City manager Gary Jackson, the most powerful person in city government, is retiring. How he defined an era of Asheville’s politics — and who bore the brutal cost of his administration
Above: Jackson’s name plaque, with him in the background, at the Asheville City Council dais. Photo by Max Cooper
Just over a week ago, the news came in the form of a city press release — longtime City manager Gary Jackson will step down at the end of 2018. By that time, he will have been in office for over 13 years.
Moreso than any individual Council member, than the three mayors he served under, Jackson is the single most powerful individual in Asheville’s city government. While city managers are always pretty important positions Jackson’s long tenure in office, the deference given him by successive Councils and the influence he’s exercised over which policies do and don’t get considered have left a major mark on Asheville.
To say that influence has been controversial would be putting it mildly. Jackson was appointed by the last conservative Council, and while his continued run stems from the acquiescence of their “progressive” successors over more than a decade, it’s indisputable that he pushed local government policy to the right during a time when the population of the city moved increasingly left. Asheville’s government during Jackson’s tenure was far friendlier to the gentry than cash-strapped locals facing increasing pressure.
That tension was more apparent in recent years, as multiple backlashes over the positions and conduct of senior city staff steadily chipped away at Jackson’s public approval. Of the six Council candidates to make it out of the primary in last year’s elections, four were in favor of seriously reining or reviewing Jackson’s power (including one who wanted him and City attorney Robin Currin outright fired) and another had sharply criticized his handling of several major issues. The days when “progressive” politicians would universally laud his efficiency were clearly done.
As with many matters in City Hall, the exact reasons for his departure are likely to remain shrouded behind the cover of personnel law and the need to keep up appearances. With his upcoming departure, it’s worth a sharp look at how he shaped Asheville’s government, how it’s reacting to the end of his tenure and where the city goes from here.
Behind the throne
City manager is always going to be a pretty powerful position. Under the city charter, Council sets policy and directly hires (or fires) three officials: city manager, attorney and clerk.
The manager oversees most of a massive bureaucracy of 1,100 people and departments with powers ranging from police and fire to determining what does and doesn’t get built. While this set-up places less power in the hands of elected officials than systems where the mayor or Council more directly runs governmental affairs, they still have some real clout. Council (a majority anyway) can still set policy, direct those officials (including to carry out legislation they might not personally agree with) and place an immense amount of pressure on the manager, including outright replacing them if they like. Even if a manager’s critics don’t have a majority, they can still make staff’s conduct a major public issue in hopes of spurring political change.
The exact balance of power between manager and Council in Asheville has varied over the years since the system was adopted in 1930. City manager Weldon Weir, for example, was the outright political boss of the whole town for the 50s and 60s. By contrast, Doug O. Bean was abruptly ousted by a conservative Council in 1993 after holding the office since 1986. While Jackson’s predecessor Jim Westbrook stayed in the post for just over a decade, he faced repeated criticism from some on Council and even a nearly-successful attempt to oust him from office.
Jackson came to Asheville after a troubled stint as the city manager in Fort Worth. But he held on here for 13 years with little of the public tumult that marked his previous time in Texas or that of his predecessors in Asheville’s City Hall.
City manager Gary Jackson. Photo by Max Cooper.
He did so through a performance that included an agreeable demeanor (in public, at least), close ties with Council members and an ironclad control of the city bureaucracy. It helped that many of the “progressive” Council members who oversaw him came from a liberal political culture that looked askance at firing the powerful or making hard demands. They were naturally averse to fights or arguments, so Jackson’s conciliatory approach found a rapt audience. Their identity politics matched up too: most of them, like he, were well-off, white and largely insulated from the harsher effects of gentrification.
The chumminess took many forms, from effusive praise in public to conversations over after-meeting bourbon. At one point they even presented Jackson, an avid cyclist, with a framed, giant photo of him winning a race. They applauded him (for what, exactly, was never mentioned) as he received it. At an official Council meeting, no less.
If one’s political goal is to maintain a generously compensated and powerful job for as long as possible, Jackson’s ties with Council were a smart strategy. This effectively immunized him from the pressures that had threatened or driven out his predecessors.
Most importantly, the dynamic also gave him a massive amount of control over policy, probably moreso than any of his predecessors since Weir. Ideas he and the senior staff he hired liked (public-private partnerships, tourist-friendly development, incentives for business owners and corporations, infrastructure on major corridors, hiring lots and lots of consultants) tended to advance, others (inclusionary zoning, vigorous social justice moves, more power to citizen boards, major affordable housing funding, serious efforts to fight racial disparities) didn’t. In many cases, Council members that may have been sympathetic to some of those latter proposals didn’t even try to bring them up, though they technically had the power to pass them over Jackson’s objection if they had mustered enough votes. For most of his tenure Jackson effectively had a de facto veto over city policy.
To the increasingly centrist “progressives” that ran Council throughout his tenure Jackson was a model official: amiable, efficient, honest and knowledgeable. They talked, perpetually, in terms of working together rather than scrutiny or criticism. Even when major controversies or problems occurred on his watch (and they often did) he almost always escaped censure.
That view was given ample length in a statement issued by Mayor Esther Manheimer — who’s worked with Jackson for most of his time in office — upon the announcement of his retirement:
Under your leadership, spanning more than 12 years, you have led the accomplishment of great things for the City of Asheville. Among those: navigating the financial hardship of the great recession, meeting the challenges of tremendous growth, creating a series of sustainable budgets resulting in a AAA bond rating, managing the greatest number of capital improvements to City infrastructure in its history, streamlining permitting and processes to better meet the needs of citizens, “greening” the city through dramatically increased recycling and other environmental measures, improving and growing transit services, building more affordable housing per capita than any other city in North Carolina, leading city staff through the planning of a $74 million general obligation bond program, making our city safer through improvements to police and fire services and helping us forward as we ensure greater equity across the community. These are extraordinary accomplishments for any municipality to achieve, and they would not all have been possible for Asheville without your commitment and leadership.
On a more personal note — and I know I speak for the many members of Council that have served during your tenure — I want to express that it has been a privilege and a deep honor to serve alongside you. You have helped us all become better leaders by tending so carefully and wisely to the governance process with us individually and as a group. Your humor and grace has made it a joy, and we treasure the experiences and friendships that have resulted.
She declined to specify which piece of peppy musical fanfare should accompany the reading of that text.
As with all things involving Jackson, it’s worth looking past the performance to the actual actions in the tally Manheimer presents.
A few are undisputed. Recycling and energy-saving measures are significantly more extensive than they used to be. The city does have a AAA bond rating (though that just indicates that the bond markets think they’ll get their money back; the area still has a massive poverty problem) and it did weather the recession with less cuts than some of its peers around the state (though it also entrenched major pay disparities between highly paid upper-middle and senior staff and rank-and-file city workers). The water system’s made considerable improvements over the past decade (though the groundwork for that was laid before Jackson’s tenure) and the city has built more sidewalks, repaired more roads and built more infrastructure (how much of that has gone to traditionally under-served neighborhoods is a very different story).
From there we enter areas where the version of things described in Manheimer’s letter are a good deal more disputed. That “streamlined” permitting and development largely benefitted people looking to start businesses or major projects, i.e. those with money. It also opened the way for the much-hated metastasizing of the hotel industry.
Bond referendums were dismissed outright by top officials for years and only advanced after public pressure and the upsets of the 2015 election. The transit system saw major mismanagement problems mount for years while the staff overseeing it ignored repeated concerns from rider advocates and the transit workers’ union. While recent reforms have led to some real improvements, those changes only came after advocates and transit workers won out over Jackson’s bureaucracy, who fought them tooth and nail for years.
Affordable housing? Asheville has a nationally notorious housing crisis and remains one of the most unaffordable cities in the country. Even Council members have repeatedly admitted that the city’s methods for tackling affordable housing — the ones pursued during most of Jackson’s tenure — were absolutely insufficient to stem the growing desperation many Ashevillians face. Regular funding for affordable housing remains far below what many advocates have pushed for. According to housing rights attorneys city staff even added some extra hoops for tenants to jump through when reporting violations by their landlords (these practices have recently changed for the better after, once again, public pressure).
On the public safety front, the Asheville Police Department during Jackson’s time has been marked by turmoil, from a 2011 evidence room scandal to two chiefs resigning to massive turnover problems. The question of “safe for whom?” is also key, as long-simmering tensions over use of force and racial disparities in policing erupted into the forefront in recent years, only for Jackson’s handpicked police chief to react by clamping down on protests. She followed that up by using dubious stats to push for a controversial police expansion, skipping the city’s usual public process and drawing an outpouring of opposition. The city’s racial disparities in traffic stops remain exceptionally bad.
That ties into the fact that on the equity front Jackson’s administration hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory. Disparities in Asheville worsened, in some cases dramatically, during his tenure, as documented by the State of Black Asheville project. City boards remained disproportionately white, wealthy and male. After the 2015 elections ended two years of an all-white Council, he agreed to hire an equity manager to oversee some efforts at reform, only to place that position under the communications department (which handles public relations). Advocates are now pushing for an equity office to get real independence and funding, and it remains to be seen if even that modest reform will happen.
Then there’s the other tally, of actions (and lack of actions) in areas not even mentioned in the press release.
According to a 2010 lawsuit, Jackson allegedly ignored repeated claims by a police officer that her supervisor was repeatedly subjecting her to racist and sexist text messages (the city later admitted the text messages were real, but claimed they didn’t indicate wrongdoing). The officer was demoted, but not fired, and the city settled the lawsuit.
Asheville steadily became more segregated, and calls for serious action fell on deaf ears in City Hall until electoral pressure finally forced some modest steps in the last few years. Senior staff backed a push by downtown gentry to basically privatize the area’s government, including hiring their own security force (it failed because almost everyone not directly involved in the effort hated the idea). Meanwhile, a majority black neighborhood can’t even get a pool renovated after years of grass-roots efforts without having city staff refuse their repeated public input and refer the matter to a consultant.
City Hall by night. Photo by Max Cooper.
The city adopted a commitment to a living wage, then under Jackson’s administration quietly paid hundreds of workers far less. When public backlash finally pushed Council to remedy the situation Jackson (who makes nearly $200,000 a year) relentlessly fought the idea of those workers getting $12 an hour. The worker who publicly spoke out about the issue was later fired, and Civic Center workers who finally won a living wage were then, at staff’s direction, stripped of their ability to receive tips. In early 2016, it emerged that city staff had simply not enacted major parts of the city’s food action plan despite Council directing them to do just that. The next year the city chopped down food trees, violating an agreement with local non-profits. Some senior city staff spent a shocking amount of time and resources trying to basically crush the local busking scene, a move favored by approximately no one outside of a handful of wealthy gentry. They were only forced back by yet more public outcry.
In 2016, civil rights groups called upon the city to pass serious non-discrimination protections and back Charlotte’s pro-LGBT rights efforts. They refused. Nor was that an exception; during Jackson’s tenure, Asheville repeatedly declined to adopt progressive measures undertaken by other N.C. cities, from requiring affordable housing in new developments to stricter police oversight. Jackson’s handpicked city attorney took far-right legal stances and pushed to make city government and public records less transparent than before. When the NAACP and Southern Coalition for Social Justice pushed last year for modest reforms to curb racial disparities in traffic stops, city government quietly refused to adopt almost all of their proposals. Last year the overhaul of the River District, intended as the crown jewel of Jackson’s tenure, ended up snarled in massive cost overruns, a lack of transparency and concerns about equity.
I’m sure I’m missing a few things, but that’s probably enough to get the idea.
Many on Council may have adored Jackson, but among many locals without such lofty positions, the cumulative result is a sentiment that started showing up far more often as the years wound on. As one commenter observed during the 2016 food plan fights, the public found Jackson’s administration “a very dark and impenetrable place.”
Curtain call
The twilight of Jackson’s era in office didn’t come in a single major showdown or a dramatic vote. While he often seemed immune to serious backlash the controversies above did, over time, start to damage his political reputation, especially from 2015 on. The living wage fight marked one of the first times Council directly went against his wishes on a major issue.
While meetings still had a veneer of comity and Jackson never got publicly criticized (the 2017 Council retreat was a notorious example of staff pushing back to take even more power), it was clear his actions and those of other senior city staff were a topic of far more public controversy than before. Tellingly, in 2016 Council rolled back some of the major development policies he’d shepherded to passage during the first part of his tenure, taking back control over downtown and hotel development.
The public was less quiet. Last year saw the biggest public backlash to a city budget in recent history, and in the Council elections that followed “when will you fire the city manager?” was the question Blade readers most wanted us to ask candidates. As noted at the start of this piece, most of the candidates that made it through to the general election had serious issues with the balance of power between Council and staff. As the post-2015 changes showed, those shifts can have an impact even among Council members who weren’t up for re-election.
In front of the cameras, Jackson got a standing ovation at the Feb. 9 Council meeting as Manheimer repeated the effusive praise of her letter.
But Council also met in closed session to discuss an undisclosed “personnel matter” in both its January meetings. We may not ever know whether Jackson read the writing on the wall and decided it was a good moment for a fairly gentle exit or whether the pressure from some on Council was a bit sharper and more direct than that.
The era’s also not entirely over, and a lot will depend on what happens in the next few months, as Asheville selects another city manager (inevitably hiring an executive recruitment firm to aid them). What role Jackson will play in the process, and how much a somewhat more skeptical Council will balance out his influence, remains to be seen.
For Jackson personally, his era in office was an unabashed success and probably the best paid performance of any actor in Asheville history. He had de facto control over city policy for over a decade and he’ll doubtless be set up for a very comfortable retirement, probably combined with some incredibly lucrative consulting work.
The rest of us aren’t so fortunate. While the dangers and desperation many Ashevillians now face have their roots long before Jackson’s time, the administration he headed for over a decade either pointedly neglected mounting crises or actively made them worse.
Beyond the damage of those acts, there is the harm they inflicted on the already-fragile ties with the people of this city. His performance leaves a city government less trusted, less responsive and less legitimate in the eyes of many of the people it claims to serve.
For Asheville, the era of Jackson was an era of failure.
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