Emails reveal Asheville city hall’s own waste manager contradicted their lies on bogus ‘felony littering’ charges
Above: Art at the December 2021 Aston Park Build. Asheville police and government officials would later claim this was grounds for felony littering charges against 16 locals. Photo by Veronica Coit
Blade reporter Matilda Bliss contributed to this piece
In Summer 2022, as Asheville police were bragging about arresting mutual aid workers on “felony littering” charges, city hall’s own solid waste manager blasted APD commanders and other officials, asserting that their actions were clearly retaliation and that they weren’t telling the truth.
“Clearly, these folks weren’t littering — it was a protest to raise awareness about the needs of the homeless,” Jes Foster, who runs the city’s anti-littering and trash collection efforts, wrote in a scathing June 5, 2022 email to city manager Debra Campbell. “I don’t understand how an ‘understaffed’ police force can spend 6 months investigating litter in a park.”
“I understand there are rules and consequences, and that this group is intentionally antagonistic to police, but this seems way overboard and a clear effort by the City to shut down this group who, at the end of the day, just wants to serve the under-served.”
It should be noted that, throughout this piece, the bold letters and capitalizations were in the originals. These emails were part of an extensive document trove obtained by the Blade and the Sunshine Request open records group.
The email, with the subject line “Park Arrests,” was in reaction to a WLOS piece about the arrest of 10 more mutual aid workers and protesters on bogus “felony littering” charges. In total, from January to May 2022 16 people would be hauled in on those charges in retaliation for a mutual aid and protest event in December 2021. That event, the Aston Park Build, culminated in the infamous Christmas night crackdown where police dragged four people out of their tents and threw food and supplies in the trash.
Two Blade journalists, Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss, were also arrested on trespassing charges for trying to monitor the police’s actions on Dec. 25, 2021. They’re set to go to a jury trial June 12.
Foster also wrote that the APD’s actions endangered efforts by some city workers to communicate with members of the Asheville Survival Program mutual aid network, some of whom regularly provide food and supplies to local houseless people in city parks.
“I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to build goodwill with a group of people serving the needs of the homeless community and show them that the City is not specifically targeting them, and then wake up to read this,” she wrote to Campbell.
Some of those arrested on felony littering charges were part of ASP’s work, and were then illegally barred from public property. The ACLU of North Carolina has since sued city hall over that ban, asserting that it’s unconstitutional on multiple grounds.
Foster also blasted APD Chief David Zack for trying to paint the supposed “littering” — the presence of mutual aid supplies and art in a public park — as a unique problem the police were concerned about. In fact, she asserted, the cops had frequently refused to prosecute actual illegal dumping.
“Did you know that Sanitation spends thousands and thousands of dollars and staff time every year cleaning up illegal dumping, as does Asheville Greenworks?” she wrote. “When we have asked for aid in enforcing this, we are turned down. So, this is clearly not a case of APD caring about litter. I’ll add that I really am disgusted by Chief Zack comparing that ‘litter’ to what our volunteer groups did downtown this year.”
Part of the June 5 email where Asheville city solid waste manager Jes Foster contradicts officials’ lies on the ‘felony littering’ charges
This is backed up by the APD’s own records, which show that before they used it against the Aston Park defendants, they’d only filed one felony littering charge in the past decade. In a 2022 Asheville Citizen-Times article about waste dumping on city-owned property in Hominy Creek, Asheville Greenworks director Dawn Chavez also noted that the APD consistently refused to prosecute illegal trash dumping.
There was more. On June 7 Foster wrote a follow-up email to Campbell and other high-level city staff about a June 6 Asheville Citizen-Times piece on the same topic, Foster directly asserted that claims made by city hall press flack (and former Fox News bureau chief) Kim Miller about the incident were untrue.
Miller had claimed that “city staff is not aware of any other instance in the past ten years where known persons left that volume of trash on City property” that they supposedly did from the Aston Park Build.
Not so, according to Foster, who contradicted these talking points at length:
“As recently as December 2021, we cleaned up OVER 15,000 lbs of trash from a site, and APD was knowledgeable of who left the trash and did not have a desire to pursue felony littering charges. (To be clear, I am not advocating that they should have pursued charges, but I AM saying the narrative being pushed that felony littering is not a regular occurrence is false.)”
My staff are regularly asked to clean up City properties that no one manages, as well as tons of litter and dumping in [right of ways]. The amount of trash is always appalling, and frequently falls into the felony littering category. Sometimes we know who did it, sometimes we don’t – there have been no 6-month investigations into those issues.
In the past 6 years, Sanitation has generated OVER 900 illegal dumping service orders based on complaints and reports.
As Dawn Chavez from Asheville GreenWorks reported at the March City Council meeting, even when evidence of perpetrators is available and provided, APD will not follow up. I can recall this being an issue since at least 2019, when we discussed it at a community litter meeting that I organized. I don’t believe APD had the current staffing shortages as a reason at that time, yet still, were unable to assist in enforcement for our illegal dumping issues.”
While she’s the official who most directly deals with waste on city property, Miller and other city officials didn’t consult Foster before making their statements.
At the end of her June 7 email Foster was noticeably fed-up with the level of deception and spin coming from city hall on this issue.
“I would REALLY like some conversation, transparency, and truth telling around what is happening, and for cleanliness/trash to not be publicly touted as the reason.”
In that email Foster also implies that she sees this is part of deeper problems with city hall’s management, referring to “problematic internal City issues” around responding to houseless camps and noting that “the lack of communication and coordination severely impacts the efficiency and morale of my division.”
It’s unclear what, if anything, emerged from Foster’s complaints. Campbell’s initial June 5 reply was conciliatory, thanking Foster “for sharing your concerns with us” and promising to raise those with the APD. But city hall is also notoriously hostile to criticism, including internal dissent. As of this writing Foster remains in her position.
The documents are revealing, openly contradicting city government’s spin and making it even clearer that the “felony littering” charges were nothing but open retaliation against mutual aid workers for showing solidarity with the houseless.
While local government’s always mistreated homeless people in Asheville, during Campbell’s reign it dramatically escalated camp evictions, with the APD even making a point of doing so in bitterly cold weather, without notifying homeless services providers. These crackdowns contradicted both CDC rules during earlier parts of the pandemic and, sometimes, the city’s own policies requiring a week’s notice before an eviction.
During 2022 city hall scrapped the latter and ramped up efforts to falsely blame unhoused camps for violent crime. Repeated investigations have revealed these sweeps not to be driven by “safety concerns,” as officials have claimed, but usually by the wealthy complaining about the mere presence of the poor. Sadly, these propaganda efforts have only escalated.
Banner at the Aston Park Build. Photo by Veronica Coit
This has gone along with an attempt to punish any organizing or journalism that contradicts city hall on this front.
The trial of two felony littering defendants was put on hold last month after it emerged that the APD badly mishandled evidence, but they — and 10 others — still face charges for trying to bring food and shelter to those without.
This is Asheville.
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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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