One of the biggest tasks Council will face in the next four years will be the revision of the UDO. If elected, what will be your priorities for changing the UDO?
We need to make sure we’re very intentional about getting the kind of development we want in the places we want it. The UDO is the place to do that. That means, for instance, if we don’t want anymore hotels downtown, if we feel like there are enough hotels downtown we need to change the UDO so no more hotels are allowed downtown. If we want to increase the opportunities for residential development downtown then we need to zone the land for that.
So we need to make really bold decisions about what we want, where we want it. That’s going to be controversial, because we might necessarily be limiting what property owners can do with their property, but this is the way we grow is going to dictate the feel and character of Asheville for the next several decades and we have to get it right. We have to get what we want as a community rather than what developers, particularly outside developers, want.
You mentioned ‘bold decisions’ and things that might be controversial. Can you give some specific examples of changes we might see that might qualify?
So I mentioned one, if we don’t want anymore hotels downtown that’s a decision we can make. From conversations I’ve had with people, many people, in this campaign, there are a lot of people who feel like we have enough hotels downtown, so that’s a conversation that’s definitely on the table.
Other parcels that are zoned for a range of uses, including commercial, again, if we decide as a community that what we’d rather have is more residential downtown we might be limiting the use of that, or if what we want is more mixed-use.
Another place that I think we might, hopefully not, run into conflict is on these huge parcels on stretches of road like Tunnel Road and Patton Avenue and Hendersonville Road where we have big box stores with enormous parking lots. We need to change the zoning for those to be, in my view, for very dense mixed-use developments. We just don’t have enough land anymore for big box stores and big parking lots. Not to say that we can’t have big box stores, but there are many developments around the country now that, if you have a big box store that’s combined with smaller, mixed-use buildings that are adjacent to it, parking is sunk down below the ground so that you just don’t have all this wasted land.
On that, there have been controversies over hotels downtown. What would restrictions on those in zoning look like? Are there any specific ones you would support?
I think the fundamental decision is: do we want to allow for more hotels downtown or not? That’s the basic decision. If the community and elected leaders have the stomach to answer that question ‘no’ then the ones that are there will be grandfathered in and there won’t be any new ones. If the answer to that is ‘yes’ then we have to answer what kind of hotels and do we want to limit where they are, do we not want to have them in downtown anymore and just limit them on the edges? Do we want to just have smaller boutique hotels as opposed to the larger Aloft and Indigo hotels?
I don’t have any strong opinions on that. I would be fine if we said ‘no more hotels downtown.’ But if that’s not where people are, if there are reasons I’m aware of not to make that decision then I’m open to that.
A proposal that’s come up on this campaign on the affordability front has been one for inclusionary zoning, possibly modeled after Davidson or Chapel Hill’s ordinance. What’s your opinion on that and would you favor that if elected?
So that’s a really complicated issue because what we do doesn’t necessarily just affect us alone, like most ordinances. What we know is that Asheville gets treated differently. If Asheville passes inclusionary zoning, there is the chance that the legislature would ban inclusionary zoning, which would then ban Chapel Hill and Davidson. I think we need to talk to those cities.
My preference would be that we come to an agreement that ‘yes, Asheville’s going to go this way and we’ll all go with the consequences.’ That would be the ideal situation. We can’t let those decisions make the decision for us, but we also should not wade into those waters and risk killing successful programs in other places.
You mentioned it as a successful program. Outside of the state power situation, on the merits itself, is it something you favor?
So it’s definitely a proven tool. I know there are developers here who are opposed to it and I would have to understand more about the implications of it for us. Here’s the other concern I have about Asheville doing it by itself is that if Asheville adopts inclusionary zoning my fear is that all of the multifamily developments will go just outside the city limits into the county and what we would really be doing is pushing affordable housing and housing density out into the county in a sprawl situation. I absolutely do not want to do that. My preference, if we’re going to do it here, is that the city and county do it together so developers are treated equally in both places.
A key thing we have to do in our redevelopment of the zoning code is not encourage sprawl, we need to encourage development in the city. If developers start telling us that inclusionary zoning is going to push them to the outskirts of the city and into the county then that’s a consequence that we don’t want. Then we might not actually get any developments that are covered inclusionary zoning because they’re all going outside. Then we’ve not accomplished our goal and we’ve created a new problem.
Another proposal on the affordability front that’s been raised is the possibility of tax breaks or some kind of incentive for smaller landlords to provide affordable housing. What are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely. One of the things we hear a lot from neighborhoods is concern about the impact of multifamily developments. Well we’re sitting in a neighborhood [in West Asheville] that has a lot of multifamily developments, they’re just small. They’re six and eight unit structures that fit right in with the neighborhood. The economics of those are harder to make work in today’s world, which is why they don’t get built very much. If our incentives around affordable housing can be made available to developers who will build that smaller scale, neighborhood scale multifamily housing I think that would be a good thing because it would help integrate multifamily into primarily single-family neighborhoods.
But again, if most neighborhoods in Asheville look around they will find these 6 and 8, sometimes even 10 and 12 [unit buildings]. Montford’s full of them. West Asheville has a bunch of them. Nobody notices them; they’re not negatively impactful in any way.
That can be a great way to step down from a corridor like Haywood Road, a very dense corridor where you have higher volume mixed-use residential, as you step back into the neighborhoods you could go to some of those 6, 8, 10 unit buildings and then into single-family.
Another issue that’s been debated with regards to affordability is short-term rentals. You’ve been a supporter of Council’s move to strengthen the fines and the current ban. What would you say to critics who worry about the enforceability or who say that’s not enforceable?
I do worry about the enforceability. My understanding is that the city has hired a new enforcement officer for this; I think we need to give that a chance to work, see what happens there, see if in fact homeowners take their units off the short-term rental market and turn them into long-term rental housing or put them on the market for sale for permanent homes to someone else.
If we don’t see movements like that, if in fact owners of what I’ll call whole-house short-term rentals go underground somehow and find some way to get around the enforcement then we haven’t accomplished our goal and we need to look at other strategies. But I think we need to give the city’s current strategy of increased enforcement probably about a year to work and see what happens.
In your view, what are the issues with short-term rentals?
I’d say the same as Marc [Hunt] and Esther [Manheimer] and the people on Council who’ve already articulated them. Neighborhood integrity is number one. The impact on, not just affordable housing, but rental housing generally. Then, related to those, I’m not interested in opening Asheville’s neighborhoods up to what I call predatory, out of state investors who want to come here and make money off us and our tourists and not invest anything in the city.
The Southside Advisory Board has called on the city to prioritize the renovation and upkeep of the Walton Street pool complex. What are your thoughts on that and if elected, how would you proceed?
Obviously this is a big priority for Lindsey Simerly and I think it’s worth looking at. I honestly didn’t know anything about the Walton Street pool before Lindsey got into the race and started talking about it. I need to understand more about all of our pools in general. I understand from the article in the paper that all of our pools are facing maintenance issues, ADA compliance issues. It sounds like there’s just a big suite of work that needs to happen to improve these pools and I don’t know where that stacks up in the context of other parks improvements that need to be done.
Particularly with the Walton Street pool is: why don’t more people use it? It’s a smaller pool, so that may be it. But are people in that neighborhood swimming somewhere else and even if we made improvements to that pool would people not come back to the pool? Are they not using the pool because it costs too much to get in? I don’t know if the city has dug into that.
According to the advisory board, it’s disrepair.
That could be it. What I don’t know is: have we actually done a neighborhood survey to know that or is that people’s assumption about things. What you’d hate to do is sink a whole lot of money into things and not have anybody show up. Now that’s not likely to happen. I am a believer, in most cases, that if you build it they will come. That’s true with services as well as with pools. But we should at least ask the question, and that’s not a hard thing to do.
On a somewhat related note, there’s been concerns — for example, with Burton Street and Shiloh, both neighborhoods with plans about how they want to see their infrastructure and services improved — that historically African-American neighborhoods have not received their due attention when it’s come to infrastructure and improvements. What’s your thoughts on that? How, if elected, would you act to change that situation?
I was part of a team, along with the Asheville Design Center, that helped develop the Burton Street plan. That is very definitely a strong sentiment in Burton Street and I think Shiloh shares that sentiment as well. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, that’s a very strong sentiment that should be addressed.
Certainly the city, as a threshold matter should look at those communities and sort of see if, in fact, there are things that have not happened because of that historic, institutional discrimination. If that’s the case, projects in those neighborhoods could and should be prioritized to some degree. I know that the city is trying to move to a very data-driven decision-making system for things like sidewalks and roads and traffic calming.
I think that’s important, but there should always be a reality check to data-driven processes. One thing we’ve seen, and this is a bit unrelated, but it makes my point, the DoT’s new process for prioritizing road expansions that system prioritized malfunction junction of I-26 over the bridge section. Anybody who lives here knows that the bride section knows that the bridge section is the section that should be built first, no question.
So I think data gets you to a certain point and then you actually have to look at the on-the-ground situation and that’s where you might have to look at the different neighborhoods and make your ultimate decisions based on reality.
Based on your experience with the Burton Street plan, do you think that things that should have happened have not happened?
That’s a good question. We started that plan in 2009, finished in 2010, still very much in the recession. I don’t know what’s happened in Burton Street in terms of infrastructure since we’ve come out of that recession. So for instance I don’t know if traffic calming or sidewalks have gone in in places they wanted. I don’t think they have, but I don’t know that for sure. I also know, or I would suspect, if there are projects that are teed up there that the city might just be waiting to see about the impacts of I-26, so there would be no point in putting sidewalks on a road that is going to get destroyed. That would be an overlay filter there to look through.
As I think back to that report and some of the visual renderings that were in that report it was making the Burton Street entrance off af Haywood very much a path into the neighborhood, so streetscapes, sidewalks, street trees, that sort of thing. That is a road that’s definitely going to be impacted by I-26 and might end up with a huge sound wall on one side, so there would be no reason to make any improvements until that’s settled.
Shiloh is getting some long-awaited sidewalks on Shiloh Road. The problem in Shiloh, and this is true in Burton Street as well, is that some of those roads are really narrow and some of the lots, the houses are really close to the street. When you talk about Shiloh, incredibly narrow road, but also houses are really close to the street and people have fences, stone walls, gardens, beautiful mail boxes. The city’s preference is not to condemn people’s land but to ask people to give their land so every time you have come across one of these yards that has a beautiful stone wall or something like that, it just makes that project more expensive. So those small roads in dense neighborhoods are a challenge from a cost perspective and from a development perspective because you’re taking, relatively, such a significant piece of someone’s front yard.
On Interstate 26, the state just came out with a whole set of potential plans, it does seem like many of the state’s proposals run counter to what local leaders have asked for. As someone who’s been following the back-and-forth over that extensively over the years, if elected what’s going to be your approach to I-26 and is there a need for a change from the city’s fairly conciliatory approach in trying to get some changes done?
I wouldn’t characterize the city’s approach as ‘conciliatory.’ I think the city has been very consistent in asking DoT to make this project the smallest footprint it can be. They have always asked that for section A, the section through West Asheville and that has continued over the past few years as I’ve been working with city and county leaders on this. The city, a few years ago, back in the mid-2000s, invested in its own traffic analysis for section A that showed that six lanes would be just fine, thank you very much. The city was also part of investing in the further development of the Asheville Design Center’s alternative 4b, so the city has put a fair amount of resources and support behind getting a project that is going to be the least impactful and I think the city is still there.
I’ve worked very closely with Marc Hunt on this, he’s the city’s point person and he is very much there. He has, along with me and others, pushed DOT to justify the size, explain the data, making sure that they’re using the best data, so I don’t think the city’s backed off. That’s been the hat that I’ve worn for years, and I can’t imagine switching that hat because I get elected.
A major redevelopment project the city’s likely going to participate in over the next four years is the redevelopment of Lee Walker Heights, at the same time that is taking place in the context of a disagreement between residents and the housing authority over evictions, over transparency, over possible displacement. What would be your approach to that redevelopment if elected?
I think, I know that not everyone who lives in public housing understands the intention and process and goals behind the development of Lee walker Heights. I also understand that there is a lot of mistrust even among people who maybe do understand it. I’m not privy to all the ways in which the housing authority has communicated to people about all of this but I think they probably could have done a better job and I have provided some of that feedback to David Nash, who happens to be my neighbor. I’ve shared some of the things I’m hearing from people and it’s just helpful for them to hear that from an outside person os they can address that.
It’s not unusual for big institutions like that to not fully understand the best way to communicate with people about major changes like this. I think they could do a better job.
If you end up on Council, making decisions about that, would you support making any future deal contingent on the approval of the Residents Council?
That’s a good question. I’ll have to think back to Atlanta. I lived in Atlanta when the Atlanta Housing Authority took a similar tack with all of its public housing units and the very first one, I do remember, there was a residents meeting and I believe the redevelopment was contingent on the residents in that particular redevelopment approving it and I was actually there for the night they took that vote.
I think the people in that development in that decision, you wouldn’t want people in Hillcrest and Klondyke and other places killing a deal that isn’t going to impact them directly. But again, I’d need to understand a little bit more about how that Council works and who’s on it. The key people to get understanding and agreement from are the people at Lee Walker Heights.
Again, the Housing Authority has said, repeatedly, at least to me and I think to them as well, has been that everyone there will have a place. They’re talking about doubling or even tripling the number of units there, so there’s not a question of space. I think the concerns that I’ve heard are if the housing authority engages a private management company, would that company require things that residents don’t have or put in place requirements that they couldn’t meet? I think that might be a situation where existing residents are treated differently than new people coming in.
Moving to downtown, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the property across from the Basilica. What’s your position on approving a sale of that property?
I’ve said three things. One, there has to be a significant, meaningful public space there. Whether that’s a park or a plaza is a question for urban design, really. Whatever we have to do there has to really honor and enhance the Basilica. The third piece is: we have to have a fiscally responsible plan for developing and managing that property. The city has to have that for every property that it manages. If the park can happen without bumping other budget priorities that are clear needs in our community — I would point to things like sidewalks, expanding transit and increasing affordable housing.
If the park can happen without impacting those priorities, fine. If it can’t, then I am open to partnering with a private or non-profit entity that would develop something on that property and help pay for the public space. It would have to be a low-rise building; I don’t think a hotel is the right use for that property and certainly not a parking deck.
Talking to people about this, they see that the last two plans were a parking deck and a hotel. If you’re elected why should they believe that this time a potential sale would be any different?
So the city has some criteria that are out there right now and if we need to amend those criteria to say that it can’t be a hotel, then we should amend those criteria. If we need to amend the criteria to put in some limitation on height then we should look at doing that. I think we need to get the kind of development we want there. The tradeoff, of course, is the more restrictions you put on a property, the harder it is to get somebody to come in but at the same time I totally understand when people say ‘if this is what you want then get it in writing.’ I’m a lawyer, I get things in writing.
I don’t know if you’re going to get into the TDA funds at some point, but my feeling on the TDA funds is that if there is this sort of unwritten understanding that more of these dollars will come to the city for infrastructure projects, greenways, things like that, if that’s unwritten then it just needs to be in writing. If everyone agrees with that we need to change the law to make it happen. I don’t like understandings that rely on the goodwill of people who may not be in place going forward.
Since the departure of Diane Ruggiero in 2012 the city has not had a staffer dedicated full-time to the arts or public arts. Is that a need that needs to be addressed under city staff and what are other ways you would change how the city deals with arts?
I have to say, I don’t know a whole lot about how the city interacts with the arts community. I know some other cities have staff positions, but I really need to explore that, I just don’t know enough to really opine on it. Arts are obviously really important, but I don’t know if the arts community is managing that well themselves or if they feel the need some support from the city and if so, what is it? Is it a staff person? Is it funding? I don’t really know enough to answer that.
One of the biggest issues for City Council, especially under our charter, is scrutiny on — and overseeing — the city manager. Gary Jackson’s been in office for 10 years and that’s seen everything from the city get a AAA bond rating to having major problems with the police department. What’s your assessment of Jackson’s conduct and how, if elected, would you deal with scrutiny on Jackson, city staff and their behavior?
On the whole, I think Gary has done a good job. You pointed some really great things that have happened at the city: the bond rating, we’ve come out of the recession relatively unscathed. There obviously have been problems, like the police department, there’s no question.
But I think, on the whole, my experience with Gary in the six years I’ve bene working closely with the city on transit issues for the most part have been good. I know a little about how he interacts with Council and I think he does that in a very fair and evenhanded way, meaning when he communicates with one, he communicates with all. He goes out of his way to avoid even the perception of favoritism, or providing information to one that the others don’t have. I think he tries to keep that playing field very even. In city government information is power and the fact that Gary is very intentional about sharing information broadly is very important.
He did that with us candidates as well. You may know that if any candidate asks for information from the city the question and the answer are provided to all candidates. I think that’s very important.
In terms of review and management going forward, like every city employee Gary should get an annual performance review. He should have his own set of goals. Obviously his big goal is to implement the city’s strategic plan and to make sure all of that is moving forward and he needs to be held accountable in the same way every other employee is.
You mentioned transit as a priority and you’ve headed the city’s transit commission for some time. In your view, what are the most needed improvements and where would the funding for those improvements come from?
Generally the improvements are that we just need more buses on key routes. So the S3 route that goes to the airport needs at least one more bus, the S4 route that goes to A-B Tech needs at least one more bus. But stepping back, big picture, we just need increased frequency all around. We did increase the frequency to 30 minutes on most major routes. But for more elective riders to get on the bus, the frequency needs to be more like 15-20 minutes. On most key corridors we really need to double the frequency that we have now.
We also need to run more buses later into evening. So for instance the N bus that runs between the Grove Park Inn and Klondyke stops at 6 p.m. Well that’s a problem because if you live at Klondyke and you want to go to something after 6 p.m., that means you’re going to walk home unless you get a ride. So that means you can’t have an evening job, it means you can’t go to evening events in the city. For the Grove Park Inn employees it means anybody who rides the bus needs to be done with their shift by 6 p.m. So it’s just very limiting. That’s just one exmaple, there are others. The city has identified a handful of routes where we need to add time at the end of the day. We know what that list is.
Where the money comes from is a good question. The city is experiencing a lot of growth and development. That’s going to increase the tax base. That should increase our revenue, that should mean increased dollars coming into the city. My feeling is that to build the system we want in a timely and predictable a way we need a dedicated source of funding. We could do that in different ways. We could say that X percent of any increased tax value going forward gets dedicated to transit. One of the good things the legislature did this year was allow local governmetns to increas the tax on car rentals. The city already has a $10 fee on car rentals and the legislature gave us the ability to tack on another $10, that would bring in another $600,000 a year.
That’s another two bus routes, that’s another bus route to the airport, it’s anther two buses to A-B Tech. We could adopt that tax, dedicate that money to transit. We just need a dedicated source of funding.
I’ve been part of an effort for the last several years to do analysis and create a white paper of the range of funding options for multimodal. We first produced this paper back during the recession and we just never released it because it wasn’t going to happen during the recession. But we’re not in the recession anymore. What we know from that study is that the two biggest pots of money, the two biggest ways to raise a dedicated source of funding are from a sales tax and property tax. Either one of those would mean millions a year which would allow us to vastly expand the transit system and build sidewalks, greenways and all that.
My position on that is that we should have a community conversation on that. Transportation is a prioirty for every candidate, it’s a priorirty for the city, we just need to have a conversation about how we’re going to pay for it and what people’s tolerance is for a dedicated, say, property tax increase that would go build this infrastructure. My feeling is that people would say yes to that because people really, really do want this.
Related to that, there was some back-and-forth recently over the management company, with local non-profits and the union both saying there were issues, considerable concerns about the manaagement and have been for over a year. What do those concerns reveal about the city’s process for oversight and scrutiny?
The problems are real, there’s no queston about that. I think it’s still a question the extent to which the problems are due to the management company as a company, if it’s due to the people that the management company had running things here or if it’s a question of resources. So if we change the management company but don’t change the resources, are we still going to have the same problem? If the management company puts different people in place here, will that solve the problems or can we keep the management company, give them another $500,000 and everything will be fine. I don’t think we know the answer to that question.
I do think we know the management company has not done as good a job as they could do. They do have a new manager in place. She’d been here not even a year, maybe eight, nine months. I believe in giving new people a chance to do what they can do. She is doing with a lot of challenges, not just resource challenges. She is dealing with an enormous amount of anger and cynicism on behalf of the drivers. Frankly, it’s not helpful. I understand they are mad and frustrated. But they’re also part of a team and they need to be going whatever they can — and maybe they are — to make the system successful within the limitations that are there. I don’t see that happening, what I see are the anger and the complaints. That doesn’t mean they’re not also trying hard to make the system work. I know that drivers care deeply about the system, they care deeply about the riders and they want the system to be successful.
They’ve said that’s why they’re bringing the complaints forward.
Yeah. But my experience also is that, in the six years I’ve been involved in the transit committee, they’ve not been happy with any management company. Now we’ve had first transit the entire time I’ve been involved, we made that switch shortly before I got involved. But it’s been under some different leadership.
The bottom line is that I think it’s good, what the city has done. If nothing else it shakes up First Transit, it gives the city a chance to put in some new accountability measures and hopefully things will be different going forward. I do think a critical piece of it, though, is resources. That’s going to be the decision that the city council or whoever’s elected this time around is going to make in the next budget cycle, is whether to significantly increase the resources that we make available to First Transit. That’s where things like dispatchers, managers, mechanics, come in. One of the complaints is that First Transit doesn’t have a Class A mechanic and my understanding from talking to city staff is that it’s because we can’t pay people enough: they can make more in private garages.
Well, if we need to increase the resources for that position then we need to increase the resources for that position. The other trick of course, is that salaries are negotiated between First Transit and the union. Just the city increasing resources doesn’t necessarily cut it. My understanding is the city can’t just say ‘ok, now you have $70,000 to go hire a mechanic.’ So even though the city makes those resources available that isn’t necessarily what happens.
Having been in this position for six years and watching this relationship, I would love for us to explore options that would take the management company out of the middle of this. I think that’s a big problem.
Now the only way to do that is to get rid of the union. I’m not saying we need to do that. I’m not anti-union, I’m very pro-union. But I think the fact that we have this intermediary entity is a source of problems. If the management company wasn’t there, the city would be directly responsible for these problems and there would be no question about where responsibility lay. With a management company in the middle, again we don’t whether its the corporate philosophy of the company, is it the person they have managing the system, is it the resources.
If it was the city and everyone was a city employee and the city made the decision about who to hire to manage the system we would know all of that much better.
That situation, of course, is the result of a conflict between federal and state law.
Yeah. It might be a question that comes up and the drivers immediately say ‘no, we like our union.’ I think it would be interesting to explore if life could be better for them without that third party in the middle [the management company]. It would give drivers direct access to the city in a way they do not have right now to deal with issues. There are issues that the city can not talk to the drivers about. My experience is that a lot of issues get tossed into that middle ground and it allows our enables the city to say ‘those are personnel issues and we can’t deal with personnel issues, that’s first transit’s problem.’
Even when they affect the system as a whole?
Yeah.
You mentioned that change, but it comes back to that change is not possible with a union unless state law changes.
Unless state law changes, which it’s not likely to do. I just don’t know if anyone’s ever had that conversation with the drivers. What would it look like? What would it mean for your pay? What would it mean for your benefits? What would the pros and cons be?
Of the end of the management company or the end of the union?
Of the end of the union, because we can’t, as long as the union’s there, we can’t get rid fo the management company. I’ve had conversations with city staff and some of the feeling there is ‘no, they’re better off with the union, they have more protections with the union than they would have with the city’
But again, my experience over the last six years is that it puts the city over here and the drivers over here and there is not a feeling that they’re on the same team. Then you’ve got the management company in the middle and the drivers just feel marginalized, not part of the overall team of making the transit system work. That’s unfortunate, because they are the most critical part of making the transit system work and if they’re not happy, the system is not going to work well. So I want to figure out the way to make them happy and to feel supported and to get them to be champions for the system all the time. That would be my goal and I would want to explore all the options.
Who else are you voting for?
Marc Hunt and Lindsey Simerly.
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