Morning Edition Host Helen Chickering and News Director Laura Lee talk about the top headlines from the BPR News Team:
- Weather: To snow or not to snow?
- NC-11 debate in Brasstown
- MLK Jr. celebration in Asheville
- Last night at commission
- A possible rise in homeowners' insurance rates
- Coming Up: Explanations of short-term rentals and city council
Join the BPR News team for the "News and Brews" gathering on Friday Jan. 26 from 8am to 10am at West End Bakery on Haywood Road. Share your thoughts on news. The first 50 people get a free cup of coffee in a BPR mug!
Transcript:
HC: Good morning. I'm Helen Chickering. Thanks for tuning in to BPR. This has been a busy week in news. Lots going on joining us to talk about all the headlines is BPR news director Laura Lee. Hey, Laura.
LL: Hi Helen.
HC: Alright, what was the biggest story this week in the BPR region?
LL: You know, it's hard to say the biggest story most weeks, but it's pretty easy to say the biggest story of this week because it's weather. Is it snowing? Isn't it snowing? Where is it snowing? Is it icy? Is it rainy? Were there some tiny little flurries people wanted? That's definitely been the top story for us this week, and you know this as well as anybody: it's hard to watch that all over a huge region.
HC: Yep. It is a challenge and it is a story that is going to keep going as we head into the weekend.
LL: I have a feeling we'll be talking about this again and again and again.
HC: Alight. Well, let's rewind all the way back to Saturday/ You and Lilly took a little trip out west. Tell us about that.
LL: Yes, Lilly Knoepp, our senior regional reporter and I went to Brasstown in Clay County for the NC-11 Congressional debate. Chuck Edwards who is the incumbent -and it's a primary debate, so it's against Christian Reagan the challenger there. We went out there with a couple of purposes: one was to report on it, obviously, but the other was to livestream because it is a couple of hours out there. So we wanted to make sure that people had access to it. We did the livestream while we were out there.
HC: What were the key takeaways?
LL: You know, it was largely a lot of agreement-which you don't necessarily see in a debate. Chuck Edwards and Christian Reagan share a lot of the same sentiments about big national issues. [There was] a lot of talk about big national issues.
I saw one commentator said, you know, this event could have been anywhere. It could have been Idaho.
I will say the thing that I thought was most interesting, as an observer, was the energy that there is another parts of the state. I mean, they were probably 150, we counted 150-ish, people there. That's a pretty good gathering in a community center on a Saturday for a political event. Lily Knoepp has a lot more in-depth detail on that. If you want to go to our website, she went through it with fine-toothed comb, and you can get all the details there.
HC: All right, and then we started the week with a holiday, right?
LL: We did. It seems like it was a long time ago. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was on Monday-not that long ago. And Laura Hackett, our Asheville Buncombe reporter, was out on the streets for that event in downtown Asheville with some great coverage there. [There was] some really nice sound from that event. If you didn't make it out for the speeches or didn't get a chance to see the march, it is at bpr.org. She's got it all there.
HC: A lot on our website. What other news stories were top of mind this week?
LL: One thing that is top of mind for me is our series called, "Last night at." So it's "Last night at Council. This week, it was "Last night Commission," and that's part of a new series that Laura Hackett is doing every week where she goes to the council meeting or the commission meeting, so if you can't make it there, and she tells you what happened this week. At the commission meeting, they had a measure about the law enforcement downtown initiative and the sheriff's department getting involved in that again. Also some surveillance methods that the sheriff is using down there.
It was interesting to me at that event -through the reporter's eyes -how there was no public comment. [It] seems like something you'd have a lot of public comment about, but the sheriff appeared, the Commissioners asked a few questions and the measure passed. So we're going to definitely stay tuned. There's a lot of details still to explore on that topic
Another top story for us this week was Felicia Sonmez's story on homeowner insurance rates.
There's a proposal for those rates to go up pretty substantially across the state. Western North Carolina is not the hardest hit with a rate hike but potentially Buncombe County- if the insurance companies get their way- it will be about a 20% hike. That's still to be determined. There's a public hearing about that. We're going to continue to follow and when that gets finalized, let everybody know what the rate change will be.
HC: Other than a snowball, we do not have a crystal ball, but [we] want to know what you see coming down the line next week.
LL: You're right. It's hard to make these kinds of guesses. What's gonna happen next week with the news? We're always just following what is happening, but two things that I'm excited about are some explanations that we have coming up for listeners and for readers about both short-term rentals. There's a lot of complicated things going on and a lot of different places with short-term rentals. Felicia's taking a look at that and hopefully we'll be able to explain all of that in detail to us. And then Laura Hackett is doing something similar on the City Council, and I don't know if you have this problem, but I often think "How many people are there? How many votes does it take?" Just the basics that we kind of take for granted. She's gonna do a little guide to that. So if you're starting to pay attention to what city council is doing, this will definitely be something you want to check out.
One more thing: next Friday, we can have this conversation in person with listeners. If you want to join us: from 8am to 10 AM, the news team is going to be at the West End Bakery on Haywood Road, and the first 50 people there get a free BPR mug. So come have a cup of coffee on us, meet the news team, tell us what you think tell us what you want to be covered, what what you think we need to be looking into. We're excited to go out and talk to people in the community about what they think the news should involve.
HC: Coffee, good conversation. You leave with a mug and we come home with a bunch of story ideas. All right, great.
Laura Lee, BPR's news director. Thank you for hanging out in the studio making time I know you don't have.
LL: Thank you, Helen.