A bizarre primary campaign season seems to take place in a different world than the harsh reality most in Asheville face

Life in this city is goddamn grim.

There’s no way around that. There never really was for many of us, but the past years have made the bad far worst. Asheville ranks, according to a Stanford study, as “the worst place to live” in the country due to the massive gap between the cost of living and the desperately low pay. We have the deadliest jail in the state, the worst covid death rate, skyrocketing rents, an openly racist, medic-assaulting, teargas-happy police department and a city hall whose attitude to the public is “shut up and stop asking questions.” Protesters get felony charges for art supplies and journalists get arrested for reporting on it.

This year Asheville’s lurched toward a packed election for mayor and three city council seats, with the May 17 primary narrowing the field to two mayoral and six council candidates. Given the reality here you might expect a bevy of calls for change, denunciations of the status quo, platforms, plans, maybe even the occasional attack ad. Even if those pushing them didn’t believe them, even if they just want to tap into public anger for votes, it still seems like this massive cluster of crises would at least be the campaign season centerpiece.

Nope.

You will search in vain through the vast sea of fliers for anger or urgency at any level that reflects what people in this city actually face. Instead what you will get are smiling photos, resumes (yes, really) and the same vague promises to do something about housing we’ve heard for 20 years.

They come off less like candidates to channel public hopes and more like applicants for a corporate or non-profit job, who need to impress the board of directors before getting down the business of robbing the communities around them blind. Given many of the candidates’ day jobs, this is probably not surprising.

Electoral politics is always somewhat surreal, always removed from the communities it’s supposed to represent but this year’s Asheville’s mayoral and council campaigns are downright bizarre. A packed field of candidates is, overwhelmingly, running like they’re in a city that no longer exists.

Breaking the facades

Up until the 2020 general election the Blade published campaign guides. We do not and never have endorsed candidates. “Endorse never, criticize constantly, condemn often” remains our motto on covering elections and anyone who wins them. But sometimes politicians are particularly vulnerable around the time they have to run for office, and asking a few direct, hard questions seemed like it might help people to cut through the blather, just a bit.

For a time it did. But by 2020 it was clear they no longer were an effective tool to inform the public. As conditions have steadily worsened Asheville’s population has moved more left, more angry and less willing to put up with the old bullshit. This isn’t to say everyone’s out there hoisting black and red flags (yet; we’re working on it), but the city’s electoral, non-profit and business classes are increasingly residing in entirely different political worlds from most of the people who live here. This is far from a new trend — we were pointing out this the gap back in 2014 and 2017 — but it’s gotten a lot more blatant in recent years.

At the same time Asheville city hall has become aggressively more conservative. They’ve rolled back even minimal constraints on cops’ ability to attack the houseless and protesters. Instead of skirting open records and meetings laws they now just openly break them. They’ve scrapped popular restrictions on hotels and airbnbs.

And no, they didn’t pass reparations. In fact city officials have been clear that their “reparations” program won’t include actual reparations — direct land or cash for Black locals — but instead vague promises of “opportunity.” The city manager has actually said she thinks of more tourism and hotels as reparations.

Lately they’re even trying to dismantle local volunteer boards because occasionally they occasionally mention basic realities like “people don’t want any more hotels” and “attacking houseless camps is a human rights violation.”

This gap — more of an abyss at this point — means that those looking to join the local political elite *really* don’t want to answer a direct yes-or-no question from a bunch of leftists.

So, what follows is a sharp, honest accounts of the records and positions of the main candidates and how they’d probably behave in office.

Assuming our readers oppose fascism, we’ll get to the obvious first. Mayoral candidate Cliff Feingold and council candidates Doug Brown, Alex Cobb and Andy Ledford — who are running jointly — are basically fascists.

They’re the usual far-right push to “take our city back” that happens every few years. As we”ll proceed to tear into plenty of liberals and centrists in the rest of this piece it’s worth remembering they aren’t the only ones delusional about the kind of town they’re living in. This slate’s serious belief is that the Asheville police department was defunded (lol no) and violent crime is running rampant (also no, it’s plummeted in recent years) while tourism is collapsing (unfortunately not). They legitimately believe a city government that absolutely loves shoveling money to cops and arresting anyone left of a hotel industry lobbyist contains “anarchists” working with antifa. No, I am not making this up.

It’s hard to think what could appease the local far-right at this point other than drenching downtown in tear gas 24/7 and arresting everyone who’s ever worn a pronoun pin, but I’m sure someone in city government will try. Given that the far-right has minimal numbers locally their electoral prospects are fairly small (Asheville’s gentry tend to prefer conservatives under a “progressive” facade) but it’s worth being aware any time this particular brand of scum is trying to rile things up.

As a reality check: police numbers are effectively down about 40 percent since the summer 2020 uprisings. But that isn’t due to any action from city council — they really didn’t want this to happen — but to public defiance and ongoing outrage. Bluntly Asheville hates the APD. Notably crime has, even by the APD’s own stats, plummeted since then.

The rest of the mayoral field is where the actual fighting will take place. Running for a third term is Mayor Esther Manheimer. At this point she’s been on city council, first as member, then as mayor, for thirteen years (she and council got an extra year in office thanks to some very under-handed cooperation with the GOP). She is a central figure in the runaway gentrification of the city — so severe it’s one of the worst in the country — the metastasizing of the police deparment and Asheville government’s steady move to being fully right-wing.

Honestly Manheimer running for another term was a bit of a surprise: she’s easily the most widely-despised elected official in Asheville’s recent history. Somehow a politician can’t oversee the tear-gassing of hundreds of people, openly sell the town out to hoteliers and airbnbs and treat the public with unbridled aristocratic contempt and not have people hate their guts. But ego and wealth are a hell of an intoxicant.

Manheimer’s main challenger is city council member Kim Roney, who so far is where most of the opposition seems to have coalesced. Roney is the closest thing to a dissenting member on the current council, opposing establishment positions on police budgets, camp sweeps and the refusal to fund actual public services.

That said, Roney’s record on council is primarily one of failure and evasion. She ditched a campaign promise to oppose loosening restrictions on hotels, supported allowing more airbnbs and recently switched her vote — with no real explanation — to suddenly back a gentrifying housing complex in Southside. Even her dissents mainly come under substantial pressure, like after the infamous christmas night camp raid.

Her platform contains calls for fare free transit, actually affordable housing and a vague acknowledgement of the hardships locals are going through. But since she announced her mayoral campaign she’s tacked more to the center, noticeably toning down her criticisms. Bluntly, she’s not running like she wants to upset the status quo. By all evidence Roney only acts when absolutely pushed by an angry public who refuse to accept her excuses.

But she’s not the only challenger to Manheimer. Michael Hayes, director of the Umoja Health Wellness and Justice non-profit, declared early on that he would run for mayor, but only if former Council member Keith Young (who lost re-election in 2020 after he supported a cop-catering budget he himself had condemned) didn’t. It was a strange move, but Young declined to run so he did. His campaign’s also been fairly vague, but based on that expect Hayes to be aligned with Young: more criticism of city hall’s racist status quo, occasional opposition to the police department but also a willingness to fold when the chips are down.

Both Roney and Hayes are, as far as these things go, to Manheimer’s left (it doesn’t take much), against the camp sweeps and for the abolition of the Tourism Development Authority, the hotelier cartel that controls the local room tax.

Over on council four candidates — Vice mayor Sheneika Smith, council member Antanette Mosley, Allison Scott and Maggie Ullman Berthiaume — are all vying to keep up the status quo. They have different records and reasons, and some of them are claiming otherwise, but that’s the truth of their positions.

Smith’s campaign an interesting case, in a terrible way. Known in the mid 2010s as a formidable racial justice activist, she ran as a left-leaning candidate in 2017 and drew widespread support. For the first few years of her term she seemed to push some policies on this front too: NAACP-backed police reforms, restrictions on airbnbs and hotels and opposition to budget hikes for the police department.

Then she did a complete reversal. In the past two years Smith has voted against the police reforms she once pushed, to give more power to the hotel and airbnb industries and has supported crackdowns on the houseless and the poor.

There are few greater testaments to city hall’s powers of corruption than the arc of her career. Smith recently said that council’s blatantly illegal secret policy meetings were “personal time” that the public had no right to know about.

Antanette Mosley, a corporate lawyer, was appointed by council in summer 2020 to fill out the remainder of Vijay Kapoor’s term. Kapoor had resigned and left the city after his political career crashed and burned when he openly embraced a gerrymander pushed by the far-right.

During her appointment Mosley claimed to be in favor of social justice and reining in the police department, but there were already some warning signs in her application: she bragged about her role in getting workman’s compensation claims rejected and defending Toyota from lawsuits in the infamous sudden acceleration case.

On council Mosley has, with very few exceptions, been an ardent defender of the status quo. She’s echoed the police chief’s talking points and pushed the giveaways to the hotel and airbnb industries.

Allison Scott is a major leader in Campaign for Southern Equality, a Gay Inc non-profit based here. Two CSE directors are running for office this cycle: the other is congressional candidate Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the minister and county commissioner infamous for shoveling millions in public dollars to one of the worst weapons companies on earth.

Scott has tried to seek left-leaning votes, mostly on the fact that she’s the first major trans candidate to run for city council, but her entire record tells another story. Given the gap between that and her marketing, it’s worth delving into why.

Scott’s main spot in local government was as a member of the city’s police advisory board. She sat on there for three years, during a time of growing anger over racist police violence and Asheville’s segregation. She did nothing but express mild, qualified concern.

She touts her role in passing the city’s “non-discrimination” ordinance was a sham that has protected not a single queer or trans person or anyone else. In its first six months city officials dismissed every single complaint of bigotry. Indeed, as a Blade analysis revealed, the ordinance has incredibly minimal fines ( overdue parking tickets cost more than violating a trans person’s rights) and gives veto power to the city manager and the notoriously conservative city attorney’s office. It was meant to get CSE some headlines, bolster Scott’s political career and not actually penalize bigots.

Both in her non-profit role and, later, as a candidate, she stayed pointedly silent over the past years as trans and queer locals were beaten and tear-gassed for protesting or terrorized for being unhoused.

The only policy Scott’s pushed so far is improving housing. On that her stances are stunningly vague and only what city hall’s already doing: a promise to use city-owned land while still preserving historic neighborhoods. In practice that’s just meant developers making money off public lands while providing a paltry number of unaffordable units.

She’s refused to answer questions about major policy issues even from establishment media. Does Scott support the crackdown on houseless camps? A low-barrier shelter? The push to dismantle local boards? Does she agree with the grassroots demands to abolish the hated Tourism Development Authority? Who knows!

Rounding out the status quo faction is Maggie Ullman Berthiaume, former city sustainability director turned consultant, a common and lucrative trajectory for local bureaucrats. She’s trying to stake out a spot as the environmental candidate but has not a single solid proposal to back this, instead leaning on a resume and her role as “climate advocate, neighbor, mother.”

Now city hall has massive resources, and if they actually wanted to do something about Asheville’s environmental degradation they certainly could. But nothing in Ullman Berthiaume’s record indicates she would, and much of it indicates it’d just be greenwashing. At the same time she claims to back measures to “equitably” address climate change she fully supports the city’s brutal crackdowns on houseless camps.

Honestly her candidacy is, in its way, as disturbing as that of the far-right’s, maybe even moreso because her electoral prospects are far better. That’s because this, theydies and gentlethems, is eco-fascism making its local campaign debut. Cops beating the shit out of poor people and protesters in the shadow of “green” energy projects is totally in line with Asheville city government’s entire history so if elected she’ll fit right in.

So, if that’s the status quo, who are the would-be dissidents?

Nina Tovish, a realtor, started out criticizing council in public comments on multiple issues, generally from a more left-leaning position.

Most recently she’s hammered them on transparency issues, which have become more prominent as city hall’s flouting of open meetings and records laws have become particularly flagrant, and on the property tax increase, which the city pursued despite overwhelming evidence it would hit Black communities particularly hard compared to wealthier white communities.

Tovish has a somewhat more extensive platform than many of the other candidates, especially on transparency issues: supporting the open meetings policy pushed by local advocates and promising to publish documents she receives as a council member.

Then there’s Andrew Fletcher, who first came to prominence as an organizer in the organizing efforts to stop a busking ban, then as a city commission member (on ‘the pit of despair,” downtown and the arts). Much of that time he’s been willing to work within the city process, and has even defended some commission’s compromises when criticized by locals.

But he has, at least as far as public actions go, moved somewhat more left since the start of the pandemic. He’s criticized the coddling of airbnb, camp sweeps, the TDA and the arrest of the Blade journalists. Most recently he’s been a prominent opponent of the push to dismantle boards (he still sits on two of them) and supported the December direct action at Aston Park.

Platform-wise though he just mentions housing, and while he musters more anger about the status quo than most (he’s the only major candidate that’s a renter) it’s still not particularly clear what he’d do about it.

Will Hornaday ended up having more support than most observers initially expected, tapping into the overlap in liberal and more left-leaning opposition to the explosion of the airbnb and hotel industry.

Those industries are widely hated in Asheville but city hall coddles them at every opportunity, so much that it can bring in some odd coalitions. Hornaday’s also mustering support from the successful opposition to the proposal to demolish a swath of Charlotte street for a luxury housing development. He claims that he’d push for expanded transit, more re-use of older buildings for affordable housing and ground-level environmental efforts like increased composting.

If we had to go with the current council set-up: the first four we mentioned would probably vote in line with the status quo, the latter three more with Roney’s politics (assuming she wins and doesn’t immediately move to a more centrist position). Make of that what you will.

Reality check

That said, if those more critical of the status quo win, they will face a city bureaucracy used to telling elected officials what to do, not the other way around. Any actual change at city hall would mean firing a shit ton of people and routinely pissing off plenty more. As it stands it’s unlikely they’ll do that. Roney’s already very practiced at the “we’re powerless” excuse familiar to any of us who’ve had the misfortune of watching far too many council meetings.

They’re not actually powerless, which we’re reminded of every time council moves quickly to make the wealthy happy and the rest of us miserable. They have a massive budget, considerable powers over development and much more.

If they wanted to council could do the following:

Ban airbnbs, push to end the TDA, start direct reparations payments to Black locals (they could send $1,500 to every Black person in the city tomorrow and still have massive cash reserves on hand), build or but housing and turn it over to resident co-ops to own, cut the police department’s budget by half as demanded by Black locals in 2020, set a salary cap of $100,000 a year for city hall staff and use the savings for transit, end all camp sweeps and set up sanctuary sites, end all city cooperation with the I-26 project that threatens to demolish Black and Latinx neighborhoods and stop approving more hotels.

If — when, more accurately — they don’t do anything close to that, it is because they have chosen to view the public’s needs as a distraction. After all: we do not live in a democracy and it’s sure as hell never been “ours.”

That should serve as a reminder. You do not have to cut them slack, “give them a chance” or any of the other nonsense you’ll hear after the primary and during the long slog of the general. They are, at best, somewhat more preferable enemies.

Treat them accordingly.

The thing is, grim as the world is, locals have shown perfectly possible to gain major victories in the teeth of city government. As we write this the Asheville police department has effectively lost nearly half its numbers since the summer 2020 uprisings. Meanwhile violent crime has plummeted, a reminder the police do not keep us safe.

No one on council did this or effectively supported it — in fact they wanted the opposite — but it happened anyway because people in this city, from those in the streets to media co-ops exposing the APD’s abuses, kept fighting.

The racist Vance monument is finally getting dismantled, after years of council refusal, because locals threatened to tear it down themselves if city government didn’t.

Over the course of the pandemic local mutual aid has fed and supplied tens of thousands here: far, far more than city hall has done with an over $200 million annual budget.

Recently a city council plan to ban food distribution as part of their effort to terrorize the houseless population failed when locals mobilized against it quickly. Council members whined about process but the tactics worked. At the last council meeting city staff quietly admitted the idea was dead.

Too often I think waking up to the reality of american “democracy” — that elected officials do not care if most of us die in misery, let alone represent us — can be interpreted as a cause for despair. But honest realization of the truth can instead be freeing: we are not waiting for them to build the kind of city we want.

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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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