Asheville city hall’s budget threatens a massive tax hike to give cops, wealthy bondholders and the city manager more money. It’s blatant extraction from struggling locals to appease the ruling class

Above: Asheville city hall. File photo by Max Cooper

“Budgets are moral documents” is a saying that bounces around town frequently this season, sometimes uttered by government officials themselves. Often wrongly attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., its origins are likely far more recent, with police reform campaigner Britney Packnett Cunningham.

No doubt, as this year’s budget goes up for a public hearing tonight, at the May 27 city council meeting and to a vote on June 10, we will hear it again from those in power. Its invocation is intended to portray budget season as some flawed-but-real communal striving towards better things. City manager Debra Campbell dubbed this year’s budget, predatory even by city standards, “caring” during its initial presentation at the May 13 council meeting.

That is, to put it mildly, untrue. In another sense, though, budgets are quite revealing about the morals of governments or, more accurately, the total lack of them. Buried in the dry lines of numbers are the countless oppressions that underly their rule, from officially-sanctioned corruption down to the cops arresting a poor person for existing. Budgets, stripped of their facades, reveal the petty cruelty and endless greed at a government’s core. Especially here.

This is the 20th Asheville budget cycle I’ve covered. Damn near every year, no matter what the public wants, it goes basically the same way. They shovel money to cops and consultants, along with the occasional piece of infrastructure beloved by the tourism industry or a wealthy (white) neighborhood. The city manager and higher-ups (who, conveniently, control the budget process) rake in massive raises on top of their already-bloated salaries. Other city workers, especially firefighters, will not be so fortunate. Indeed, many of them won’t get enough to make ends meet.

Past the constant hype about “reimagining” or grand plans, this is what city hall’s budgets reveal about who they are. When locals want anything else, like functioning buses or a pool that’s not in complete shambles, they will snap that “everyone can’t have everything.” Except, apparently, the city manager.

In 2021 Mayor Esther Manheimer even illegally shut the budget hearing down early because she didn’t like criticism of the police department.

One might think that the catastrophe of Helene would finally shake things up a bit and prompt officials to focus more on directly helping locals, even if temporarily, mainly for the sake of tamping down public anger.

Instead they’re doing the exact opposite with astounding vindictiveness. This year’s $273 million budget is focused on lining the pockets of the powerful at the cost of everyone else. It is, even more than before, openly extracting from the rest of us to do so.

The self-inflicted shortfall

At the budget’s heart is a massive eight percent property tax hike. Combined with a similar move from the county locals could face a staggering 14 percent spike in taxes this year. Downtown residents are hit with another tax on top of that to fund the BID, a private front group for the chamber of commerce intended to, in their own words, further police “anything deemed out of the ordinary” in the center of the city.

These taxes don’t fall predominantly on the wealthy. The reality of property taxes in the Asheville area is that working class homeowners — especially if they’re Black — get their properties wildly overvalued while the white and wealthy’s are undervalued. That means that those with the least ability to pay bear the taxes’ worst impact.

As for renters, who are most of the city’s population, landlords just pass the taxes onto them in the form of increased rents.

Nor is this tax hike going to some major public benefits that will help keep people in their homes or make their day to day lives easier. Instead city services continue to falter. The proposed budget for the transit system remains flat, even as worker shortages recently led city hall to cut back on four routes in a bus network that’s already barely functioning.

This year’s budget even cuts the annual round of grants to community groups on the ground, already far too paltry (some years it’s been less than Campbell’s salary) entirely. The same goes for the city’s annual $500,000 contribution to the affordable housing loan fund. Nor are they dedicating any of this coming budget towards desperately-needed rental aid. They also aren’t devoting any of the $225 million federal aid to that purpose, with a city staffer noting at the May 13 meeting that this was an intentional choice to focus on “capital projects” instead. With some exceptions, like long-overdue water infrastructure improvements, those are mostly things that the tourism industry and developers like.

No, instead the taxes are meant to cover a $4.5 million budget “shortfall.” Defenders of city government have tried to portray this, falsely, as some inevitable consequence of state and federal neglect after Helene.

But city hall’s own documents contradict this, showing that the shortfall is thoroughly self-inflicted. The memo for the city council budget hearing declares that the tax hike is meant to “cover compensation adjustments and maintenance of the city’s fund balance at the recommended rate of 15%.”

It’s worth breaking that down. The “compensation adjustments” include an entirely new pay scale for the Asheville Police Department. This comes after years of massive raises and increasing piles of cash shoveled to the APD despite it losing roughly 40 percent of its officers since 2020.

While the APD is as transparent as contaminated mud, just before Helene hit they reported 58 vacancies among sworn officers, only a slight reduction from the number of vacant spots the year before. At the same time they noted the force had 177 sworn officers in total. The proposed budget funds 272 full-time positions for them. Even accounting for overtime, cadets and non-sworn APD employees that’s still a massive gap.

While some of their increased funding went to things like the drones they use to spy on bookstores, or the repair bill for the former police chief’s mysterious car crash, it’s not clear where much of this cash has gone. Many of these vacancies have stayed on the books for almost half a decade at this point. When council member Kim Roney raised mild questions about this in 2022, APD higher-ups demanded her removal from the committee overseeing the department, which Manheimer quickly did.

This year the department’s shadowy new payscale clearly costs a lot more, as it goes along with a $1.5 million hike in the APD’s pay and benefits. Over a third of the massive tax increase will go to pay for this, including keeping those dozens of vacant positions open.

Maybe when the next storm comes they can shoot at it.

In seriousness, this shows a city government terrified of the public and actively preparing to attack increasing protest and dissent. If you remember the clouds of tear gas in 2020, the false felony charges against mutual aid volunteers and the arrests of Blade journalists in 2021 or other crackdowns since, you get the idea. City officials, like their peers among the Republicans, are terrified of the day the people’s patience runs out. They desperately want to get more cops on the force as quickly as possible.

Cops not the only ones making bank from the “compensation adjustments.” Once again raises among city employees are done in a way that benefits those with the most power.

Asheville city government has a notoriously uneven pay scale, with rank and file workers badly paid and higher-ups drawing unusually lush salaries for public servants. While this is far from new, it’s notably worsened under Campbell’s administration.

City raises are typically done as a flat percentage of existing pay. This preserves inequality, and gives higher-ups massive pay hikes while firefighters, public works employees and others on the ground see their pay fail to keep up with the cost of living.

This year city manager Debra Campbell, on her way to retirement, will rake in an $8,000 raise while entire parts of the city are still in ruins, bringing her salary to $272,000. This is, for contrast, higher than the annual pay of the mayor of New York City.

This year, at least on the surface, city officials claim to be doing something different. Many city workers making under $58,000 will get a flat raise of $1,740. This is better than the pittance they usually get under the percentage scheme.

Campbell’s administration swore this kind of tiered pay hike was impossible for years, and are only acting now out of fear of losing workers after Helene.

But there’s a major catch. All the city staff paid above $58,000 will get a three percent increase, using the same method that gave us all the inequality above. So those paid bloated salaries will make even more. Apparently the idea of officials already living in comfort on the public dime forgoing their cushy raises — or even taking a cut — in the name of shared sacrifice is too much to ask.

But what about the firefighters, who showed such heroism during Helene despite being badly underpaid?

Well, they don’t get that $1,740. Instead they just get a three percent pay hike after a year battling a catastrophic natural disaster. For some firefighters this is less than a dollar an hour raise. The contrast with the resources poured into the police, who spent the aftermath of Helene guarding empty stores and yelling at locals for trying to get water, is damning.

The budget documents claim that city government will start a “long-term process” to hire more firefighters and reduce the absurd hours they currently have to work. While long overdue, that’s not the raises they’ve consistently demanded. Locals starting out in the fire department, and plenty who’ve been there for years, will still make well below the area living wage of $23.15 an hour.

At this point her policies towards them are so punitive that one can only conclude Campbell has some deep, personal hatred of firefighters.

So, if that covers the “compensation adjustments” part of the tax hike, what about the fund balance part of it?

Once again, some background is necessary. “Fund balance” is cityspeak for their reserves and “rainy day” funds.

The fact this is on the list may seem surprising. At least on paper the idea behind such savings accounts is that they build up when times are relatively flush. Then the funds are spent when something like a recession or, well, a catastrophic storm hits. Once things genuinely recover that cycle can start over. They’re supposedly there to help the public, not hurt them.

But this is Asheville, where benefiting the public is the last thing on officials’ minds. They repeatedly refused to use the reserves to help locals during the worst of the pandemic. But last year, when they pushed through a 4.11 percent pay hike (about $10,500 for the city manager) they used $7.8 million of the reserves to fund it. The people of this city receive no such special treatment.

Wealthy bondholders and investors like to see sizable reserves, and city policy sets the fund balance goal at 15 percent of the $168 million general fund that comprises the lion’s share of the budget. So city hall’s hiking taxes to get the balance back up. The excuse for this is that otherwise Asheville will lose its high bond ratings from various credit agencies, making it somewhat more difficult to borrow money on favorable terms.

This is speculation. The 15 percent threshold is city policy but it’s recommended, not mandatory. Plenty of local governments play hardball and negotiate with credit agencies during a crisis, sometimes successfully. Others decide to risk a temporary hit to their ratings to use emergency reserves for, well, emergencies.

Asheville city hall has done neither. So rather than a “rainy day” fund benefiting locals who were literally flooded out of their homes, they’ll be heavily taxed to put money back into a bank account so it can just sit there and make the rich feel cozier. This is after paying out for dozens of police that only exist on paper and a cushier retirement for the city manager.

I wish I were making this up. I am not. This is what the enemies of the public seek to inflict on the rest of us.

Extraction is a choice

Even with all the constraints imposed by Helene, none of this is inevitable. City hall could cut vacant police positions and the department’s creepy (and expensive) surveillance of the public while holding off on the new pay scale. Higher-paid officials could go without a raise this year or even, horror of horrors, get their bloated salaries cut back. City hall could wait until the area is more fully recovered, or promised state funds finally arrive, to fill up the reserve fund. It’s a $273 million budget; they have options.

None of these are particularly radical (the police department, to pick one example, actually needs to be abolished entirely). During the financial crisis of the late 2000s even city government enacted pay and hiring freezes. There’s no law dictating Campbell and her cronies have to get a massive raise every year or that they have to keep shoveling money into all those vacant police positions (or wherever that giant pile of cash is going). These are choices, as is deciding to gouge the public to pay for it.

This move is blatant enough that, on May 13, even some council members started to balk. Roney blamed state government for not sending Asheville more funds (a real issue, but not the excuse council portrays it as) and invoked “budgets are moral documents” but acknowledged that she’d heard “deep concerns in the community about property tax increases as we’re recovering from Helene.” She wanted another council session to discuss alternatives. Vice mayor Antanette Mosley and council member Sage Turner also backed that.

In a revealing moment about what a farce local government “democracy” is, Manheimer scolded them for not staying in “our lane” and just rubber-stamping whatever the city manager handed them.

Any additional budget session, however, hasn’t emerged yet.

While vicious, this extraction budget also aligns with how city hall higher-ups have behaved since they crawled back into public view in the aftermath of Helene.

Three days after the storm hit Manheimer refused to take any responsibility for city hall’s catastrophic failure to put aside water reserves in the aftermath of the 2023 system breakdowns, blaming it on the county. The first major post-storm project they announced was renovating the golf course. In January multiple council members quizzed a FEMA representative about using funds from a program primarily meant for restoring residential neighborhoods to bail out wealthy commercial property owners. Even state and federal governments found their riverfront redevelopment rules ridiculously lenient to developers, and after Helene city council only changed them under the threat of an end to federal flood insurance support.

Despite locals literally pleading with them for rental aid so their neighbors don’t die in the cold, they refused to for months. At the last council meeting they finally found $135,074 in leftover covid relief funds to dedicate to it. Officials bragged this would help 27 families, a fraction of a fraction of those in need.

The true role of city hall is to extract as much resources as possible from the public, both to benefit themselves and gentry like the tourism industry, commercial property owners and bondholders. In this case, the storm just swept away the facade.

The question then, is what the rest of us do. It is never a bad idea to make city officials’ lives hell. Even when they still support awful things, it at least increases the public cost.

“We’re taking money you barely have to pay for the city manager’s luxury vacation, more asshole cops and the profits of wealthy bondholders” is not exactly a popular stance. Anger against the tax hike is growing across the city. The more people are aware and enraged, the greater the chance something finally gives.

Whether one applies that at the official hearing tonight, or in another way, is up to you and yours. Council’s budget vote isn’t until June 10, and often some of the most effective ways to pressure them are outside their own terrain in city hall.

Organizing a phone zap while they’re at dinner is one such option. To that end:

Mayor Esther Manheimer 828-231-8016
Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley 404-395-3665
Sheneika Smith 704-401-9104
Sage Turner 828-216-9284
Maggie Ullman 828-713-9488
Bo Hess 828-759-5354
Kim Roney 828-450-1099

Next week will mark the fifth anniversary of the multiracial uprisings that shook this city. While police brutality, establishment media propaganda and official co-option were deployed relentlessly to crush it, that memory still scares the powers that be to their core. There is a reason it, and the sustained outrage that followed, spurred the exodus of cops the APD is still desperately trying to wipe away.

Seven months ago Helene struck Asheville, and locals once again banded together to care and protect each other in a massive mutual aid effort, some of it building on what emerged from 2020. There is a reason city hall is desperate to return to the ultra-gentrified status quo, and erase the possibilities that courage revealed.

They are reminders of the power that lies within our communities. In the face of city hall’s endless greed, we’re going to need it.

—

Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with 20 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.

The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by our readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.

Copyright © 2025 The Asheville Blade. All Rights Reserved.