Despite claims of a new era of transparency, the selection of one of Asheville’s most powerful jobs — city attorney — is being decided behind closed doors, with no public input and few clear answers
Above: A binder of city attorney candidates and a confidentiality form for the city of Asheville’s “candidate review committee,” a group made up exclusively of city staff
With little public notice and less input, Asheville City Council and senior staff are making one of the biggest decisions of the past few years: who will be the next city attorney.
Under Asheville’s charter, Council can hire and fire three jobs directly: city manager, city clerk and city attorney.
Earlier this month, Council took the rare step of calling a special meeting for Dec. 14, on a Friday afternoon, just to hold a closed session for an unspecified personnel matter. Council usually holds its closed sessions during its regular meetings.
When a few members of the press and public arrived, strewn over what’s usually the press row were binders with city attorney candidates. I snagged a photo before city staff swept them away. The document under the binder mentioned a “candidate review committee” that was advising Council. Who was on that committee hadn’t received any public notice. Council would, before going into closed session, admit that interviewing city attorney candidates was the purpose of the meeting. They didn’t divulge more.
Next to city manager, city attorney is the most powerful position in Asheville’s bureaucracy. This year, the city’s seen major change on both fronts. In March Council removed longtime City manager Gary Jackson from office and this summer, City attorney Robin Currin announced she was leaving to take up the same role in Raleigh’s local government.
While the city manager process that led to the selection of Debra Campbell (then Charlotte’s assistant city manager) in October had its own share of real problems (the public was pointedly denied a promised opportunity to directly question the candidates before Campbell’s hiring), the city did have input sessions for locals to weigh in what kind of manager they wanted.
City staff also publicly detailed the membership of the committee that advised Council in narrowing down the candidate. While that included gentry (like Chamber of Commerce CEO Kit Cramer) and center-right/centrist figures (former Vice mayor Marc Hunt and former Mayor Terry Bellamy) thoroughly within the city’s political establishment, there were others (NAACP leader Carmen Ramos-Kennedy and Just Economics’ Vicki Meath), who had actively criticized city government and pushed for some social justice measures.
By contrast, the appointment of the new city attorney has received no attention, no public input and been shrouded in mystery and evasion. The only reason the public is even aware of the existence of the committee advising Council is because staff left some documents out that the press happened to see. It would, as it turned out, take a week to even get the city to answer the question of who the “candidate review committee” actually was (hint: there are no members of the public involved).
Given what Currin’s tenure revealed about the sheer power a city attorney wields, and the damage one can do, that’s a big problem.
The obstacle course
Former City attorney Robin Currin. File photo by Max Cooper
Robin Currin, a development and corporate attorney from Raleigh, took over the city attorney’s job in the spring of 2014. Over the next few years, she would espouse legal views that weren’t just cautious and conservative, but aligned with the far-right.
Currin tried to essentially ban busking, frequently claimed even modest social justice measures weren’t legally allowed (even those other N.C. cities had adopted without much issue), scaled back even the limited level of transparency the city attorney’s office had before, and even expressed outright bigotry (deriding the singular they/them pronouns used by many trans and non-binary people).
Wonder why Asheville ignored the 2016 call of LGBT rights groups to stand with Charlotte and pass non-discrimination rules? Or why local government failed to fight HB2 in the ensuing years? Or why city government’s going after harm reduction spaces using dubious legal rationales?
Currin was a major reason why, and over time her role in pushing city policy in a far more conservative direction became more publicly apparent. In last year’s Council elections multiple candidates spoke about the need for Council to direct the city attorney’s office rather than just taking their rationales at face value, and some even endorsed her removal from office.
This summer, Currin announced she was leaving Asheville to become Raleigh’s city attorney, effective Sept. 2.
Council hired an outside lawyer, Sabrina Rockoff of McGuire, Wood and Bissette (whose team also includes Bob Oast, Currin’s predecessor as city attorney) to temporarily take the job.
Given the relatively long length of time Council took to select Campbell and Currin, the sudden closed session in December seemed to indicate the elected officials might be seeking to expedite the process beyond their usually somewhat glacial pace.
There’s been no clear reason stated for that, but one might be mounting public questions over city government’s strange delay in challenging a state law delaying local elections by a year and trying to force Asheville to adopt a system of racist gerrymanders. Other cities in N.C. have usually quickly (and successfully) challenged such laws, but some on Council had claimed they were waiting on the appointment of a new city attorney. If they delayed that step long enough, it could basically make local elections next year impossible, even if a judge did stop the law from going into effect.
That decision, which shapes the whole terrain of Asheville politics, makes it clear once again how decisive a role the city attorney can play.
Advice from the shadows
But while Council and Campbell have, over the past months, claimed a wish to rebuild public trust and involve Ashevillians’ input in more key decisions, the city attorney process has been completely out of the public eye, with no opportunity for input and little transparency.
While Council makes the final decision, who’s advising them can prove key. After I saw the mention of the “candidate review committee,” and minutes after Council called their closed session, I sent an open records request to the city to find out exactly who made up that group. While interviewing personnel decisions are, under N.C. law, mostly closed from public view, the roster of who’s shaping them isn’t. Getting a plain answer to that question would prove difficult.
While the city’s open records office quickly acknowledged they’d received the request, almost a week went by without a response. This Thursday, Dec. 20, I followed up again, asking when I could expect the relevant document.
Later that day, city spokesperson Polly McDaniel sent the following statement:
City Council reviewed the applications for City Attorney and cut the list down to the finalists that they want to interview.
Council conducted interviews earlier in December.
At that time, all City department directors and staff from the legal office were allowed to meet the candidates for informal conversation.
Those who attended were invited to give Council feedback, if they so chose.
That added a bit of info, but still didn’t clarify much about who the committee actually was. Were those “informal” conversations the committee the documents had referred to? I asked them as much, writing “so ‘all City department directors and staff from the legal office’ were the ‘candidate review committee’ referred to in city documents?”
The next day, city records staffer Terry White then answered that neither “our HR Department nor I are familiar with the ‘city documents’ to which you are referring. The email from Polly McDaniel explains the review process used for selection of the new city attorney.”
I sent along the photo of those documents to jog their memory and repeated the question. At 4 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas, they finally answered back: yes, the candidate review committee was entirely made up senior city staff having “informal” conversations with city attorney candidates.
Given how Currin’s far-right legal views were so sharply at odds with those held by the public and (publicly, at least) most of Council, the fact that no one outside City Hall — let alone any civil rights or open government advocate — was even there to provide some larger perspective is pretty dismaying. At this point it is, despite the recent promises of a new approach by local government, not surprising.
Once again, we have local government making decisions in a closed loop, with Council only advised by staff on one of the most important choices they’ll ever make. When pressed about the committee who’s advising them, it takes staff a week and repeated pressuring to even answer a simple question and admit that such a group exists and detail who comprises it.
I’m frequently asked why Ashevillians have such distrust for local government. There are a thousand reasons, but this kind of evasive contempt is one.
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