A breaking transit system, an attempt to sweep the Rush attack under the rug, an early start to budget battles, land use wrangling and the public comment that wasn’t

Above: Pictures taken by bus drivers of a major oil leak on an Asheville transit system bus, submitted as part of a letter by the local union president expressing “grave concern” about the state of the transit system.

August 28

Members of the public, journalists, activists, advocates and others who braved the Aug. 28 Asheville City Council meeting were in for the long haul. After a budget work session and a lengthy array of hearings and presentations combined with an hour-long closed session (dropped right in the middle of the meeting) Council had met for nearly eight hours when adjournment finally came. That length, as we’ll see, caused its own problems. Locals there to comment on issues ranging from policing to the bus system were essentially denied a chance to weigh in because the meeting ran so late that it made public comment impractical, something Council worsened by a few of their own decisions in how to structure the proceedings.

Some of the meeting was consumed by fairly small-scale zoning battles. But some major issues came up as well. The budget, transit and policing all saw their turn in the spotlight.

• The bus system is a wreck, and union and rider advocates want the city to enforce its contract — The Asheville transit system, which thousands of locals rely on to get to work and partake in public life, is in shambles. In July the bus system missed 539.5 hours, meaning some routes were basically not functional. On Aug. 1, a letter from Diane Allen, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union local representing the system’s workers, expressed “grave concern” to city officials about the safety and state of the transit system if more resources were not immediately put to staffing, repairs and maintenance.

This is the latest part of a long-running fight. Over the past few years ongoing problems in the bus system spurred an effort by the union local and rider advocates to push for reforms to solve serious problems they asserted were due to rampant mismanagement and the negligent approach of city transit staff. After a major political battle, they won the replacement of the management company and a new contract that put more of the burden of keeping the system running properly on the new management company, RATP Dev, with fines and penalties if they failed to deliver.

While city transit staffer Elias Mathes acknowledged major problems in July, he told Council that the issue was now less dire, that they didn’t expect July’s problems to reoccur and that new buses were on the way later this year and early next year. He noted that normally the penalties would have kicked in, but that the city was choosing not to enforce that part of the contract because they believed the company was operating in good faith.

But while they had to wait hours — until open public comment at the end of the meeting — to deliver a response, union representatives and rider advocates took the city to task, saying that they were obligated to enforce the penalties until a situation that put both riders and drivers in danger was remedied.

Vicki Meath, director of Just Economics, told Council the situation was “completely unacceptable.”

“We have been working with the city since 2014 to improve the bus system,” she said, noting that they were proud of the contract that the city, the union and rider advocates had worked on together but “that management contract isn’t worth anything if we don’t enforce it.”

The 539.5 missed hours, she said, represented “people not getting to work, not getting to school, not getting their kids to daycare, not getting to the grocery store. That is unacceptable and it’s really the city’s responsibility to hold the company to that contract.” She was skeptical of the city’s claims that things would improve without the contract’s penalties and enforcement.

Allen told Council that the condition of the buses hadn’t improved, that the system was still short on mechanics and that the issues needed to be addressed as “we care about our riders, we care about our city.”

Transit committee member Kim Roney spoke in support of the ATU and transit riders, claiming that city staff had given her committee shifting explanations of the system’s problems and when they would actually be solved. She was now skeptical of their rosier assessments and said that Council needed to “instruct staff to uphold the contract.”

Since the Aug. 28 meeting, union representatives have continue to meet with the management company and transit staff. On Sept. 6 ATU International Representative Sesil Rubain wrote to the Blade that progress is being made.

“Presently we are working with ART and they are, at this time, being helpful in our campaign,” he wrote. “We got most of our requested information from ART and ART has promised to improve maintenance and hire more technicians.”

• An official report tries to bury the Johnnie Rush attack — While policing has been a constant issue in Asheville for a long time, the events of the past year have brought it front and center, especially the attack on Johnnie Rush, which happened almost just over a year before the Aug. 28 Council meeting. Rush was walking home from work when then-Asheville Police Department Officer Chris Hickman and trainee accused him (wrongly) of jaywalking. After harassing him, Hickman proceeded to brutally beat and tase Rush.

Other officers enabled or actively assisted Hickman. His supervisor, Sgt. Lisa Taube, mocked Rush’s injuries, falsely claimed he was intoxicated and ignored his right to file a complaint. Then the case was kept from the public eye (including outside investigators, elected officials and the city manager) for nearly five months, until after a key local election. From start to finish, the case revealed injustices at every level of the department.

The report, conducted by 21 CP Solutions, a consulting firm made up of former police, is an odd document. On the one hand, it condemns Hickman’s violence and even acknowledges several multi-level issues that led to it. The report found that the APD had major problems with training (Hickman should have been disciplined long before, let alone in charge of training other officers), enabling the violence against Rush (multiple other officers and supervisors should have intervened and didn’t) and a failure to communicate to elected officials and the city manager (who wouldn’t find out about the case until a video of the attack was leaked to the press months later).

But then, after citing these serious failures the report bizarrely claims the state of the APD is basically fine and that it’s a “high-functioning agency.” While the Rush incident amplified broad community criticisms of the department, the only people the report interviewed were city staff and police officials (who, shockingly, thought that city staff and police officials had done a great job). While the incident shone a spotlight on the department’s history of serious problems with violence towards black Ashevillians, every last named person interviewed by the consulting firm was white. The rosy assessment of the APD’s performance is based entirely on its accreditation by CALEA, a police organization.

While the revelations about the Rush attack set off a public debate and the very push for reform that led to the report being commissioned in the first place, the document claims that the real problem was the public being aware of the incident at all, it condemned the leak and essentially asserted that the criminal investigation of Hickman’s conduct was going just fine until the public and the press got in the way. It focused on the need for the police department to have a faster and more capable public relations office.

The report also outright ignores several key pieces of contradictory evidence. For example, it asserts that embattled APD Chief Tammy Hooper followed the relevant laws and procedures, but makes no mention of the APD’s own use of force policy, which required her to call in outside investigators for any case involving the death or serious injury of a civilian (Hickman tased Rush repeatedly and admitted “I beat the shit out of his head”). Hooper would fail to do so for five months.

The APD has the worst racial disparities in its traffic stops and searches of any major city in North Carolina. While this should have raised serious questions for any outside group examining the APD, especially related to its training and practices, the report failed to mention this entirely. Indeed, the only time it brings up racism is to condemn remarks by Council member Sheneika Smith — one of Council’s two African-American members — about the role of structural racism in local policing as “inappropriately prejudicial against the APD.”

The report emerged out of a Council request for an examination of the incident March 20 worksession, and the consulting firm was paid $87,500 for the result. While the contract called for a “comprehensive review” that took “community response” into account, Council got a narrow document that ignored the community almost entirely, only talked to city staff and condemned both public knowledge of the video and the very discussion of structural racism.

Despite this cover-up, criticism on Council was relatively muted. The only skeptical voice was Smith, who questioned Sean Smoot, the police union attorney representing the consulting firm, if the firm had reached out to community members to get a broader picture of the police department. He replied that they hadn’t. She asked if his firm would find that beneficial. He said that he didn’t understand her question. Smith replied that without community viewpoints the report came off as “the police policing the police.” Smoot then asserted that the firm’s job was only to “call balls and strikes” and he believed the APD had a “fairly robust community engagement program.”

Instead of a new leaf, the report was in line with a pretty typical tack from senior staff and most Council members over the past decade: “Everything’s fine, the crisis was a one-off (except for the last time it happened, and the time before that, and the time before…) and we just need better p.r. about all the good things we’re doing. And if no one would ever air our dirty laundry or criticize us (it’s not constructive) that would be grand.”

Indeed, Council member Vijay Kapoor, who’s emerged during the police fights as Council’s most right-wing member and the most vocal defender of the APD’s leadership, has already embraced this line of attack, asserting in a public statement that the real issue in the Rush case was the press revealing the racist attack and that Hooper was dealing with the situation properly until meddling Ashevillians came along.

Nonetheless, public backlash to Hooper is mounting. A petition to remove her from office has gathered over 200 signatures and her surveillance of peaceful civil rights groups has been publicly criticized by civil rights groups like the NAACP. But for a range of reasons, for the moment senior city staff and some on Council seem to be doubling down on keeping her in her job and burying criticism of her administration. We’ll see how long that lasts.

• An early start to the budget battles — Once upon a time (a few years ago), city budgets didn’t tend to attract much public controversy. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of criticisms one could make of them. For example, a lot of the problems the city’s struggling with now are tied to the budget decisions of 2006-16, when “progressive” Councils repeatedly passed gentry-friendly policies despite problems like a worsening housing crisis and transit system. But during that time most local political battles tended to focus around zoning fights or other struggles over policy. The budget was the domain of wonks, the occasional activist and a few non-profits.

That changed rapidly in 2017, when a controversial policing expansion became a flashpoint for larger concerns about gentrification, equity and the relative lack of city resources going to issues like fighting the housing crisis or addressing de facto segregation. The budget hearing that year was packed and raucous. The budget ended up passing 5-2, but much of the police expansion did end up delayed, meaning it would have to come back for another vote (and, presumably, another conflict) this year.

This year, the actions of senior staff and a narrow majority on Council seemed tailor-made to avoid a repeat of 2017; to keep the budget issue out of the public eye and permit as little public criticism as possible. A fairly tepid opposition didn’t help either: while three Council members opposed the expansion, they let it proceed for months without much vocal criticism or helping to rally the public against it.

The result was a self-inflicted budget shortfall that resulted from the city prioritizing raises for high-level staff and the police expansion. Both these moves were deeply unpopular with broad sections of the public, especially as they meant social justice priorities like transit, participatory budgeting and equity got short shrift. But staff managed to keep the issues quiet, barely discussing them at the public budget sessions or official presentations, the opposition stayed relatively silent and the public hearing on the budget ended up not taking place until 9:30 p.m. during an already-busy Council meeting. It was the least transparent process I’ve ever seen.

But word still got out and the next meeting, when Council would vote on the actual passage of the budget, proved a good deal more contentious. Locals tried to insist, with good reason, that they had a right to speak about such a major issue and that Council’s process had been a farce. But Mayor Esther Manheimer insisted the public hearing would remain closed. Amy Cantrell, a longtime social justice and transit advocate, was arrested after she spoke out against the budget during a public hearing on another agenda item, then sat in front of the podium in an act of civil disobedience.

Still, while the budget passed it only did so by a single vote; unusual for Council. The heavy-handed tactics had further inflamed public opinion, so in the ensuing two months, the city opted to start discussion of the budget far earlier, with a series of presentations during the latter months of this year. There’s also some tentative moves to give the transit system a substantial increase, and it’s likely that additional property tax revenue from Mission Hospitals transferring to a for-profit owner (meaning it’s no longer exempt from city taxes) would provide the lion’s share of that increase.

On Aug. 28 CFO Barbara Whitehorn ran the first of those presentations (watch it here), on the state of the city’s overall finances and some tentative predictions for the coming year. Other city staffers came up to hone in on a few areas like the city manager’s, attorney’s and equity offices. For the moment, senior staff are saying they believe that the earlier, more open process is a change for the better. So far there’s been relatively little public debate (public comment isn’t generally allowed during work sessions), but that will likely change (the underlying issues have gone nowhere) and the fact this process is starting so early is a sign that the close vote and public pressure have senior staff a bit rattled.

• The public comment that wasn’t — At the end of every Council meeting there’s an open public comment period when locals can raise concerns about any item that didn’t receive a public hearing or comment period during the agenda.

But with some exceptions, public comment’s been in relatively short supply this year. Council typically only has one meeting a month during the summer months of June and July. But this year, during the most contentious local political season in memory, they went further. March only had a single formal Council meeting. So did August. Combined with the possibility of single-meeting months in November and December, that will make half the year where Council has held only half its usual number of meetings.

On Aug. 28, the open public comment period didn’t take place until nearly 11 p.m.

One meeting a month usually means longer agendas, and that’s certainly been no exception (remember that late budget hearing that spurred so much controversy). Some of the delays have been due to less meetings colliding with growing political tensions.

But even assuming Council members had no choice but to cut down the number of meetings the way they did, there’s been a number of points where the specific decisions (especially of Manheimer, who has broad power over the agenda) have worsened matters. Council has routinely held lengthy closed sessions before public comment periods or hearings that were likely to be contentious. They’ve put key matters fairly late in the agenda and the mismatch between incredibly long meetings (like Aug. 28) and incredibly short ones (like the Sept. 11 meeting that would follow it two weeks later) show that items could be spaced out between meetings a lot more evenly.

A public comment session that happens after 10 p.m. is no public comment at all. It especially shuts out those with less wealth, less spare time and less access to transit — exactly the people Council needs to hear from most. While I have no doubt that some on Council see shutting out the public as way to blunt criticism, I think that others are just not used to pushing back about process or considering who their current procedures exclude. They need to reconsider, and they need to do so quickly.

Public comment should be as accessible as possible. Council could wait to hold closed sessions until after open public comment, in longer meetings as well as shorter ones. They could move particularly contentious items forward in the agenda (which any Council member can call for) so that people get to speak on them with less wait. They could allow public comment after official presentations (like the ones on the Rush and transit reports) if it was clear a substantial part of the audience was there to weigh in on that specific topic. Indeed, while this isn’t a typical practice of Council, these aren’t typical times, and these are all things they’ve done on occasion before.

For elected officials who genuinely believe that more public interest in local government is a good in its own right, these changes should be a given. But even the ones who may prefer quieter meetings due to an inaccessible public comment period should take warning, because there are a lot more reasons than altruism to adopt a more transparent course. Locals are coming to City Hall, waiting for hours and not even getting a chance to voice their concerns. Every time that happens, those same people go home and talk to their friends and neighbors. They tell them that the officials of their city didn’t even have the guts to hear them out — and the anger simmering just below the surface of our town grows just a bit more.

September 11

The Aug. 28 and Sept. 11 meetings were a study in contrasts. The latter ran just over an hour. The former saw incredibly controversial issues once again before Council, while the Sept. 11 meeting saw changes that were more at the procedural level, but ones that still have some wider implications.

• Land use policy gets an overhaul — The major policy item was an overhaul of the city’s Land Use Incentive Grant policy or LUIG (staff, Council and the public all generally pronounce it like the Super Mario Bros. character).

The LUIG policy was passed in 2010, an attempt by Council to encourage more affordable housing near jobs and transit. Using a formula that assigns points for a slew of factors like accessibility, level of affordability, energy-saving features and proximity to a bus line, LUIG offers developers who meet those criteria some of their property tax dollars back for a set period of time.

But the policy’s run into some obstacles. Some developers have routinely pushed for getting substantial incentives despite offering fairly minimal levels of affordable housing, and it hasn’t found the number of takers city staff hoped it would.

So on Sept. 11 Jeff Staudinger, the city’s former point person on affordable housing, returned to City Hall to announce the terms of the proposed overhaul: developers could potentially get larger grants than before if they provided more amenities, but affordable housing would have to stay affordable for longer (20 years instead of 15), more incentives were added for low-income housing and developers will have to provide more documentation than before.

Overall the proposals found a receptive Council, though Mayfield wanted more clarification on the policy’s energy efficiency incentives and Kapoor wanted to ensure developers were actually adding affordable units due to the policy.

One criticism came from Sabrah n’haRaven, who told Council that the policy’s criteria for transit accessibility were too lax, giving developers points for building in spots that were a long walk from intermittent routes, rather than reserving incentives for areas with truly accessible transit. However, Council passed the changes unanimously without adopting her proposed modifications.

• The removal of Alan Escovitz — A key item that attracted no comment at the meeting was the removal of Civil Service Board member Alan Escovitz by Council.

The Civil Service Board is one of the city’s most powerful. Created by state law, it contains members both appointed by Council and elected by city workers who are part of the “classified service” (i.e. most city workers except department heads, assistant department heads and the hundreds of city workers who work 20 hours or less a week).

The board has broad powers to reverse or change personnel decisions if a majority of its members believe the city didn’t properly follow its policies. That’s made it a target of criticism by city officials who claim that it prevents them from removing bad employees. In recent years, much of the focus has been on the board’s ability to keep police officers in their jobs even in cases when their supervisors felt they should be removed.

The Council appointees serve at the pleasure of the elected officials, so they didn’t have to give any reason for removing Escovitz. But it’s an unusual step — this is the first time in over a decade Council’s directly removed a board appointee — that highlights how the board remains a controversial institution.

• The city backs a small and minority business start-up fund — Council unanimously voted to put $250,000 towards staring a Mountain Community Capital Fund. A partnership between the city, Self Help Credit Union, Buncombe County and Mountain BizWorks the fund is intended to help with start-up cash for small and minority business owners.

Asheville has an unusually small number of minority-owned businesses for a city with its demographics, and local governments’ come under repeated criticism for. The idea of such a capital fund emerged in early 2016, when then-Council member Gordon Smith proposed it after the previous year’s elections (which saw the end of an all-white Council) pushed racial equity issues front and center.

Smith got a parcel of praise from the current Council members, who noted that over two years later the idea was finally coming to fruition. But city officials also wondered how much funding the county was willing to put towards the matter (Vice mayor Gwen Wisler noted that if the city was the only backer Asheville businesses should get priority in its loans) and it remains to be seen what it’s impact will look like on the ground.

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