Insistence on a controversial police expansion and pay hikes for top-level staff bust a hole in Asheville’s finances and bring social justice proposals to a halt in this year’s hidden city budget fight

Above: City Hall by night. Photo by Max Cooper

[Editor’s note: While many locals showed up to comment on the budget, Council and city staff ended up delaying it so far into the agenda that the hearing didn’t take place until after 9 p.m., by which time many Ashevillians (not being rich lawyers with flexible schedules) had to go home or to work. This year’s budget process has been a farce However, Council can re-open the public hearing on the budget before their vote this Tuesday, June 19. You can tell them to do so, and share your opinion about the budget, here. — D.F. 6/17/18]

One of the biggest political issues of the year — perhaps the biggest — has flown almost completely under the radar. Every year the city of Asheville passes a budget. This controls what money gets spent where and what plans get vital funding (or don’t). Approving that budget — $180 million this time around — is almost always the most important vote local elected officials will make all year.

Locals will get a chance to weigh in at tonight’s public hearing (5 p.m. on the second floor of City Hall) and Council will vote on the issue at its June 19 meeting. You can also call or email Council. You should, because the story of the budget this year is far more important — and troubling — than many realize.

This year, the city faced a budget gap, projected at about $3 to 5 million at various times. This isn’t unheard of, it was really common to see Councils wrangle with these during the years around the recession and when a far-right state government started slashing sources of local revenue with abandon.

But this year was different because much of the gap wasn’t due to declining revenues or outside cuts. Instead, it was self-inflicted, caused largely by an insistence on an expensive and controversial proposal to massively ramp up policing in downtown and on raises that will disproportionately go to higher-level city staff. That meant that a number of social justice initiatives — fare free or considerably improved transit service, participatory budgeting, an eviction crisis fund — that proved popular in last year’s elections were pushed completely off the table.

If this sounds like a recipe for a political conflict, that’s what many expected. The police plan drew a major public turnout last year, much of it opposed. The issue of law enforcement in our city has seen a firestorm of controversy since. But while the police and pay issues were discussed in early April, at the last two Council meetings even those opposed to the proposal stayed silent as the expansion plans moved forward.

It didn’t stop there. The budget presentation, usually 10 to 15 minutes with multiple slides and explanations, was just three and a half minutes this year. Until yesterday, the budget itself was also difficult to find on the city’s website, buried back in a timeline (the day after a Blade social media post pointed this out, the city finally put up an announcement with a clear link and more information, though it notably doesn’t mention the staff pay hikes or the police expansion at all).

While the past week has seen a bit more attention among the public, especially due to the work of local activists and government watchers, the fact is that the day for the people of this city to weigh in has come with remarkably little attention. Indeed, aspects of the process reek of an effort to actively keep the public from being aware of what’s being done with our resources, in our name.

What happened?

Under the radar

Last year the budget became an all-out political brawl, especially over the police expansion. There were major transparency issues then too: Asheville Police Department Chief Tammy Hooper skipped the usual budget process entirely, refusing to present her proposal to multiple committees that normally would have heard it and using shaky numbers in the justifications she did offer. Repeated changes to budget documents often weren’t presented in a clear manner to the public (the expansion hasn’t received any more transparently this time around).

In a time of enduring segregation and increasing gentrification, the issue proved a perfect storm: a wide coalition of critics saw the city as spending desperately-needed resources on something that would only result in more locals getting harassed on minor or fabricated charges. “A million dollars for the people” — calling for the funds to go to housing, transit or other social services instead — became the rallying cry of an array of angry locals, left-wing groups, progressive non-profits and even some downtown business owners opposed to the expansion.

Council ended up passing last year’s budget, with the police increase, 5-2 with Council members Keith Young and Brian Haynes opposed. But the pressure had some effect. Instead of going fully into effect in the 2017-18 budget cycle, the APD only took the initial steps, with full approval to await this year’s budget. Those early steps were funded by a variety of other temporary cuts within the department.

Staff pay was also an issue last year, with $2.5 million going to increased salaries, especially to senior staff, who had access to potential bonuses on top of getting a major share of the pay hikes.

Last year Council raised property taxes, partly to help pay back bonds approved by voters for transportation infrastructure, parks and rec and affordable housing. But this year Council was loath to pass another such increase. What’s more, this year’s budget called for staff to get a 3 percent pay increase across-the-board (later dropped to 2.5 percent).

Between reversing the temporary cuts from last year and the full cost of the police expansion plan, its price tag inched towards $1.4 million. Combined with $3.5 million in increased staff pay (some of it for new positions but the lion’s share for pay hikes), these two measures broke a hole in the city’s budget.

Most of the city’s budget already goes to staff pay. The across-the-board method used by city management to raise pay might seem pretty straightforward, but in practice it means more well-off senior staff take a disproportionate share of the pay hikes. For example, under this year’s plan a rank-and-file firefighter’s raise tallies out to a good bit less than $1000 a year. But an upper-middle position gets a raise more than twice that and a senior-level staffer more than quadruples it (the APD Chief will get a $4,000 a year raise under this year’s budget).

In the ensuing year, policing has become an even more controversial issue. Two of the three victors in last year’s election had criticized the expansion or the troubling process used to pass it (though Vijay Kapoor said that he wouldn’t vote to reverse it). The attack on Johnnie Rush showed cops from rookie to supervisor complicit in acts of blatant racist brutality. On top of that Asheville now has some of the worst racial disparities in traffic stops and searches of any city in the state, but Council and the APD have repeatedly refused to adopt reforms proposed by the local NAACP (a presentation about that issue is also on Council’s agenda tonight).

So political anger over the issue has grown, and what happened to Rush added a potent piece of evidence for the main argument against the police expansion: that given the current state of the APD it will largely use additional officers to harass minorities and gentrify the city’s core further.

Indeed, three Council members had opposed the expansion. Haynes and Young voted against it last year, and Council member Sheneika Smith criticized it harshly on the campaign trail. Indeed, at the April 10 budget work session the opponents reiterated their criticisms. Haynes also proposed limiting this year’s staff pay hikes to those city workers making $50,000 or less.

But then something strange happened. The issue nearly disappeared entirely. The next budget session, on April 24, staff announced a plan to close the gap through a smattering of cuts, the use of reserve funds and an increase in parking fees. The causes of the gap were barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The same was the case at the May 15 Council meeting. Kapoor mentioned the expansion briefly, when the parking fee hikes passed 5-2 (with Haynes and Young opposed). Activist Amy Cantrell highlighted it in a public comment at the end of the meeting. If Council opposition to the police plan was still there, it got very quiet.

While the proposed budget closed the gap, a big part of this story is what didn’t happen, what the insistence on staff raises and more policing removed from the table. Transit improvements nearly disappeared, being sharply limited to replacing a few older buses and hiring (for $86,000 a year) a transit planner. Instead of the long-demanded increased routes or later service, rider advocates got a promise to pay someone over twice the median income to think about doing those things sometime in the future (maybe).

The budget does fund the Equity Office and increase the authority the city’s equity manager has, but it remains unclear exactly how much power they’ll receive (the office still remains under the city manager’s authority). Meanwhile, a proposal to start participatory budgeting, which would give local neighborhoods some direct say in how a portion of city funds are used, also disappeared. Aside from the bond funds, the budget keeps affordable housing spending flat.

The May 15 budget presentation by CFO Barbara Whitehorn was also incredibly short, just three and a half minutes with very few details and zero mention of either the police expansion or staff pay. This is unheard of. The city’s never been great on transparency, but almost every year I’ve covered Council has seen presentations that were 10 to 15 minutes with multiple slides and numerous details about spending.

There was more: the budget was hard to find on the city’s website, and when the Council meeting agenda was released, it was sandwiched among an array of other public hearings. This too is unusual; in most years, other public hearings are kept to a minimum due to the import of the public weighing in on the budget.

Last year, an unprecedented number of locals showed up to express their anger about the direction of the city and call for a different approach.

This year, the way city officials have handled the budget process reeks of an all-out push to make sure that doesn’t happen again: to lock out the people, avoid criticism and pass incredibly controversial policies without adequate information or public discussion.

Show up anyway.

Silent seats

A big question throughout all this has been why Council members who opposed the police expansion and had concerns about the staff pay hikes weren’t more vocal. Even if a group of Council members doesn’t have the votes to carry the day, they can still raise problems and turn a topic into a matter of public attention and debate.

“I was silent because I didn’t feel I had the support, didn’t feel like there was a point in bringing it up,” Haynes tells the Blade about his conduct during the past two Council meetings. “”At most, three others on Council feel this way. It’s discouraging.”

After the April 10 meeting, he says, Whitehorn and Hooper had Council members, in groups of two, attend a presentation on the details of the police expansion (such a presentation was not made to the pubic). He said that during that discussion Hooper seemed more open to proposals to rein in police conduct towards the homeless, but that the APD made no definite commitments.

But Haynes remains opposed to the police expansion and says he won’t be silent tonight.

“I still intend to vote against the budget,” he says. “I won’t be silent [at the public hearing] and I hope others will do the same.”

“I’m still learning along the way,” Smith says when asked about the relative lack of opposition at the last two meetings. “I do think it’s important to speak on it anyway, so people know that you’re not bowing down.”

“We’ll never get the four votes” to halt the police expansion, she adds, but believes that opponents like her still have an obligation to push back.

She says she hasn’t been satisfied with the level of public transparency and attention around the issue. In a time when “the public really needs to have some sort of open dialogue around policing, [the city] hasn’t been very open.”

The APD has lost trust even from community leaders, Smith emphasizes, and changing that “the APD is going to have to give something up. Council is going to have to take on more leadership.”

Young did not respond to requests for comment.

Haynes says that since he took office in 2016, he’s “never really been satisfied” with the level of transparency in the city’s budget process and presentations. “It’s a little discouraging.”

Even Council, Haynes said, often doesn’t seem to get a full picture from senior staff.

“We’re told one thing one time, and one thing another.”

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