Once again a fight over firefighter pay reveals the callousness and corruption at the heart of how Asheville city hall spends the public’s money

Above: City hall by night. File photo by Max Cooper

Readers, this marks the 18th year in a row that I’ve covered an Asheville city budget cycle. The public hearing on the latest proposal, all $266 million of it, is set for tonight’s city council meeting.

By this point I can, sadly, write how things will probably play out in my sleep.

We will be told that unprecedented public input was gathered and that senior city staff did incredibly hard work (such hard work) making all the numbers balance. Asheville, of course, has “unique challenges” that make getting enough funding difficult. Whether it’s boom times or the middle of a recession there are, we will be told with much wringing of hands, simply not enough resources to do what the public wants.

So if you’re looking for sidewalks, transit, affordable housing, living wages, support for community groups, any of the many things that “progressive” governments supposedly do you are, to use a technical term, shit out of luck. In fact if you ask for any real shift in where the money goes council members will scold you, sputtering that you just don’t understand “how things work.”

They will claim what you want is unclear even if you literally spell your proposals out with specific numbers attached. If you go a step further and demand they do anything differently, in a way that’s hard for them to ignore, they’ll threaten to have the cops arrest you.

But they do in fact have plenty of money, and where they put it is quite revealing about what governments (including the “progressive” ones) actually do. Millions more will be poured into the police department, even if there are scores of vacant positions they can’t really seem to fill. The city manager and other top officials will get major raises. Most years a smattering of consultants will also make a pretty penny.

As for those consultants, the city loves hiring them for damn near everything. The fact many high-level city staff later go on to become consultants themselves (where it’s real handy to have racked up some favors during their time in public service) must simply be a coincidence.

Yet the generous attitude city hall’s higher-ups have towards using the treasury to line their own pockets does not extend to those lower down the hierarchy. Remember that mention of living wages? A lot of city workers aren’t paid one, and they’re usually the ones that do things — like put out fires — that are actually necessary.

Every budget year reinforces this further. Asheville city government does its raises across the board, as a flat percentage of current pay. That means that the money disproportionately flows to those who already make high salaries. Conveniently these are the same officials who control each year’s budget process.

By contrast a starting Asheville firefighter will get less than a dollar more an hour on their already-obscenely low wages. The other employees who make well below a living wage won’t fare much better.

This injustice has not gone unnoticed. Almost every year Asheville’s firefighter union local IAFF 332 reminds the powers that be that they are paid terribly to risk their lives in one of the least affordable cities in the country. In 2020 this even interrupted the official city government twitter account during its hallowed celebration of Taco Tuesday.

And every year city manager and council, in a grim ritual, wring their hands and say how terribly challenging firefighter pay is when this is brought to their attention. But never fear! They’re seeking “holistic” solutions to such terribly vexing problems. Perhaps by hiring another consultant.

They then pass the budget through largely unchanged. Everything gets worse for the firefighters, along with the vast majority of people in this town.

This year is, of course, no exception, but the responses to the increasingly dire issue of firefighter pay have starkly shown just how ugly and deep the corruption runs.

‘Driving us away’

The firefighters are, understandably, loudly demanding actual change after years of excuses.

“We are dissatisfied, we’re undervalued right now,” Welcker Taylor, president of the firefighters’ union local, said at the April 23 city council meeting. “That dissatisfaction is driving us away, it’s driving us away in numbers that I haven’t seen in my 10 years in the Asheville Fire Department or in the 25 years our vice president has served the city.”

“We can talk about how much we value firefighters, but as the saying goes ‘don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value,’” he continued, pointing out that their pay was 10 to 17 percent behind other fire departments in the region, including others in Buncombe County, and that so many firefighters were leaving that it was endangering their ability to deal with emergencies.

By contrast, one place where city hall always seems to have plenty of cash is probably its single most widely-hated department: the police. Council didn’t only not defund the police in 2020 but gave them massive budget hikes every single year since. They did this despite the APD having a large number of vacant positions. It’s still clear as mud where all that extra money’s going.

One thing the cash did purchase was drones, which the APD quickly used to monitor such looming dangers as the re-opening of a beloved community bookstore and homeless people looking for a place to sleep.

This year city government once again has its priorities pretty much where they’ve always been. The $266 million proposed budget is their largest in memory. The lion’s share of that goes to paying city staff and that, as always, disproportionately goes to those who are already quite well-off. The police department stands to get about $2 million more to its already-bloated budget, even though their patrol division alone has over 60 empty positions.

This year the budget is set to give city workers a 4.11 percent across the board pay hike. For city manager Debra Campbell this will mean nearly $10,500 more on top of the over $254,000 (not counting bonuses and perks) she already rakes in. Other top-level city employees — who all make over $150,000 a year — will profit similarly.

The firefighters? Those just starting out will get 65 cents more on their $15.88 an hour pay rate. For context Asheville’s living wage — the minimum required to possibly make ends meet here — is $22.10 an hour. The union’s seeking a raise to a $18.33 starting hourly rate, with similar increases among their rank-and-file.

But the budget found plenty of money for more drones. In fact city hall’s set to invest even more in this particular part of its dystopian police state. They’re allocating $170,000 for two more APD drone operators “to provide more real time intelligence” on all those scary poor people and bookstores. Another $100,000 goes to maintain their “expanded” drone fleet.

The consultants? Don’t worry, they’re getting their piece of the pie. There’s a whole $70,000 set aside for a transit consultant that may yet provide some magical solution to the city’s crumbling bus system. Besides actually spending enough money on it and paying bus drivers well, which the city manager considers clearly unthinkable. Indeed, the point of the consultant’s study may be to provide an excuse to cut routes and hours, even further gutting the transit system. At this point it’s worth wondering if the city higher-ups have a personal grievance against buses, or just really hate the idea that poor locals might be reliably able to get to participate in the wider life of the city.

Also, while not technically listed in the budget, it’s very likely that if city council fully approves the downtown Business Improvement District on June 11, despite massive public opposition, they’ll give the Chamber of Commerce the $200,000 they want to repay the consultants the conservative business group hired. To lobby for giving the chamber their own share of tax money and their own private police force. So far council’s shown zero willingness to anything but bend over backwards for them.

To avoid having to actually change what they’re doing, council’s set to go to the public with a referendum for $75 million in bonds. Much of this is slated for housing, parks and transit, though city hall’s perfectly capable of spending cash designated for those things in ways that do absolutely nothing to actually solve the problem. But they also want $15 million for “public safety facilities,” which given their track record will mostly mean more police stations.

After the official budget presentation at their May 14 meeting, council played out the same usual excuses when the issue of living wages came up.

Mayor Esther Manheimer, a land-use and real estate attorney for one of the highest-priced law firms in the area, noted that funding their proposed salary increases and the bonds next year meant “folks could easily be looking at a 10 percent increase in their property tax bills next year.”

What she didn’t mention was that these will, given Buncombe County’s record of systemic racism, disproportionately fall on Black communities rather than the white and wealthy. They’ll also hit renters, who landlords will pass much of the property tax hikes onto, particularly hard.

“Unlike the great recession, when we didn’t have money and the economy was horrible, we have no money but the economy is not horrible,” Manheimer continued. “When we sit here this time next year it’s going to be a painful conversation, unfortunately.”

Then council member Kim Roney brought up the issue of worker pay, especially for firefighters, noting that “every single time we don’t get to living wages it will be exponentially harder to catch up.”

She added that there were at least “five community-driven solutions to use our existing funds and not raise property tax” including from the firefighters’ union and Just Economics, all of which rely on focusing raises at the badly-underpaid lower echelons instead of the top tier.

“We wished we could have responded to every budget request, but obviously that would not be fiscally responsible,” Campbell, who controls the budget process that will yet again get her a massive raise, replied. She claimed that they could look at improving firefighter pay next year — maybe — due to having “more information” from studies and consultants.

“The other alternative is cutting services,” Council member Maggie Ullman, who unsuccessfully tried to make it illegal to give cash and food to the poor last year, claimed. Falsely.

“I know this isn’t popular, but I have to say it,” Roney responded. “A living wage pledge that doesn’t include our firefighters is not a living wage.”

“Well you can just tell us what we need to cut,” Manheimer shot back, with her characteristic brittle anger that someone had contradicted her. Locals in the audience booed her remarks and shouted out that not every official needed a big raise.

The mayor then claimed Roney, by mildly criticizing the proposed budget, was implying “we don’t care as much about this as you and we do care” and asserted “we do not have more funds to spend.”

She was lying, of course. City government are perfectly capable of moving quickly and pouring out cash when it’s something they want to do. Manheimer’s been in office for over 12 years. If she or the rest of council cared about firefighter pay they would have done something about it by now.

Roney again pointed out that there were multiple, detailed proposals for how to pay firefighters and other underpaid workers a living wage that didn’t cost that much more. Council member Antanette Mosley, a corporate attorney who’s bragged about her role in denying workers’ compensation claims, asked rhetorically “where would you like us to cut $400,000?”

The obvious answer, of course, is the entire drone program, the vacant police positions and raises for anyone already making above $100,000, just for starters. That would provide a lot more than $400,000, and that’s before we even touch things like the 2020 demand, from multigenerational Black community groups, to cut APD funding by half. Officials who can’t find $400,000 somewhere in an over $260 million budget don’t want to.

But it’s clear from the shifting excuses that council’s particularly scared about firefighter pay becoming an even larger flashpoint for public outrage. On May 16 Council member Sage Turner, a well-off manager with a record of violating labor rights, claimed in a Facebook post that “starting firefighters are paid a living wage of $22.24” assuming a 40 hour work week.

She wasn’t telling the truth, to put it mildly. A post from Taylor on the union’s social media quickly pointed out Turner’s post was “extremely misleading and, in some cases, downright false.”

“We provide 24/7 coverage to our city and therefore work 40% more hours than 40-hour-per-week employees. Every single one of our new firefighters is making $15.88 per hour. No exceptions. We are never just ‘on call’ we’re constantly just ‘on,’” he wrote. “The starting firefighter in the back of my truck was making $15.88 when she responded to a car accident at 10 a.m. yesterday morning. She was also making $15.88/hour when she got out of bed and responded to a housefire at 10 p.m. last night.”

Other excuses, buried within the proposed budget document, hint at some of the real reasons city hall treats firefighters with such disdain, specifically “salary compression,” which is the jargon they use to excuse the ridiculously unequal pay scales.

Basically the idea is that if underpaid workers make enough to live off of, city government will have to give massive pay hikes to upper-level managers or the fragile souls will get disgruntled and leave because the salaries are now more “compressed,” meaning those below them on the organization chart are finally making enough to pay the bills.

I am not making this up. This is actually what they believe. The sheer, vindictive entitlement behind this mentality reveals a lot about what drives the decisions of city government. The result is that salaries for Asheville city hall’s higher-ups are more than some of the top officials in New York City — Campbell’s set to make more than its mayor thanks to her latest raise — a municipality with roughly 83 times our population and an even higher cost of living. Meanwhile the lowest-paid city workers here have trouble affording rent and food.

Honestly if giving firefighters and other on-the-ground workers decent pay leads to a mass exodus of city hall’s most well-heeled bureaucrats that’s a wonderful reason to do it. They won’t be missed.

Because whatever the upmost echelons of city hall are being paid for, it clearly ain’t a record of sterling competence. In 2021 they lost nearly $1 million in parking revenue because their managers botched a software transition. The water system catastrophically failed for over a week in 2023 because the higher-ups didn’t anticipate that mountain winters can get really cold. They also underfunded the system for over a decade so big business could get a huge handout.

Currently city hall’s losing a civil rights lawsuit over their policy of letting any cop or official secretly ban individuals from public property without an ounce of due process, partly at the urging of the current police chief.

Unlike many of the things city hall seems willing to pour out millions for, firefighters are an actual community need. There’s a reason that in all of Asheville’s many demonstrations no one ever shouts “Abolish the AFD.” Firefighters do difficult, dangerous work stopping life-threatening blazes and acting as paramedics. Because of the ever-escalating demands of the tourism industry, combined with the dangers created by an aging housing supply and an abundance of slumlords, they’re incredibly overworked.

They also face what so many of us do: everything costing far, far more than many people in this town can afford.

We do not need the APD’s drones. We do not need more (or any, really) cops. We don’t need to line consultants’ pockets or give the city manager another wing on her house.

The money in their hands is ours, much of it taken from those of us struggling to survive here, then funneled to enrich those who make our lives hell. The fact they won’t even bother to pay enough to keep the town from burning down is a reminder of exactly the kind of damage they do. That will not change until the rest of us stop them.

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Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with over 18 years experience. 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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