In the weeks between two citywide elections, local government still continued on with some important steps. Here’s what happened over at City Council
Above: Mayor Esther Manheimer. File photo by Max Cooper.
Asheville elections are interesting beasts. There’s a long primary season, with candidates usually declaring in the first half of the year then stepping things up after the official filing deadline in July, with campaigning steadily escalating until primary day in early October.
Then there’s a little less than a month before the public (those who show up to vote, anyway) make their final decision. At that point, especially in a close election like the one we just had, things can get downright frenzied, with a multitude of forums, mailers and campaign ads cropping up everywhere and those engaged in local politics hurriedly trying to get out the vote for their side.
But during all this time local government is still going about its business, though not at the usual pace. While there’s no rule about it, Council’s historically held off on major items until after the election. This time was no exception, but some important things still happened (and some very major items are up for a vote before the new members take office).
Here’s a rundown of what happened there.
Hitting the pavement
One of the biggest changes concerned sidewalks, particularly an attempt to deal with the dearth of them.
As Asheville saw a growing population and increased business over the past 25 years, a number of major challenges to its infrastructure arose. Infrastructure was left neglected (especially, many have asserted, in the city’s minority neighborhoods) during the city’s desperately cash-strapped years, which coincided with planning at all levels of government more focused on cars than pedestrians.
Then the city’s population boomed, taxing the infrastructure faster than the tax base could keep up with it. In addition, tourists use (and thus strain) the city’s infrastructure, but don’t pay the property taxes upon which municipal revenue primarily depends. Also, as more people and businesses moved into the city core, people demanded more options or pointed out that, in a city with notoriously low wages, many couldn’t depend on a car for transport.
Sidewalks are also expensive. According to city staff’s calculations, the $350,000 a year it has set aside to meet neighborhood sidewalk needs will cover the planning, designing and building of about 1,000 feet. And the city’s neighborhoods — leaving out major corridors — need 90 miles (at the current rate of funding sidewalks, Council member Cecil Bothwell noted, that would take about 475 years).
So the city’s been trying to figure out a way to rank neighborhood need to prioritize how it spends that cash and provides sidewalks (though perhaps a bit faster than the next four centuries).
At its Oct. 13 meeting, the city rolled out the policy and Council gave it its blessing.
“This arose out of concerns that neighborhoods were asking for sidewalks and projects couldn’t compete with the larger projects like Hendersonville Road,” Jim Grode, chair of the city’s Mulitmodal Transportation Commission, said. “So the city developed an allocation for neighborhood sidewalks.”
That allocation was the aforementioned $350,000 and the process was developed between city staff and committee members to figure out how to divvy it up. They settled on a policy with a two-step process prioritizing sidewalks based on proximity to transit, zoning, low-income neighborhoods and the number of people without cars, as well as traffic volume and the history of crashes involving pedestrians.
The second round then further filters the areas that have those needs based on their connectivity, if a sidewalk’s already present, how easy a sidewalk would be to build and how widely the city could distribute them. The goal of all that, Grode noted, was to create a more “objective” way of dealing out the city’s limited sidewalk funds.
He emphasized that the second round of criteria wouldn’t eliminate an area from getting sidewalks, instead “it just helps prioritize them.” He also noted that in some of these areas, additional funds might come from other city or outside sources, “this is just for this pot of money,” and hoped the city would find enough additional funds that replacing neighborhood sidewalks “isn’t a 400-year cycle.”
But Council member Chris Pelly said he was concerned that the new criteria might leave out less-dense neighborhoods — one of the zoning criteria prioritized higher-density neighborhoods lacking sidewalks — and result in their exclusion from receiving newer sidewalks.
“It cuts off a substantial part of the city,” he asserted.
Grode noted that two of the top areas for sidewalks under the new criteria, Old Haywood Road and North Louisiana, weren’t particularly high-density, but made the list because of other criteria.
“We may go back and see some things we need to tweak,” Transportation Director Ken Putnam said. “But what we were trying to do was get a list where everybody can see that we would then be further along for getting it set up for the next five years.”
Other Council members were less critical than Pelly.
“I think you’ve done an amazing thing,” Council member Gordon Smith said. “With all the requests we get, we’re going to allocate the resources to where they’re going to make the most people safer, link the most people to the things they need to be linked to — as well as the other criteria there — I find it very clear and it ought to be really helpful for us to recognize as a city.”
“We’ve needed this for a little while,” Vice Mayor Marc Hunt said.
“Our community deserves a clear process and if they don’t agree with the opinion an opportunity to have their voice heard,” Mayor Esther Manheimer said.
As for how much sidewalks the city could build in neighborhoods, Putnam noted that “we’re hoping to do a lot more than 1,000 feet” but they wanted to err on the conservative side so as not to get expectations too high.
Council passed the new sidewalks policy unanimously, with revised language to note that lower-density neighborhoods would not be excluded.
The legislature wrapped up
Months after its originally scheduled adjournment, the North Carolina General Assembly concluded after the House and Senate managed to agree on a budget plan. On Oct. 13, Manheimer gave the last update of the year, something she’d noted previously she looked forward to with a sense of relief given the differences (to put it mildly) between the city and the legislature.
But the assembly went out with a frenzy, as there was a last-minute attempt — inserted into a bill on licensing counselors — to strip all cities in the state of the ability to regulate nearly everything, including discrimination, any private employment practice, wages, housing and traffic. The way it was initially written, the bill might even have ended requirements, for example, that housing have heat.
The move drew opposition from groups representing municipalities, the LGBT community and even some Republicans in the legislature concerned about the sweeping changes and the way they were brought forward. Eventually, the changes stalled and the counselor bill passed without them.
“We had a little flurry at the end of the session,” Manheimer said.
“Some of those initiatives got put into study committees, so it’s not as if they were defeated,” Hunt noted. “They’re active ideas that might come up again.”
But on the legal front, the city wasn’t so lucky, as the Court of Appeals overturned a previous ruling that state legislation seizing the city’s water system was illegal on a number of fronts.
“As we’ve all heard, we received a very bad decision on the water legislation from the Court of Appeals,” Manheimer noted. Later that meeting, Council decided to appeal the decision to the N.C. Supreme Court.
Mission gets the go-ahead
Council also signed off one of the biggest structures the city’s seen in a long time; a new tower for Mission Hospitals, another organization that’s expanded as the city’s population has also grown. The 12-story building, according to Mission’s representatives, would include a new emergency room and replace many of the hospital’s current beds with a more modern facility. It had to get Council’s approval, under the city’s zoning rules, due to its sheer size.
At the same time, the city’s changed and now local government’s looking to make roads like the hospital upgrade’s location on Biltmore Avenue part of better-connected urban corridors friendlier to non-drivers and with more future opportunities for housing and business directly on the street. So a major institutional building faced some challenges as city staff — as well as the city’s Planning and Zoning commission — had concerns that some features of the building did little to help the city’s goals of making the streets more accessible and usable by the public.
By the time the proposal reached the Council dais for a vote, Mission had agreed to add a courtyard, along with trees and more aesthetically pleasing walls. The hospital, also one of the biggest organizations and employers in the area, also promised a bus shelter to move the whole tower closer to city approval.
“I appreciate the effort to change the feel of this as it moves along Biltmore Avenue because I don’t think the first version is appropriate for a modern urban setting,” Manheimer replied when presented with the changes. But she also wanted more connection from the parking area to the new tower as part of improving the situation for pedestrians using the hospital, but staff said that Mission offiicals found the possibility of including stairwells and other changes “too challenging” to include.
Bothwell said that, going forward, the city should perhaps look into “clearer definitions” of parking requirements for larger buildings like this, given that “the changing nature of transportation” may make less spaces necessary.
Sonya Greck, Mission’s Vice President of Operations, said the hospital started planning for the new tower in 2011, as “it was quite obvious” that many of its facilities — including the emergency room — were becoming too old to adequately keep serving its patients.
“This tower is a replacement hospital,” Greck told Council. “We did not feel our current facilities had the healing environment we wanted.”
Greck hoped that the new building would be a “state-of-the-art facility” that would suit Mission for years to come. She also asserted that the hospital had “a very challenging site” to work with and had “done its best.”
Mission had agreed to spend $20,000 on a transit shelter as a condition as getting the project approved. Staff then informed Council that it might be more than that, given that costs could differ once city workers started building the shelter. In the end Council opted for a condition that Mission reimburse the city for any costs of a bus shelter, up to $30,000.
Council member Gwen Wisler expressed concern about the relatively long walk pedestrians leaving the facility would face.
“We’re trying to move Biltmore Avenue in the direction of being a vibrant urban corridor and the way you do that is you energize that urban corridor with storefronts, restaurants, housing,” Manheimer added. “This is not a very forward-thinking concept in terms of an urban corridor. I realize there’s practical concerns and I’m thrilled that Mission is serving the needs of WNC by building this facility, but this is Asheville and we’re hoping that folks will work with us in trying to continue this theme of pedestrian-friendly corridors.”
Mission representatives replied that they needed the project’s current configuration for it to work effectively with the rest of the hospital’s facilities.
Bothwell added that he was “optimistic” that once the medical functions from the old St. Joseph’s campus across the street moved into the new facility, that space could be redeveloped into a combination of retail and housing to further enhance the area.
He also praised Mission’s project for lowering the carbon footprint of the hospital by lowering the amount of ambulance trips between the two campuses.
Despite their concerns, however, Council proceeded to approve the project unanimously.
New planning commission members
The city’s planning and zoning commission is among its most powerful boards, as changes in recent years gave it more authority to directly approve developments without going to Council (that power itself was the subject of some controversy in the recent election).
On Oct. 27, at a brief meeting before the election, Council appointed Guillermo Rodriguez and Tony Hauser, both landscape architects. At pre-meeting interviews, Rodriguez cited his experience with urban design and the need to rein in and manage the effects of tourism, while Hauser noted that he supported mixed-used development near the Basilica of St. Lawrence and believed market forces would resolve the controversy over hotels.
The two replace outgoing members Holly Shriner (who had served the maximum number of terms) and Joe Minicozzi (who declined to go for another term), both members whose initial appointments attracted some controversy, Shriner’s due to a perceived lack of experience and Minicozzi due to assertions that he had previously been unfairly overlooked — despite an abundance of experience — for an appointment.
Double-header
Normally, one might expect things to slow down a bit before three new Council members — Keith Young, Brian Haynes and Julie Mayfield — take office on Dec. 4.
Not so, as the current Council, with outgoing members Hunt, Pelly and Jan Davis, still has some major issues to weigh in on. Tonight’s meeting will see Council consider new loan terms and funding (along with a reduction in the number of affordable housing units) for Mountain Housing Opportunities’ Eagle Market Place project. The changes are, the non-profit’s leaders claim, necessary to deal with the consequences of a broken concrete slab and will allow the project to proceed while the organization seeks compensation for the problem.
Meanwhile, at the Nov. 17 meeting (Council’s having two in back-to-back weeks), Council will again take up the controversial issue of what to do about Airbnb and its ilk. Back in August, Council reaffirmed the ban on short-term rentals in most areas of the city, with increased fines and enforcement. It also delayed a decision on relaxing the rules on “homestays,” which would allow residents to use part of their own home for short-term rentals, amid fears of possible loopholes. Now new rules on homestays are back on the agenda.
There’s plenty to watch before the new Council members are even sworn in. It’s going to be an interesting Fall.
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