Based on the Town of Lake Lure's public records response to Lake Lure Insider's Records Request #2, the Storm Recovery Fund donations ledger, two check-request/invoice packets (Cooley bench; Lions Club benches), and a review of every Town Council meeting summary and packet published from July 2025 (when both donations were recorded) through February 2026 (after both checks were cut). Lake Lure Insider sent the Town Manager's office a detailed written request for comment and additional records covering the findings in this piece and in Parts 1 and 3. As of publication, the Town has not responded.

Part 1 of this series showed that the Town of Lake Lure has taken in well over $169,000 in checks, cash, and PayPal gifts into a Storm Recovery Fund whose purpose the Town never publicly defined — and that most North Carolina towns don't take disaster donations directly at all; they route them through a nonprofit partner precisely so one town employee isn't deciding, alone, who gets paid from a pot of public-facing charity.

The Town's records show the fund has paid out exactly twice, both times for memorial benches from the same vendor. One was an Eagle Scout project that Mayor Carol Pritchett presented to Council on behalf of her grandson. The other, paid for with a Lions Club donation, never appeared on a Council agenda.

Bench One: The Mayor Presents Her Grandson's Project

On July 8, 2025, Town Council's agenda included an item titled "Eagle Scout Project." The Town's own meeting summary describes what happened next in three lines: "Mayor Pritchett made a presentation on behalf of her grandson, Eagle Scout Cole Pritchett. This project is a rededication of the Kevin Cooley memorial, which includes a plaque, a bench, and landscaping near the Gazebo in Morse Park. The plan was approved."

That's the entire record. No vote count is given. No recusal is noted — the Mayor is recorded presenting the item, not stepping back from it. No dollar figure, funding source, or connection to the Storm Recovery Fund appears anywhere in the summary.

Four months later, on November 15, 2025, Cole Pritchett — a Boy Scout, and Mayor Carol Pritchett's grandson — unveiled the finished bench at a public ceremony at the Lake Lure Gazebo, presenting it to Yvonne Cooley, the widow of former Mayor Kevin Cooley, whose original memorial bench had been destroyed in Hurricane Helene. The Town published two write-ups of the ceremony, "Boy Scout Honors Late Mayor with New Bench in Lake Lure" and "Boy Scout Honors Late Mayor with New Memorial Bench at Lake Lure Gazebo." One says only that Cole "has rebuilt a bench." The other goes further, describing it as "funded entirely through Cole's own fundraising efforts."

The Town's own financial records tell a more specific story. The Storm Recovery Fund donations ledger includes a $1,601.25 entry logged as a "Park Bench Donation" from "Benjamin and Amanda Pritchett" — Mayor Pritchett's son and daughter-in-law, and, on the relationship the Town's own press materials describe, Cole's parents. The Town's own check-request records show a matching $1,601.25 check, to the same vendor — Leisurecraft Holdings, LLC — cut in October 2025, a month before the dedication.

In other words: however Cole raised the money — and the records don't say either way — it didn't go straight to the vendor from a Scout's independent fundraiser the way the Town's retelling implies. It went through his parents, who are recorded as the donor, into the Town's own Storm Recovery Fund, and came back out as a check the Town itself wrote. That routing — parents' donation, Town fund, Town check — appears nowhere in either of the Town's published accounts of the dedication, and nowhere in the July 8 meeting summary where the project was approved.

None of this means anything improper happened, and it doesn't mean Cole didn't do real fundraising of his own — he may well have, and then handed what he raised to his parents to give. Families helping fund memorials for people they loved, via their own kids' Scout projects, is the kind of thing that happens in small towns, and there's a real, touching story here about a grandson honoring a mayor his grandmother worked alongside. But a sitting mayor presenting her own grandson's project to the body she chairs, with no recusal on the record, financed by a donation recorded under her own son and daughter-in-law's names and routed through a Town fund with no defined purpose or public accounting — and then publicly described as funded "entirely on his own," with no mention of that routing — is the kind of thing a newspaper discloses in full, not the kind of thing that should require a records request to piece together.

Bench Two: No Presentation, No Vote, No Mention — Anywhere

The second disbursement bought two more benches from Leisurecraft Holdings — $3,202.50, for "Lake Lure Playground, 2 labeled 5' benches (plaques)," per the ledger, which identifies the donor as the Lake Lure Lions Club. The timing lines up with the reopening of Morse Park's east entrance and its new playground on November 22, 2025, though the Town's check for these benches wasn't cut until February 2026 — a gap we've asked the Town to explain.

We read every Town Council regular-meeting summary and packet published between July 2025, when both donations were recorded in the ledger, and February 2026, the month the Lions Club check was issued — eight meetings in total. The Cooley bench appears exactly once, on July 8. The Lions Club benches do not appear at all: not as an agenda item, not in a consent-agenda vote, not in a budget amendment, not in a Storm Recovery Fund update, not anywhere.

Both purchases were charged to General Fund accounts (the "10-" series) even though both donations were deposited into Fund 20, the fund the Town Manager's records-request response identified as the Storm Recovery Fund. We found no interfund transfer or journal voucher connecting the two. On the Lions Club check request, the Town's own Communications Director, Laura Krejci, signed both as the requesting employee and, on the line reserved for a separate department head's sign-off, as the approving official — the form's third and final line, Town Manager approval, was then signed separately by Town Manager Olivia Stewman, so the check didn't go out on Krejci's signature alone, though the department-head check that's supposed to catch a conflict before it reaches the Town Manager was bypassed. And the Lions Club deposit carries a journal voucher number — JV 7064 — that falls numerically between vouchers recorded for February and March 2025, despite a July 2025 ledger date; either the date or the voucher number on that line is wrong.

The Pritchett/Cooley entry, by contrast, carries a journal voucher number that fits cleanly into the ledger's July 2025 sequence — one more small sign that it moved through the Town's books in the ordinary way, while the Lions Club entry didn't.

A Different Eagle Scout, A Different Process

To be clear about what this section is and isn't: it has nothing to do with what either Scout did. Both completed real community projects, and Lake Lure Insider isn't questioning either one's work. What's being compared is how Town Council handled the two projects on the record.

Cole Pritchett's wasn't the only Eagle Scout bench project Council took up in this period — and it wasn't the only one labeled that way on an agenda. Eight months earlier, on Nov. 12, 2024, Emerson Ansley — a Scout with no family connection to Town Hall — gave Council his own "Eagle Scout Presentation," proposing a memorial bench near the Little Lakeside Chapel. Like Cole's, Ansley's item carried the same designation: an Eagle Scout project, brought to Council for approval. The Town's minutes on it run four paragraphs — what Ansley proposed, Council's conditions (clear it with the Pastor of Chimney Rock Baptist Church first; place it temporarily near the Green Space until post-Helene debris removal was finished), and individual remarks from all four Council members, quoted by name. No Town money changed hands; his project needed none.

Cole Pritchett's item, presented eight months later by his own grandmother, the Mayor, got three sentences — no individual Council remarks, no recorded conditions, no recusal — despite being the one of the two that did route Town money to a vendor. Since both were brought to Council as the same kind of thing, an Eagle Scout project, that label alone doesn't explain the gap in how thoroughly each one was recorded. What differs between the two is who presented them and whether Town money was involved — not what kind of Scout project they were.

What Part 1 Means for Both of These

Part 1 explained why most North Carolina towns don't take disaster donations directly in the first place: a nonprofit partner creates a layer of independent board oversight and public accounting that a town's own finance department, answering only to the town manager and council, doesn't automatically provide. Lake Lure took the money directly, and — on the record we've now checked twice — spent some of it without the one layer of oversight a direct-donation model still leaves available: a Council vote specific to the expenditure, disclosed, recorded, and open to public comment.

One bench got a version of that disclosure, incomplete as it was. The other got none. Neither got a budget ordinance amendment, which North Carolina's Local Government Budget and Fiscal Control Act generally requires before a town spends donated money at all — the same gap Part 1 asked the Town to explain for the fund as a whole.

What We're Asking the Town

Lake Lure Insider has requested, and not yet received:

• Any budget ordinance amendment authorizing either bench expenditure, as N.C. Gen. Stat. Chapter 159 appears to require.
• The interfund transfer or journal voucher connecting the two bench purchases (charged to General Fund accounts) to Fund 20, where the donations were deposited.
• Whether Mayor Pritchett recused herself, formally or informally, from presenting or voting on her grandson's project, and the Town's general practice on family-member recusal for agenda items.
• Confirmation of how the $1,601.25 Pritchett family donation was solicited, received, and approved for disbursement — and why the Town's public description of the bench as funded "entirely on his own" doesn't mention it.
• An explanation for the Lions Club bench's out-of-sequence journal voucher number, and why — unlike the Cooley bench — it never appeared on a single Council agenda across the eight meetings we reviewed.
• Why the Lions Club check (February 2026) postdates the Morse Park playground reopening it appears to be for (November 2025) by roughly three months.

We will publish the Town's response in full when we receive it.

Two small checks, two different levels of public disclosure — and neither with the budget authorization North Carolina law appears to require. But the biggest claim the Town has made about where Helene recovery money and labor went isn't in the ledger at all — it's on the Town's own website, in a single unnamed line: "a private donor and the Town" re-sanded Lake Lure Beach. Part 3 of this series names that donor, lays out what he actually told the Town he did (and didn't do) in his own words, and surfaces a clause in a Town concession contract — never mentioned in any "Storm Recovery Update" — that calls into question whether anyone needed to "donate" this work at all. We also found out what the Town was telling FEMA about that same sand, in the same week it learned the truth about where it came from.

Read the Documents

Every record the Town produced that this story relies on, as PDFs:

• Storm Recovery Fund Monetary Donations (excluding PayPal) — the donations ledger, names redacted
• Check request and invoice, Cooley memorial bench, Oct. 2, 2025
• Check request and proforma, Lions Club benches, Feb. 3, 2026
• Minutes of the Nov. 12, 2024 Regular Town Council Meeting — includes Emerson Ansley's Eagle Scout presentation

Lake Lure Insider redacted the names of private individual and business donors from the two donation lists to protect their privacy. The entries this series discusses (RHI Legacy Foundation, Lake Lure Lions Club and the Pritchett family donation) are left visible, along with every amount, date, voucher and account number. All other records are posted as the Town produced them.

Sourcing Note

This story is based on Town Manager Olivia Stewman's email response to Lake Lure Insider's Records Request #2; the "Storm Recovery Fund Monetary Donations (excluding PayPal)" ledger and associated check-request/invoice packets produced in that response; the minutes of the Town's Nov. 12, 2024 Regular Town Council Meeting, also produced in that response, documenting Emerson Ansley's Eagle Scout presentation; the Town's own Town Council Regular Meeting Summary, July 8, 2025; the Town's two bench-dedication write-ups, "Boy Scout Honors Late Mayor with New Bench in Lake Lure" and "Boy Scout Honors Late Mayor with New Memorial Bench at Lake Lure Gazebo"; WLOS's photo gallery of the Nov. 15, 2025 dedication; the Town's "East Entrance to Morse Park Reopens 11/22/25" announcement; and Town Council meeting summaries and packets, Aug. 12, 2025 through Feb. 10, 2026 — all eight regular meetings between the donation dates and the Lions Club check date. Lake Lure Insider sent the Town Manager's office a written request for comment on the specific findings in this piece, and additional records requests, covering all three parts of this series. As of publication, the Town has not responded; we will update this piece with any response received.

Last updated: 2026-10-07