Forget the marketing about a “historic” council. The current crop of Asheville’s elected officials are easily the most conservative in over a decade

Above: Asheville city hall by night. File photo by Max Cooper

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” — Frank Wilhoit

As November wound on and winter hit Asheville the nights started to get bitterly cold.

This is a particularly dangerous situation for our city’s houseless, already hit hard by the pandemic and the return of evictions. When this happens city government and local non-profits will usually declare “Code Purple,” requiring the opening of additional shelter space to make sure no one stays out in the cold.

This time they didn’t.

Only after public outcry did a declaration finally happen on Nov. 25. But there was a catch. Despite sitting on tens of millions in reserve, including federal relief dollars specifically for this kind of emergency, city officials refused to fund sufficient space. Despite protest that refusal has continued.

Then last Friday, Dec. 3, city officials suddenly announced they were ditching much-touted plans for a permanent emergency shelter at the former Ramada Inn in East Asheville. This followed ugly attacks against the proposal from right-wing gentry groups.

The very same day Mayor Esther Manheimer announced she was running for a third term. She knows who her base is.

Those actions were far from the first times this year that city government has taken an increasingly vicious stance towards the houseless. Back in February officials sparked the summary eviction of the Lexington Avenue houseless camp on the coldest night of the year. Even non-profits city hall had worked with for years were left reeling.

The move was brought on by a single gentry complaint that houseless camps shouldn’t be allowed within sight of tourists. City hall’s purge was openly cheered by the far-right.

Attacks on camps continued into the spring. When locals banded together to defend the Aston Park houseless camp City manager Deborah Campbell personally directed the deployment of nearly the entire on-duty police force to brutally shut it down.

It’s a common excuse among local politicians, especially council, that they don’t actually have that much power. This is false. The April crackdowns followed Campbell consulting directly with the mayor and two other conservative council members. Four council members can, if they’re willing, fire the city manager. They’ll almost always listen to three. Two can force a vote and one can — if they actually want to — bring their proceedings to a grinding halt over a particular issue.

While Campbell’s certainly a particularly conservative city manager (which is saying something), her actions are consistently taken with the enthusiastic approval of a majority of council. Indeed, council themselves sharply demonstrated their own conservatism with two incidents in a single day, Oct. 26.

The first, in an afternoon meeting of council’s public safety committee, was a refusal to extend written consent — requiring police officers to get a signature before conducting a “voluntary” search — to people who aren’t driving a car.

Keep in mind this policy is widely backed by liberals and centrists. Since 2017 multiple groups — including the local chapter of the NAACP — have pressed for these policies. In 2018 council passed them, initially including written consent for any “voluntary” search regardless of mode of transportation. Staff and police officials proceeded to gut the law, including removing that provision.

Council member Kim Roney proposed, at long last, adding it back. But the other committee members — Vice mayor Sheneika Smith and Council member Sandra Kilgore — shot this down, claiming the proposals still needed more time and study. At this point these are proposals that have been before council for over four years, as long as an individual council member’s entire normal term.

The committee’s position was far more conservative than that of mainline civil rights groups. While previous councils had been weak on this issue this was something else: an outright turn in the other direction.

This even happened on a personal level. Smith ran her 2017 campaign partly on supporting written consent. In 2018 she was one of its main supporters on council. Now she opposed moving it forward.

Then, at the full council meeting that night Kenilworth gentry Atlas Kinzer called in to read an openly racist google review of the recently overhauled Maple Crest (formerly Lee Walker Heights) public housing complex, comparing it to “New Jack City” and “old Leigh Walker Heights vibes” and complaining about people smoking weed. Manheimer told the city manager to press the housing authority, asserting that while she hadn’t witnessed such in a recent visit, it was “important to communicate the concerns.”

This wasn’t an idle threat. Manheimer has the sole power to appoint the local housing authority’s governing board. The city manager oversees the police department, which has a notorious unit dedicated to occupying public housing.

Keep in mind this is a city where intoxication (including plenty of cannabis) is extensively marketed to white tourists. Lee Walker’s recent overhaul already pushed out half its overwhelmingly Black residents. Manheimer’s stance — wanting an immediate crackdown on Black public housing due to online suspicion of minor drug use — was supporting 90s drug war levels of open bigotry.

Not a single council member contradicted her.

By contrast at their Nov. 9 meeting multiple locals spoke up against a particularly unjust eviction. A family had just been forced, over community opposition, from their longtime home due to housing authority staff simply failing to pay their share of the rent for months. Council blithely ignored them.

Now, the Blade is broadly leftist. I’m an anarchist. Asheville city government is a status quo institution. We’re always going to be way, way to the left of anyone who ever occupies the dais.

But, whether you share all our stances or not, what’s happening is obvious. The current council — all women, three Black council members — has been touted as “historic.” This has completely ignored their actual votes, actions and policy.

The stark fact is, from new crackdowns on the houseless to excusing police violence to openly shilling for the hotel industry, this is easily the most conservative city council in over 15 years. This has come along with an attitude of open contempt, including shutting out the public with tactics that the GOP general assembly would envy.

As this council nears the end of its first year Asheville has become a more left-leaning city while its elected officials have taken a sharp right-wing turn. Always bad, they have decided to get far worse.

City hall conservatism

Let’s start with the first things Asheville city council’s supporters (all six of them) will pull out to demonstrate their supposed progressiveness: reparations and the “non-discrimination” ordinance.

The reparations process has, bluntly, been gutted by city hall. City government refuses to consider cash and land to Black communities — actual reparations — in any way. Earlier this year Campbell openly said Asheville’s Black population should consider more hotels and tourism a form of reparations.

Plenty of Black locals on the ground were always skeptical of the “reparations resolution,” even openly calling it a sham. Now even those who initially supported it are decrying yet another top-down city process shoveling money to consultants and hand-picked non-profits instead of local communities.

The “non-discrimination” ordinance was a farce, as the Blade analyzed in-depth at the time. Those who filed a complaint with city hall would find not justice but a byzantine process intended to coerce their silence. Those dishing out discrimination would face, at most, a fine less than some parking tickets.

The equity office that was supposed to enforce the ordinance has basically ceased to exist. Its staff left en masse with its former director openly saying her departure was because the city manager didn’t support stopping bigotry. A longtime city pr and business apparatchik was appointed to permanently replace her.

Meanwhile the major actions council have moved forward, much more quickly, have been markedly conservative.

They ditched even the facade of divesting from Asheville’s openly racist police department, let alone any consequences for the APD’s tear gas-drenched spree of brutality last summer.

They doubled down on supporting police chief David Zack, dropped any independent investigation of police attacks, handed the department a pay boost, threw millions into a new cop station and — for good measure — gave the APD new rifles and body armor.

At the Oct. 18 groundbreaking for the new station Campbell — flanked by the mayor and Council member Gwen Wisler — said that hiring more cops was actually “equity and inclusion.” I’m not making that up.

While the mildest of police reforms languished council moved quickly on a giant handout to Asheville’s most-hated industry. The previous council has approved plenty of hotels but, facing public outrage, they had finally started rejecting some and passed a moratorium. Last year even council’s centrists expressed skepticism about a staff proposal to shift more power over hotel approvals away from elected officials to city hall’s infamously hotelier-friendly bureaucracy.

This council thought that idea was great and swiftly moved to open the floodgates, letting hotels get waved through in return for minimal “community benefits” maxing out at $400,000 on projects that will rake in countless millions. Even a meek proposal from Roney to raise those benefit requirements got roundly rejected. Plenty on council’s majority openly said the goal was to make things easier for the same tourism barons already making massive pandemic profits.

They did this after over 100 locals marched through the streets demanding a halt to this open corruption.

 

Council reacted similarly to a grassroots push from city schools’ teachers and parents demanding more transparency and a halt to the planned demolition of a West Asheville preschool near multiple Black communities.

Instead council refused to even consider the coalition’s proposal for new school board candidates, appointing supporters of the status quo. They later went further, in an effort spear-headed by Smith, by appointing another new school board member last minute. They added that move to the agenda mere hours before the meeting.

Other councils were, to be clear, not good on these issues or anywhere near. Contrary to the mythology local governments aren’t some up from the people institution. They exist to please local elites. One can readily see this by who largely has the funds to run for office and who city hall considers “stakeholders.” It ain’t most of us.

Previous councils were perfectly happy to shovel funding towards a racist police department and back gentrification. They did plenty of harm. They were even, as liberals often do, willing to coddle the far-right when it was convenient. We didn’t have a council election this year because of a devil’s bargain local Democratic oligarchs made with the GOP legislature, partly to give their favorites on council a whole extra year in office.

But something has shifted. Previous councils may have tried resist, for example, the push to oust openly racist police chief Tammy Hooper, but she did eventually get ousted. When pressed on the hotel issue they did shift some power away from the industry. They didn’t do these things because they were good, but because they viewed it as essential to their careers to at least maintain a “progressive” facade.

Now council openly sides with conservatives on multiple key issues in a way that hasn’t happened since the mid-2000s.

What’s more, this “fuck you, that’s why” stance has extended to their attitude towards the considerable public outrage over these moves. As the Blade recently documented, the current council has openly broken open meetings law, made-up non-existent rules, given Black and Brown critics of city hall less time than white gentry and outright cut off and threatened to arrest critics. The legislature in Raleigh would be proud.

Stuck in the intersection

This has all largely been obscured by the fanfare over who’s on the new council. The reality is a reminder that as much as Asheville liberals like to throw around words like “intersectionality” they don’t understand them. Considering intersectionality was coined by radical queer socialists that’s not exactly a surprise.

So let’s be intersectional for a moment. Yes, Asheville city council are all women. Well-off cis women. Women who are realtors, attorneys for the wealthy and retired millionaire CEOs. The city manager has spent her career a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. In Charlotte she patronizingly dismissed an uprising against police brutality. In Asheville she had zero hesitation about tear gassing crowds full of women, including Black women.

As a trans woman who’s spent the vast majority of her life in poverty, this is not surprising. Plenty of people who’ve grappled some level of oppression still choose to side with the systems making our lives hell if it means a bit more personal power for them. It is an old, ugly story.

Plenty of the figures on this conservative council are not new. Manheimer’s aristocratic disdain was apparent all the way back in 2012, when Occupy Asheville shouted her down after she called them beggars. Gwen Wisler’s nearing the end of a second term and has openly hated poor people the entire time.

Sage Turner’s pre-council record — shady hotel deals and worker mistreatment — was awful enough the Blade ran a whole story on it. She’s governed accordingly. Antanette Mosley is a corporate lawyer whose resume openly bragged about helping major car companies fight lawsuits from injured workers and grieving families.

Sheneika Smith ran as a left-leaning candidate. But since then she hasn’t just shifted stances, she’s often reversed them entirely. In five years she’s gone from condemnations of policing to voting without hesitation to give cops more guns and money. Kilgore’s so right-wing she was the only official, city or county, to favor keeping the monument to segregationist Zebulon Vance.

This summer none of council’s members — white or Black — batted an eye as the mayor responded to Black locals criticizing a more draconian noise ordinance by giving them less time than the mostly white speakers before them.

At a time when a multi-generational collective of Black locals came together to issue a set of demands — including 50 percent defunding of the APD — council did the exact opposite.

That brings us to the last member, and an unspoken factor in its rightward turn. Kim Roney is ostensibly left-leaning and does cast the occasional dissenting vote. But she’s also consistently folded in the face of any real conflict: thanking officials who openly insult her and ditching campaign promises (e.g. fighting the hotel industry) like it was going out of style. This opposition is no opposition at all.

The result is a government more openly dedicated than ever to the defense of wealth, the crushing of dissent and the oppression of anyone outside a narrow elite.

This is all as out of touch as the terrible boomer memes city hall’s social media loves. Public outrage against local government is now more extensive than any time in memory. There’s a reason they’re even breaking their own b.s rules to keep people from speaking. As city council’s swung right something else has happened off the dais: Asheville, as a whole, is moving way more to the left.

There’s no easy single measurement for this. But the signs are clear. Ideas like police abolition have gone from discussions by a handful of leftists to more widespread support. In early 2020 no council candidate would support even mild reductions in the APD’s budget. Within a few months hundreds of callers to the city’s own meetings wanted the department’s funding cut in half. Support for dismantling the tourism status quo has gone mainstream.

When city officials dragged their feet on removing the Vance monument locals threatened to just do it themselves. Even after the massive turnouts of last summer faded a bit, protests remain many times larger — and more militant —than they’ve been in the past.

I’ve witnessed people who once put their hope in candidates and government process now openly support mutual aid and confrontation. This is not surprising. To reverse the old saw that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a leftist is a liberal who’s been tear-gassed.

In all this there’s an election looming: filing began yesterday. Recent cycles are marked by council members losing their seats because they moved conservative while locals went the opposite direction. Savvier oligarchs might look at these facts and decide it was time to offer real concessions just to maintain their power.

But if there’s one principle that runs Asheville city hall it’s “no change, ever.”

Key to this is that local gentry’s stances increasingly converge with the blatant right-wing. They both wanted workers forced back on the job to make them money during the pandemic. They supported police repression of anti-racist demos. Now they’re backing brutality towards the houseless. Gentry who once presented as mild progressives now openly clamor for private security forces. While this has happened around the country, it’s been particularly evident in a town where there’s always been an abyss between “progressive” facade and segregated, hyper-gentrifying reality.

Where the gentry goes council follows.

Yet despite their aristocratic belief that the world begins and ends with them, they are far fewer than they think. Most Ashevillians, after all, don’t own a single property, let alone several. A right-wing council may push more reactionary harm even more quickly; they are also racking up far more opposition.

Ironically even city hall’s own recognize the writing on the wall. The departure of a third of the APD in the face of public defiance drew plenty of attention. But a slew of high-ranking bureaucrats also bolted for other jobs this year. Recently city officials — who universally prefer to fill major positions by hiring from elsewhere — had to promote long-time bureaucrats to jobs like equity and economics director because they couldn’t find anyone else.

Maybe some candidates will try to tap into some of the popular rage in the coming election, though it would be unusual: the establishment here exerts a lot of pressure against left-leaning candidates even running.

But more than ever locals aren’t waiting. Tired of years of fake processes and broken promises Ashevillians are turning to alternatives outside the ballot box. If they comment at meetings it’s now statements of rage, not deference or requests.

S0 council flails on, grabbing as much as they can in their stolen year while their cops quit, their officials flee and they grow more despised by the day. Nestled in their mansions they shut out reality, desperately trying to ignore the hard fact that there are far more of us than there are of them.

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Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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