The moveable meeting

by David Forbes January 16, 2015

Exiled from City Hall due to a burst pipe Asheville City Council opposes a development, prepares to duel over a powerful board and gets an earful

Above: anti-fracking and Keystone XL pipeline protesters outside the U.S. Cellular Center, Asheville City Council’s temporary location due to a burst pipe in City Hall.

On Thursday, Jan. 8, just before lunch time, a fitting on a sprinkler system pipe broke. This clamp, fatefully, was on the seventh floor of Asheville’s historic City Hall, an area slated for renovations.

The results (according to a later report by James Ayers, the city’s general services director) flooded the elevator shafts and wrought significant water damage on the sixth and seventh floors as 10,000 gallons spilled through the seat of city government. By the time Tuesday, Jan. 13 rolled around, City Hall was back open again, something Ayers credited to “Asheville ingenuity” in the response by municipal workers.

However, because elevators are required to make sure the meeting is accessible to disabled citizens, Asheville City Council packed up and moved to the other end of downtown, laying out chairs and a temporary dais in the U.S. Cellular Center (still commonly known as the civic center) banquet hall. The area was considerably more spacious than the usual chambers, though it also lacked the strange 1920s art or the interesting (and photographically challenging) woodwork. Despite these draws, over 50 people eventually showed to witness the proceedings.

The meeting that followed was as different as the location in a number of ways: public hearings, including on some formerly contentious issues, saw no comment and little debate. Council also, unusually, banded together to reject a rezoning for new development. And the public comment portion of the meeting — usually more of an epilogue than a main act — ended up a time of sharp criticism over downtown development, the city’s graffiti clean-up efforts and a clash between a police organization and city government over the role of a powerful board.

Ready to go

The first major item was a resolution against fracking pursued by an alliance of local environmental groups. Before the meeting, protesters gathered outside the center holding signs against fracking and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Last year the governor and state legislature lifted the moratorium on fracking, raising concerns about the possible impact in WNC.

According to the resolution, “negative environmental and public health impacts related to hydraulic fracturing have been documented in other states, including contamination of drinking water wells, contamination of surface water, degradation of air-quality, an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and increased incidents of earthquakes.”

Council’s resolution in opposition is largely symbolic and encountered no opposition or discussion on the dais. Indeed, it was tucked into the consent agenda, a list of multiple, usually uncontroversial items passed on a single vote at the beginning of the meeting.

Nonetheless, Sally Morgan of Clean Water NC thanked Council and asserted the resolution was part of an important effort against fracking in the region.

“Asheville is now joining a host of Western North Carolina municipalities and counties who have passed resolutions against fracking and hopefully others will continue to do so until fracking is banned in our state,” she said.

The next major item usually carried plenty of controversy as well, but this time proved a bit different. In 2011, Council (along with state and other local governments), gave significant incentives (in the form of a $2.2 million exemption from most city property taxes) to car parts manufacturer Linamar to open up in South Asheville. The next year, Council approved another round of incentives, and the company’s plant even got a visit from President Barack Obama in 2013. Now, however, Linamar announced plans to expand even more, and wanted a new incentives package to overrride the 2012 one, which were never issued.

“The company is proposing one of the largest new capital investments in Asheville’s history,” Economic Development Director Sam Powers said, a total of $190 million in upgrades and new equipment and the creation of 400 new manufacturing jobs with an average salary of $39,000 a year. In return, they wanted exemption from 95 percent of the increase in city property taxes on the developed property for seven years, a total of $3.5 million. The funds would be refunded after Linamar paid their taxes rather than taken directly from existing city funds.

Powers emphasized that the city would only issue the refund after Linamar finished with the expansion.

“Staff believes that the project will further the economic development interests of the city,” he said. “It’s encouraging the retention and expansion of a major industrial operation.”

A tracker from WRAL of incentives given to companies versus jobs created didn’t show that Linamar had followed through on the jobs it had received incentives for, though it isn’t clear if that information is current.

No one spoke during the public hearing and Vice mayor Marc Hunt framed incentives for private business, something often controversial in the past, as a cost of doing business.

“Why would we be giving away $3.5 million?” he asked. “Without participating in this system of incentives we wouldn’t see Linamar here today, or GE Capital, or New Belgium.”

“It is the way the game is played,” he continued. “I wish it weren’t. I wish it were a level playing field in a different way where incentives weren’t part of it, but that’s the way that industries of this scale do filter through communities they might locate in.”

Indeed, Council member Cecil Bothwell voted against previous rounds of incentives on the grounds that they were part of a harmful process of corporate welfare that pitted cities against each other. But this time neither he nor any other member objected, and the incentives passed unanimously.

Intruder alert

Normally, a rezoning to turn a home into a lawyers’ office wouldn’t attract much attention — Council usually deals with such smaller changes to the city’s zoning without much discussion. It’s usually the larger commercial or residential projects that attract concerted opposition and extensive debate.

But in this case, an effort by lawyer Jim Siemens to turn a one-bedroom bungalow in North Asheville into an office and change the entrance saw the biggest fight of the evening, with many neighbors objecting to the change. Indeed, enough had signed a protest petition that Council would have had to muster six votes in favor of the project (instead of the usual four) for it to proceed.

Even more unusually, staff (who usually give a project their stamp of approval before it reaches Council), encouraged the elected officials to oppose the rezoning, citing a reduction of housing supply and the goal of “preserving and protecting residential neighborhoods,” even though the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission had given the project its go-ahead.

“I live in the neighborhood,” Siemens told Council, asserting that the renovations would allow him to employ another lawyer. “I understand that [the neighbors] have an emotional reaction to my proposal by I suspect that when it comes to fruition it won’t be offensive.”

“It is a loss of housing stock, but what you have there right now is a one-bedroom bungalow; it’s not going to profoundly affect the housing situation in Asheville,” he continued.

But Angela Skachi, speaking on behalf of some of the neighbors, asserted that “the permanent loss of this home would have a negative and irreparable affect on our neighborhood.”

She put pictures of families playing in the neighborhood’s streets on the overhead projector as she made her argument to Council.

“We live in a neighborhood because we like the 24/7 activity of human life and we don’t feel isolated,” she said. The street the office is on, Madison Avenue, “is strictly a residential street and always has been. We want it to stay that way.” At a time where there was an abundance of commercial vacancies but a shortage of housing, she said, “a vote to change this to an office seems contradictory to Council’s stated goals.”

While a number of neighbors praised Siemens as a good neighbor, they opposed his proposal. Bernard Oliphant, who’s lived in the neighborhood since the 1950s, said “we are very conflicted” because they appreciated his presence.

“But this is the beginning of the erosion of the neighborhood,” he said. “Right now we’re a nice, little tight village.” He was also concerned about increasing traffic “and the danger to children, pets and animals in the area.”

In recent years, Council has usually approved rezonings necessary for redevelopment, even in the face of neighborhood opposition. For example, it concluded 2014 by approving a housing development in West Asheville and a mixed commercial/housing development on the French Broad River, both in the face of neighborhood opposition and concerns. In those cases, Council asserted that the need to expand density and housing necessitated the new development, though in approving the West Asheville development they did agree to expand infrastructure in response to some neighborhood concerns.

But this time, dealing with a different neighborhood and a reduction (even a small one) in housing stock, Council instead unanimously opposed Siemens’ proposal.

“This is tough one, good people on all sides of this,” Council member Chris Pelly said. “For me though I think it comes down to the fact that when homeowners purchase a home in a residential neighborhood there’s an expectation that, unless there’s a compelling reason not to, zoning will remain consistent for them. Madison’s been residential for a 100 years. If we were to approve the rezoning that would start the dominoes down the road.”

Lines being drawn

In recent weeks, the departure of former Asheville Police Department Chief William Anderson has proven only one chapter in the turmoil over the Asheville Police Department and how it will change in the coming years. The latest fight focuses on the powerful Civil Service Board. The board’s powers were a subject of criticism by some Council members and the City manager, as well as representatives of several community groups at a Dec. 16 meeting hosted by the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Asheville and Buncombe County, who asserted that it was an obstacle to necessary reforms in the the police department.

Asheville’s Civil Service Board, created by state legislation, can review and overturn some personnel decisions, like firings and promotions, making it the most powerful such board in the state. At a meeting of the Council of Independent Business Owners last week, City Manager Gary Jackson and Mayor Esther Manheimer again asserted that the board’s powers were an impediment to managing the police.

But Rondell Lance, president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, sharply disagreed with Council’s assessment, countering in public comment that the board is a necessary check on abuses by management.

In his opinion, the opposition to the board showed a mindset that declared “if we didn’t have that civil service board to monitor our actions, we could put a stop to the people that raise the issues about the way we treat them and the way run the department. The Civil Service Board causes us to follow procedure, it causes us to follow procedure, it causes us to follow the rule of law when we would just like to do what we want without being questioned.”

He added taht attempts to blame the board for the issues at the police department were ignoring real problems.

“I have to strongly disagree with what Mr. Jackson said,” Lance continued. “The problems at the police department have very little, if anything, to do with the civil service board. It’s so out of touch with what is happening at the department and it deflects the responsibility.”

The FoP and the Police Benevolent Association, the other main organization representing local police, were both critical of Council and city management’s actions during some of the controversies of Anderson’s tenure.

During an earlier discussion about the city’s boards and commissions, Hunt noted that board Chair Mark Rosen did not wish to serve another term. After some controversy, Rosen recused himself in a recent hearing on actions taken regarding Lt. Mark Byrd, a critic of Anderson, after it emerged Rosen had liked a Facebook post on a petition by officers dissenting against the department’s leadership. That board ended up finding 3-1 in favor of the city and dismissing Byrd’s complaint on the grounds that he hadn’t filed it in time.

Lance asserted that of the six APD grievances he’d seen before the board in the last few years, four ruled in favor of the city and two in favor of the officer.

“Does that seem like an unreasonable or destructive board that hinders the chief or the department from doing their job and running their department?”

Lance noted that, during a previous 2009 controversy over the powers of the board, he, city staff, Council members and state legislators all gathered to talk out their issues. He noted his respect for Jackson and Manheimer, but that the FoP was ready to fight on this issue.

“We were able to reach a compromise that is in place today,” he said. “We don’t want to struggle with this again, but if need be we are prepared. We are reaching out to our lobbyists in Raleigh. We are reaching out to legislators that can assist us in keeping civil service in Asheville.”

Manheimer answered that “I recognize that this is a very serious issue and that city employees greatly value the role the Civil Service Board plays. I hope we can find a middle ground. I personally see that we have some challenges that the Civil Service Board presents in trying to address some key issues within the department.”

“I don’t plan to railroad anyone on this issue,” she added. “Frankly, from a political standpoint, I don’t think I can.”

Jackson asserted that, despite his earlier comments about the board, he agreed with Lance on many points.

“I’m not sure we have that great a disagreement,” Instead, he claimed, he simply laid out the situation between the board and city government. “The city of Asheville operates under a very different set of rules and statutes than the private businesses present in the room.”

Grey grievances

Also during public comment time, Lawrence Rice, owner of Absolute Auto Performance in West Asheville, criticized the city’s graffiti rules.

“We’ve had windows broken out, we’ve had doors kicked in, we’ve had vehicles stolen, we’ve had graffiti tagged on our building many times, we’ve done everything we can to keep our property in presentable condition,” he said. “We have received letters from the city of Asheville stating our property is a public nuisance. We don’t feel this is just.”

A new graffiti ordinance passed last year requires property owners to clean graffiti off their buildings, though the city has offered subsidies covering some of the costs of contractors putting paint (often grey) over the old graffiti. The effort has proven controversial, attracting criticism from arts advocates and others who say it’s ineffective and wasteful.

“We can no longer afford to keep repainting our building,” Rice said. “We are here today to challenge this ordinance because we believe the city is trying to make us responsible for something we have no control over.”

He also criticized the city’s approach to cleaning up graffiti.

“The graffiti returns three or four days later right where they’ve covered it up,” he said, though he later noted that his building hadn’t been tagged in “eight or nine months” though some still remained from a previous incident. “It’s trying to put a band-aid on it. It’s not working.”

“It’s not possible, quite frankly, to have officers watch locations hour after hour,” Council member Jan Davis said. “We really understand the difficulty you’re having and there’s got to be a better way to do this.”

Rice said the money might be better used for additional police officers, though he later added that where there are murals, graffiti rarely appears and wondered if some city funds might be used to promote those.

“That usually stops it from our experience, I don’t know if that’s a feasible plan or not,” he said.

Bothwell noted that a group of artists was discussing such a move (local artist and administrator Jen Gordon proposed such an initiative in a column here when the graffiti ordinance was debated last year).

Grey concrete was the target of another commenter, as Clare Hanrahan noted that disappearing benches and sidewalks in disrepair made downtown a less-than-welcoming place for many of its elderly and low-income residents.

“I live here, and 300 other seniors live here too, and we matter,” she said. “I’m not a property owner, I’m not a person of wealth, I’m not a big business that you’re going to give million dollar incentives to. But every day I see us locked away from the life of the city because the sidewalks are not adequately maintained. It’s not safe to walk to Pritchard Park but there are no benches around in between.”

She also criticized the “fenced-in gravel yard” that replaced crumbling buildings on city-owned property across from the civic center at one point slated to become a hotel.

“It’s an affront to every single diverse, lively and important elder in this neighborhood. I don’t know what the solution is. I know you have to make big bucks so you can get out more incentives and have more hotels. But we’ve got to honor the citizens that are elders, provide places where they can sit out front. You see folks clustered in front of the library, they have to bring their own wheelchairs out because there are no benches there.”

She asserted that the city needed to consider better services for pedestrians and the elderly.

“We’re hidden away in our little apartments because there’s nowhere to sit.”

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