03/15/2026
Listen up! This is a copy and paste from a post from Margaret Ackiss.
No one could say it any better! She has defined the direction that we are heading into here in Murphy!
I will attach a link to this statement in the comment section as proof of her post.
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Margaret writes as follows:
"Just read a very thoughtful post on Blue Ridge Politics. (Blue Ridge, Georgia).
My response:
It’s about to happen in Murphy.
Realtors in Blue Ridge literally tell me — when they have clients that aren’t millionaires, they send them to North Carolina to get more for their money. That’s not speculation. That’s a sales strategy. And it’s working. Cherokee County is about to become the relief valve for a real estate market that has already priced out the people who built Fannin County.
Let me tell you what happened next door. Blue Ridge median home values hit around $540,000 — an 11% jump in a single year. Local businesses that served the community got replaced by shops targeting visitors. Families who lived there for generations got taxed out. Short-term rentals consumed the housing stock. And the people left behind are working $10 to $15 an hour jobs to support an economy built entirely for people who don’t actually live there.
That’s the model your new county commissioners are calling progress.
Here’s what they’re not telling you. When those property values rise in Cherokee County, your tax base doesn’t just grow — your tax bill grows with it. Cherokee County residents already pay about 1.83% of their yearly income in property taxes, which is higher relative to income than Fannin County residents pay. When retirees and investors drive up assessed values, longtime residents on fixed incomes and working wages don’t get a raise to go with it. They get a bill. That’s not progress. That’s displacement dressed up in the language of economic development.
And we are not the same as Blue Ridge. We are not the same as Blairsville. We are all mountain people, yes. But our infrastructure is not the same, our zoning is not the same, our lake access is not the same, and our main employment sources are not the same. You cannot compare us to communities that have natural gas access and regulated internet — both held accountable by the state government — when we have neither.
You cannot compare our highway access. And you absolutely cannot compare our healthcare. You cannot have a baby in Cherokee County. We have no OB-GYN. Children have to be born in Georgia or at least an hour and a half away. That’s not a minor inconvenience. That’s a community telling young families they are not a priority.
Then there are the children who do stay.
North Carolina is ranked dead last — 50th in the nation — in school funding effort. We rank 48th in teacher pay. We do not offer the Hope Scholarship. We do not offer universal preschool, because we don’t have the lottery infrastructure Georgia built 30 years ago to fund it. We have no adequate daycare. We have no appropriate state funding for our schools — period. Georgia has been increasing its Pre-K budget, reducing class sizes, and raising teacher pay. North Carolina has been going in the opposite direction, raising class sizes and cutting quality. When families compare what their children get across that state line, the math isn’t close.
What that means long term is consolidation. We have fought it for years. We will lose that fight when the tax burden crushes the community that was here before the retirees arrived, and the families that would have stayed — the teachers, the nurses, the small business owners — leave because they can’t afford to stay and the schools can’t afford to keep them.
And small businesses. We don’t have the town infrastructure to grow. We don’t have the sewer infrastructure even if we wanted to. You cannot have the density of Blue Ridge without sewer systems. Full stop. If commissioners want growth without first securing infrastructure funding — ideally through state and federal grants, not local bonds that fall on the people already here — they are asking the existing community to pay for an economy built for someone else.
What is the same on both sides of that state line? No workforce housing. No funding for community-based programs for children and the elderly. The people who need the most from local government are the ones who will be asked to pay for changes that don’t serve them.
Cherokee County is staring at the same trajectory as Fannin County, but with fewer safety nets, worse infrastructure, and a state government that is already failing its kids and ranking last in the nation in what it’s willing to spend on them.
Blue Ridge didn’t happen overnight. But it happened fast.
Murphy is next. And the people making these decisions right now either don’t understand that — or they do, and they’re counting on it."
