Facing budget cuts of more than $2 million, Legal Aid of North Carolina plans to eliminate about 30 positions and close its offices in Smithfield, Boone and Henderson by the end of September.

Those three offices have served about 2,000 households a year in Johnston, Harnett, Sampson, Allegheny, Ashe, Avery, Mitchell, Watauga, Wilkes, Vance and Yancey counties.

The nonprofit looked at furloughs and salary cuts but the reductions in funding were too great, said George Hausen, Legal Aid of North Carolina's executive director.

Legal Aid's total budget was around $20 million a year before the cuts.

By closing rural offices, Legal Aid hopes to maximize the number of poor people it serves at its current funding level.

"We serve poor people, and in the rural areas we have to travel a much greater distance to serve fewer people," Hausen said.

"In order to keep the numbers high and serve as many poor people as we possibly could we decided that we needed to circle the wagons in the big, urban offices."

Forest Summit, a 381-acre development in Boone that was once the campus for the Spiritual Center of America, is to be auctioned off next month.

The center was constructed in the mid 1990s at a cost of some $40 million. It includes 26 buildings and nearly 340,000 square feet of dining halls, classrooms, office and warehouse space and 418 apartment units.

The property is owned by Upper Blue Mountain Holdings, an entity formed by brothers David and Earl Kaplan.

The Kaplans were the developers behind Heavenly Mountain, a 7,000-acre resort and center built for followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles' guru and founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement.

In 2004, the Kaplans left the TM movement and publicly repudiated Maharishi and ordered all the TM practitioners at the center to leave.

Chartwell Auctions, which is handling the auction, said in a release that the Kaplans are selling the property to focus on a book company they own.

The reserve price, the minimum price the seller will accept, for the Sept. 14 auction is $2,485,000.

After a nine year hiatus, Buzz Peterson returns to Appalachian State to coach the Mountaineer basketball team.