“Clean For Who? Safe For Who?”: Asheville Business Improvement District
We sat down with three local activists to talk about the proposed Asheville Business Improvement District, a model of service provision using public funding to increase policing in downtown by an unelected and unaccountable body of largely business and property owners. For the hour, Grace, Madison and Elliot talk about attempts to ram the BID through public process, some of the businesses and individuals behind it, how bids have panned out in other cities around the country and what space there is left to oppose this further privatization of public space in Asheville.
We didn’t mention it here, but there have also been rumblings of the BID model, a version of which was fought and never funded in 2012, being applied to other parts of Asheville, for example West Asheville. You can find more information and ways to get involved with folks organizing against the Business Improvement District at AshevilleBID.com and on Instagram at @NoAVLBid. This is our show for the week of May 12th.
As a quick note, there are a few acronyms frequently used in this conversation. One is RFP, which stands for Request for Proposals and is a process of contracting out an element of a project. Another acronym is ADA, in this case Asheville Downtown Association which is an independent pressure group made up of individuals, business and property owners. Not to be confused with the Asheville Downtown Commission, which was created by the City Council and contains appointed representatives from the ADA, city council, Buncombe County Board of Commissioners and few other community members including business owners.
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Featured Tracks:
- Asheville BID song (unknown artist)
- Moving Through The Streets (instrumental)
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Transcription
TFSR: Would you please introduce yourselves to the audience with any names, gender pronouns, affiliations, or other info that you think the audience should know for this conversation?
Madison: Hi, I’m Madison Jane, she/they. I am the owner of the House of Jane. It’s a salon and production company here in Asheville.
Grace: Hey, I’m Grace, I use she/they pronouns, and I’m just an avid follower of our city’s increasingly oppressive policies in the area.
Elliot: I’m Elliot, I use he/they pronouns, and I do a lot of mutual aid stuff around Asheville, street medic stuff. I am a graduate student in public health, and I work in homelessness services.
TFSR: So we’re here to talk about the proposed BID, or Business Improvement District, which is coming again before the Asheville city council, and it’s caused quite a stir. Likely many listeners won’t have heard about the proposal or the idea might still be new to them. So I’m wondering if you all could give us a rundown of what is on the table with this Business Improvement District at the upcoming May 14th Asheville City Council meeting and what the hell it is.
G: The Business Improvement District is a proposal to put an additional tax on all downtown properties. It’s currently proposed at nine cents per $100 of property value. This money would go into a fund that would be run by a completely unelected board that’s been handpicked by the Chamber of Commerce which is pushing this proposal in the first place. One of the big concerns is that on the board, it is predominantly property owners, and three of the seats are slated for people who have over $1.5 million in taxable assets in downtown. This has come up very quickly, we are actually already past the public hearing that was a couple of weeks ago, and they are going to vote two times on May 14th and June 11th to pass the tax and the map at which point then I guess the community might learn some of the actual details about what all this will entail, which seems a really backward way to do things.
TFSR: Is the Chamber of Commerce a public, private, or mixed institution in terms of public accountability and funding?
G: It’s a private institution made up of voluntary membership. And in Asheville, we’re seeing a lot of the same pools of people who interact with our Tourism and Development Authority, the Chamber, and then the steering committee for this Business Improvement District.
E: When you say voluntary, it is composed of people who own businesses in downtown Asheville who joined the Chamber of Commerce. I don’t recall if they pay to be members or what they vote on, whether they make recommendations to the city council, or whether they just advertise collectively.
M: The ADA [Asheville Downtown Association] that is working with the chamber to propose this BID, they are a paid membership, I believe.
TFSR: And it was described as a tax. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that tax would be used to do. I know that you said that more of the information is going to be released during one of these upcoming hearings if it gets passed or whatever. But what do people expect who aren’t the planners of it for this to actually be?
M: The majority of their proposal, $700,000, will go toward safety and marketing. Their main pitch is “clean and safe.” Beyond that, it is very vague. Grace, I believe you have some of the details that are from the website of what “clean and safe” means for them.
G: So the main pitch is that they’re trying to hire downtown ambassadors—that’s how they branded this—which are really street patrols. I think they would like to have body cams. They will be going around and identifying people who they deem to look out of the ordinary. They will be probably reporting our unhoused neighbors to the police, identifying encampments it looks like from what I can tell. These have been put in place in other communities. It’s really just a strategy for private businesses and corporations to be able to exert more control over their district areas with no oversight or accountability from the public.
E: A large part of their operational plan is about the safety and policing of homeless people, but these aren’t cops. They’re not accountable to anyone other than their unelected board with a 10-year term. A lot of the language about their safety and hospitality services is about identifying out-of-the-ordinary behaviors, noticing antisocial behaviors, and reporting them to appropriate agencies. It’s about the further policing of people who are homeless or perceived to be homeless who are existing in public.
M: And in other BIDs around the country, these ambassadors are not trained in de-escalation. They are not trained in social work. So there’s a big barrier on how these people are going to be approaching our community. There is no statement, and there’s no job description anywhere. That’s up to the RFP [Request For Proposals]. So the thing about this proposed BID is it needs to be voted in first, and then they’ll fill in the gaps with all the fine details through an RFP. So we as a community have no idea what this BID will evolve into after it’s passed. So in that RFP, they can decide whether or not these ambassadors will or won’t be armed and if they can ever be armed. It will, hopefully, give a better idea of what that job description is. Again, none of these details are to come until after the BID is passed.
G: One of the other important aspects of this is that a Business Improvement District isn’t supposed to be replacing, it can only enhance, already existing city services. So a lot of folks are also talking about how there are a lot of vacancies in city positions for things like sanitation because the city actually still doesn’t pay people a living wage. So these people who would be in these ambassador positions, I think in the proposal they may be claiming that they will be paying them more, which is interesting when we’re actually not even providing the existing services. If it’s really about cleanliness and all, we need to pick up more trash downtown or empty the trash bins, which is why I know that’s not what it’s actually about.
TFSR: There used to be a model when firefighting was professionalized in the United States—I can be a little cloudy about the details here—but it was a service that was provided to the individual businesses and homes that paid for the service. Firefighting would just skip by places that were on fire if it wasn’t one of their patrons or whatever. If you want to if you want to know about how this model of public service and its accountability to the general public stands, there are some examples out there.
G: I just want to note that, since you brought up the firefighters, we also are paying our firefighters in Asheville, currently $15 an hour. So supposedly, these ambassadors would make more money than they do, which I think is really important. Also, I wanted to point out that if these downtown businesses are so concerned about these things, literally nothing is stopping them from getting together and donating their money to a nonprofit that they use to pick up trash downtown.
TFSR: Could you talk about that use of the language of a “safe and clean” downtown? And this corresponds to the promotion of a story that downtown has ceded to crime and violence that’s been promoted at a national level over the last at least a year, maybe two years. I’m curious about how you see this fitting in with the fact that the police can’t keep themselves staffed to their desirable levels and hired a promotional company to do PR for them. Their supporters have continued to move to increase the funding and or get patrols from other departments like the sheriffs into downtown.
M: I think the biggest question is when they say “clean and safe,” it’s clean for who and safe for who? I’m afraid that our most marginalized communities will be left behind in this rhetoric, especially around the toxic narratives that have definitely enhanced over the last year or two about our unhoused population and the “rise” in… What’s the word? Sorry, I can’t even think of it because it doesn’t go hand-in-hand when I think about our houselessness. Even businesses that I would generally consider more progressive, I’ve heard them have more of a toxic rhetoric around our unhoused neighbors. The thing with the “clean and safe” is everything on the BID website is very vague. They don’t really talk too deeply about what clean and safe means until we’ve gotten into these city council meetings and the downtown commission meeting where we’ve heard people that are on these steering committees say what they essentially deem as clean and safe, and it’s getting our unhoused neighbors off of their doorsteps.
E: I think the point about who deserves to feel safe in downtown is a really important one here because the language about homelessness feels a little bit hidden behind the proposals. If you look at the text, if you look at the presentations that have been given to the city council, when they say “clean and safe,” they’re like, “There is trash on the streets. We have to pick up the needles. People are scared.” And it takes a few steps for them to say what they mean, which is “We don’t want people sleeping in our doorways, because we don’t want to talk to them.” It feels connected to me that this increasingly violent rhetoric, this very fear-based rhetoric about homelessness. I’ve worked for a couple of businesses downtown. I’m also somebody who has lived experience of homelessness. When I would come in to open up the store, sometimes there will be somebody sleeping in the doorway, and you have to say, “Hey bud, can you move out of the doorway? I’m gonna have to unlock in a few minutes.” It’s been a little baffling to me to hear business owners speak at city council, as if that was an impossible task. I don’t think it’s hard to just be nice to somebody. I think it’s notable that the solution that is being pitched here is not more services, more housing, or more accessible housing. The solution is to kick people out. We’re not seeing homeless people as people who don’t have houses. We see them as people whose existence is inherently criminal.
M: I also just want to point out that by all of even the cop’s own metrics, so-called crime is down. And, in fact, it is the police’s own policies that are increasing the visibility of our unhoused neighbors as they continue to relentlessly sweep encampments and move people constantly from one location to another under threat of criminalization just for trying to even sit down somewhere.
E: This reminds me of Mike Lamb’s presentation to the city council. Was it a couple of years ago, where he tried to say that the majority of felonies were committed within 100 yards of a homeless camp, and then tried to figure out where you think those camps are located, and what else is in 100 yards of homeless camps? It turns out, it’s basically, also 100 yards from every brewery. I feel there’s been this narrative push around the idea that homelessness equals crime, and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but the escalation in camp sweeps is something that’s been particularly concerning to a lot of us because we know when you kick people out of a place they felt safe, even if just temporarily, and you throw away all their belongings, it’s a lot harder for them to continue to function and exist, not to mention the the impact of being arrested on somebody’s access to housing. Once we see the cops might tell somebody to move along, show up and clear their camp, give them a citation, maybe eventually arrest them, might arrest them immediately, depending on how they’re feeling that day. But it’s now going to be a lot harder for them at some point in the future to rent housing because they have a charge on the record. What it has looked like as a resident of Asheville is a desire to try to make downtown more palatable for the tourism economy. Not a safer place for those of us who are also having a hard time paying our own rent. I think we should assume that given the increased cost of living and difficulties, I don’t know if we want to talk about the food and beverage unions, fights around income and housing, but this town is becoming increasingly more expensive, difficult to work in, difficult to live in. More of us are closer and closer to homelessness every day. That’s not a problem that can be pushed out just by sweeping up people that tourists don’t like to look at.
G: The irony is not lost on me that they’re going to put more guys downtown in polo shirts when the safety concerns that I have personally encountered in downtown Asheville have been with brewery guys in polo shirts who are way too drunk and who are harassing me on the street. That is literally the only time that I personally have had a safety concern in our community. We know that they’re not going to go after anyone who’s engaging in the tourist economy with this program.
M: I feel that that’s generally my main concern with this probe proposed BID is none of this added tax is going to any fundamental needs that we need to survive as humans: affordable housing, living wages, health care, infrastructure maintenance. None of the proposed BID will go towards any of those things. To your point, as so many of us are struggling, whether we are housed or not, I’m afraid that this BID is just going to start to create even more barriers for people to be able to live and survive in this town.
TFSR: I think a part of this discourse that’s not being centered by the proposal, there’s underlying the proposal is the assumption that downtown is for the purposes of the businesses to be able to conduct better business. It’s not centering on the needs of the community or talking about the role that downtown could, has, or maybe should serve to the wider community, whether that means a place that people can go panhandle, because tourists are down there, and they might be willing to give some money, or play some music and busk or whatever. Somebody that I talked to had described the BID as being a development in the model of the mall, as this highly-controlled space that is for the purpose of commerce that a lot of us have memories of growing up. There are a lot of stories in the US about people in their teenage years going and hanging out in the mall because other people are there. It’s a place that people can make niches out of, but it is not a space that is designed, or that organically allows for those sorts of interactions, and it’s very easy to get kicked out of a mall if you’re not buying anything.
The question of what is the role of this space in our community with real community members is lost in the way that it’s framed during these meetings, especially with the highly racialized language of social hygenics. Who belongs in this space? What are the appropriate ways that people can interact with each other in this space? Who is meant to benefit? Is it this class of people that are going to be coming and buying stuff, staying for a little while, and then going away? Is it the people that happen to own a lot of property, however they got that wealth to be able to do it? I think that those discourses would make a lot of the “progressives and liberals” who are pushing for this model very uncomfortable because they don’t want to think about themselves as pushing for what they’re actually pushing for.
G: I think one of the interesting things is that they actually haven’t been nearly as veiled in their language around this as one would expect. I have heard them directly referencing how basically downtown went into shambles in 2020. They are referencing the uprisings of that time and also a time when temporarily unhoused folks were allowed to live where they were—they were allowed to stay in place until they started the sweeps and after that went against the CDC guidelines. I think that what’s been interesting about this is that some downtown business owners actually aren’t for this either. Because this is so concentrated in the the hotel class, which is even different, I think, than some of the smaller downtown business owners, it’s been nice to see a broader opposition to this within that. But I think that liberalism teaches us that they co-opt the words and then move it around, and they actually are trying to bill it like you asked for this, you asked for ambassadors. That’s what you wanted. Like that’s what we were asking for in 2020 during the uprisings, which is just outlandish. This isn’t what anyone asked for.
TFSR: Like as an alternative to the police. This is abolishing the police is replacing them with a privatized army of unaccountable people with body cams.
G: Who are going to just call the police, which they’ve made very clear too. It actually took about 20 minutes into the Downtown Association meeting about this before somebody said, “Well, why can’t we just use this money to hire cops instead?”
TFSR: No thanks… It was mentioned that there was a past effort for this. Grace mentioned that this is not a unified business-owning decision. Madison has identified themself as an owner of a business. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what about that failed 2012 attempt to create a BID, some of the voices in particular, if you could talk about the perspectives of people that maybe were in favor of it then who now are speaking out against this, what they’re saying.
M: I heard about this current BID from a business owner who opposed the first BID in 2012. They weren’t sure if they had the energy or time to try to organize again like they did 12 years ago. So that’s where I picked up on this. From what I see, the first BID was passed, and there was enough community organizing that it ended up never getting funded. So the tax was never placed. I noticed that there were at least one to two speakers at the city council meeting that were pro-2012 BID that were speaking against this current BID. I believe a lot of it is because of the vagueness in this proposal. So there’s a lot of distrust around what it is. There are no clear intentions on what it will actually become.
G: I think another aspect that those folks are concerned about is the makeup of the BID board. So this board would be appointed and then would be self-appointing from there. So there’s really no oversight on that aspect. I think they’re really trying to push this through quickly in this particular year because we’re coming up on a tax reevaluation so all of the property taxes are about to go up anyway. So if you’re a business owner, that’s obviously something you’re thinking about, not to mention, we just increased our water rates, we increased the downtown parking rates, and there’s a bond that’s going to go through. So from a fiscal perspective too I think there are a lot of reasons why people might push back on this. Also, you’re going to be paying even more than what the proposed amount is for the BID once that [reevaluation] happens. So I think those are some of the more fiscally-minded talking points against this.
M: This current bid is also asking for a 10-year contract before it can be up for renewal with only a five-year check-in.
E: When you asked about people who had supported it then but opposed it now, at the City Council hearing where there was substantial public comment about this—I think it was 37 people speaking against it and 11 people speaking for it. There was one person who got up and spoke who said that she had, I think, chaired the committee for the 2012 BID and supported it then but was against the current proposal because of how vague it is. A lot of what we were hearing from people who would otherwise support the concept of the Business Improvement Districts, who think that these safety ambassadors are a good idea, they’re looking at the current proposal, and they’re saying this is too rushed, this is too vague. We don’t know what this means, we don’t know how this is going to be implemented. So it seems like there is a pretty broad opposition right now. It’s maybe people who don’t want to pay higher taxes, it’s people who don’t want even more unaccountable police activity or policing happening. There’s opposition from people who would probably want something like this but don’t how rushed and vague it was. I’m hoping that means this one also gets defeated and doesn’t just get further revised into something that they would want.
G: They also pointed out the people who worked on the 2012 proposal, which is really interesting, is that the consultants, this company P.U.M.A. out of Denver who were paid $200,000 for a feasibility study that they’re asking for city council to reimburse them for, basically copied the proposal that the community had worked on for years together and then charge them $200,000 for it and put it back forward. So that’s just another interesting tidbit. I think it’s really important, how much of this is just people lining their friend’s pockets.
M: To your point, Grace, spending $200,000 on all their research and marketing for this proposal. one of the things that they often say in these meetings of theirs, these pitches, is that they have 400 people on board around town that are pro-BID. That’s over a year of their research. I just wanted to make a little point that we’ve been able to get over 630 votes on a petition that opposes the BID in one week. So I think that just shines a light that 1) we were able to do this for free and actually get input from our community, 2) in one week, we’ve been able to get more opposition than they’ve been able to get and pay for in over a year.
TFSR: Yeah, I’ve been talking to some folks that were canvassing about this. They expressed how surprised some business owners downtown were hearing about this for the first time or having had a rep from the proponents of this come by and just being totally turned off by the interaction. It sounds like they’re just cooking the numbers to promote their argument. Besides the fact that it was tried in 2012, this model and even the language of it isn’t new or locally unique. Would you all talk a bit about what’s known of examples of BIDs being imposed in other places and people’s experiences with them?
M: A big pitch from the people that are pro-BID is that there are over 1000 BIDs across the nation. That being said, there are over 3000 towns that are around the same sizes as those 1000 towns that they say have BIDs, so more than two-thirds of towns in the US don’t have BIDs. We have a list of about 21 cities that just in the last couple of years have defeated BIDs, most recently we know of up in Rochester. They defeated their BID for the second time just this past March. A lot of these BIDs are riddled with civil rights cases across the country. I’m personally from California, and I had no idea what a BID was until April of this year. When I started doing research, there were civil rights cases against BIDs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and a lot of those suits were based on either encampment sweeps or destroying people’s property, especially houseless people. It is putting this these tax dollars into politicians pockets. It’s also civil rights cases against essentially just feeding police information about our community members.
G: And I think one of the challenges we’re facing in our BID fight is just this really short timeline that we’ve been given to push back against this, but like Madison pointed out, we’re doing great on our petition so far. Also, at the public hearing at the city council, there was more than tripled the opposition to the BID than there were proponents of it, which is an amazing turnout. As someone who follows the city council pretty closely, it was amazing how quickly people rallied around it. So I think that we have those things going for us in our case, and I’m really hoping that we can defeat it. But one of the challenges of this is that if you hear Business Improvement District, that doesn’t mean a lot. It’s just nonsense words put together that you might not realize are going to be this threat to the community. So we’ve been working to try to give more education around this to our community so that we have time to push back against it. I’m really thankful that we have such a vibrant community that’s ready to get involved.
M: That unfortunately, what I experienced when I first heard about this BID and tried to talk to more people affiliated with it, I talked to people, businesses on the steering committee, I talked to people that are on the board with the ADA and the downtown commission, I talked directly to the ADA and the Chamber of Commerce. The thing I noticed the most is that they had a very pretty script that I was being fed. A lot of the same words were coming from completely different people, as well as I was continually told that everyone wanted this BID, everyone was on board with this BID, and that this BID is inevitable, that there was nothing that can be said or done that would stop it from happening. When I started reaching out to the community and talking to people who work downtown and businesses downtown, so many people didn’t know about this BID. What I realized is that I was just perpetually being gaslit by these people that are proposing this BID, essentially trying to make me not question anything about it, saying, “Oh, yes, it’s the great thing. It’s going to happen. Don’t worry about it.” I’m worried about it because something that’s supposed to be for the community that doesn’t seem to have a lot of community input.
G: Madison and I attended the Asheville Downtown Association meeting about this. It actually became abundantly clear during that meeting that the downtown commission members themselves actually don’t understand what a BID is. They were being asked to make a recommendation on it. They were asking very basic questions that we didn’t have the answers to, and they seemed confused. So that’s how quickly they’re trying to move this through so that there is no time for public input and questions to be asked.
M: And speaking of public input, the fact that we only had one vote or one public input available four weeks prior City Council’s first vote was when the only public hearing was. They changed the time of when the public hearing would be three times leading up to that hearing. At first, it was at 7pm on a Tuesday. Then it was at 4pm that Tuesday. Then they told us to show up at 3:30 to sign up for a public hearing. So when I got there at 3:15 to sign up, they were already letting people sign up. So they started letting people sign up early, only to be told that they had changed it again that day to 7pm. Even city council members didn’t know if we were going to be given two minutes or three minutes, if they were going to allow everyone who signed up to speak, or if they were going to limit it to one hour. Even just trying to show up it was extremely hard for people to navigate, how to show up and when to show up. Not everybody has the luxury of sitting around for five and a half hours. Even during the meeting they tried to change the time. They’re like “Well, we’re all here. So let’s start talking now” at five o’clock when initially they said it was at seven o’clock. So it was just such a clustercuss even just to get public comment, and it almost seemed intentional. They didn’t necessarily want to hear us. I don’t think they would make it so difficult for people to show up if they actually wanted to hear what we had to say.
TFSR: And also worth noting that those times are… Not that there’s a perfect time for everyone ever for something like this, but if the concern was actually about public input, doing it during what are considered, “regular business hours,” especially for people that have to think about childcare, working a job, and don’t have easy access to transportation, it’s pretty high barriers for public participation, let alone those time changes you were talking about.
M: Huge time. And on top of that, the next public hearing through the downtown commission was at 9am on a Friday. So a lot of barriers were being laid for general working-class people to be able to show up at these meetings.
TFSR: I know it might be speculation, but because people who were concerned about this were able to rally three times as many people to this meeting on such short notice and have been doing a lot of work stamping the concrete and talking to people and knocking on doors and whatever, does it seem like they thought about this as a last-minute effort, and they’re like, “Oh, shoot, we could just push this through, they’re going to be ignorant, not be able to do anything about it?” Or does it seem like this is a well-oiled machine or some mixture of the two?
M: I don’t feel that it’s a well-oiled machine. Just the fact that BIDs have been around for over three decades and they don’t have a very clear proposal, it just shows me that it’s not a well-oiled machine. If it’s something that’s been so successful time and time again for over 30 years, I would expect very clear documentation or a document on what is to be proposed and expected down to every single tiny detail. So I do feel that it could possibly be more of a “Let’s just rush this in, and then figure it out as we go” or be able to control. I do feel this is a power grab. I do feel this is about privatizing our public spaces. The sooner they can get it in and not have the community push on it is more beneficial for them.
G: I think the Chamber of Commerce is really counting on this tight timeline, because they made it abundantly clear, once in the downtown commission meeting, when people started asking questions about “well, can we adjust this here or just this there,” the Chamber made it very clear that there is a point at which they actually would no longer be interested in having a BID at all, because they wouldn’t be able to have their hand-picked rich board in charge of it. I think that that is very telling. I also think that there’s another political dynamic at play, which is that some of these same folks who are pushing the BID have actually been really hard and on and nasty to our city council, complaining that they’re terrible at their jobs. In fact, part of their pitch is like, “Well, the city sucks at doing all these things. So let us do it instead. We’re nimble, we can be nimble.” So I think that’s another interesting thing that is unraveled as I’ve watched this.
E: I think what is well-oiled about this is City Council’s lack of concern or regard for people who are service industry workers, for people who live downtown who are not major property owners, hoteliers. They’ve pretty much practiced the disregard that led them to reschedule public comment so many times.
G: I do think that in the event, which hopefully won’t happen, that they pass the BID, knowing that there is a point at which the chamber will no longer even want this thing is really important for people in the community to understand because there will be a point where they’re doing this request for proposal, and if it becomes so odious to the Chamber of Commerce, there could be potentially another situation where we would at least be able to reel back the power of the BID in terms of not giving it to this unelected board, which actually is not necessitated by the state statute that outlines a Business Improvement District. It is actually technically a municipal service district, and there are other communities do not have an unelected board that controls these funds.
M: I think to that point, too, Grace, is something we learned in the city council and the downtown commission meeting is that legally City Council can have full control of this BID. This specific proposal is asking for a management company to be handling it. The ADA and the Chamber of Commerce intend to make a 501c because if there is a management, it has to be a 501c. They intend to come together to create that 501c to be the managers of this BID. Based on the RFP and whoever pitches for this BID, the city council can decide to go with a completely different management company or no management at all. So again, that’s where there’s just a lot of gray area with the BID once it’s passed. It can literally become something completely different than this current proposal.
G: We’re going to have to out-nimble their nimbleness.
M: “Nimble” was their favorite word alongside “clean and safe.”
E: You asked about lessons in other places fighting bids. I’ve already said I’m really impressed that Asheville was able to bring three times as many people in opposition with extremely short notice. I think we were planning around that for a week or two to try to round people up. I feel like there’s been a lot of groundwork and relationship-building and conversations that led to people who are against this thing bringing it up and talking to each other about it. In the conversations that you Madison and Grace have been having with other business owners and other involved parties, the opposition to this here in Asheville now rests on that work that was done in 2012 but also on this ongoing relationship-building groundwork that a lot of people I’m in community with here trying to engage in constantly so that we’re able to respond to this stuff when it comes up. It’s not just a single issue that we were trying to organize around. I want to say something about being prepared for whatever fight that comes, being prepared for whatever issue we need to try to respond to.
M: To add to your question of whether we have any success stories from other cities, we have a list of 21 cities, including Asheville, that have rejected a BID, some cities multiple times, including Rochester. In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, their BID was rejected due to a lawsuit that vote collection was illegal. Beyond that, I don’t have the fine details on what the organizing looked like or what the fine details were of how these other cities were able to have their bids rejected, but we’re looking at Philadelphia; St. Paul; Bristol, UK even; Sarasota, Florida; Kansas City; Birmingham, Alabama; Atlantic City, New Jersey; all across.
G: My hometown.
M: Yeah. All across St. Paul. We have a whole list of cities just in the last decade that have had BIDs rejected in their towns.
G: I don’t know much about Atlantic City’s efforts, but I know that it’s the highest union-density city, I believe, in the country. And a lot of New Jersey BIDs have been rejected. I do think that our coalition with Asheville Food and Bev United, which represents our downtown service workers, I think the power the workers who are maintaining their livelihoods in downtown Asheville really, really have a huge stake in this, it is so important. And I’m just so appreciative of the way that they’ve shown up for this.
TFSR: It’s interesting, to point back to what someone had said about how even if people can’t get total no vote on it, if people can shift what is passable to something that the Chamber doesn’t want, maybe they’ll drop the effort, although maybe just after it got passed, the city council would shift it back to something that people expressly don’t want. But that seems to open some possibilities.
G: I do think that that’s an important possibility that we have to consider. That will be our next job. Right now, one of the things that’s baffling about this is we actually have no idea where our city council members stand on this issue. I only feel confident that I know one no vote on the city council, for sure. There’s one other person who I think is almost certainly a yes vote, that being Maggie Ullman, who had the nerve to say at the city council meeting that we need all the help we can get, while the city is literally criminalizing people for distributing food and resources in our community. I hate that hypocrisy. But I think after the May 14th meeting, we’ll have a much better idea of where the city council members are standing. Also, if there might be room to move from there before the next vote on June 11th.
TFSR: My next question was going to be about who was backing it, and it’s already been referenced that it’s not clear how the politicians are sitting for the most part. Hoteliers have been brought up here as a class that is backing this issue. But I wonder if any particular businesses that y’all are aware of are behind this effort so that people could go and talk to them and say, “This is not a thing that we want.” Or is that something that y’all are proposing?
M: Yeah, on the steering committee, there’s Spicer Greene Jewelers, and the owner is on that Downtown Commission Board. They were the one person on the steering committee that I heard express very violent rhetoric around our houseless community. They said that they felt very uncomfortable when they would show up to work and somebody was sleeping in their doorway and that they had called the police multiple times with nothing happening. They were also one of the ones in that meeting that was pushing for the ambassadors to be armed if a BID gets proposed.
G: I’d like to call attention to J.B. McKibben, who is the owner of Hotel Arras downtown, and actually stood at the council meeting and said, “I own 10% of all commercial property in Asheville,” so he’s our local Jeff Bezos. I remember him from such hits as allowing snipers into his hotel to point at protesters in 2020. I also remember a photo of, I believe, his father circulating on the internet of him wearing blackface. He said, “That’s my wife, but that’s not me.” But we were pretty sure about that. So he’s one of the more despicable ones. I want to call out Tupelo Honey, Burial [Beer Co.], and Wicked Weed. These are some places where folks who listen may go—or not want to go anymore. Then other hotels and banking and commercial real estate interests. Biltmore Estate, of course.
TFSR: Some of those that you named are our local businesses or some of them are local businesses that were franchised or were sold and then franchised out to other areas. Tupelo Honey was originally from here, but they’ve got a number Tupelo Honeys around the southeast. Wicked Weed was purchased by Anheuser-Busch. It’s interesting. I know that one of the businesses that sticks in my mind, or one the business owners that owns multiple businesses that signed on to the request for the sheriff’s department to do patrols downtown to move along homeless folks is Spicewalla and Chai Pani business, which also owns a restaurant in West Asheville. They owned Buxton Barbecue and shut it down in October-November, also ruining a bunch of people’s jobs.
M: I think to that point, to tie everything into the violent rhetoric around our unhoused neighbors, Chai Pani, along with a few other restaurant groups signed an open letter to the City Council asking for more policing around their businesses. Those are the same businesses that are calling for this BID because they do want more privatization of their public spaces. They want more policing of their businesses. Something that we don’t consider is how many of these people working in these restaurants, people that are dishwashers, that are service workers, how many of them are houseless? I don’t think that’s something that we talk about when our minimum wage is $7.25, and It hasn’t changed in over a decade. Back to the point that this BID does absolutely nothing to focus on the needs of our actual community. It’s not talking about how we stop people from facing houselessness. How do we stop people from becoming these “unsafe and unclean” things that people are uncomfortable seeing around their business? That’s where my fire for just sharing knowledge around this BID is really relayed around because I see endless calls for mutual aid every day on the internet for our local community members that are barely making it by. They’re barely making their rent. Their cars aren’t able to get them to work. None of this is actually going to the real needs of our community, which is hurting on so many different levels. This BID is made to add to the services that we don’t have to begin with. Our social workers aren’t getting the funds that they need, back to the point that our firefighters only make $15 an hour. The core services of our city aren’t getting the funds and the attention that they need to even try to add something on top of that that’s from a private entity that has very specific and very close-minded ideas of where that money is going to be spent.
TFSR: It’s been mentioned that there are two votes are coming up for this that are necessary. It’s been mentioned also that there has been a lot of going door-to-door a lot of talking to people a lot of organizing, coordinating, and trying to get people in a room together to discuss, to think about, and to share their perspectives. I don’t know if there’s anything else about the methods that have been employed in this coordination to oppose the Business Improvement District in Asheville that maybe you’d want to highlight quickly that maybe people in other communities that are facing a similar thing could be able to employ.
G: I think I would just point to what Elliot was talking about earlier about having networks that are prepared to respond. Also, I hope that this allows people who may have not had a BID proposed in their community yet to know more about it so that they can get the word out about it quickly when it comes up. Hopefully, you’re given more time than we are. Because once people start to get to know this thing, it’s fairly easy to understand why it’s not something that we would want. We’re using petitions, canvassing, and also just talking to our neighbors.
TFSR: And what are the next steps that people can get involved with or ways that they can learn more from what you are offering, what information you’ve collected, or plugged into the process?
M: If you go to AshevilleBID.com, it has a few different links. One of our main asks is for people to look at the petition which has a lot of different links to different things about BIDs across the nation. Our goal is to get it to 1000 signatures by the May 14th City Council meeting. So that’s our biggest push. Our second ask is just for people to continue to share the information with their neighbors and with other businesses. It’s really important if anybody has direct contacts or relationships with our city council members to try to have conversations with them about the harmful impacts of the BID. We would also like to see more downtown businesses that are opposed to it being vocal in the sense of putting a sign in their window or having flyers to the petition and more information about the BID in their businesses that can be shared within the community.
G: You can also follow @NoAVLBID on Instagram where we’ll be posting updates. You can message that account if you want to volunteer to canvass the community with this. We’re asking for support at that May 14th City Council meeting because while the public hearing has already officially occurred, that doesn’t stop us from continuing to speak at City Council meetings.
TFSR: Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that y’all wanted to mention that fits in this framework, maybe that just occurred to you and I didn’t make space for it?
M: Yeah, there was one thing that I wanted to add when you were mentioning how this BID sounds a lot like a mall. For me, not only does the BID sound like a mall, but the foundations of a BID are based on the dynamics of a mall. For me, I feel that this BID sounds a lot more like redlining and Jim Crow segregation and and urban renewal. On the point of urban renewal, if anyone is interested, Grind AVL coffee shop in the River Arts just put up a massive historical mural on an entire wall inside their business that shows the history of urban renewal here in Asheville and how devastating it was to our Black community in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. We lost over 1000 homes to urban renewal and over 50 businesses around Asheville in predominantly Black neighborhoods. So a lot of this BID and privatizing public spaces, these power grabs of public spaces sounds a lot of the dark history that Asheville has already seen and experienced, and its repercussions have been felt over generations. My fear is that this BID will be another one of those things that are negatively felt over generations in this town.
G: A great way to remember if you want to talk about the BID is a lovely acronym that we borrowed from our friends in Rochester, which is that the BID is CRAP: Corporate, Redlining, And Privatization.
TFSR: Very catchy. Thank you all three of you for being a part of the conversation and for the work that you’re doing around this. And good luck.
M: Thank you.
G: Thank you so much.