In this Issue of Hey Cherokee County…

✅ Months Into the Job, Conley Makes Her Case for a Full Term

✅ After Helene, Cherokee County Is Building Its Own Warning System

Cherokee County Events

August 26th

September 10th

September 16th-19th

September 26th

October 31st

November 21st

Publisher’s Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series based on an interview with Dr. Jeana Conley, Cherokee County Commissioner for District 1. 

Dr. Jeana Conley filed to run for the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners with a clear timeline in mind. Campaign through spring and summer. Win in November. Take office in December. That was the plan.

It didn't go that way.

When Conley defeated incumbent Cal Stiles in the March 2026 Republican primary for the District 1 seat, the sitting commissioner decided he'd had enough. Stiles resigned rather than finish out his term, and suddenly the woman who thought she had months to prepare found herself holding a job she hadn't officially won yet. 

"This 90 days came out of the blue," Conley said. "I had no idea that right after the primary, circumstances would evolve and I would actually be sworn in as a commissioner almost immediately."

The unexpected early start is, in some ways, a fitting beginning for a woman whose entire argument for running was that Cherokee County needed to stop waiting for change to arrive unmanaged and start shaping it on its own terms.

Conley grew up in Andrews, graduated from Andrews High School in 1986, and spent the next 32 years inside the Cherokee County school system. The last eight of those years she served as superintendent, managing a budget north of $40 million without once going into the red. She holds a doctorate in educational leadership. 

When she retired in 2022, Conley had every intention of stepping back. It didn't take. That fall she ran as a write-in against Cal Stiles — the same incumbent she would eventually beat — and the response she got from voters was enough to bring her back to the ballot officially in 2026. 

What Conley brought to the race wasn't a political resume, but rather an institutional understanding of how systems either work together or quietly fail apart. Thirty-two years in a public school system taught her that problems rarely arrive in isolation and that reactive governance is the most expensive kind.

"People have no true understanding of how slow government actually works," she said. "You have to take into account risk management, all the legalities, the funding, the opinions of the people, and then the lawyers get to weigh in before you make any decisions whatsoever."

One of her first priorities was making sure this board didn't operate the way previous ones had. Within her first 90 days, the commissioners voluntarily participated in a multi-hour facilitated workshop, called a retreat. Conley rejects the word. 

"When I think of the word retreat, I think of a spa and a golf course," she said. "This was several long hours locked together in a room with a facilitator."

No governance resulted from that meeting. But what came out of the room was something the county hadn't managed to produce in years, Conley said: a shared commitment to building a strategic plan grounded in real data — census figures, economic development projections, demographic trends. 

"You can either manage change or become a victim of it," Conley said. "We don't want to be a victim of change. We want to be able to design exactly how and when we grow."

What surprised her most in those first weeks as commissioner wasn't the volume of issues on the board's desk; it was the volume of people who wanted to be heard. Not the loudest voices on social media, she noted, but the ones who sent thoughtful emails, asked good questions, and showed up ready to help if someone would just give them an avenue.

"I've heard that there's so much apathy, that people don't really care about governance," she said. "I don't agree with that."

The concerns, Conley says, are real and stacking up: property taxes, animal control, the slow erosion of the county's working-age population, schools that have watched enrollment shrink for years. Andrews High School, which Conley attended when it had nearly 450 students, is now closer to 210. The county has fewer than 5,000 residents under the age of 18.

"We reinvent the wheel every single time there's an issue instead of coming up with a systemic plan," she said, adding that the most encouraging thing about the board she's now part of is the mutual respect and a shared commitment to actually developing a strategic plan.

To see any of it through, she has to win the job she already has. Conley faces a general election opponent in November for the District 1 seat. 

"I may not always agree and they may not always agree with me," she said. “But I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work and talk about where we need to go. Not just where we've been, but where we need to move forward.”

In the next issue: the fights currently on Conley's desk, from a phone company pulling landlines out of the mountains to an environmental ordinance she says can't wait. 

Paid for by Dr. Jeana Conley, candidate for the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners District 1 seat. Hey Cherokee County accepts paid political advertising. Candidates and campaigns may contact us for rates and availability.  

Cherokee County is getting an outdoor warning siren system, a network of sirens and flood gauges spread across the county's most populated public spaces that will automatically sound when severe weather or rising water reaches dangerous levels.

The county secured more than $368,000 through the Next Generation Warning Systems Grant, a FEMA-funded program administered by North Carolina Emergency Management, to make it happen.

Officials say Hurricane Helene exposed a critical gap in the county's ability to warn people when water rises fast. Though Cherokee County avoided the worst of the storm, the destruction across Western North Carolina made clear that existing alert systems — including those from the National Weather Service — aren't always enough on their own to get warnings to people in time. The new siren and gauge system is designed to fill that gap locally. 

The first phase puts sirens in the downtown areas of both Murphy and Andrews, at the recreation parks in each town, on the campus of Hiwassee Dam High School, at Tri-County Community College, and in the Erlanger Western Carolina Hospital area. Murphy and Andrews will each get two tone-and-voice sirens along with two digital flood gauges. Hiwassee Dam High School and the community college will each get a tone-only siren.

What triggers the sirens will depend on the type of emergency, and local officials are still working out which tone will signal which threat. One may warn of an approaching tornado, another of rising floodwater, another of a severe storm. 

“That will require some public education on our part,” Cherokee County Emergency Management Coordinator Sam Davis said regarding how the public will know what each tone means and what to do when they hear it.

The system is also designed to grow. Davis said other entities across the county, whether businesses, schools, churches, or other organizations, will have the ability to add compatible sirens to the countywide network in the future, and at a significantly lower cost than building a standalone system from scratch because the infrastructure being put in place now will already be there to build on. 

"We would love to have a siren in every community one day," Davis said. "Ideally, we'd install a combination siren and gauge system in our most flood prone watersheds in the county, but we just don't have the funding for that right now. We've got to start somewhere."

The system is designed to warn people who are outside when severe weather strikes. It may be audible from inside a building, but that's not its purpose. Residents are encouraged to continue using weather apps, radios, and Wireless Emergency Alerts alongside the new system.

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