supreme Court declined to review a Black man’s claims of jury discrimination, even though the prosecutor admitted at a 2023 hearing that he considered race in dismissing Black potential jurors. 

All five Republican justices agreed to deny Frank Chambers’ petition; Democratic justices Allison Riggs and Anita Earls dissented. 

Chambers, 64, is on death row. In 1994, a jury convicted him and two other Black men of the murder of a white elderly couple in Rowan County. Chambers claimed racism affected every aspect of his case, including jury selection. 

At the trial, Chambers’ attorneys challenged prosecutors’ dismissal of Black people from the jury pool based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, which concluded that prosecutors could not dismiss potential jurors based on race. 

It was not until years after Chambers’ conviction that his lawyers found evidence that prosecutors had illegally used race in jury selection. His attorney Gretchen Engel wrote in her petition to the state Supreme Court that prosecution notes identified potential Black jurors by race and gender, noted whether they opposed the death penalty, mentioned their hairstyles, and in one case, gave false information about alleged criminal activity at a historically Black university where the potential juror worked. 

Two Black people were dismissed from the pool because they didn’t know anything about the case, according to the petition, but they retained four white jurors who also said they didn’t know anything about the case. 

But the most significant evidence came from one of the prosecutors involved in the case: Bill Kenerly, who was Rowan County’s elected district attorney at the time. Kennerly testified during a week-long evidentiary hearing in May 2023, admitting that he did consider race in jury selection. He said he asked one Black woman whether she would face criticism from her friends if she recommended the death penalty.

Ultimately, Superior Court Judge Richard Doughton denied Chambers’ claims, prompting an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Engel said she considered Chambers’ case to be a slam dunk, considering both the prosecution notes and Kenerly’s admissions. 

But that wasn’t enough to warrant review from the state’s highest court. Last week’s decision raises more questions about whether state appellate courts will consider the merits of Batson claims going forward. 

State appellate courts have rarely overturned a criminal case based on Batson claims. The court first overturned a conviction based on a Batson claim in 2022, under a Democratic majority. 

But under the current 5-2 Republican majority, the court also denied a new trial in State v. Russell William Tucker in 2023. 

Engels said she plans to file a federal petition for habeas corpus. 

“It really feels like if you can’t win on this case, then who can ever win on Batson in North Carolina?” she said. 

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.

The fire chief recommended the sweet chili burger, and that was a solid call: heaping patty, topped with melted provolone and a thick slice of fried pineapple, all of it drizzled with a tangy red sauce. You have to reach the third page of the burger list at the RiverWatch Waterfront Bar & Grill to find this sucker, so I was glad for the guidance.

“That was probably one of the better feelings I’ve had in a long time, when RiverWatch opened back up,” said Chris Melton, chief of the Chimney Rock Volunteer Fire Department. The beloved restaurant held a soft reopening for locals on August 7, grilling burgers and frying up onion rings for the first time since Hurricane Helene wrecked the place last September. 

It marked something of a soft reopening for Chimney Rock, too—the first downtown restaurant to welcome back customers. “Everybody was together, just smiling and laughing, telling old jokes, telling stories, being able to talk about old times,” said Melton, who also serves as the assistant fire chief for neighboring Lake Lure. “Almost normal for a minute.”

Almost, because the view off the back deck of RiverWatch still includes piles of debris, a collapsed bridge, and a collection of heavy machinery. Almost, because most of the other businesses on Main Street are still closed or just plain gone, with rebuilding plans in limbo. Almost, because the Rocky Broad River, which used to be a tree-shaded, moss-dappled dose of mountain serenity, now flows through a blasted expanse of rock and sand, a constant reminder of last year’s catastrophe.

“That was 100 years of beauty we were looking at before,” said Kerry Ann White, referencing the century since the 1916 flood that also scoured and reshaped Chimney Rock, “and we took it for granted.”

White lives just across the river in a cottage built in the 1920s and set back high enough to escape Helene’s flooding. Several houses just across the street from hers were washed into the river. It took months to build a temporary bridge reconnecting her neighborhood to the rest of the world, allowing residents to return full-time.

She recalled idyllic scenes before the storm: tubing down the sleepy river under a canopy of shade, greeting neighbors on a “cocktail walk” down her street. “It’ll take another hundred years before it looks like that again,” she said. “I fell to my knees and bawled my eyes out the first time I came back and saw it like this.”

For White and so many others, grief and gratitude have intertwined in the months since Helene tore away much of the town and closed off what was left to the outside world. It’s only been a month since the town removed police barricades keeping nonresidents out, finally allowing a trickle of hardy tourists to see what’s become of the postcard scenery and cherished vacation spots. 

Chimney Rock State Park reopened to visitors on June 27, just after the Army Corps of Engineers got a temporary water treatment plant up and running, but the park is requiring reservations in order to keep traffic manageable as recovery work continues.

“Until then, we really kept people out because of the infrastructure,” said Melton. “We just weren’t ready. I feel like we still aren’t ready in some ways, but it’s good to see the roads being crazy with people again.”

Local Traffic Only 

The road through Chimney Rock is crazy, but in a different way than it was before. Pre-Helene, summer weekends were a tangle of minivans trying to back out of narrow parking spaces, motorcycles revving their way up the road to Bat Cave, and throngs of pedestrians navigating the patchwork sidewalks and grassy shoulders. 

Now, the crowds are thinner, construction fencing is the main obstacle to parking, and visitors can’t figure out if the newly installed, temporary road connecting Chimney Rock to Asheville is really open. 

“Can we ride that way?” asked a bearded gentleman on an orange Harley, peering at the “Closed—Local Traffic Only” signs marking where the old Main Street washed out and a new, sharply curving road has been installed atop a pile of rocks and gravel through the middle of the gorge. You can, I told him, but best to take it easy on the one-lane bridges. “Sounds fun!” he said before cranking the bike and pointing it west. 

He’s not wrong: The provisional road that engineers have plunked into the riverbed is a great drive. The boulder-strewn stretch of Hickory Nut Gorge between Chimney Rock and Bat Cave is an awesome, terrifying patch of scenery that includes wrecked houses still dangling above eroded cliffs and the remnants of landslides on both sides of the river.

But everyone is clearly figuring out the ethics and etiquette of inviting visitors back to a mountain oasis that is still very much a disaster area. I saw several people raise their phones to photograph some apocalyptic bit of destruction, only to hesitate and look around for affirmation that it was OK.

“It’s been a long, hard road for the town,” said Teresa Cauthren, who owns the Chimney Rock Inn with her husband, Glenn. “And it’s hard to come back to normal when you’re just not there yet.”

Like nearly every person I met in Chimney Rock, Teresa uses the word “magic” to describe the feeling of the place. She and her husband bought the inn after making a day trip to town in 2018, relocating from Florida to become the proprietors of a charming, old-school motel with cozy rooms and a porch filled with rocking chairs. 

By the grace of being on the far side of the road and a few feet uphill, the Chimney Rock Inn survived the storm. But across the road sit the ghostly shells of two other little inns now awaiting demolition after the storm eroded their foundations. The Cauthrens’ home along the river is a quiet ruin—still standing, but uninhabitable. They’ve been living in one of the motel cottages and haven’t decided whether to rebuild their house or accept a federal buyout that would require tearing it down and prohibit new development on the parcel. 

Teresa relishes the tighter sense of community since the storm, even as it coexists with lingering grief. “You work together, you cry together, you pray together,” she said. “I didn’t know that many people here before, and now we’re like family.” 

She’s also figuring out how to welcome guests looking for solace while she looks at her destroyed home directly across the street. “We put everything we had into this place,” she said. “And now we’ll have to do it again.”

The Lake Shall Rise Again—Eventually

Barely a mile down the road in Lake Lure, the sense of limbo is acute. Much of the idyllic lake that gives the town its name is currently an expanse of mud and fresh weeds, having been lowered more than 25 feet so that the Army Corps of Engineers can excavate the earth, rock, cars, trees, furniture, propane tanks, and other remnants of civilization that the storm washed downstream. 

Lake Lure’s town park has become a dump truck depot, with full rigs rattling their way down the narrow roads out of town 12 hours a day, seven days a week. As of mid-August, those trucks had carted more than a million tons of sediment and debris to a specialized landfill in Union County, South Carolina, nearly 70 miles away. 

“Whatever they’re doing, I just need them to get it done as fast as they possibly can,” said Mark Helms, who co-owns the Lake Lure Adventure Company with his wife, Genevieve. They sell fun on the water—boat rentals, wakeboarding lessons, guided fishing tours—which is difficult to do with no water. “Everything depends on the lake being open.”

Mark is wiry, fast-talking, full of energy. The first time I met him, a week after Helene, he was roving around in a doorless Jeep Wrangler, talking his way past police checkpoints and trying to help neighbors get back to their homes. His photo on the company website features him leaping, headlong, into Lake Lure. A year of idling the business has been tough on the family, both financially and mentally. 

“After the storm, I was ready to pack up and enroll the kids in soccer in Raleigh,” said Genevieve, standing at the kitchen counter of their home in a lakeside neighborhood. “But the kids said, ‘Hey, you chose to raise us here!’ They just wanted life to continue.” 

They’ve been trying to make it work, picking up odd jobs where they can. Mark hauled a boat to Florida for a client, while Genevieve has been checking on property for absent homeowners as they anxiously wait for the lake to return.

With no firm reopening date, vacation homes sit empty, and boats sit precariously on their lifts, dangling above cliffs of dried mud. The cove next to the Helms’ house is dry, with damaged kayaks still wedged into the lake bottom around a marooned dock. 

Mark has heard that the lake might start to refill in October, if the Army Corps maintains its pace. Officially, the town is more circumspect. “The lake restoration is a dynamic process,” reads an August update. “The Town of Lake Lure remains hopeful that we will be able to reopen the lake in 2026.”

Mark drove to a more elevated spot along the shore, offering a sweeping view of a waterless Town Cove and the fleet of excavators working the muddy bottom. “If we can get next summer—all of next summer—we can make it. But it better not rain on Memorial Day weekend,” he said with a laugh. “We need to have a very, very good season.

“For now, I’m just going to hang on and spend everything I’ve ever saved,” he continued. “And then we’ll have to start over and be happy about it.”

He pointed to the heaps of sediment in the lakebed. He recently learned that his 14-year-old son, Brody, had been sneaking out at dusk and riding his electric minibike through the muck, a practice very much discouraged by the federal agency currently in charge of the lake. 

Mark grinned, though he said he discouraged his son from continuing. “Even when it’s a disaster, they love this place.”

Magical Thinking

By Sunday afternoon, visitors were back at RiverWatch in force. The wait for an outside table had grown to an hour, and people were happy to hang around. 

“We had to come up for the reopening!” said Dawn Collins of Statesville, who arrived on the back of her husband Bryan’s Electra Glide Ultra Classic, a Harley touring bike. “RiverWatch is his favorite restaurant.” 

Bryan sang the praises of the veggie burger, which forced me to adjust my biker stereotypes. “They still do the original black bean burger,” he explained. “There used to be this place up in Mount Airy that had a better one, but then they switched to the Impossible Burger, which is garbage!” 

I asked Dawn what it felt like to be back in Chimney Rock for the first time since the storm. “It gives you goosebumps to see it like this,” she said. 

General manager Shelly McCormack hustled between tables, greeting locals by name and thanking families who’d made the drive. Couples sat along the edge of the back deck drinking Coronas. Small children begged parents for phones and iPads. Like the fire chief said, almost normal for a minute.

“We knew from the start we wanted to come back,” said McCormack, whose family owns RiverWatch, the coffee shop next door, and a still-wrecked novelty gem mine. “It’ll take years, but this place is going to be something special again.”

In the 11 months since Helene, there has been plenty of debate about the wisdom of coming back, of rebuilding on mountainsides and rivers that will inevitably collapse and flood again–whether that’s next year or next century. Much of the national coverage has been skeptical of plans to repair riverside homes and businesses, often accompanied by somber warnings of climate risks. 

In a PBS Frontline special in May, national correspondent Laura Sullivan warned about “an endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding” in storm-hit areas. In a July New Yorker feature, John Seabrook cited Helene’s impact and touted a new Vermont law that severely restricts private development along riverbanks. “Healthy rivers with free meander patterns” require communities to step back from the water’s edge, he wrote. 

There’s no way to drive the temporary road through Hickory Nut Gorge without marveling at the wildness and rawness of the place, without contemplating forces that have carved and recarved that gorgeous valley and will keep right on doing it, no matter what we build.

But for the people who love these mountains, residents and visitors alike, the policy debates and cost-benefit analyses can seem a little bloodless and detached. Chimney Rock is still a spectacularly beautiful place. People drive for hours and put their name on a waiting list to eat a chili burger beneath the high granite walls of Chimney Rock State Park; they visit for a day and decide to spend their life savings on a cute motel. They stack rocks and carve logs into gonzo shrines along the riverbank, because humans have always done that sort of thing.

“The people who are here to stay now, they’ve really got their heart in it,” said Josh Kerr, a woodcarver and chainsaw artist who works out of a shop along the river. “It’s not an easy decision now; you’ve really got to choose it.”

And plenty of people will. “It’s physically less beautiful right now but spiritually more beautiful,” said White, looking out from the porch of her century-old cottage. “There’s a deeper connection, a different level of grace.” 

And if the scale of the recovery gets to be too much, she said, “Just look up.” 

The view, as ever, is magical.

Jesse Barber contributed reporting.

Irving Allen walked through the growing crowd at Dame’s Chicken and Waffles earlier this month, shaking hands, dabbing up supporters, and smiling at those who walked through the doors. Friends, family members, and various elected officials had gathered at the restaurant after hours for Allen’s Greensboro City Council campaign launch event. At 38, Allen is almost a decade older than he was the last time he ran for council in 2017. Since then, he said he’s learned a lot.

A seasoned organizer whose family has deep ties to civil rights in Greensboro, Allen has used his experience over the years to launch a bid for an at-large council seat this year. The race is stacked—10 candidates, including Allen, all vying for the three at-large seats on the nine-member council. Two current at-large members—Hugh Holston and Jamilla Pinder— are running for re-election. The third, Marikay Abuzuaiter, is running for mayor.

There are a lot of contenders—some incumbents, some well-known and well-funded names running for the first time. But Allen told The Thread he thinks he has a shot.

When he ran for council in 2017, Allen was an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement. President Donald Trump was less than a year into his first term. Allen and others saw the need for a grassroots, Black-led movement to combat police brutality, but also to address issues such as housing and food insecurity. Now, as the country faces a second Trump presidency, Allen said that the need is still there.

“Fresh off the heels of that first movement, that put the wind at my back to run because I saw what we were able to organize and accomplish,” Allen said. “I feel like we’re living in a similar time. It feels like we’re reliving a déjà vu period of the Trump administration coming in, us losing rights, debating the Voting Rights Act, the heightened sense of aggression and division.”

Even before getting involved with Black Lives Matter, Allen had an activist sensibility. His uncle, David Richmond, was one of the N.C. A&T Four, who helped launch the sit-in movement. Allen’s father, Steve Allen, is a longtime civil rights attorney.

Civil rights and community organizing are at the core of Allen’s campaign.

“All we have is the person standing next to you, your neighbor living next to you, the folks in your community,” Allen told the crowd at the launch event. “That’s all we have at this moment. But guess what? That’s enough. That’s enough. That’s all we need right now is each other.”

In the past, Allen has worked with city officials to build programs like Thrive GSO, which works with formerly incarcerated people to reintegrate into society through job training. He also helped form the city’s first criminal justice advisory commission, which monitors and reviews police practices.

Last year, he and other Black candidates made a bid for Ashton Clemmons’ North Carolina House District 57 seat, which was eventually filled by Rep. Tracy Clark. There’s still more to do, he said. 

“We want to build power for the community and do the things that we worked on over the last 13 years,” he said. “Which is to move the city to be more equitable.”

Allen pointed to issues like affordable housing and investing in the younger population to avoid brain drain. The city also needs to invest in youth programming to curb community violence, he said.

All of that is possible this year, Allen said, because of the huge shift facing city council.

With every city council seat up for grabs, Allen said this year’s election has the potential to change the direction of the city for years to come. He points to other activists he’s worked with who are running on similar platforms to his. In District 1, he talked about his connections to incumbent Sharon Hightower and candidate Crystal Black. In District 2, he pointed to Cecile Crawford and Monica Walker, both seasoned organizers. In District 3, longtime friend and collaborator April Parker is running. In the at-large race, Allen mentioned incumbent Jamilla Pinder.

Many of Allen’s collaborators and mentors, including Parker, attended the launch event. Political organizer Nicole Quick, Sen. Gladys Robinson, former state representative Marcus Brandon, and County Commissioner Frankie Jones also came out. Brandon, who served from 2011-15, said he’s excited by Allen.

“I’ve been in politics a long time,” Brandon said. “I know when change is in the air. The incumbents should be very scared. The city is way past a new direction, and I support young people doing that.”

When asked why he decided to run for at-large rather than in his district, District 2, Allen said it’s because the issues most important to him and the city aren’t just “east side issues or south side issues.”

“These are main concerns that everyone cares about,” Allen said. “Everybody speaks about equity when they come to the table. Everyone is concerned about violence and the work that we’ve done to combat that. Everyone is concerned about public safety and wants us to lean into community policing. So all of these are issues that are at the core of the entire city.”

Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.

More by this author.

This story is republished from our partners at NOTUS.

The people of Key West, Florida, are living with flood maps based on studies that are more than 30 years old. So, too, are some of the people in the rural counties of Latimer and Pushmataha, Oklahoma. East Carroll Parish, Louisiana. Chautauqua, New York.

In Buncombe, Yancey, Avery, and Burke counties in western North Carolina, where flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene devastated communities, the most recent maps date back to anywhere from 2007-2010.

Many of the maps that dictate the country’s flood zones—and decide who has to buy flood insurance—are significantly outdated. Efforts to change them, however, keep hitting a roadblock: the people who live there.

The nation’s deadliest floods put the crisis in clearer focus: In the Texas Hill Country, certain buildings on the grounds of Camp Mystic, where young campers died in the July floods, had received amendments to be excluded from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s updated maps.

There are buildings, neighborhoods and entire cities just like Camp Mystic throughout the United States. Local governments, like that of Key West, Florida, with the aid of private engineering firms and lawyers, have fought hard against updates to maps that show more of their residents living in high-risk zones, or that will make it harder to build and turn over real estate.

“The common response is: ‘Why are you putting a flood plain on me? I don’t want you to put a flood plain on me,’” said Glenn Heistand, a University of Illinois water resources engineer who leads FEMA flood mapping updates for the state of Illinois.

Flood maps don’t only warn communities about their risks. They come with a “regulatory burden,” he said. “It may devalue their home, it may make it harder for them to sell, it may cause them to have to purchase flood insurance.”

FEMA, increasingly under-resourced, hasn’t always been able to adjudicate these conflicts in a timely manner. The Trump administration has acknowledged the problem, while also cutting about a quarter of the agency’s staff. FEMA’s flood mapping processes and the National Flood Insurance Program are “a priority area for review,” the agency told NOTUS.

The stakes are high for the more than 22,600 communities that have opted into the federal flood maps program. Updated maps give residents a better understanding of the danger they face—and require communities to set building codes based on flood risks. They can also create perverse incentives, and ill will can grow quickly.

“The maps themselves are inherently political, whether you want to admit it or not,” said Karl Bursa, the public works manager for Lake County, Florida, and former floodplain manager for Monroe County, Florida, which governs the Florida Keys.

Without accurate maps, Americans are left to contend with the harsh realities of a changing climate, chronically under-insured and without adequate information about the risks they face.

Insurance Costs

Congress requires that the federal government review the national flood maps every five years. But the government can rarely stick to that schedule.

FEMA has always been notoriously slow, and it is now facing staffing cuts and existential uncertainty under the Trump administration. And when the agency does change a map, communities will frequently appeal the update.

Participation in the flood mapping and in the National Flood Insurance Program is voluntary, and participants have the right to review and appeal FEMA’s decisions.

In return, communities must certify the final maps and follow federal regulations about what can be built inside the floodplain. If they don’t certify the new maps, they lose access to the nation’s subsidized flood insurance program.

The taxpayer-subsidized National Flood Insurance Program is currently covering more than 4.7 million insurance policies across the country—and the rates are set based on FEMA’s mapping. Researchers estimate that among those living in areas at risk for flooding, 88% are underinsured, both within and outside of FEMA’s mapped zones, according to an August paper published in Nature Climate Change.

“There are unfortunately events that occur when maps are in the process of being adopted, where if those maps had been adopted, damage might have been avoided,” said David Maurstad, who was the senior career official in charge of the National Flood Insurance Program before he left FEMA in July 2024. “But again, it’s more of a system issue than a FEMA issue that the maps can’t get adopted. Individuals are going to look out for their best interests, and some individuals think their best interest is these maps not being put in place.”

“The flood mapping process is a collaborative effort between FEMA, states, and communities. While FEMA is required to review flood maps every five years, updates are not mandated on that same schedule. Instead, FEMA works with state and local partners in each region to identify areas that need updates, prioritize resources, and incorporate community input. Local knowledge, areas of concern, and relevant data sources are integrated into mapping studies to ensure maps are accurate and useful,” the agency said in response to questions from NOTUS.

Flood insurance prices have been rising dramatically since FEMA began a restructuring of the NFIP in 2021 to make the cost of insurance more accurately reflect risks. The program had drawn repeated censure from the Government Accountability Office for its fiscal irresponsibility. The riskiest areas, like coastal zones in Louisiana and Florida, saw some of the steepest increases in price as a result of the reform, and in many high-risk areas, premiums have more than doubled since 2020.

And local governments dealing with economic uncertainty, housing shortages and trying to revitalize their cities don’t want to face additional burdens to develop.

“I believe in having good floodplain policy, the rationale for it makes sense, it’s a public safety issue. But the burden of making sure it’s accurate should fall on the people charged with implementing the program. It’s their obligation to make sure it’s right, and I don’t see a culture of ensuring it’s right,” Mequon, Wisconsin, Mayor Andrew Nerbun said.

Nerbun says the city’s new flood maps—which went into effect in 2024—dramatically overestimate the risks and are based on outdated data.

The new flood maps required residents who’ve been living in the city for decades to buy flood insurance for the first time. Milwaukee has been battling record flooding this summer, but Mequon has mostly been spared the devastation facing its neighboring city.

Even though the appeal period for Mequon ended last year, the city hired a private engineering firm to help it conduct a study to file a formal request for the map to change. Nerbun said that the new maps don’t incorporate data from a U.S. Geological Survey water gauge, which he said paints a lower flood risk picture than the one on the current maps.

“The process is rigged,” Nerbun said. “We’re a small community, relatively, 25,000 people. We don’t have certified floodplain modeling experts on our staff, and we were not in a good position to challenge at that time.”

Nerbun said that he believes FEMA doesn’t want to admit a mistake and wants more homeowners to pay for flood insurance to prop up the struggling finances of the NFIP.

“No one wants to dig up old skeletons on what may have been done incorrectly,” he said. “There’s a vested interest in this, because then they can charge more insurance,” he added later.

In neighboring Illinois, frustrations with FEMA’s mapping process are rooted in a desire to redevelop South Beloit. The city’s government believes that FEMA’s proposed map changes are dramatizing the flood risks, and they are pushing hard to get changes made before the maps are actually completed.

“The city has been fighting for five or six years to get this hotel torn down. We finally get it torn down, and we have at least one developer who has expressed an interest. And now nobody wants to lift a finger until we can get some sort of clarity from FEMA,” City Council member Courtney Prentice told NOTUS.

“We don’t have political clout. We don’t have lobbyists. We’re a small town.”

The Appeals Process

The National Weather Service issued more than 1,400 flash flood warnings in July, the second-highest total in 40 years, according to an analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Outdated maps mean taxpayer dollars are funding increasingly frequent and expensive flood recovery efforts for communities that weren’t prepared for increasingly devastating flooding.

“Clearly the things that we have been doing aren’t getting the job done,” Maurstad said. “It’s not as simple as just making the maps newer or spending more money on maps. This situation that we have now, in my view, is not having the outcomes that the country is looking for.”

Resistance to new maps is especially common in wealthier communities with greater resources, according to research from Sarah Pralle, a political science professor at Syracuse University who specializes in the politics of flood mapping.

Pralle’s research has found the appeals process usually results in buildings being removed from flood zones after FEMA releases preliminary maps, and that communities often seek the smallest flood zones possible because they are worried about insurance costs and the way that floodplains affect future development.

In 2019, FEMA tried to thoroughly update its flood mapping for the Florida Keys.

There’s little question that flood risks have changed in Key West. Between 1980 and 2015, the island recorded only three years with low-level flooding occurring in multiple months of the year. But between 2015 and 2023, with one exception, Key West has experienced low-level flooding in many months of every single year, according to data from the Key West office of the National Weather Service.

A FEMA analysis using 21st-century technology and modeling found that more than 2,000 existing buildings in the city of Key West alone were at risk of serious flooding—buildings not marked with any risk on the existing maps.

The maps declared that much of the old town center of Key West, long considered immune from flood risks, needed flood insurance.

The Monroe County government immediately protested the changes, submitting a robust formal appeal to FEMA in 2021 that prevented the new proposed maps from going into effect. The appeal from Monroe County asked to remove almost all of the city center of Key West from the areas required to buy flood insurance.

Since 2021, the county has not received an update on its mapping appeal. Until FEMA does address the appeal, which was conducted by a large international engineering and modeling firm that said it had access to newer and better data than FEMA, the people of the Florida Keys are allowed to go on living and building and buying like it’s 1997.

“The County communicates regularly with staff at FEMA and the State of Florida Division of Emergency Management’s Office of Floodplain Management to request updates on the timing,” said Emily Schemper, the growth management director for Monroe County, Florida. “At this time the County has not been provided an estimated timeframe,” she said.

“Staff continues to assist property owners, as much as possible, to plan ahead for the final maps in their permitting decisions and design of construction projects.”

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about the status of Monroe County’s maps.

In Limbo

Mapping technology has radically changed since the first FEMA flood maps were created in the 1970s and 1980s. So has the physical landscape.

“Our understanding of the world, our understanding of science and how things are impacted, it’s a completely different animal now,” Bursa said.

He pointed to Florida specifically.

“We’ve been building like mad here. The developed environment compared to when they did the original mapping; it’s night and day. You’ve got areas that were completely wild, absolutely nobody lived there, and now all of a sudden you may have four or five different subdivisions within a 200-yard radius. That changes the character of the land, and it changes the character of the flooding.”

Keeping up with these aggressive changes requires significant reform to what the maps reflect and how they are used, not just better, faster-made ones, floodplain experts said.

For about six years, beginning under the first Trump administration, FEMA was seriously exploring new or alternative ways to communicate risks and hazards so that people could actually understand them. Until Trump took office a second time.

Almost immediately, the Trump administration axed the independent group that has been pushing FEMA toward more significant changes—the Technical Mapping Advisory Council.

FEMA has since lost experts on flood mapping. Delays and cuts in contracting have slowed private sector and university work on mapping. And it’s not clear what FEMA has done with the Future of Flood Risk Data initiative, which most experts see as the leading effort to transform how flooding risks are communicated to the American public.

“If we want a resilient nation, having good, accessible, granular risk information is a critical path; we cannot get there without it,” said Victoria Salinas, who served as the deputy administrator for resilience at FEMA under the Biden administration. “That’s one of the key functions that’s been under attack both at FEMA and broadly, changes to the organizational structure to diminish and bury that work.”

Meanwhile, local governments are in limbo.

“We feel like an ant climbing a mountain,” said Prentice, the South Beloit city council member. “We’ve been grasping at straws to try to get people to listen.”

Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS. 

This story is republished from our partners at INDY.

Commissioned by a group of vacationing Texans hoping to break several Guinness World Records, the $8,887 Bloody Mary served at a Holly Springs restaurant on August 9 looked like the kind of caricature of American intemperance that might appear in an animated movie about marine life, maybe during a scene in which the hermit crab protagonist slips into a dockside tavern to discover surf and turf isn’t the epic wave-riding competition he’d imagined. 

The base for the drink is a clear rectangular vat filled with ice, with an inverted pyramid hollowed out in the center and filled with five gallons of Bloody Mary mix. 

The price tag, and the wow factor, come from what’s piled on top—a shipwreck of prickly crab legs, whole red snappers, shellfish, exotic proteins, and enough red meat to recreate Lady Gaga’s iconic VMA dress. Shrimp, frog legs, alligator bites, calamari, and scallops jut out on skewers. Elk cheeseburgers crowd for space with onion rings, crab rangoon, chicken wings, and grilled cheeses. Tomahawk bison steaks are wedged into any remaining crevices, charred rib bones arching skyward. Nearly 100 oysters topped with chunks of lobster and salmon roe balance precariously around the edge of the vat alongside open tins of beluga caviar.

All hands are on deck at the restaurant, The Blind Pelican (at least he was spared the sight), the morning of the attempt. Showtime is 11 a.m. As staff start to wheel the behemoth out of the kitchen, someone screams and points at a steel hotel pan left on the counter. In it, three open tins of caviar are perched atop a mound of ice. 

Someone waves him off. “Those are backups! Keep it moving!”

They’ve almost made it through the double doors when another minor emergency strikes—the wheels are locked. Someone drops to the floor, does some jostling, and the procession continues.

When the convoy finally clears the threshold, the dining room erupts. The customers, 34 travelers from Longview, Texas, are gathered around one giant central table, wearing matching T-shirts that say “Don’t Mess With Texas” on the back and inexplicably bearing the Buc-ee’s logo on the front.

This isn’t the group’s first pilgrimage to The Blind Pelican. The mission all started a year ago when the same group made the trek for Alexis Walters’ 40th birthday trip and ordered a giant Bloody Mary, a menu item the restaurant is famous for.

“We base our vacations on where we’re eating,” Walters explains.

During that trip, the group set The Blind Pelican’s in-house record for biggest Bloody Mary with a $2,600 order. But soon after, another group of people broke that record with a slightly more expensive one.

One member of the Texas bunch compared the situation to being outbid by one dollar on The Price is Right.

Unwilling to accept defeat, the group decided to return to Holly Springs to reclaim their title. And while they were at it, they figured, why not try to set three world records: the most expensive Bloody Mary ever purchased at a restaurant, the largest garnish to ever top a Bloody Mary, and the most people ever served by a single Bloody Mary in one sitting.

“You can put this in print: we wanted to put our foot in their ass,” says Paul Walters, Alexis’s husband. “That way, next time somebody wants to step up, they just have to pull us out.”

Months of planning went into the event, both on the part of the restaurant and the customers. The Blind Pelican had a custom vessel made and collaborated with the Texans to develop the ingredient list. The Texans took charge of the world record process, hiring local private investigator Ruth Cruz-Nichols and her assistant, Yajaira Tellez, to serve as adjudicators. They’d need to document everything meticulously to submit to Guinness.

As soon as the Bloody Mary makes its entrance, Cruz-Nichols and Tellez, dressed in white collared shirts and black blazers, start running around with handheld camcorders, recording from every angle, racing to document the scale of the creation before the eating begins. Then Cruz-Nichols pulls out a yellow measuring tape, and Tellez starts getting bystanders to sign witness sheets, attesting to the authenticity of the spectacle.

Within minutes, the Texans are circling the vat. Servers walk around with trays of oysters Rockefeller, handing out ramekins of melted butter. Bloody Mary pitchers are placed at regular intervals down the table.

“They’re starting to devour it,” Cameron Chowanski, a friend of the Walters, narrates giddily. Chowanski is walking around with a tin of beluga caviar, handing out spoonfuls to friends and strangers alike. “None of us have ever had it before,” he says. “It’s like seafood butter.”

The Texans aren’t the first to make The Blind Pelican a destination. On the wall of the restaurant, there’s a map studded with pins marking the hometowns of visitors who’ve made the journey for elaborate Bloody Marys.

Nikki and Andrew Stafford opened The Blind Pelican in 2019. They’d had big plans for a build-your-own Bloody Mary bar, but then COVID hit.

“There were so many rules and regulations—we couldn’t have everybody touching stuff,” says Nikki, who is celebrating her twenty-second wedding anniversary with Andrew the day of the world record attempt. “So our bartender, Josh, had an idea to build an elaborate Bloody Mary and put a lobster tail on it. That weekend, we sold out. It’s just become a sensation.”

Across the restaurant, a group of locals are standing up to shake Paul Walters’s hand.

They’ve been here since 8:30 a.m., camped out, waiting for leftovers, and it’s paid off: They just received plates of food.

“We called ahead, earlier in the week,” says Curtis Gladney, who learned the record attempt would be happening from a Facebook post. “The restaurant said, ‘there’s gonna be so much food, there’s no way they’re gonna be able to eat it all, I’m pretty confident they’re going to be sharing.’”

Indeed, just about everyone in the restaurant gets in on the fun. Even the adjudicators fix themselves plates. While they’re chowing down on whole Maine lobster and filet mignon, Paul stops by their table and hands Cruz-Nichols the receipt. She places it carefully in a folder and tucks the folder under her plate.

“Proprietary information,” she says, with a wink.

The Guinness World Record verification process should be complete within 12 weeks.

Lena Geller is a staff writer at INDYWeek.

In the South, the word “barbecue” conjures up images of smoked pork or beef that falls off the bone, savory racks of ribs and sauce with a vinegary or tomato-y tang. But in many east Asian cultures, BBQ means something wholly different.

In Japanese and Korean cultures, barbecue means small cuts of meat—usually beef or pork, sometimes chicken—often marinated for hours in a sweet or spicy soy sauce, cooked on a small grill. Like American cookouts, the act of grilling the meat can be communal. Family and friends gather, taking turns flipping slices of kalbi or pork belly, careful not to get the smoke in their eyes.

The first time I had proper yakiniku—“grilled meat” in Japanese—was two decades ago on a summer visit to Japan. My mom’s side of the family settled on a popular chain where my cousin was working at the time. We scooched into booths, circled around a single grill set into the table, and got to work rattling off the cuts of meat we wanted from the menu.

Short ribs soaked in soy sauce, aged strips of skirt steak, slices of beef so thin they would cook in just seconds. Then there were the sides. Packets of chopped veggies, like enoki, shiitake, king oyster mushrooms, zucchini, and onion rounded out the meal. Glasses of beer clinked as the adults chuckled and took turns manning the grill. It was a feast, a gathering, a proper barbecue.

In recent years, similar Asian BBQ joints have become more common in the U.S. Korean versions, often offering all-you-can-eat (AYCE) options, served with banchan, or sides consisting of pickled veggies and the popular cheese corn. My favorite of these recent offerings is Gyukaku, a Japanese BBQ chain. It has two locations in North Carolina, one right here in Greensboro.

When the spot first opened in the old Libby Hill location off North Battleground Avenue a few years ago, it only had an à la carte menu. That could get pricey pretty quickly. Asians love to eat. Maybe more than Americans. Our love language is food. Have you seen our buffets? In keeping with trends, Gyukaku expanded its menu, offering an all-you-can-eat option in the last year. It’s still pricey compared to other competitors, but truly a meat lover’s dream come true.

While other BBQ spots like K Pot and the newly opened The One in High Point also offer AYCE, my preference for Gyukaku lies in some specifics. First, many KBBQ (Korean BBQ) spots don’t offer much outside of meat. That, of course, makes it difficult to bring anyone who wants to try something different. But the thing that draws me to Gyukaku, and other JBBQ joints, has got to be the marinades. Many of the cuts are pre-flavored, their offerings sitting for hours in concoctions of soy sauce, mirin, garlic, and other spices. That means when you grill them and pop them in your mouth, they’re the perfect balance of umami and flavor. The meat melts in your mouth as the sauce slowly coats your tongue. Ecstasy and bliss. 

Recently, we took my mom to Gyukaku, the first time she’s been to a yakiniku place in North Carolina. She loved it. So much so that she contemplated going by herself—what we call “hitori yakiniku” or “solo grilled meat”—in her free time. And while any kind of BBQ—Southern or Asian—is perhaps best enjoyed in the company of others, there’s a certain intimacy of having a grill all to yourself, too.

Just be sure to eat your fill so you can say, onaka ippai—“my stomach is full!” by the end of it.

Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.

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This story is published in partnership with The Food Section.

Visit any ABC store in Fayetteville, and you’re bound to see bottles sporting Army insignia or prominently pro-military designs, such as Boundary Oak 82nd Airborne and Old Hillside Purple Heart Tribute. Mainstream brands target the armed forces, too: Evan Williams and Pendleton have special offerings that celebrate the military and veterans. 

As the Army celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, distilleries such as Green River and Brother Justus have released limited-edition bottles to commemorate the occasion.

Marketing to the military is a smart move in a region that is home to Fort Bragg and 90,000 veterans. Many themed brands are produced by veterans, and a significant number of them are associated with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, which has been headquartered at Bragg since 1952. 

While no organization tracks exactly how many of America’s more than 3,000 craft distilleries are owned by veterans, across all small businesses the number is 5.5 percent. There’s no reason spirits should be any different.

But if you visit Fort Bragg’s liquor purveyors, called Class Six stores, you’ll find very few veteran-owned spirits on the shelf. This dearth has nothing to do with the merits of the products. And it’s not because soldiers, veterans, and their families don’t want to buy them. Instead, like many things related to the Army, it boils down to rules, hierarchy, and bureaucracy.

To many producers, it seems like a real missed opportunity.

Easter Eggs in the Field

Most military-themed spirits are whiskeys of some kind—usually bourbon, sometimes rye or a blend. Whiskey is often given as a gift for promotions or retirements, enjoyed with comrades at unit balls and other special events, and shared during moments of remembrance and mourning. 

For veteran-owned brands in particular, the liquid inside the bottle is almost beside the point: Often the package itself matters most.

These bottles are eye-catching, meant to attract attention with shiny metal labels, waxed tops, and a host of symbols and insignia. To a civilian, such imagery might have little meaning, but for those who have been in the ranks, it signals insider status.

That’s an attractive communication technique because the military limits which designs can be used for commercial purposes.

“Any Department of Defense trademarked word, image, or mark is not allowed to be licensed to an alcohol product,” explained Drew Kellerman, a retired infantry officer and co-founder, with several other veterans, of Heritage Distilling. The Washington-based company makes a lineup of whiskeys called Special Operations Salute and donates a portion of sales to nonprofits that support servicemembers, veterans, their families, and even K-9 units.

“We tried every which way” to get permission to use certain marks, Kellerman added. “We were getting two- and three-star generals to write letters on our behalf.” Kellerman’s company eventually learned that the Army had trademarked only a few marks, giving his brand a way around the legal obstacle. (The Marines, meanwhile, hold over 650 trademarks and contacted Kellerman specifically to tell him not to try using any.) 

Thus, Special Operations Salute’s packaging is replete with imagery that wouldn’t look out of place on a uniform—though for the inaugural Army Special Operations Edition, it’s not an exact match. That’s by design. The label has an intentionally incorrect reproduction of a Special Operations shoulder patch, depicting the familiar red arrowhead with a dagger overlaid with a master parachutist badge with a combat jump star (called a “mustard stain”) in the middle.

“That’s not how this is worn,” said Kellerman, explaining that a parachutist badge would never be located near, let alone atop, the shoulder patch. But thousands of Special Operations vets will be familiar with that unusual combination because it replicates a sign that once hung over the entrance to a training area at Fort Bragg.

“Apparently that sign doesn’t exist anymore; it was moved somewhere else,” Kellerman said. “But the advice we got was that they’d know exactly what that means. We got all kinds of comments, especially from some of the older veterans, saying, ‘Oh my gosh, did you guys get this off that sign? This brings back memories.’”

Horse Soldier, a whiskey brand founded in 2015 by former Green Berets who were the first troops deployed to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, also features quite a few Easter eggs on its package. That includes an embossed arrow and hatchet for the Army Rangers and Special Forces; a challenge coin; and the legend “Forged in Fire”—a nod to the whiskey’s custom bottle mold.

“We buried pieces of the World Trade Center steel across Afghanistan after certain battles” in homage to those lost on 9/11, co-founder Scott Neil explained. “That type of steel was also the kind needed for the bottle molds. So we struck a bargain: If I was to get you some steel, could I get a discount?” 

Once the manufacturer realized that Neil was serious—and who he was—the molds were made. Now, Neil says, “every bottle touches World Trade Center steel.”

Check Your Class Six 

Horse Soldier is one of the few independent brands that has netted space at Fort Bragg’s Class Six stores, the designated outlets where spirits can be sold. Most of the bottles that surround it are familiar, big-name products like Crown Royal, Tito’s, and Hennessy. There are also the large, bottom-shelf handles of industrial gin, blended whiskey, and other spirits sold under the “Military Special” label, which seems to have been around for the better part of a century. 

That’s because the process for getting listed on base requires resources and visibility that most smaller, startup companies lack.

Sales of spirits, and pretty much all other consumer goods, on Army bases are handled through the Army & Air Force Exchange Service, also known as AAFES. The organization has existed in some capacity since the late 1800s, evolving into its modern form during and after World Wars I and II. AAFES operates sites of all shapes and sizes, from sprawling grocery stores to “mobile exchanges” that are little more than trucks loaded with goods for troops in the field—a total of more than 4,300 facilities across dozens of countries.

The AAFES merchandising team chooses which spirits are stocked, using criteria such as “sales trends … category growth, and industry trends,” according to AAFES senior public affairs manager Chris Ward. He added that “because of space and investment limitations, the Exchange may not always select new and/or unproven products.”

For Horse Soldier, that meant early efforts to get picked up went nowhere. “We overthrew an entire country in less time than it took to get past the fortress of AAFES,” Neil said. 

The process to get listed was opaque: “There’s no portal, and at the time there was no ‘best of’ or ‘how to approach.’ … Sometimes you’ve got to know a guy or gal.”

The Horse Soldier team eventually met the right person in the form of a strategic partner: E. & J. Gallo, one of the largest privately held wine and spirits companies in the U.S., which already had a supplier agreement in place. After investing in Horse Soldier, Gallo worked with AAFES on the company’s behalf, Neil said, which “allowed us to get into the full breadth of the AAFES system.” Horse Soldier is now sold in 276 AAFES locations worldwide, and the sector made up 5.6 percent of its total sales in the 12 months ending in June 2025.

The process is much easier for companies like Jack Daniel’s, which offers an exclusive whiskey called Heroes Selection, a single-barrel rye chosen by employees who are also veterans. Senior manager of global travel retail Mike Soskin said that Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman, which supplies numerous other brands to AAFES, doesn’t have to take any extra steps to get such products listed.

“We just sell directly to the military retailers and ship to their distribution centers,” he said. But small companies have no such infrastructure. Kellerman said his “dream from the get-go” has been to gain AAFES placement for Heritage. “That’s the only way we can get any of our bottles overseas,” and into the hands of “our warriors that these [labels] are honoring and celebrating,” he said. 

But the problem is that Heritage Distilling does most of its sales through e-commerce, rather than the traditional—and much more resource-intensive—three-tier system that puts physical products onto store shelves. This system, which takes different forms in each individual state, separates suppliers like distilleries from retail buyers by mandating that a distributor or wholesaler serve as middleman. In so-called control states, like North Carolina, the state operates as the distributor and/or retailer. AAFES maintains a separate system, though it uses local sales trends to inform what gets stocked in Class Six stores.

“[AAFES] doesn’t want to bring in anything that doesn’t have demand, and their metric for demand is based on store shelves,” Kellerman explained. “We’re very slowly getting some of our Salute Series into the three-tier distribution system, but the e-commerce platform, which is doing great, has no meaning to them at all. So, we just keep running up against the wall.”

Far-reaching Potential

Brad and Jessica Halling are both veterans with longstanding, and outstanding, ties to Fort Bragg; Brad is a retired sergeant major in Special Operations Command who lost a leg in the Battle of Mogadishu—the clash depicted in the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down—while Jessica is a retired colonel who served as staff judge advocate for Joint Special Operations Command. 

The couple opened their distillery, BHAWK, in Southern Pines to stay close to the heart of the Sandhills military community. But while active-duty soldiers, veterans, military families, and civilians have embraced the company, they’ve had less luck with AAFES.

“We tried to get details right so we would actually be and believed to be ambassadors of the Fort Bragg community, of Moore County, and of North Carolina,” Jessica said.

BHAWK, the acronym for Brad Halling American Whiskey Ko., is still in its early stages, launching its first products in February 2024. It has managed to secure placement at Fort Bragg’s Class Six stores, though its proprietor declined to discuss details about the brand’s AAFES agreement or sales figures. 

The company’s Sergeant’s Valor bourbon and rye and Madame Colonel gin, vodka, and pistachio bourbon cream liqueur are often featured in prominent displays at Bragg, sometimes flanked by banners that explain the founders’ backgrounds and the distillery story. Now they’re hoping to expand their availability to other military installations. Camp Lejeune began offering BHAWK products just this month.

“It’s an expensive business, and your resources need to be consolidated in one place,” Jessica said. “We’re still very much a startup. Stretching too thin could be very dangerous for us.”

Getting wider AAFES distribution could be game-changing for BHAWK and other veteran-owned spirits companies. Neil of Horse Soldier points to AAFES’ international reach as especially valuable.

“Be ready for success once you’re in and behind the AAFES wall,” he said. 

Considering the challenges many former servicemembers face in the civilian work world, Neil believes AAFES leadership should get behind their small businesses. He wants customers to pour Horse Soldier, or other veteran-owned spirits—when toasting safe homecomings and swapping old stories.

Susannah Skiver Barton serves as spirits columnist for The Food Section and as a freelance critic and journalist. She lives in Fayetteville with her family and the state’s best whiskey collection. More at susannahskiverbarton.com.

When Gabriella Neyman received the email in her university inbox, she screamed. 

“‘We’re filming the third season of an Amazon Prime show typically filmed in Wilmington,’” she said it read. “And from that sentence alone, I knew what this show was.”

The 30-year-old media relations manager guessed correctly: The Summer I Turned Pretty wanted to film portions of its final season at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jenny Han, a UNC-CH alumna and the author of the original book trilogy, oversees the hit romance-drama series that chronicles a heated love triangle between two brothers and their childhood friend.

While the show is largely filmed in Wilmington, in the final season UNC-CH is transformed into Finch College, a fictional New England school. Some episodes capture the main characters strolling around campus (with many lucky students cast as extras), while others show them shopping on Franklin Street.

“I think that Carolina is one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. We were only a couple of hours away, so why not try? I was thrilled when the University said yes,” Han said in a university feature promoting the show. “I’m proud to show it off.”

Neyman, who was the UNC-CH point of contact on the production, said she had the task of explaining the show to many of her colleagues before the school signed off—including Chancellor Lee Roberts. “It was kind of comical explaining it to Chancellor Roberts,” she said. “He just was not familiar with it.”

Roberts’ main question, she said, was whether students watched the show. “And I was like, ‘Yes, 100 percent, this is something that I think a lot of young people in general watch,’” she recalled. “Once he realized how much excitement there would be around this, he was really on board.”

The show’s crew descended on campus for three days of filming in summer 2024. During the long 16-hour days, Neyman stood on the sidelines and watched the show come together. Parts of the show mirror Han’s own journey at UNC-CH. For example, the main character, Belly, stays in the Old East dorm, where Han lived as a student. At one point, Neyman said, Han snuck away from production to UNC Student Stores and signed book copies until she sold out.

“The process of Jenny being on campus was just very endearing, seeing her take her production team through all the locations and talking about how much campus has changed, yet how it has also stayed the same,” Neyman said. “There’s just such a strong connection between her experiences here and the books.”

While UNC-CH receives dozens of filming requests every year, Neyman said The Summer I Turned Pretty was the biggest production to come to the university since the 1990s, when Patch Adams, a Robin Williams movie, filmed on campus.

As a public university, UNC-CH does not receive any revenue from movie productions. But the campus has certainly reaped the benefits of association.

On social media, UNC-CH has made several posts with carefully curated shots that show where the characters appeared on campus. While most of the people in the comments are fighting about which brother should prevail, some wrote things like “literally my dream university” and “is this a valid reason to transfer out of UNC Charlotte?” 

Beyond anecdotal social media comments, Neyman said visitors have bombarded campus tour guides with questions about where certain parts of the show were filmed. 

“It is so great to see how many, especially young people, are commenting like, ‘My dream school,’ and asking us to admit them in five years,” she said. “I think a really young audience invested in our school, just based on the filming taking place here.”

While it’s hard to say how many young minds the show may sway, Neyman said the opportunity to show off the campus to viewers is an exciting prospect. For Neyman, who grew up just outside of Los Angeles and moved to Johnston County in middle school, her first exposure to campus came from a reference to “Carolina blue” and the women’s soccer team in She’s The Man, a popular 2006 Amanda Bynes movie.

“Pop culture and media can really shape how people perceive a lot, especially institutions,” Neyman said. “[The Summer I Turned Pretty] amplifies who we are—and our pretty campus scenes—to an audience that I think might not even be thinking about Carolina.”

Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.

Brenda the Drag Queen is hosting a “Big Gay Spelling Bee” at Greensboro’s Carolina Theatre this Sunday to benefit Triad Health Project. The Thread caught up with her this week to talk about her background, her charity work, and the hardest word she can spell.

For those who don’t know, tell us a bit about yourself.

So, I’m known as the Green Queen of Greensboro because I work with the Guilford Green Foundation and put on events with them throughout the year. We do a Bingo every other month, and those have a pretty high attendance and helps raise funds for the Guilford Green Foundation and the LGBTQ Center.

I’m also known as the live-singing, shade-slinging comedy monster of the Carolinas. I’m just north of seven feet tall in drag, and in 99 percent of cases, I sing live, which is a little different from other drag performers who lip sync. I also consider myself a comedy queen. I like to bring joy to people in what can sometimes feel like a dumpster fire of our reality. 

How long have you been doing drag, and how did you get into it?

It will be seven years in October since I started doing drag. I had been doing a Halloween queen situation. You know, Halloween is the birth of a lot of drag entertainers. Then I met my drag mother, Kitty Litter, who, when our paths crossed, saw something in me and encouraged me to do drag.

How did you come up with your name?

I’ve always gone as Brenda. I think it’s because everyone knows a Brenda, whether it’s a nurse or someone who works in HR. It’s just one of those funny names. It’s a classic, middle-aged white woman name.

Why a spelling bee?

I just think spelling bees are fun. They’re something that we don’t see that much anymore. And these days, drag is so saturated, everybody is doing something. So it’s a challenge for drag performers to do something a little different, something unique. I always wanted to do a spelling bee, and it’s big and gay because I’m big and gay. 

We’ve got five entertainers who will be performing and competing. I’m the MC and I’ll be performing to open up the show.

Tell us about partnering with the Triad Health Project.

When I’m not wearing a wig, and sometimes when I am, I work for the Triad Health Project. I’ve been there for over two years as the director of people, culture, and outreach. I oversee our development to help raise money to bring attention to the important work that we do.

THP has been around since 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Since then, it’s transformed into a much larger sexual health and justice organization. We provide free and confidential testing and go out into communities to share information about prevention. We also offer medical case managers for those living with HIV and have a day center for impacted folks, too. We run food pantries, too.

A lot of folks think we’ve moved on from that epidemic, but preventing the spread of HIV and other STIs is still important. And we’re seeing threats to funding from the national level, and we want to stay free and accessible for those who need support.

What is the hardest word you can spell?

I feel like it’s probably phlegm. But that’s not gonna be one of the words we use on Sunday night. We’re drag entertainers, not academics. I’m using words that have been used by the National Spelling Bee, but not at the national level. We’re trying to make it more approachable. We just want people to come prepared to have a good time and share in the joy of the event.

Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.

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When filing closed for Greensboro City Council seats last month, there were a few big names absent from the list of this year’s candidates. Among them was Eric Robert, the local businessman who publicly announced he would make a second run for mayor after a failed bid to have his businesses removed from downtown’s business improvement district (BID).

Robert argued he hasn’t seen benefits from the district, managed by Downtown Greensboro Incorporated (DGI), and that the extra taxes he pays as part of it aren’t justified. He also said the council conspired to reject his request before even considering it to prevent others from abandoning the district as well.

Robert is a frequent critic of DGI and councilman Zack Matheny, who also acts as its president and CEO. When the State Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into an unnamed city council member last month, Robert hoped what he calls Matheny’s unacknowledged conflicts would finally be addressed, something Robert has spoken out about for years. Matheny, who is now running for re-election to his District 3 council seat, said he welcomes any investigation into those allegations as he has nothing to hide.

Robert is also no fan of Council Member Marikay Abuzuaiter, now running for mayor. Among other criticisms, he points to an e-mail in which Abuzuaiter wrote, before his BID hearing took place, “If he [Robert] is allowed out, then several more will ask to be removed as well. So… the motion should be for the property to remain in the [municipal service district].”

Still, after claiming he would again run for mayor this year after a defeat in the 2022 primary, Robert ultimately decided against it. The Thread recently caught up with him to find out why.

“I was still weighing it up until Friday morning,” Robert said, citing the deadline for filing. “But the truth is that I’ve lost faith in the system, and honestly, in the people who should give a damn but don’t.”

During his failed 2022 campaign, Robert said he found support among those who felt disenfranchised and ignored by city government.

“I really believed I could make a difference,” Robert said. “I believed in the underdog… I believed in the Hollywood ending. And for a moment, I really thought this city might want to save itself.”

Since that race, Robert said, his perspective had changed.

“City Hall is broken and rotten,” Robert said. “Its culture is dishonest, hostile, and allergic to transparency and/or accountability. It’s a closed loop with no love or room for people like me, who speak plainly, sometimes too plainly.”

Robert, who was born in France, said his father used to tell him, “You can never be more royal than the king.” That phrase resonates with him, he said, in relation to city government.

“You can’t expect fairness, decency, or humility from elected officials who do not value those things themselves,” he said. “You can’t fight for the truth, for justice, or for what’s right when the king/queen is corrupt, self-serving, or indifferent…They’ll still rule.”

Though he was conflicted, he said, he ultimately decided to use his energy outside of elected politics.

“I want to work on things that matter, with and for people who care,” Robert said.

Robert said he’s been heartened by seeing some of the candidates who have filed, but this year he didn’t want to be among them.“Greensboro does deserve better,” he said. “But I just don’t think it wants it.”

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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