After a strange election in a strange year, a new city council lurches into office in an embattled city hall

Above: Asheville city hall under renovation, photo by Bill Rhodes

This year has, by every standard, been a revealing one. Asheville’s been a divided city for a long time (always, for many communities) but during 2020 the cracks in the tourist-friendly facade were harder than ever to ignore. Our city has faced a pandemic, rampant police brutality and local governments sickening thousands by re-opening hotels, pushing tourism at all costs. It was also the year of uprisings, massive demonstrations and mutual aid.

Through a downtown soaked with tear gas and locals worried about literally dying while they tried to pay their bills it was easy to forget there was a city council election. All the candidates — centrist and left-leaning alike — mostly stayed silent about the largest issues roiling Asheville, with the exception of offering vague hopes for justice and change. Council meetings were dominated by locals calling for far more sweeping demands (defunding the police, actual reparations) than any campaign had dreamt up. Partly due to the pandemic, forums were fairly limited and usually eclipsed by the more pressing news of the day.

The results were a surprise. Sandra Kilgore, Sage Turner and Kim Roney won the three open council seats (out of seven, council is six members and the mayor). Incumbent Keith Young lost. Perennial candidate Rich Lee failed in his third bid for office. Longtime activist Nicole Townsend had a surprisingly strong showing despite dropping out of the race entirely this summer.

Again, strange times.

Indeed, it’s always particularly strange to cover local elections, especially as an anarchist (but covering elections is also a reason I am one, so there’s that). Local governments are one of the first lines of attack against communities, they are major drivers of gentrification and, as we’ve seen this year, they have the ability to do massive damage on the ground in a crisis. It’s worth being aware of what we’re up against.

In this case, city hall is set to continue being awful as ever (which wasn’t really in question) but there might (emphasis on “might”) be some more division in its ranks. The new council holds their first meeting tonight.

In another way, however, the election did mark the end of an era. None of the council members elected in 2015 remain. Young, the only one that ran for re-election, lost in an upset. That election five years ago was one of the first where anger over Asheville’s status quo had a major impact, laying bare the growing division between left-leaning locals and the “progressives” who’d held a lock on power for nearly a decade.

But the two ostensibly more left-leaning candidates who won in that race proved unwilling to seriously challenge the establishment. The hopes of that year, for a city hall that reflected public will even a bit, ended in 2020 with barely a whimper.

We are, however, told that the result of the 2020 elections — an all-women council — is “historic,” a term establishment media have badly twisted this season. Given that there’s no sign the new council will change much when it comes to whom city hall hurts or what it does, that doesn’t hold up.

This is indeed a historic time, but not in the way they say. There’s been some serious shifts in the centers of gravity in this city, in where people look for change and power over their future. More and more, Asheville ain’t waiting for city council.

Shifting tides

The results of the 2020 council election were as strange as the rest of the year. Asheville city races don’t exactly draw waves of pollsters (inaccurate as those often are) so it’s even harder to predict how they’ll play out. It used to be a truism of local politics watchers that the primary results basically determined the general, but that’s not been true for over a half a decade.

These ended up being the election results.

Kilgore’s victory was a surprise. She didn’t campaign heavily, her main position was ending “divisiveness” (scattered with a dash of standard progressive rhetoric) and she’s not a known political figure. She’s fairly conservative by Asheville standards. She came in sixth in the primary.

Hell, there were signs before election night that Kilgore herself didn’t expect to win. This fall, she applied for the seat council kept vacant after Vijay Kapoor’s resignation, which would have given her two years on council. That’s not usually a step a candidate does if they think they’re a lock for a full term.

What happened? Well, while the devil’s bargain of Democratic party hacks and the far-right state legislature failed in their attempt to gerrymander local elections, their move to delay council races by a year succeeded (thanks to city hall’s refusal to fight it until it was too late). This let the mayor and all council members swipe an extra year in office, especially party establishment favorite Julie Mayfield. She was getting groomed for state office and would have almost certainly lost a 2019 council election badly.

Importantly, the move to even year elections also allowed the local Democratic party (who are hellbent on keeping anyone remotely left-leaning out of city hall) to use a lot more of its machine and take a much more active hand in tilting the race. Even though council elections are nonpartisan, parties can add recommended candidates to their voter guides and put the party machine behind them in a time when their supporters are already activated for state and federal campaigns.

Kilgore got a major boost from that, and from the fact centrist and gentry support consolidated behind her (she’s a realtor). She also drew support from some Black voters, especially older, more conservative ones that tend to vote more regularly in city elections. Too many Ashevillians, including on the left, view Black locals as a monolith. That’s false, of course, Asheville’s Black communities include conservative and pro-establishment political strains just as they do plenty of far more radical and leftists ones.

Asheville centrists tend to do a lot better in their first run for office, before they have a whole batch of unpopular votes behind them. While Kilgore’s fairly conservative by Asheville standards (she criticized anti-racist protesters), that didn’t get much focus in the race. The lack of criticism combined with considerable support from some fairly powerful groups was enough for her to pull into first, though not by a huge margin.

Then there’s Turner. Turner is practically the embodiment of gentrification, with a long history of worker mistreatment, shady hotel deals and relentlessly pushing to ramp up policing.

Seriously, it’s so bad there was an in-depth Blade investigation into her record.

However, if she was widely hated by many for that, plenty of gentry ardently supported her for those very reasons. This year’s amply demonstrated that Asheville liberals absolutely do not care what happens to the vast majority of the city as long as the money keeps flowing. Turner’s endorsements read like a who’s who of those who’ve raked in cash and influence from the city’s status quo. While her ugly record was well known enough to push down her vote tally (she came in first in the primary but started losing support by election day), combined gentry and establishment party support was enough to get her into office.

But that machine has its limits, because the one candidate it pointedly excluded from voter guides, Roney, still managed to win a seat. Roney was the one remaining left-leaning candidate in the race. She had alienated some of those voters by a tepidly cautious (or outright cowardly, depending on which leftists you asked) response to the defunding movements and the police crackdown on anti-racist protesters this summer.

But she also has a real base, a long history of activism and a solid campaign operation. Left-leaning pressure groups like Sunrise Movement are more organized than in the last election and they supported her with key get-out-the-vote efforts. Many left-leaning voters cast a ballot for Roney despite their problems with her hedging her stances, especially given the other options in the race.

That brings us to the other surprise of the evening. Council member Keith Young lost. Young came in first in 2015, running partly on opposing racism and gentrification. But in office he moved steadily to the center.

He did oppose some of city hall’s more blatantly racist moves. But even when some of the things he’d pushed were defanged or ignored by city hall he either stayed silent or confined his opposition to rhetoric.

Young also became infamous for criticizing various measures — hotels, police budgets, “affordable housing” that wasn’t actually affordable — and then voting for them anyway. Shockingly, that pisses people off. When he did that with this year’s budget, which contained no substantial cuts to the police, it likely cost him his seat. His support (he’d come in a solid second in the March primary) collapsed accordingly.

Young’s defeat is also part of a larger trend. Centrist incumbents generally do poorly in local elections if they have serious opponents. This goes double for left-leaning candidates that move more conservative in office. In 2015 then-vice mayor Marc Hunt lost his seat (to Young, ironically enough). In 2017 Cecil Bothwell, who’d gone from a dissident vote to touting the glory of airbnb and the police chief, didn’t make it out of the primary. Vice mayor Gwen Wisler barely won re-election the same year. Hell, the crumbling of Kapoor’s political career — he came in first in 2017 then moved right-wing and ended up so widely despised he resigned and left town — are another example of this dynamic.

Why the rapid shift in Young’s electoral fate? City hall has perpetrated a lot of terrible things in 2020. They’ve done jack shit to halt the pandemic (quite the opposite), are currently pushing to bring in another wave of hotels and refused to even modestly cut the police. Hundreds of people were tear gassed and beaten by the APD and the police chief, mayor and city manager all kept their jobs. When people yelled at them about this during their meetings, they basically shut down public comment.

Bluntly, Asheville’s enraged and Young either failed to oppose or actively supported the things they’re angry about. City hall loves to pretend nothing exists left of the gentry, but this is in fact a fairly left-leaning town. Young ignored that and lost badly.

Lee came in fifth in his third run for office. He’s notorious for changing his stated stances rapidly over the year but this time ran fully in line with the establishment. After the protests he made some token noises about supporting some version of defunding (maybe, someday) but nobody believed him, any more than they had his claim to be a socialist in the 2017 race. Left-leaning voters didn’t trust him and the gentry had more effective servants to throw their full support behind.

Since there were only five candidates in the race, one might think that’s the end. But it’s not. Anti-racist activist Townsend halted her campaign in late summer — condemning the city’s political establishment and the oppressive nature of city hall — but still remained on the ballot. She got over 13,000 votes. I know a lot of voters who, seeing no option but Roney, marked Townsend as a protest vote. That also may explain the unusually high number of write-in votes this year, as some of the same voters did that as their third option.

There’s a significant base of voters in Asheville well to the left of city hall. Roney’s win, Townsend’s showing and Young’s defeat are all evidence of that. We’ll see what happens in future years on that front. City hall and elections in general are intentionally hostile terrain for actual change. The status quo is likely to take Kilgore and Turner’s victories as further proof of their deep-seated belief that everything is fine and they’re doing great. Activists who make it to council often get crushed or co-opted. Increasingly, left-leaning Ashevillians have become more radical and organized outside of city elections and the non-profit complex.

With a whimper

With the 2020 elections finally ground to a result, it’s worth looking back at the era of city politics they brought to an end. None of those elected in 2015 remain on Council. Brian Haynes refused to run again. Mayfield went to a safe state senate seat (she would almost certainly have lost another council race). Young lost his bid for re-election.

The elections five years ago were one of the first where pressure from an increasingly irate public started to press the “progressives” (a mostly centrist faction of the Democratic party heavily tied to the city’s gentrification) at the ballot box. Two of the three council members elected that year — Haynes and Young — promised to shake things up, especially pushing back against the city’s segregated and increasingly unaffordable status quo. The centrist vice mayor lost in an upset after coming in an overwhelming first just four years before.

While Mayfield never pretended to be anything other than a creature of the status quo (after a particularly noxious hotel vote, even she admitted she was one of the most hated people in town), Haynes and Young, at least on the surface, claimed they stood for a different direction.

But city hall is set up to kill change. Despite all the supposed promises of 2015 things largely continued the same, in fact they got worse. More than Young, Haynes actually took positions in line with the frustrations of many locals. But he was also so terminally conflict-averse that he almost always refused to fight.

So council took back power over hotel approval, only to keep signing off on them anyway. At Young’s insistence, they created an equity office, only to make it absolutely powerless.

Opposition was, with few exceptions, incompetently mild.

One of those exceptions actually neatly sums up these problems. In 2018, at the urging of the local NAACP and a broad coalition, Young and Council member Sheneika Smith forced a vote on measures to rein in the polices stop and search powers.

Their opponents sputtered and fumed, but even they realized that “Council squashes NAACP reforms” was a terrible headline for a supposedly progressive town. They largely supported the proposal, and it passed.

It was a moment that showed that if they’d had an ounce of actual spine, Young and Haynes could have forced through any number of popular measures, or at least compelled their opponents to publicly vote against them.

Instead of using this power, Young, Haynes and Smith largely folded. The next meeting the mayor and city staff brought forward a watered-down version of the restrictions and left their enforcement in the hands of the APD. They proceeded to languish for over a year and when the police finally made them a policy, were defanged even more. Haynes and Young did nothing. The official report on the Johnnie Rush attack (done by a consulting firm of cops), said the APD was great and criticized the council members who dared to even mention systemic racism. Again, they did nothing.

Hotels kept getting pushed forward and Young almost always voted for them, even when he criticized them first. Haynes actually did vote against them — one of the few consistent stances by a council member in the entire recent history of city hall — but absolutely failed to push forward any measure to stop the deluge. When council did something he hated — including gas and beat the shit out of protesters this year — he would briefly complain and throw up his hands in frustration. He stayed silent when he could have helped bring real public pressure to bear by a more determined opposition.

As city manager Debra Campbell started to push for austerity Young lined up behind her, mocking activists’ demands (you know, crazy things like food, housing and not getting brutalized by the cops). Not only was the move obscenely callous, it was also a direct insult to those who voted for him. For good measure he spent part of 2018 running for the congressional primary all the way over in Charlotte, for reasons no one has ever been able to explain.

Once in a long while Young would take a stance against some of council’s more blatantly awful moves, and the treatment of him when he did so — especially by Mayor Esther Manheimer, who seemed to take any opposition from him as a personal affront — often laid bare the racism that council’s happy to wield even at fairly mild opposition from Black locals.

That, however, was the exception. Again and again, the supposed opposition voted in line with the people their constituents hated or just stayed silent. Even defeating the blatantly racist gerrymander took months of growing grassroots outrage before Young and Haynes rousted themselves to take action. The final collapse of Young’s campaign was probably the most telling example of this, and it reveals a city’s people completely out of patience.

Young was a main architect of this summer’s “historic” reparations resolution. Given that, mainstream media’s expressed some surprise at his loss.

But the media narrative around the resolution buried the wave of skepticism and sharp criticism coming from a wide array of the public, especially Black locals on the front lines. City hall has a long record of passing resolutions whenever they get in trouble for the APD’s violent racism, then making sure those moves change nothing.

Those supporting the resolution in good faith botched the effort badly, those backing it at as a measure to co-opt a growing movement got exactly what they hoped for. The resolution gave city council something they desperately needed: a headline to take attention away from the international condemnation they were getting for the APD’s violent crackdown on protesters and medics. In return the supporters of the resolution didn’t even get concrete concessions, just a statement and a vague promise that city hall would some day consider reparations. City hall got what they wanted and police brutality escalated accordingly.

Making even a solid start on reparations would have required the defunding of the bloated police force (the largest per-capita of any major N.C. city) and indeed, there was a large coalition demanding exactly that.

But Young stayed on the fence and Haynes only tepidly supported the 50 percent defunding activists called for. When the city manager squashed the very idea they did nothing, even though council’s supposed to set policy. When the city’s own equity officer Kimberlee Archie resigned in protest of the lack of support Young could muster nothing but mild criticism couched in effusive praise for Campbell, the very person who’d help drive Archie out. When the city budget finally contained no real cuts (simply shifting some minor positions to different departments) to the police Young condemned the move then voted for it anyway.

His final council meeting, after the election, he hurriedly proposed a $4 million reparations fund (the city has $190 million budget and $30 million in reserve), but written in a way that would largely go to non-profits rather than directly to communities. That was watered down to $1 million, then Manheimer pulled it from the agenda entirely. Young said nothing about this at the meeting.

However, he later went on social media to condemn the rest of council for not passing this last-ditch move. But if he was so keen on doing so, he could have said or done something at the meeting. He was, after all, still a sitting council member. With Haynes’ support he could’ve even forced a vote. After all, he had nothing to lose and might even have won.

Instead Young ended his career as he spent it: in silence and failure, desperately trying to shift the blame to someone else.

Duelling histories

Asheville’s incoming council is all women, something I won’t use the “historic” label for and don’t think anyone else should either. The policies they’ll likely push will be largely the same as before. Indeed, the first meeting of the new council has them ready to shove over $100,000 more towards to the APD, for brand new rifles (like the one used to murder Jerry Williams in 2016), body armor and bullshit trainings.

“Historic” is what city hall and the corporate press use to make people think things are changing when they’re clearly not.

Asheville is, I’ve heard repeatedly, a city run by women. As a trans woman it’s a statement I’ve always found absurd. Believe me, the people saying it don’t mean us or many, many other women in this town. So it’s worth reviewing other historic women in power we’ve been told to be thankful for.

There was Terry Van Duyn, state senator and wealthy donor. Van Duyn backed the notoriously anti-trans HB142. She followed this up by teaming up with conservative legislators to gerrymander Asheville, terrified her friends in city hall would face any pressure at the ballot box.

Van Duyn lives in a giant mansion and was so scared of hearing trans women tell her the truth she shut them out of a town hall. The policies she spent her career upholding harm and kill women in my community and many others every day. We have nothing in common.

Then there was Tammy Hooper, Asheville’s first woman (and lesbian) police chief. She was also an outright racist. Her cops harassed a grieving mother when she spoke up about them murdering her son. Hooper covered up police brutality and yelled at one anti-racist protesters (a woman) while she was chained to a chair. In the end it was queer and trans women that helped oust her from office.

The pandemic has made this even more clear. Most of the cases here have been women, but that’s not given the women at the top of Asheville’s city government a second’s pause. Nor did the tear gas canisters hitting crowds that included mothers holding their children. When women were assaulted by the police Manheimer, Campbell and Wisler didn’t just stand by but actively defended the crackdowns.

There’s plenty history in this all right. The new council represents not the crumbling of the patriarchy, but the old and ugly sight of a smattering of well-off cis women enthusiastically joining the ranks of those making our lives hell.

But there is other history being made. It’s not coming from candidates. Tomorrow, grudgingly, council will also vote on taking down the notoriously racist Vance monument.

While I’ve discussed left-leaning votes a bit the fact is the centers of gravity in Asheville’s growing left aren’t with candidates, campaigns or established non-profits. Back in March every single council candidate refused to support even modest cuts to the police department. Roney, one of the less centrist candidates, took issue with the Blade even asking the question.

Less than a year later defunding the police department by half is a widespread demand council is trying desperately to contain. The city’s own hand-picked committee overwhelmingly told them to tear down the same racist monument their cops spent the summer defending.

The history on this front is that city hall, the candidates and their allies spent their time scrambling to react to popular outrage they couldn’t control. They retained plenty of power, certainly, but this year like no other in memory they were no longer driving the events of this town. Determined crowds of locals blocking interstates and facing tear gas spurred a lot more change than anyone who’s run for council.

Demonstrations in Asheville are now many times the size they were less than a year ago. That defiance has already cut the ranks of the police (45 officers have quit since June 1) more than any election. Hundreds of locals are now helped, fed and supplied through mutual aid networks — under whatever name — while local governments let millions sit useless in their coffers as the pandemic’s run amok.

We’ve seen left-leaning Ashevillians once focusing on running for council or joining a non-profit now talking in terms of abolition, organizing directly with their friends and neighbors. While we’re not the type to keep tallies on these kind of things, there are certainly a hell of a lot more anarchists here than there were a few years ago.

City hall still looms over Asheville, but the future’s slipping rapidly from its grasp. The people of this city are perfectly capable of making our own history. We don’t need them to do it.

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