Council has the power to undo much of a state-imposed bill rigging the local election system. But despite growing public outrage, they’re doing nothing.
Above: Asheville City Hall by night. Photo by Max Cooper
Yes, it’s that time once again. The agenda for tonight’s Asheville City Council meeting is notable for what’s not on it: any measure fighting the rigging of our elections in a whiter, more conservative direction. Council has the power to undo most of a state legislature-passed bill, throwing out districts drawn by the GOP to break up Black voting power.
But they’re not. The agenda includes a recognition of the city as a breastfeeding-friendly community, a zoning hearing and the city deciding how to parcel out housing trust fund dollars. It does not include any step to break that gerrymander. This is surprising, because Council’s admitted they actually have the power to undo much of it, locals called for it (again and again) at a July 2 work session. It only takes a single Council member to try and move such a measure forward. None has. They even had three weeks to figure out any exact details. They did nothing.
Even in a City Hall culture marked by an almost compulsive aversion to ever actually doing a goddamn thing that doesn’t come from the upper echelons of the bureaucracy or the upper crust of the gentry, it’s a notable failure.
Reader, I’m used to City Hall not caring. About us, about our communities, about this city’s future or the harm done every day to countless lives. I’m used to them not taking action.
But this is, even by their own miserable standards, completely ridiculous.
The gentry clamps down
The frenzy over the city’s election system started when long-simmering anger over gentrification and segregation started to boil over. A lot of this increasingly organized anger took place outside elections, with everything from protests and community aid efforts to the occupation of the APD station and the ousting of a particularly noxious police chief.
City Hall is, however, one of the key spots where a lot of the systems of power that fuel those evils come together and local elections can be an opening. For years — due to money, organization and low turnout — a particular variety of gentry politician had them on lockdown.
But Asheville’s previous system, known as “at-large,” allowed voters citywide to cast their ballots for every open office. This meant that black communities split into different parts of the city through a long legacy of redlining and “urban renewal” could, if they supported some common candidates and platforms, prove potentially decisive. In recent cycles, that started to happen. The 2015 elections saw the end of an all-white Council and the ousting of the first incumbent in years. In 2017, with pressures mounting, another Black Council member was elected, social justice issues were harder than ever to ignore and centrist politicians were left fighting for their political lives.
On paper, this is even how things supposed to be how things work. Over the course of a long, harsh decade, things got far worse for most Ashevillians while “progressive” Councils either failed to deal with those problems or actively enabled them. Conservative policies from City Hall didn’t play well in an increasingly left-leaning city. Elections worked as intended and growing discontent started to produce some change.
There’s always been a fair amount of lie about the last part of that story; most fights over political power happen outside the ballot box, and sadly even more left-leaning Council members have often proven unwilling to fight major parts of the status quo. But elections were an open flank, sometimes a key one. They were one way among many that pressure was pushed. Under the city’s at-large system those who had run things for many, many years were suddenly a lot more vulnerable than they liked.
The previous “Asheville way” of pushing terrible ideas most people hate as some sort of savvy leadership had finally run into a growing public backlash.
But the second locals started using the election system to put in office people who (maybe, someday) offer a dissenting vote (or were even just anything but rich, white and cis), the system got carved up and changed.
The Republicans hated Asheville’s voting system along, of course. The 2015 elections saw the wipeout of avowedly right-wing candidates in local elections, with three failing to even make it past the primary. The next year, Sen. Tom Apodaca (whose district includes a sliver of South Asheville), pushed a bill to gerrymander the city into six state-drawn districts (only the mayor would remain elected at-large) clearly intended to break up Black voting power. That bill failed, but the next year his successor, Sen. Chuck Edwards, passed one directing Council to draw six districts of their own, under criteria that would essentially require them to do the gerrymander themselves.
Instead Council put the matter to a referendum that year. The state’s district measure was resoundingly defeated, with 75 percent of the voters who showed up voting against it.
As time went on, especially after the 2017 election, plenty of the Democratic elite grew worried too. The protests and an increasingly vocal public were bad enough. But they regarded elections as their fief, to be passed on as their personal possession to chosen successors. Voters were there to show up, mark a piece of paper as they’re told, get a stern lecture if they raised a ruckus and then shut up until the next cycle. The 2017 results — both how hard it was for centrists to hold on and how a vocal public was increasingly losing their patience — worried them deeply.
A map of gerrymandered Council districts drawn by state legislators
So in 2018, when the gerrymander bill came around again, Democratic Sen. Terry Van Duyn signed onto it and, in deference, her party’s state senators fell in line behind it. The bill now went even farther, not just carving the city into five districts (with the mayor and one Council member elected at-large), but delaying elections for a year (from 2019 to 2020) and eliminating primaries (city elections are non-partisan, so primaries narrow large fields down to a few candidates for the general election).
Public pressure against the idea was still strong, however, and — publicly at least — Democrats in the state House still opposed the measure and voted accordingly. But a bipartisan sheen had been put on a racist gerrymander. It turns out that plenty of liberals were willing to throw in with a far-right plot if it meant staving off public pressure against the status quo. At their core, there’s a surprising amount of overlap between who right-wing and liberal gentry both want to keep away from the levers of power and this bill was an attempt — like so much of gentrification — to keep the non-white and non-wealthy away from their turf.
Despite Council publicly being against the gerrymander, silence followed. The previous times such legislation had been imposed, targeting Greensboro and Wake County, the lawsuits came within weeks or even days. The new systems were halted while the case was being decided, and in both cases local governments won resoundingly in court.
This year, momentum to fight that gerrymander ramped up. Locals started speaking up at Council meetings in January and the momentum only increased as city officials refused to take action and the public’s anger drew regional attention.
In recent months locals started a petition that quickly drew hundreds of signatures, and three Council members — Sheneika Smith, Keith Young and Brian Haynes — finally broke their silence and outright called for Council to fight the gerrymander. Council member Vijay Kapoor, one of the city’s most conservative elected officials, then turned coat and publicly declared that he supported the gerrymander (he’d been vocally against the state-imposed districts when he ran in 2017). Council finally agreed to hold a public meeting on the matter, but had delayed fighting the measure so long that they lost any chance of holding elections this year (normally three Council seats would be up for a vote) and gave them all another year in office.
On July 2, City attorney Brad Branham spent over an hour detailing a very conservative view of the city’s legal options, emphasizing the $500,000 to $2 million cost of a potential lawsuit (the city’s budget is over $190 million and officials have never focused on such costs in previous legal battles), minimizing the city’s chances and warning that the legislature in Raleigh.
But even Branham had to admit that undoing much of the gerrymander was directly within Asheville’s power. The bill hadn’t taken away the city’s power to change its own charter, possibly due to fears of running into a similar result as the Greensboro bill (where a federal judge threw out the state’s gerrymander because it had denied a city that right). So the city could basically reinstate the at-large system and undo almost all the legislation except the election delay (which they would have to fight in court).
He noted that while legislators in Raleigh could try to pass the gerrymander again, the city also had the power to undo that measure and if the state ever took that ability away, the city would have major grounds for a constitutional lawsuit. Publicly, the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the public coalesced around a two-prong approach: change the charter to undo the gerrymander at a local level and fight the remaining parts through a lawsuit.
On July 2, despite a looming holiday and Branham’s presentation running so long many locals had to leave, the people that showed up were overwhelmingly against the gerrymander. Repeatedly, they noted “I’m one of the 75 percent” and tied the gerrymander to Asheville’s long history of segregation. Locals also noted the gerrymander’s impact on queer and working class voters across the board. Those calling on Council to finally do something included literal veterans of the civil rights movement.
Only a handful of aging right-wingers and racist cranks showed up to defend the gerrymander. Even some on Council, like Haynes, belatedly admitted Council should have started looking at ways to fight the measure far earlier.
But in the ensuing weeks that sense of urgency has apparently disappeared into the humid summer air. Changing the city charter takes about three meetings, and after July 2, plenty of locals expected Council to at least start the process at their meeting tomorrow.
They’re not.
Enough is enough
Any Council member can propose a measure. If it gets a second from another Council member, they can force a discussion and vote on the matter. That means that the three Council members on the fence or who have dismissed the city’s ability to challenge the gerrymander (Mayor Esther Manheimer, Vice mayor Gwen Wisler and Council member Julie Mayfield) would actually be forced to take a position. It also means there should be (with Young, Smith and Haynes’ votes) more than enough Council members to force exactly that decision.
It’s not like the language of this change is hard to come up with — it’s literally restoring the election system that was in the city charter for over two decades — or that they haven’t had time to do so. The gerrymandering bill was passed last summer.
Fear of voter backlash is a factor in city politics, and in struggles that extend far outside City Hall. A gerrymandered Asheville is a city that will see an even more vicious and unaccountable bureaucracy, gentrification that’s even more blatant, officials even more contemptuous of everyone but tourists and well-off property owners. It allows them to cinch up a place they’d been forced to fight, to at least expend time and resources, in recent years.
We’re already seeing the impact of that. It’s almost impossible to imagine this year playing out the way it did with an election looming. It’s doubtful the city would have passed its widely decried budget ramping up police, high-level staff pay and cash for consultants while ignoring transit, deforestation and fair wages. It’s damn near certain that Mayfield wouldn’t have cast the deciding vote for the hated Flat Iron hotel proposal if she’d had to face re-election this year.
While some on Council are undoubtedly happy with that state of affairs, some supposedly aren’t. But the lack of action speaks louder than words.
If they’re trying to be strategic (this town’s oft-invoked excuse for not doing anything) it’s a terrible strategy. If they’re trying to run out the clock, it won’t work: the public’s growing more angry, not less.
As for the people of Asheville we have to decide — not for the first time — exactly how much betrayal and incompetence we’re willing to bear.
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