news-record.com

SEAGROVE — Things are firing up in North Carolina's pottery capital, and it has nothing to do with kilns or clay.

Supporters of the nonprofit N.C. Pottery Center are up in arms over Randolph County commissioners' decision to delete $23,700 earmarked for the center from their 2008 budget. The county funding, which had been received annually by the center since 1996, is needed for getting through the final quarter of each year, supporters say.

The N.C. Pottery Center, which operates on a $310,000 budget with two full-time employees, includes a state pottery museum, as well as samples from Seagrove's famous potters. It serves an important role in tourism for the county, says Meredith Heywood, a potter who also serves on the center's board.

"It gives new visitors that one place to start out," Heywood said. "It's not possible to go to 100 pottery shops in a day, but you can go to the Pottery Center and narrow the field of where you want to go."

Heywood and Bonnie Frazier Burns, another potter, are asking their peers to show up at the Sept. 4 meeting of the Randolph County Board of Commissioners in hopes of salvaging some funding for the year.

However, commissioners adopted their final budget in late June, and the final document contained funding for neither the North Carolina Pottery Center nor the Museum for Traditional North Carolina Pottery, a group that stages the Seagrove Pottery Festival each fall and wants to establish its own museum. Last year, commissioners gave $10,000 to that group, the first time it had received county money.

This year, however, the county instituted a new application process, said Will Massey, assistant county manager.

"There are different pottery groups down there," Massey said. "The commissioners didn't want to favor one over the other."

The $23,700 in funding for the North Carolina Pottery Center was included in a preliminary budget, Massey said. But a necessary $100,000 expense for hospital expansion plus an ongoing $25,000 appropriation for a hospice in the county, meant cuts had to be made in a budget that eventually totaled $110 million, Massey said. Plus there were complaints about the North Carolina Pottery Center, he said.

"The commissioners had heard that the Pottery Center hadn't been as responsive to needs of potters down there as we liked," Massey said. "And the Pottery Center had a focus on education, not so much tourism."

But Denny Meacham, director of the North Carolina Pottery Center, said the center has been a growing tourist draw for the county.

Visitors to the center increased from 8,300 in 2004 to 16,000 in 2006, Meacham said. "And our education for adults is for tourists as well as schoolchildren," she said.

"We felt we were being very proactive," Meacham said. "When the funds were cut with no warning or explanation, it really felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us."

County Commissioner Arnold Lanier, whose district includes Seagrove and who sits on the board of the rival Museum for Traditional North Carolina Pottery, said he voted against both the preliminary budget, which included Pottery Center funds, and the final version, which didn't.

"A lot of things came into play," said Lanier. "That might have been a part of it, and it might not have been."

The bottom line, Lanier said, is that the Museum for Traditional North Carolina Pottery was hurt much worse by losing its $10,000 allocation than the North Carolina Pottery Center was by missing out on $23,700 in county money.

The Museum for Traditional North Carolina Pottery is "just about broke," he said. "We're trying to figure out what we can do to put on the festival this year."

The ultimate answer, say Lanier and even North Carolina Pottery Center supporters such as Heywood, might be for the two pottery groups to combine forces. But both sounded as if it were unlikely.

"We'd like to see them consolidate, but there's a zero chance in 100 of that happening," Lanier said. "It's more people versus people than anything else."

Contact Tom Steadman at 883-4422, ext 228 or tsteadman@news-record.com