Despite deceptions from city hall, locals remain strongly against the downtown Business Improvement District as it heads to a final vote

Above: The Asheville Chamber of Commerce headquarters. Despite recent claims to the contrary, the proposed Business Improvement District is still set to give them even more power. Photo by Matilda Bliss

Tonight Asheville city council will hold its final vote on approving a downtown Business Improvement District. This will tax the whole of the city center, send the funds to a private organization controlled by the wealthy (almost certainly by the Chamber of Commerce and similar groups) who will use most of them to fund a private security force that will make life hell for those they view as “anti-social.” In practice this will mean pretty much everyone who isn’t a hotelier or a drunk tourist from Florida.

BIDs have a horrible track record in cities around the country. This includes, but is not limited to, blatant corruption, illegal surveillance, harassment of the homeless and multiple other marginalized groups, labor law violations, civil rights violations and outright bigotry.

The idea is, to put it mildly, wildly unpopular. Opposition to it has galvanized a grassroots coalition of locals from service workers and small businesses to elders and transparency watchdogs. Even some of the property owners who backed the previous BID effort in the early 2010s have condemned this one.

But on May 14 Asheville city council supported the BID 5-1, with only Council member Kim Roney against it (Council member Sheneika Smith was absent) though the district still has to pass another vote at council’s meeting tonight at 5 p.m. at the civic center.

Nonetheless, as determined as they are in their contempt for the public even city council is desperately trying to pretend they’re making some concessions to the BID’s many opponents. On May 14 they claimed that the chamber’s BID plan wouldn’t necessarily be the one they adopted and asked critics to hold out for a future resolution they’d vote on June 11 laying out more about how the BID would operate.

But locals aren’t giving up. They’ve continued to organize, canvass and try to rally as much of the city as possible against the BID. Despite city hall pretending that the proposal isn’t a blatant power grab by those who already have far too much, Asheville’s still strongly against the BID.

The chamber’s disappearing act

At the May 14 meeting, where council took its first vote on the BID, one of the most telling things was who wasn’t there at the podium: the Asheville Chamber of Commerce.

This was honestly bizarre, because the chamber and city hall had been hand in hand for months, pushing the BID through at breakneck speed. The business group paid for the BID’s consultants (though they want city government to pay them back), held the scripted p.r. events and put out the official plan that detailed everything from the BID’s boundaries to a board dominated by wealthy property owners. They laid out the duties of the private security who would target “anything deemed out of the ordinary.” While some other similar business organizations, particularly the Downtown Association, also played a role the chambers was clearly the main driver.

All the way back at their Jan. 9 meeting Mayor Esther Manheimer told the rest of city council that they needed to approve a staffer from the Downtown Association for a spot on the downtown commission, because city government looked to work with them on the chamber’s BID effort and didn’t want to seem “hostile” by not bending over backwards to do their bidding (or BID-ding, in this case).

At the April 9 and April 23 council meetings the chamber and others who’d worked closely on their BID plan presented the proposal alongside city staff. It was attached to the agenda for the public hearing and the chamber’s plan forms the basis of the proposed tax and the boundaries of the BID. On April 23 Council member Maggie Ullman even insulted members the public for being outraged at the blatant corruption shown by the chamber basically dictating city policy.

On April 10 downtown projects head Dana Frankel appeared on the Overlook podcast alongside Zach Wallace, the chamber’s point person for the BID push and Downtown Association director Hayden Plemmons to tout the proposal. There she noted that local government was involved in communication with the chamber about their BID plan for months, even helping them hone what exactly it might entail.

“There’s always a formal and informal relationship between BIDs and city government,” Frankel said on the podcast. “We’ve seen it can be a useful model in managing public space.”

By May 14, however it was just Assistant city manager Ben Woody presenting the BID measure, and City attorney Brad Branham pointedly they were just voting on the district boundaries and tax rate rather than a specific plan for the BID. Ullman then referred to the chamber’s proposal as just “a demonstration of how things could look.”

What changed? At the April 23 public hearing speakers opposing the BID outnumbered supporters by 39 to 11. This happened despite city hall botching, badly, official notice of the hearing. Combined with the fact such such hearings already tilt towards the well-off, who can sit in multi-hour meetings that start when many locals are still at work, and it was a stark demonstration of how little support the BID actually has.

Indeed a broad array of locals loudly and strongly condemned the measure, while its support was limited to a fairly small group of the wealthy.

On April 26 even city government’s own downtown commission, a group that’s predominantly property and business owners, refused to endorse the BID.

Yet on May 14 council backed it anyway. To excuse this they claimed the public had misunderstood the proposal — that despite months of cozy collusion the chamber wasn’t running the show — and that all their concerns would be addressed by an upcoming council resolution.

These are old city hall tactics when faced with public outrage. They’re meant to sow confusion — the BID is in fact a blatant chamber power grab — and to disperse anger by shifting people’s hopes to processes that city hall controls. This is how local government tries to kill any momentum for change.

But locals weren’t fooled.

“In doing this you’ve overlooked over 900 Asheville residents, people who voted for you, that oppose this BID,” Hannah Gibbons, on behalf of the anti-BID coalition, said during open public comment after the council vote. “We have an opportunity to learn from other U.S. cities where BIDs have exacerbated harm and inequality.”

Gibbons was referring to a petition launched by the coalition, which was closing in on 1,000 signatures at the time. As of the publication of this piece it has nearly 1,500, an unusually high amount for a local issue.

“The fact brief tours of neighborhoods with BIDs have glowing testimonies is likely survivorship bias,” Paige Huzyak said referring to one of BID supporters’ main talking points. “Anyone pushed out by the BID is no longer living in the neighborhood to complain. The kind of people who benefit from rising property values and the riff raff moving out are still around to rave about the results.”

“Since the 1930s Asheville’s citizens have been discriminated against through racist redlining, urban renewal and this BID, which I like to refer to as CRAP, Corporate Redlining and Privatization,” Madison Jane, owner of the Haus of Jane salon, told council, linking the BID to city hall’s long history of racist policy. “This is about power. This is about corporate greed. This is not about community needs. Asheville doesn’t need to be plagued by more broken promises and hidden agendas.”

“Mostly the reaction is incredible frustration over the fact that they’re blatantly ignoring the community,” Jen Hampton, lead organizer for the Asheville Food and Beverage United union, tells the Blade about the May 14 BID vote. “That’s not going to deter us: even if they pass it we’re still going to keep at it.”

False promises

The promised council BID resolution came out last Friday, June 7, attached to its agenda for tonight’s meeting. There are enough devils lurking in the details that we did a more in-depth analysis of them here.

The BID resolution is another in council’s long history of looking like they’re making concessions while keeping things exactly the same. It proposes renaming the “ambassadors” as “community stewards,” giving them equity training (which clearly worked wonders for the APD) and promises that they’ll be unarmed.

But lurking in the somewhat milder jargon about this rebranded security force is also a note that they’ll still “proactively engage with the public.” Given BIDs’ track records around the country, that clearly means the same old harassment, especially directed at the homeless.

The BID board is where the resolution promises, on the surface, the most change, Now the future “steering committee” will supposedly have equal numbers property owners and renters with no wealth requirement, along with a representative from the historically Black neighborhood of the Block and another from the “continuum of care,” meaning the non-profit complex.

But there’s a catch: these board members will be chosen by the private organization (like the one the chamber’s setting up) that runs the BID. City council will just have the ability to rubber stamp them. The same goes for their replacements. That means that whoever’s managing the BID will hand-pick the people supposed to be overseeing them.

If you think that’s a recipe for corruption, you’re right. Even by the standards of city hall this is very unusual; similar boards are often appointed directly by council.

On top of that there’s the kicker: the entire resolution is non-binding. While it’s supposed to form the framework for city hall’s contract for the BID, in practice this means they can change any commitments in it last minute or just ignore them entirely. Once the future BID is in place it would have very little constraint on, say, hiring armed security to attack protesters.

Past the surface, the BID resolution is clearly still intended to set things up for the chamber and its cronies to take over a chunk of public tax dollars and their own private security force. North Carolina law allows city governments to directly set up and run their own BID rather than paying an outside organization to. While that would still be awful, if they really were concerned about how a private group would handle the BID that’s what they’d do. Instead council made the deliberate choice not to.

Like previous city commitments to reparations, supporting transit and reining in the police department, the BID resolution is just a tactic to divide movements with false promises.

‘This is a power grab’

As the BID moves through the halls of power, locals against it are still organizing and spreading the word.

“We’re still out there canvassing, talking to workers and business owners downtown,” Hampton tells the Blade. “We’re still getting a sense that folks just don’t know much about it, haven’t even heard about it or are against it. I haven’t talked to anyone who was like ‘yay, a BID’s coming.’”

“We’re not sparing any businesses either, we’re going into every one we walk by.”

Locals who are becoming more informed about the BID have a similar reaction.

“They’re shocked to hear this is even a thing,” Hampton notes. “When they find out they’re like ‘no.’”

More groups are also joining the fray. Last week the Asheville chapter of Radical Adventure Riders, a cycling group that focuses on gender inclusivity and racial equity, strongly condemned the BID.

“We affirm that the movement of unhoused, BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQIA cyclists and pedestrians through our streets should be easy, fair, and without fear. The proposed ‘Business Improvement District’ would instead privatize and redline downtown Asheville — a mobility injustice that we cannot ignore,” a public statement on the group’s Instagram reads. “We unconditionally reject these culturally sanitized and corporatized notions of “safer streets” that only endorse safety for a select few.”

“While last fall’s vote to approve bike lanes downtown was a positive step towards mobility justice, this vote is now sandwiched between crackdowns on mutual aid and homelessness, harsh restrictions on parking bikes, and now one of two votes to approve a BID,” the statement continues. “This district would displace an ever growing number of downtown renters — of whom many are dependent on bike and pedestrian infrastructure.”

“We believe that this is a power grab and a land grab, it feels like a reimagining of urban renewal and redlining by corporations that just want to control these areas of commerce and where people live and enjoy their lives,” Hampton says. “We’re determined to be vigilant, stay on top of this, keep an eye on everything.”

The BID, combined with the Housing Authority’s push to close Southside Community Farm and council’s insistence on shoveling yet more money to police surveillance and city hall higher-ups while badly underpaying firefighters, have spurred yet more anger over governments’ role in Asheville’s runaway gentrification.

So even as council looks set to approve the BID, what the city is witnessing doesn’t look like the end of a fight, but the beginning.

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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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