City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Asheville City Council meeting. If you could just take a moment to silence your cell phones. And if you want to sign up to speak on an item on the agenda, just step into the hall and you can sign up to speak and it'll show up on our screen, assuming we have the sign up sheet pulled up on our screen. And if you would please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. and indivisible with liberty and justice for all. First, I will begin by reading our decorum statement, our chamber decorum statement. Members of the public attending council meetings or addressing the council shall abide by the following rules. Everyone shall follow the instructions of the mayor or any other presiding officer or official and shall refrain from impeding or interrupting the conduct of business. This shall include but not be limited to clapping, yelling, or other audio expressions of approval or disapproval of comments made during the meeting. Persons addressing the council are expected to observe the decorum of the chamber, to be respectful of the council and the public, to refrain from the use of profanity or foul language, to refrain from personal attacks, and commentary on candidates for political office, and to refrain from making disclosures prohibited by the Personnel Privacy Act with respect to any city employee. Failure to abide by these rules may subject you to removal from the council chamber. Thank you. Before we begin our meeting today, and we don't have any proclamations. I do want to recognize that we in our community since our last meeting suffered a double homicide of two young people in our community and Our community is grieving. There have been several events already to honor the memories of the lost, of the folks whose lives were lost. And there will be additional community events coming up along with funerals for those individuals. And I know various council members have spoken out on this issue. The manager and I, along with the chief of police who is here, have also spoken to the community about this event in our community. And as I said before, I do not want us to become numb to these kinds of events. It should not be anything anyone accepts in their community as something that is normal. And we need to continue to work in partnership to make sure that people receive the education, the support, the healthcare, the housing, everything an individual needs to be successful in life and have the greatest amount of opportunity. And tonight, on our agenda, we do have an expansion of a current partnership we already have as a city with what I would call a violence interruption program. And it's a timely opportunity to expand that partnership. So with that, council, I would ask if there's a motion to approve the consent agenda, there is a request to remove item I from the consent agenda. So do I have a motion to adopt the consent agenda without item I? So moved.

Second.

All right, we have a motion and a second. Okay, somebody have the sign-up sheet pulled up? I do. Is there anyone signing up?

There is not. Oh, let me reload. No. Oh, one. No. Sorry. Yes. Okay. It's not. No consent.

No.

Oh, okay.

All right. We don't have anyone signed up to speak under the consent agenda. So with that, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the vote is six to zero to approve the consent agenda without item I, and I forgot to mention that Councilwoman Ullman is away this evening. Item I is a resolution authorizing the city manager to accept the 2026 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant from the Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control Policy on behalf of Asheville. HIDTA branch and authorize the city manager to execute all documents associated with the grant and adopt a budget amendment in the city's special revenue fund in the amount of $160,904. Do I have a motion to approve item I?

So moved.

Second.

All right, I have a motion and a second.

If I may?

Yes.

Regarding item H. Bulletproof vests are necessary equipment for our police department and we have always had the funding to purchase them. We still have budget priority and transparency issues in my opinion. This year I'm voting to approve this grant because it is important to me to show that we're using every available opportunity to minimize the burden of property taxes on our residents, the city of Asheville, has budget issues, overtime issues, serious public safety issues that require us to ensure we're sending the right responder with the right tools and training during serious issues our community faces around mental health and behavioral health, substance use, violence prevention. Not two to four people on staff for a whole city, but an office of community safety is needed that matches the demand of our community needs. Regarding item I that I've asked to be pulled, the ACLU has warned against the Hydida grants as continued funding for the failed war on drugs and unconstitutional warrantless searches. Our community expects proactive relational responses to safety issues, violence prevention, and living wages so first responders, including law enforcement, can afford to live in the community they serve. We know detectives have to do the work downstream, responding to violence and crime that has already happened. But the city of Asheville has an opportunity to go upstream to prevent crime and violence if we make it a budget priority. And I think we've failed to do that multiple times. Recent budget cuts have included strategic partnership fund cuts that fund youth programming and cuts to weekend hours at recreational facilities, the community investments for violence prevention that are proven to work. I believe our staff have the resources and vision to get us moving in the right direction with council's support, but until then, I have to use the lever I have for accountability, and that includes my vote of no on budget on items like this.

Thank you.

Okay, so council, just to follow up on that. We already voted for item H, which Councilwoman Roney mentioned, which is the funding for bulletproof vests, which historically has been a six to one vote on that topic. So I'm glad to hear that you're voting for that tonight, especially given a recent incident involving an active shooter in a parking lot at a bar that police were forced to confront. I would want to make sure that our police officers are well protected when they're facing that kind of violence and potential injury. So what we are voting on, though, is item I, which is a recurring item that we receive federal funding around, not very much funding, but some funding around working on, from a policing standpoint, drug trafficking. We are tonight also, as I mentioned, continuing a partnership in what is considered a violence interruption program and building that out to be able to serve more more students and children in our community. So that's a positive change in our relationship there and expansion. I am a little bit concerned about Councilwoman Roney scolding us all for not funding strategic partnership funds when we just went through a budget cycle where we were challenged not to raise taxes more than we did because we were placing that burden on the backs of all of our taxpayers in our city. So while I think we all would love to be able to vote for every strategic partnership opportunity in our community and serve every single person in the way that best suits them and then the way that they need. We know that we have limitations on our funding and we do not want to overburden our community with taxes that make their lives unaffordable to be able to continue to live here in Asheville. So it's a challenging balancing act to make the tough decision to vote for a budget that is balanced and not a budget that funds every single thing that is before us. And so voting against something because it's not perfect instead of voting for something because it serves the community that we live in to me is, what leadership requires so that we do support a balanced budget to be able to serve our community.

And Mayor, thank you for those words. I also want to just highlight the co-responder program that we started on July 20th, where we have a mental health clinician riding along with both our fire department and our law enforcement. This is in addition to the additional peer support specialists that we've added and the additional extra firefighters that we've added. And that was working directly with our strategic partnerships, and I'm proud to have led that effort with Councilwoman Ullman, who is not here. I also want to say that for the grant purposes of this, it actually says this unit does not focus on or adopt cases that are for simple possession. only on cases that deal with trafficking and manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs. And I think we all know that we have a severe substance use issue. We have methamphetamine and fentanyl coming into our community, and I can't imagine why anyone would not want to protect our community.

Okay, we have a motion and a second to approve item I on the consent agenda. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay, we have a five to one vote on item I on the consent agenda. All right, council moving on to presentations and reports. We have a very important manager's report. They're all important, but this is a very important manager's report tonight. I'm going to turn over to the city manager to introduce our manager's report this evening.

Thank you, Mayor. On this evening, we have our Transportation Director, Ashley Hare, as well as our Assistant Transportation Director, Jessica Morris, who will be providing us with an update. Because this is a managed report, we are not seeking any action from you today, just taking any feedback, and we'll bring that forward at your August 25th meeting. So I'll pass it over to Ashley.

Good evening. As the city manager noted, we're here to talk about the Asheville Rides Transit Comprehensive Operational Analysis. We are about a year and a half into this study. We're going to talk about where we are. I don't think they can hear you.

Is that a problem? Can you speak just a little bit closer to that? Oh, sure. Can you hear me now?

Is that better?

Try that.

You might need to project. Okay, I'll just talk louder. Okay. We're here to talk about the Asheville Rides, that's better, okay, Asheville Rides Transit Comprehensive Operational Analysis, which we've been underway with for about 18 months. We're gonna talk about where we are in that process, what our next steps are, and what some of the options might be. Is there a next slide, or do I do that?

Oh, I'm sorry.

OK. So what you see here is a diagram outlining the phases of this study. We started about 18 months ago last March on the phase one of the project, which was asking the public what they wanted to see in their transit network. Phase two, we brought those ridership and coverage concepts, took those to the public, brought them to you to get direction. Phase three, we took the feedback that we had received and prepared a draft plan, which we presented to you in May. We've taken all that feedback, we've gone back out to the community, and we are now at the point where we are refining that network. The direction we received from Council back in November was to design a draft network that nudged the system towards the ridership model, so better frequencies on more routes. Our current network is about a 50-50 split between coverage and ridership. The draft network that you were presented with in May nudges that towards the ridership side with about a 40 to 60% split between coverage and ridership. We're also directed to prioritize coverage in areas with many low income persons. So backing up to May when you saw the draft network. That kicked off about five or six weeks of public engagement that we took out to the public. We had a new survey. We had a stakeholder workshop. We had several tabling events and community engagement meetings. We went to MMTC. We went to the Planning and Zoning Commission and talked to the Housing Authority about that draft network. Last week, on July 21st, we met with Petty. to get their feedback on the input that we've received through that public engagement effort. We got a recommendation from them to bring this presentation to you tonight and also to suggest that council might direct staff to identify a longer-term funding strategy for this plan. Tonight, July 28th, we're here to, again, discuss with you the network options, inform that final plan, that we'll be bringing back to you next month on the 25th for you to take action on that final network plan. Depending on what action is taken in August, at the earliest implementation of any of those final changes to the network wouldn't happen before fiscal year 28, so next July or later. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jessica Morris to talk about the network and our options.

I'm curious, and I'll ask the question later, the touch points that you mentioned for engagement, are you going to tell us about what was said in those meetings anywhere in this presentation? What was said at those meetings mm-hmm the responses all of that yes, yes, there's Survey information and presentation in particular. I'm looking for that housing authority or the touch points of folks you met with Yes, we can talk about that.

Okay.

Thank you

So this is a map of our existing network. The colors you can see here are mostly in the blue shades which are showing the frequency of our network which predominantly is every 30 minutes and or every 60 minutes. We don't have any orange on our map right now really which is showing that we don't have any any routes that run every 15 minutes. So as you can see, a lot of our routes are running greater than every 30 minutes. The next slide, and I can toggle between the two if you'd like, but is what is in the draft network. And you can see kind of going between the two, that generally the draft network has less routes, and you'll see that there's still a lot of blue routes, which are 30 minutes and 60 minutes, but what you'll see is that we now have some orange routes, which are the 15-minute routes that are being proposed. So what the draft network is seeking to do is to provide not only higher frequency, which are those orange routes, and we'll talk about where those are, but it's also seeking to provide more, better schedules, better on-time performance, so better efficiency and improving how these routes are coming into and moving out of the transit center so that they're synced better and the transfer times are going to be more functional for folks to be able to not have to wait at the transit center as long. So you're going to have a lot better synchronization of those routes coming in and out. So we call that time transfer. So we're timing those transfers a lot better. So that's improving the convenience for folks. But the orange routes, what we're showing are 15-minute frequency that would essentially be going from downtown to Hillcrest, from downtown to the River Arts District, and then downtown down Biltmore and McDowell to Biltmore Village. Those would be 15-minute frequency. And in that frequency, what has been shown is to not only increase ridership, But it's really at that frequency that you're making it so that somebody doesn't have to time their life around the bus. They're able to just rely on that and have they don't they no longer having to just really time everything around the bus schedule they know that that bus is going to be there when they walk to the stop and so it makes it just makes everything more convenient so you know it's not our whole network having that 15-minute frequency but those key corridors would be a huge improvement there. Additionally, where the draft network is proposing increases in frequency on Patton Avenue, so a 30-minute frequency there, as well as to the south, which we've had very infrequent increases frequency. We've had 90 minute routes on our southern routes. These would now be 30 minute frequency from Biltmore Village down to Long Shoals and then 60 minute frequency down to the airport and to Biltmore Park, which is better than it is now. We have 90 minute frequency. So those are some improvements. The rest of the network largely is staying the same in terms of frequency, but again, there's a lot of improvements in terms of just streamlining the network and improving the way that those routes are coming into and out of the station.

May I ask you a question? Sure. Is the notion then that higher frequency automatically leads to increased ridership? And what is that assumption based on, please?

I'm going to, if it's okay, I'd like to invite our consultant up to.

And we may have seen some of that. We did some 15-minute routes, right? The West Asheville ones in particular come to mind. So maybe we can speak to actual experience since we implemented some 15-minute routes.

But West Asheville isn't up there.

No, I just mean we have some 15-minute routes that we added in the past. We can speak to the literal experience.

Okay.

Or do you want us to?

I'm not disagreeing with it. I'm just wondering. Like, would it matter? Okay, making something up. And this is an assumption. If I live in Hillcrest, I suspect I might be a necessity writer. Right? Right. So if you have the bus coming for me every 15 minutes instead of every 20 minutes because I had to ride the bus anyway, it doesn't make me more likely to ride it because I have to ride it, right? But if I live, making it up, on Kimberly Avenue and you increase it, what is the time frame, or how frequent does it have to come for me to decide to catch the bus instead of driving my Lexus downtown?

So two parts to that question, and I think you've all met me online, but my name is Ricky Engata. I'm a principal with Jerry Walker and Associates, and I work on this type of transit study, helping different transit agencies and communities think about transit. So two parts to that. First, what makes transit the most useful is being able to reach destinations, not just transit existing. And so more frequent service in the densest places is the formula to make transit the most useful because people spend less time waiting and more time traveling. And so people can reach more things within whatever time they have in their lives.

Well then, hold on. If you cut service to some places, you're actually fixing it so I can get to fewer places, but more frequently.

So we need to think about a specific time period in which people are traveling and think about what that would look like. And so in a lot of previous presentations, I've talked about access in 45 minutes. And so if you're thinking about where a person can get to in 45 minutes, that takes into account walking to a bus stop, waiting for the bus, and riding the bus. And what we see is that frequency overwhelmingly takes over that time because if you're waiting for a 60-minute bus, then on average you're waiting 30 minutes, which means that you ride the bus for 15 minutes and you can't get very far. But if instead the bus comes about every 15 minutes, then your waiting time is seven and a half minutes and you can wait the other 38 minutes or so riding the bus and transferring and using other routes. So even if it goes to specifically less places, it's still in the densest places and you can still reach more total jobs. And so that's why we see that networks that are designed to have less crowds or more frequent do end up seeing higher ridership. And I've seen that in cities where I have designed network, but they have decided to adopt networks that shift that way. In Knoxville, Tennessee, they decided to shift towards ridership. And they did that where they had less crowds or more frequent. And one year later, they saw an increase of 18% more ridership.

And so 15 minutes is the goal?

15 minutes, anything that is more frequent will be more useful than service less frequent. Something magical happens at 15 minutes where people, like Jessica was saying, they just don't have to live their lives around a schedule. And so when we look at data, what we see is that ridership increases as frequency increases, but not just ridership, but productivity, ridership per cost. So even though we're providing more service when we provide higher frequency, that ratio should go down because we're providing more service. But we actually see that it goes up. And something happens at 15 minutes that it just shoots up in data that we see in many different.

And so show me where we have the 15 minutes.

So here there is 15 minutes service that is going from Hillcrest through downtown into the River Arts District along the Route 2 that you see here in orange. And then there is service every 15 minutes going south of downtown along Billmore and McDowell to Billmore Village. And those are some of the strongest and densest areas that you have. So if you concentrate the service more frequently there, then you get the most bang for your buck. And to answer the second part of your question about people that may just need to use transit no matter what, what we see is that a lot of times people have talked about the difference between a choice writer and a dependent or a captive writer. We try to stay away from that because everybody is on a spectrum some point in between those two. It's not just binary, it's not just one or the other. That comes back from older computing times when everything needed to be binary and that kind of stayed along. But everybody's on a spectrum along that. And what we see and what we have seen in the past in the US is that even people that you thought were dependent, if the service is bad enough, they'll buy that car they can't afford, and they'll find other ways to move around, or they just won't have that job because they can't get there in a reasonable amount of time. And so yes, there's some people, it's a spectrum, and there's some people that are on either end of that spectrum, but there are many points in between. And so I invite you to just think about

Service in general and how useful it can be that kind of Explains why when I talk to other cities that have done something like this That people either choose to buy a car have to rent or schedule a ride more often or leave Thank you

Thank you. Thank you, Ricky. You have so much knowledge and information. I'm just so glad with all the money that we spent on this study that you're finally coming in person to address us. So thank you.

Thank you. So, of course, you know, we want to talk about the trade-offs, because there are trade-offs. And so this study, it was using the same resources. It wasn't adding resources or adding money. What we were doing with this study was looking at our existing resources, the same number of buses, the same amount of money, and saying, do we want to consider reallocating those resources? you know, if you tug on one end of the string, it's moving at the other end. And so if we're adding buses and adding frequency in one location, that means that you have to unfortunately have a removal of service from somewhere. And so the trade-off there is removing service from certain locations and And so what we did is we looked at the places that were providing service right now, and we looked at where we have the lowest ridership. but we also looked at it from the perspective of where we have the least amount of housing or residential density with low-income persons. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we were looking at where jobs are that people may have, but we're looking at residential. And so what we looked at were these locations here on the right where we have the least amount of ridership. and we tried to make our decisions based completely on trying to avoid areas where there were residential units that had low income residences. So that was kind of how we prioritized these cuts that are being proposed in this draft network. And so this graph, or these bar charts here, what we're trying to show here is within a half a mile, and the top bar of each of these bar charts is the existing network, and the bottom one is the draft network, is we're trying to show the difference in how many people will be closer to transit service within that half mile of transit service between the existing and the draft by frequency. So as I mentioned, our existing network, we don't have any 15 minute frequency. We just have 30 minute and above. And so if the draft network is adding 15 minute frequency, overall we're gonna be adding 8% of the population will now be within a half mile of 15 minute frequency. And in total, we would be bringing 37% of the population within a half mile of 30 minute frequency. And then if you looked at it from low-income persons near transit, we would be bringing 38% of the population, 38% of low-income persons within a half a mile of transit service. Now there is obviously a trade-off here because we are removing some service with this proposed network, the gray, the red box on the right, the total number of persons that would not be within a half mile of service does increase slightly. So from 39% to 42%, you'd see a 3% increase in the total number of people that would no longer be within a half mile of service. So we want to highlight those trade-offs there.

Can we press pause here? Sure. Because it came up in the Planning Economic Development Environment Committee meeting. Unfortunately, there's some missing parts of the study because of the scope that we set at the beginning, which isn't on y'all, it's on us. We didn't consider the future land use projects. So for example, Ferry Road, the closest you get to Ferry Road, which is gonna be like 700 households in our community as a new neighborhood, that's not considered in the loss here because that's what, the W-2 is what we would build the Inka Candler circulator around. And Yeah, when folks in the public are looking at this, we're only considering what we're losing based on what we have now, not what we've approved to build moving forward. And that's a pretty big one. So I just wanted to make sure we brought that to this meeting as well. Thank you.

So Ricky was talking a little bit about jobs. And that is one of the things that the draft network is looking at is the change in job access and so within 45 minutes and that 45 minutes is kind of a standard commute time and it's not just the time that you're on the bus it's meant to be from your door to from your front door to your destination so your total trip time looking at between existing and with this draft network, there would be an increase of access, 10% increase for the average resident with the draft network, and a 15% increase for the average low-income resident would be able to reach 15% more jobs within a 45-minute period between the existing and the draft network. So we did talk to, we did go to the board meeting, one of the board meetings at the Housing Authority, and did a presentation, a short presentation, and one of the things that we HIGHLIGHTED AT THAT MEETING WAS THE COMMUNITIES THAT THE HOUSING AUTHORITY OVERSEES AND WANTED TO KIND OF BREAK DOWN HOW THE DRAFT NETWORK IS GOING TO EITHER STAY THE SAME OR NOT FOR THOSE COMMUNITIES. AND SO FOR THE MOST PART frequency is staying the same for the majority of the Housing Authority communities. There will be 15-minute service available for Hillcrest, Maplecrest, and Aston Towers. Aston Towers is on French Broad, but it'll be very close to Hilliard Avenue, which is gonna be on that 15-minute network. Pisgah View, Bartlett Arms, Erskine, Livingston, Walton, Asheville Terrace, those are all going to be essentially same in terms of frequency. Some of the routes are changing a little bit in terms of their alignments and where they go. Deaver View, the... frequency is the same the route alignment is different and um we have heard that that the way that the route is aligned in the proposed network is could be um could be problematic for some folks that that typically like to go to Haywood, it's now being aligned on Patton. So we have heard some negative comments there. And Pisgah View, the alignment there would be a slight change. in terms of the direction of travel. But from a frequency perspective, all of that is staying the same. The Housing Authority board members were very, very concerned with the cuts that have been proposed particularly the cuts that have been proposed to Social Security and to MHEC as well as Grove Park. And those were the ones that seemed to be at the top of their mind.

May I add to your comment here? Sure. So I was at that meeting as well. You did a great job in your presentation. I think we're downplaying the angst and the ire and the venom that was present in that room. They did discuss MHEC for quite some time. They were particularly upset with the Kenilworth elimination because there are a number of housing authority scattered sites In that area They talked in addition to in addition to the social services building Folks may not know but there is only one Dialysis center in the city of Asheville, and it's right there They were appalled at the loss or potential loss of service to transformation village and as it relates to Pisgah View. It seems that while this makes sense on paper, the people who actually have to use the service, they think it's nuts. Moving service from one side of Pisgah View to the other street caused one gentleman a lot of angst. You recall that it kind of got so out of hand that I kind of had to come up and save you from the room. So I just want my colleagues to know that while our intention, well, from the four that said move in this direction, on paper it looks like this is a good thing. The very people that you're trying to help with this are adamantly opposed to it. Do with that what you will.

I also noticed that in the survey, Given how many people ride the bus and how many people participated in the survey, I was encouraged by how many people participated. But one of the questions was, will the system work better for you? And another question was, do you know someone that it will work less better for. And the neighborliness around that was unsurprising, that people took the time to think about like, wait, maybe this system works better for me, but the changes make it harder for a friend or neighbor to get to work, to get to the grocery store. So I just wanted to amplify that. If you haven't looked at the results of the transit survey, I'm not surprised that Asheville cares enough to think about the other people that they move around the city with.

So I wanted to make that. I know you've got a long, presentation to, it's yet to go. And so we'll try to let you do that.

Thank you. So this slide is, I know it's a lot of information. The next slide kind of tries to pull it together graphically, but what we've attempted to do is just show how the draft network is aligning with some of our other plans and policies, including the comprehensive plan, the affordable housing plan, and the missing middle study, as well as some more recent UDO updates. This is kind of a crazy graphic, but the orange lines are the draft network, 15-minute routes. And the blue lines are the 30 minute and 60 minute routes. The black dots that are on top of those are actually what is proposed in the city's comprehensive plan as 15 minute routes. So our comprehensive plan actually went so far as to suggest that we have 15 minute service on these key corridors. And so while there's not perfect alignment, you can see that the draft network is suggesting some routes where we have alignment with the comprehensive plan for 15 minute service. And then the green boxes are where you see that the city has made either monetary investment or land investment recently within the last I think six years in affordable housing projects and those are projects that either are directly on the 15-minute routes or very close to 15-minute routes and those are not just Projects that the city has approved, but are ones that the city has actually had a hand in in supporting financially. So just trying to bring that together to show how we're trying to align the pieces of our policy and how the draft network plays a role in that. So here is the information about the survey. It was a six question survey and compared the existing network to the draft network. There are three questions that asked, is the draft network better for me? Is it better for my friends, neighbors, coworkers? And is it better for the region overall? And then there were open-ended questions where people could express if there were things that they did like about it and also are there things that you don't like about it. There were 1,350 participants, and we did hear from both frequent riders, non-frequent riders, people that don't ride at all, and then we had folks that did not answer whether they were riders or not.

Can I step in here real quick?

Sure.

I did get the, and maybe it's going to be to you. I was able to watch y'all's meetings, H-P-E-D-E, and when it was revealed, you know, 1350, someone said that that's not a statistically significant enough representation. Oh, I remember that, yeah.

That caught me aback.

Because I don't know when we've had surveys where we've gotten much more than that. So my question is, what number do we need to reach before it becomes significant? Because there were a lot of people that took this survey and it's as if we're telling them, now that you've decided to take the survey, it's not significant. So what number is statistically significant?

Well, so I heard you answer this question at PED, and having barely gotten through my statistics class in graduate school, I mean, statistically significant would mean that you actually do a randomized, you know, poll to a community and target whatever group you want to target but when you put out a voluntary participatory survey where people can opt into it it's never statistically significant no matter how many people you ask so i kind of say this every time why do we do it yeah i mean it is it's because the reason i'm saying that is if you look at the polling results

the polling results are exactly the opposite of what staff is recommending we do.

Yeah, I'd love to answer that. I think one of the reasons why we survey is because that is a data point, right? There's lots of different factors that we consider in our recommendation as staff. That is one of them, but it's not the only one. So it is still important for us to survey our community to get feedback, to use that as one of the data points that we consider as staff in making our recommendation to you all.

Vice Mayor, I know I guess a couple of us did statistics in grad school. I was in that meeting and I didn't really chime in because I was confused because I had seemed to remember a statistical significance meeting like you could have a smaller population, but the smaller it is and less representative of the whole. then the less the confidence you can have in the data. So I don't know why we suddenly started talking about statistical significance at that meeting or what it's relevant.

Because what people heard was it's not significant, your response. It doesn't matter.

And that's what people were talking about. This is statistically significant. I kind of thought that too.

It's significant.

It's not statistically because it's not randomized. And our surveys typically aren't for that purpose. That's not typically why we do surveys.

I guess for me, something that maybe is, I don't want to take away from this part of the conversation, when I'm thinking about percentages, the percentage that sticks out to me throughout this process and has from the beginning of the study is what is Asheville's goal for ridership percentage? Are we happy with 1%? Because I'm truly just, that's why I got involved in transit. I'm concerned about our ridership over a long period of time. And let's face it, like, We can't fund it. We can't expand it. We've planned it and failed to execute it. We've cut funding. We've shrunk routes. We've lost riders. We've disappointed riders. We can't make it on time. We're really struggling. And I mean, we can talk about the dire need of everyone in every corner needing transit. And when I started fighting for this study, I was expecting microtransit as an option. So we don't just abandon people in the corners. But we didn't do it. So we're facing possible abandonment of some folks and some routes in the effort to grow overall ridership, which I do think we need. And I do think we have to.

What's the point of growing? I'm not disagreeing. Is the point of growing ridership to bring in more money, or is it, I don't know, like a climate issue?

I don't think ridership produces a significant portion of our budget. But I do want us to, and maybe this was going to be my request to staff tonight ahead of our vote, if we could get a little more insight from the planners in the room about why does a city need transit? Is it to supply rides? Is there an environmental benefit? Is there a reduction in traffic? Is there a housing component? Is there an interconnectivity? We're not talking about any of it, right? Like a little bit here and there, but... I feel like we're not doing the full education and we're kind of in this tunnel. And I'm worried for the sake of future transit that we'll just stay in this cycle. I don't think anybody wants to abandon rides or make people really struggle. I definitely don't. But I don't know how to get more ridership and more people out of cars and reduce the traffic that the whole city is worried about. So that's where I'm hoping we can get to.

That's what this study was about. Right. I mean, we can't do both when we have a limited amount of money, you can't grow ridership and serve everybody in every corner.

I'm glad we did the study. I'm in the court of supporting the ridership. And we can't provide microtransit without more money. Which is why we're going to come together as a council and say we need to find more funding sources as a directive. We just are in this cycle.

I think we're going to make a resolution.

Yeah, we can go through it.

Just barrel ahead. Don't even take our questions.

So this is exactly the issue. Positive comments. Everybody likes the good stuff. They like the increased frequency. They like the on-time performance. They like the reduced wait times at the transit center where we're improving the time transfers. They like the increased access. They like the improvements to reliability. They don't like that we're cutting anything. Survey responses. are that nobody likes the draft network. I mean, I shouldn't say nobody. The people that took this survey, the majority, it's on the end of disagree and strongly disagree. That is what the survey responses are. These are all respondents. So this is for me. The draft network will be better for me. The next one is the draft network will be better for the people I know. The next, this one is the draft network will be better for the region overall. That really shouldn't say region. It should just be like the Asheville, Asheville. And then this one is frequent art riders, so this is folks that ride every day. And then this one is non-art riders, and I think that means folks that don't ride ever. This one was a little more split, but these are folks that don't ride the bus. The full survey I think was available to you guys in the packet and including all of the written comments. So this, as City Manager Wesley said, this is a data point for you guys, just as our recommendation is a data point. And to that end, and the next slide, you know, goes into what staff's perspective is, which is just a perspective looking at it from, you know, policy and land use and things of that nature. But, you know, it is, you know, you guys are looking at the full picture and that's what we're trying to present to you here. So, but this slide, you know, the four things that are listed here, these four bullets under option two, those are the four proposed cuts that we heard the most about. So there were seven things that were proposed to be cut. Those four are in order of the thing of the most commented. And as you can see next to those are the average daily riders. So 40 average riders per day on that Brevard route to Transformation Village down to the Outlet Mall, 11 average daily riders to Mayhack, eight average daily riders to Social Security and the Dialysis Center and then 34 average daily riders to West Haywood. And so our recommendation, staff recommendation is option one. Option two is that you can consider to modify the draft network by bringing, preserving access to any of these four. And we can talk about any of these in more detail. Or option three is to maintain what is currently here today. And based on, this is what staff's recommendation is based on, and so what we're looking at is that the draft network is not just improving frequency on some of the key corridors where we have a lot more density and housing, but we would see, I think, a significant improvement for the vast majority of riders in terms of on-time performance and system reliability, which would improve. every rider's customer experience.

When you say HACA communities, does that include the scattered site HACA communities? I'm sorry, can you... The scattered site HACA communities? Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Like on Kenilworth? No, it does not. Okay. I mean the... the larger scale HACA communities.

Okay. So some, but not all.

So, no, she said none of the scattered sites.

I was saying that that should read maintains or improves service to most or something. It doesn't maintain it to all because the kennel worth will be lost.

I was just wondering. And essentially, our... recommendation is based on you know alignment with the city's plans and policies that were outlined in the presentation so that is what our recommendation is based on and then This is just a summary of the PEDE meeting which we discussed. PEDE did recommend that there be a resolution brought forward that would direct the city manager to secure additional sustainable sources of funding. That would be the best case scenario is that we have more funding, but we we know how challenging that can be. And so what's next is that pending what we hear from you tonight, we would go back to work with our consultant We would make any changes that we got consensus feedback on this evening. And we would also have discussions with impacted groups of stakeholders. We've already had discussions with some of those folks. And we would make changes to the draft network as directed. We would prepare a final plan and then come back to you in August for action.

OK. I know we're ready for questions and discussion, but first I want to make an invitation to friends and neighbors to ride the bus with me. For the past 18 years, the bus has been my primary form of transportation. I walk to the bus, I bike to the bus and put my bike in front of the bus. I ride the bus to go get groceries and to visit with community. And so I just want you to know that there's public transit in our city, and it is a joy to meet your neighbors and ride the bus. So join me. I have a couple things before my questions. One is there's an update. Back in November, city council got a letter from local businesses in support of the frequency model, but that was before the study was complete, it was before the survey was complete, or the draft network plans were available. So this week, that letter got referenced in our planning economic development meeting, and I heard from a number of businesses on why they wanted to be removed from that letter. Due to their concerns, the transit improvements and frequency are needed, but the news of the cuts to service and our need for more information changed their position. Of those 31 businesses who were originally signed, 11 have signaled their request to be removed, including those who asked their names to be named explicitly. Chipani, Crucible, Ben's Tuna, Penny Cup, Anoche, and Old London Road said the cuts are a problem. Okay, a couple questions for staff. Some of these cuts, I think we're assuming that mountain mobility paratransit will continue on the routes that we cut. But can we get that in writing? Because if we're going to lose ADA accessibility commutes because we cut fixed routes and those are usually tied together, then we need to know that before we make this decision. Do we know? Is it a promise? Is it a hope? Is it in writing that the county's paratransit will continue even if we cut the fixed route?

We can do that. So we are required to provide paratransit within three quarters of a mile of any fixed route. So, for example, we would still have paratransit service to Mayhack, theoretically, if Mayhack was cut. We're still within three quarters of a mile. Same with Social Security. But as it stands now... Well, it depends on where they're coming from. Is it three-quarters of a mile where the pickup is or the destination? It's within three-quarters of a mile around the route. So if you envision the route like a buffer around it. But actually, what the city already does is we just provide paratransit within the city of Asheville, whether your destination is anywhere within the city of Asheville.

That seems hard to budget for. OK, so I would like some more information on how we budget for paratransit and how we can make sure that it's in writing that we're still going to do that. We're gonna hear today about variable fixed routes from our Multimodal Transportation Commission members. Of course, they have to wait until public comment at the end of the meeting to do that, which is unfortunate. What does it look like for us to press pause and see what the county study illuminates? Now this question I'm bringing today, because a lot of our neighbors might not know, when we first looked at doing this study, we were gonna do it together with the county, and then we were gonna do it 50-50 on the funding, and we were gonna look at efficiencies and look at a big picture. And then it was not the county, just us, but we moved forward anyway. And that was a missed opportunity for us to look at partnership. Now the county's doing its own transit study. So it feels a little bit like the seesaw, but we're ready to make a decision, and they're not yet, and we're missing parts. So I think it'd be unfortunate if we lose that. So that's the question that I have before we vote on this in August. I'm also holding on to what Ricky has mentioned multiple times in conversations from our consultant firm that In cities where they make cuts, they don't normally come back. And how we really need to focus on more funding because our community relies on both coverage and needs frequency. So I'm thinking about Transformation Village on W2, the shelter for women and children in our Code Purple shelter. I'm thinking about health services. Antoinette brought up dialysis in the city limits. We know Mayhek. I have walked to Mayhek from Hendersonville Road without a sidewalk. That's a hill to walk up. Hotel workers on the W2 route down Brevard Road. Our passport program partner in Grove Park pays into our system. If you didn't know this, it's like, we should have partners that pay into our system and help us have good transit. We do, and we're cutting the service. So we have a missed opportunity to have engaged our funding partners and deepen those relationships. But the thing that I'm really kind of flabbergasted about is I thought there would be an option for which is we studied the coverage map. What if we just maintained coverage and were there efficiencies that we could do within that? The South Asheville frequency has long been advocated for and needs to happen. The timing efficiencies in the coverage map are adoptable, but by pulling this thread in the direction of minor frequencies on some routes, we're risking serious affordability and accessibility issues for other parts of the population. And I wondered if while we're waiting to see what the county learns, we need to make the efficiencies in option four, which is not on the table, which is to adopt the coverage map. And that is the fullness of my questions before we get to August.

Thank you.

Yes, I was just curious if whether staff could elaborate on the county study, because the only thing I can see is... really an acknowledgement of a French Broad River NPS study. So I just wanted to see if anyone had any information on that.

I know that they are doing a study, but I do not know what the timeline is.

Do you know what they're studying?

They have told me that they are studying their fixed routes. They have the trailblazer. And so that's my understanding is that they were going to study options for potential future routes for the trailblazer.

Okay.

Thank you.

I'll say that the coverage concept or something like it definitely is an option. The spectrum between ridership and coverage, it really depends on the community and where you want to land between them. I've worked in many different cities in many different places, and I've seen transit agencies land at different points between all those. I worked in St. Pete, Florida, where they implemented a new network that I helped design last October that kept all the coverage they had. Because through the process, they decided that they didn't want to get rid of any coverage. And that's okay. I'm perfectly happy designing a network like that. I'm not advocating for either option. As the consultant that's coming from out of town, I am not here to impose my values onto you. I am here to really have a clear conversation about the goals for transit, and if you decide that coverage is the goal, and you want to design something that does go back to keeping all or most of the coverage, then that's perfectly fine. If you do choose something like that, then the one thing that I would want to be clear about is that your goal is not ridership. So you would not expect ridership to grow, and that's okay, because the goal is coverage, and they would be providing coverage. And if you as a community decide that your ridership is not your goal, then you shouldn't ask ORT to get higher ridership. But that's okay. That's what St. Pete, Florida did. It's been about nine months since they implemented it and their ridership is flat because they kept all the coverage and they didn't do a shift towards ridership. And so it really is a possibility for you all to decide to either bring back two, four of these things or maybe all of them that we had on the slide before. And we're happy to design a network and adjust the draft network to final network to do those changes. It wouldn't be exactly the coverage concept because we've learned a lot since then. We tested some routes and we did make some adjustments from the concepts to the draft. So what I would do is tweak the draft network to bring back some of that coverage if that is what you all collectively want.

Can I ask you a question? I did get to watch the PED meeting, so I've seen the rest of this presentation. We're about to look at some of the routes that are proposed to be reduced or cut to sort of move slightly towards this ridership model. And I notice, as Councilwoman Roney mentioned, We have one partner that pays some money towards transportation, that being the Grove Park Inn. I believe it's something like $8,000 a year they pay, which is not anywhere near close to covering the cost to bringing them their employees. You know, if I'm doing the math correctly, we have 11 riders to Mayhek every day at $125,000 a year, which is about $31 a ride, which is probably more than it would cost to Uber everyone to Mayhek.

But we pay more per person living in Compass Point.

More than $31? Mm-hmm. Well, so here's my question about that, which is, you know, I would think that... you would want to see more robust partnerships with private partners. That we would want Mayhek, the Grove Park Inn, the Outlet Mall, Ingalls, HCA, major partners. I was talking to a couple of the cashiers at Ingalls the other day, and they were telling me they ride the bus to work, and that's their preferred method to get there. But we don't have... We don't have these private partnership relationships in our community like you might see. And I'm just asking you, do you typically see funding partners in other communities as a way to help sustain the costs around transit?

Yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable for an employer. There are places that are difficult to serve to provide either their own type of shuttle service or to pay you all to run service there. You know, Mayhek is one of the perfect examples. Mayhek is in a place... Regardless of what the facility is or the people that use it or any of that, it is physically in a place that is really difficult to serve by transit. It is off the main road and up a hill, so it is very, very inefficient to provide good service to MHEC. No matter what you do, you're never gonna get very high ridership going to MHEC just because it's physically in a place that was a land use decisions that's not supporting transit. And you have things like that all over Asheville. That is the biggest challenge that you have here. You have a lot of important destinations that are just tucked away up hills or in the forest, and they're just really, really difficult to serve by transit. So I don't think it's unreasonable for employers that are in difficult to serve places to do provide their own shuttle service. Now that does require partnerships. You can't just, you know, it depends on them. but it's not unheard of, and I do know transit agencies in many places that do have additional, employers that do pay for additional service.

And I just want to register, that's where I kind of get frustrated, as Councilman Turner said, you know, I think the very first time we ever met with you, she brought up microtransit, and I brought up additional revenue sources, and specifically advertising. In every single city I've ever visited in the United States, they have advertising that helps fund their transit center. So when we're looking at, even if it's just eight people going to social security office, sometimes social security office makes folks come in in person to sign documents that you can't do. And so that eight person a day is, that's very important. So even if we can't wrap the buses or if we can't put sliders on, there's in some cities, there's auditory or audio advertising that goes through. And so I just don't think that we're looking at all the options that we could to fund this, including at the same time partnering with state and federal officials to make sure that we get that funding here. But I just wish that was part of this, because now what CitySAB is saying, and maybe DK can give us an update, is that now they have to study this. And so I just wish that we had this in this year or so that we've been studying this. We're not like pioneering new space here with the advertising for our transit. This is something that every city has done. I think we can figure this out.

Ads can help a little bit, and that's worth exploring. One thing I will say, try to avoid bus wraps because they tend to be really bad for the people riding the bus. They can't see inside the vehicle they're getting on, and they can't see outside the vehicle. Apart from that, I don't have anything against ads. Is that imposing your values on our community?

What was that? I'll just say that I've also heard that from multiple cities, including Baltimore, Richmond, Chicago, New York. it's really hard for people to see where they're at in placemaking and know if they're reaching their destination.

Yeah, ads can be bad for the writer experience. On the windows.

Okay, so I offer the slats that are on buses, that are on chapels. I understand your point, though. We've got indoor...

Multiple, just revenues. I think we all just know we need revenues. We need revenues in general. We just know it. I guess some of the things that would really help me better understand the impact overall, because I respect my colleague's concern, and I respect that 93 people, I believe, will not have a ride after this. Is there a goal or an outcome that we're going to measure success by if we go this route? If we're losing... I think 93 is 2% of daily ridership. Are we gonna gain 5%? Is there any projection or goal or something that can be?

So I will never project ridership because ridership can be very volatile. I can go up and down for manufacturers or outside of arts or outside of as well as control, right? Pandemics, economic gas prices, all those things can affect ridership. So I will never predict ridership. We do see a correlation that when you increase access, you increase ridership. So I won't promise anything, but we do see that increase in ridership. In Knoxville, the increase in access was about 17% and the increase in ridership was about 18%. There is a correlation. I will never promise that you will get high ridership because there's no way of knowing.

Did you just say 18? I mean, that's a big jump.

It was. I would be happy if we got five.

What was that? I would be happy if we got five. That's 18. I mean, that's hope to me.

18% over today, yes.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, all of those things, talking about the people going to the Social Security office, that's a coverage goal, and that's completely fine. It's service that is going to be very expensive per person, but if that's what you value as a community, that's completely fine. On the other end, there are many goals associated with ridership, with transit that come from high ridership. All of the environmental goals, they don't just arise from transit existing, they arise from people using transit. just transit prosperity and all those things. So there's goals on both sides of this. There isn't a right answer.

I just want to show you one more slide, and then... So this is trying to summarize... summarize for you the top four above the red line are the four that I mentioned are the the cuts that we heard the most about and the reason that we've isolated those four from the three below the line are to help you distinguish that if you wanted to bring any of those four back and you could bring them back individually or all together. Each of them have a separate trade off. But if you brought back anything below the line, that's where you lose any of the, what I'll call the like customer, enhancement customer service and reliability on-time performance transfer benefits. So anything below the line takes away all of the 15-minute frequency improvements, and it gets rid of all of the benefits related to on-time performance, time transfers, and those benefits that that folks would feel across the system.

So help us with our math here. So here it's telling us in the corner that ART averages 4,300 daily riders. And each of these daily, the daily ridership is in the brackets there. And it totals 132 rides. So these are the proposed cuts total to the... to be able to adapt to more of a ridership model, right? Correct. So, I mean, I'm just, I mean, it looks like, I know cutting even a single person from getting a ride is a tough decision to make, but on balance, it looks like you went for just a very narrow movement from one model to another to try to gain significant additional riders.

Yes.

Right.

Yes. I mean, that was what we were directed. That is what we were directed. That is what we were directed to do in November was to take a small step towards ridership. And that is what we have done. And that comes with trade-offs, which we said up front.

It looks like you really tried to, I mean, because I think, you know, way back when council gave you direction to move lightly into the ridership direction. And so this is like a... kind of as light as you can do to be able to achieve that 15-minute service on some routes.

Right. And I think, you know, we tried to be upfront to say that that was always going to come with a tradeoff. We couldn't do it without there being a downside. I understand that.

I mean, you know, look, I've lived in cities where the bus comes more frequently than 15 minutes, and then, you know, I was able to ride it. And like you said, you don't even check the schedule. You just go stand by the bus stop, because it's going to come in enough time to get you where you need to go. So you just depend on it, because it's more convenient than your car. If you have a car, it just becomes an easier way to get around. So I appreciate what we asked you to do this, and you have done it. And not without a lot of discussion, obviously, but you have done it. Do we want to go through all the rest of this presentation? I mean, I know not everyone got a chance to see the PED meeting, so they might. What do you need from us?

Well, we will bring this back in August, but if you all want us to consider modifying the draft network based on A through D, any of those, we want to hear that because we'll have to go back and do work. in order to do that. If you don't give us any options that you want to pull back in, then we'll be essentially, we'll continue to have conversations with our partners, so we might have some new information based on the questions you have, but it could end up you having to make a decision on the current draft network. whether to move forward with that or option three to maintain.

What does E, F, and G mean? Adding back anything below this line removes final 15-minute service.

If you tried to add E, F, and G back in, you'd lose that 15-minute.

I'm going to say it very generally. You'll basically be going back to your current network.

Right. To be able to bring back EF and G, you basically need to break the 15-minute frequency going south of downtown along the Bermuda and back down. So that would go back to having 90-minute service down to the airport, 45-minute frequency on Hendersonville, and you would use that bus to provide in service along those coverage gaps.

So that means not all three, but any one of those. So if you put road parking, then you lose the 15.

They probably come back as a packet because they cost the same to do one or to do all three. You would use one bus that you can probably redesign to bring them all back. When we're doing transit planning, we need to work in full integer of buses. We can't split buses in half. And so doing all of these would basically cost the bus.

You know, I was in a meeting yesterday with someone, I think he's here, but I can't explain his PowerPoint as gloriously as he can.

He's in public comment.

He's in public comment, but I think it's only three minutes. I don't know that I saw. Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions. When does the public get to weigh in? It's at the end of tonight, so I would prefer to hear that before we gave you a direction, if that's possible.

Yeah, you guys jumped out. So we have a lot of people signed up to speak under general public comment tonight on transit, which is fine. But when we officially vote on this at the end of August is when the formal public comment is.

But could we amend the rules to hear the 11 public comments before we give recommendations this time?

Are you making a motion?

I move to amend the rules.

You don't need to. Let's just have a discussion here. So, yeah, I just want to be mindful of the rest of the people that are here for the council meeting. So let me just... Hey, everybody who's on public item ABC... And new business, A and B. You cool with that? So I just want to, because let's see how many folks we've got. We're not doing all of general public comment. It's just the transit people, just the transit commenters, okay? Just do me like this. Are you good? Is everybody good? Are you like, what are you doing? All right, we're going to give it a try. We'll give it a try. Staff, do you want to say anything else before this happens?

He had something about special routes that you go.

Okay, ready? Everybody ready?

I hope nobody went to go get dinner. You'll get it if you're not here for some reason. Okay, we got a bunch of transit people. So transit folks, well, anybody who's speaking tonight, you'll have three minutes to speak unless somebody's yielded their time to you, but I don't see that under the transit item. Well, I see one person attempting to see their time, but in order to get any more than three minutes, you have to have three people see their time to you. Okay, so the first, so you're going to watch. Oh, everybody, there's a tornado. What? Is this for us? It says we need to go to the basement. Wait. Is this for natural? I guess so. Wait. God. Okay, we're out of here.

Okay, welcome back.

Welcome back to the Asheville City Council meeting.

all right so Maggie everybody might know our city clerk is Burleson is going to retire this fall and she's been with the city 167 years she has never had a tornado happen so this is unprecedented and I hope everyone's okay because they did actually see a tornado on the ground it looks like Okay, we're gonna try to do this public comment during the manager's report, which for the record, we are not establishing as a practice, but we're gonna do it tonight. So the first person signed up to speak, I think I was in the middle of explaining about the three minutes and the lights, so everybody hopefully got that, is Bethany Cobb. They're clapping because we're all okay.

Oh, my word. That's a tough act to follow. Can everybody hear me okay? I feel like this is too tall.

Good? Good, everybody? Okay.

Good evening. My name is Bethany Cobb. I'm the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Omni Grove Park Inn and Spa. I'm here tonight on behalf of our associates, urging you to please not approve the draft transit plan in its current state. As you know, Several current stops were removed in order to prioritize frequency over coverage, including the Grove Park Inn. The Grove Park Inn has been an integral part of the Asheville community since 1913 and remains one of the region's largest employers. With a team of approximately 700 to 950 associates, many depend on these services daily for transportation to and from work. The proposed changes would negatively impact our associates, the very workforce the city is seeking to support through improved transportation access. In 2025, our associates completed over 14,667 rides on public transit, demonstrating a meaningful and ongoing reliance on this service. Cut my time. Okay. Since 2018, GBI associates have completed over $78,000 rides or over $40,000 to the city of Asheville. We understand the intent of prioritizing frequency of the bus service, but please do not prioritize potential riders at the detriment of thousands of your current riders. A note about surveys. As we know, at the Planning Economic Development and Environment Committee last week, there was a comment suggesting that because the engagement survey had a relatively low response rate, that the data was not meaningful. I respectfully disagree. More than 1,300 people took the time to respond to the survey. That's a significant level of public participation, particularly considering the survey was not distributed to every potential respondent via email. I gotta breathe again. Those who chose to participate cared enough about the future of transit and our community to share their perspectives. The survey results provide a meaningful snapshot of public sentiment, and that sentiment was remarkably consistent. The majority of respondents indicated that they do not believe the draft network is better. 52%, not better for them personally. 59%, not better for their friends or colleagues. 57%, not better for the region overall. It's also worth remembering that the fundamental principle of a survey is that we don't ask a survey that we don't want a question that we don't want to know the answer to. We asked the question three different ways, and the message was very clear. No, the public does not agree with this draft network plan. I respectfully ask that you please not adopt this draft transit plan in its current form. Instead, I urge you to continue evaluating alternatives. Because I breathed. No, we can't breathe? It was so good at the end. Thanks.

We have Michelle Hale.

Okay.

We started out this meeting talking about helping people access the help that they need to not have problems facing homelessness, violence, and substance abuse. Well, those problems only get worse as more social programs and resources or access to resources get cut. That's why there will continue to be more homeless and substance abuse if we don't take a different direction. There just isn't enough help. And I can speak from personal experience. including but not limited to access through RHA and Sweeten Creek Mental Health Center, which is the site division of Mission Health. Let it be known that the Sweeten Creek Mental Health Center is almost a mile from the nearest bus stop. There are no continuous sidewalks, no crosswalks. You have to cross Sweeten Creek, a four-lane road, cross Highway 40 exit ramps, among other hazards. It is way too dangerous. This has to change. There are not any shuttles provided by Mission or any other services either. Therefore, it's prohibited for people that need the access to actually access. Among the other shortcomings, I'll just mention a few that were already mentioned, which is the Mayhek bus stop. There's no sidewalk, and even if you try not to walk on the road, you can't because the shrubs grow right up to the curb. And it's so windy, it prohibits view between the pedestrians and the drivers. And then the W2 bus change, taking away access to Brevard Road. It was not mentioned, but this would also remove access from the Office for Employment and Independence for People with Disabilities, which is just unfathomable. Already with these two bus lines, that's removing five providers from me personally. This isn't just taking away access from one, place for people, this is often affecting multiple places and access points, vital access points to improve people's lives. I'm urging you today to please keep all access to the current bus lines. There's absolutely no justification for cutting any bus stops when so many of us are already struggling to meet our basic needs. Adding another hurdle of transportation access will only increase our problems exponentially. The only action that would make sense is to find more funding and expand the bus network more, not less, more. At minimum, this should include access to vital resources like the Sweet and Creek Mental Health Center that has no access right now. This is the only way to not only best serve the working class that has used the buses for years, if not decades, among myself, but to also take steps in the right direction to really start addressing people facing homelessness and substance abuse. Thank you. I will send the rest of my comment through email. Thank you.

Mickey Fox.

Hello. I have not spoken with y'all before, but I am happy to be here. I live in West Asheville. This directly will affect my family. We have three people in my home with one car. And they're all adults. It's how they get to work. It's how they get home. It's how they get to the doctor. And I would just really appreciate it if you did not cut off people from being able to get to work and to the doctor and to the Social Security office and really think about how many people this is going to affect and how deeply it's going to affect us. And I think that's more important than making shorter routes for a few people downtown. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.

And now we have Bill Loftus who has three people seating their time. The first, and you'll just raise your hand so I can see you, Joseph Chesler, thank you, David Nutter, and Jeffrey Burrows, yes. All right, so Mr. Loftus, you will have 10 minutes.

Thank you very much. My name's Bill Loftus. I'm on the Multimodal Commission. I'm also on the Transit Committee. And I'm here tonight to ask you to postpone a decision about this network until some more analysis is done. There's some other things we believe, myself and others, that Asheville needs to consider that were not part of the study. I think the study has been wonderful. It's taken us page forward. But there's some things, there's some options that weren't looked at. Some of you have mentioned these options, and my analysis says that they should be studied before we make a decision. This was multimodal's recommendation. We unanimously passed a recommendation of support to the network with the encouragement that staff analyze non-fixed route options as part of the solution. Now, I authorized this, or I authored this motion, and I was happy for it to be unanimously accepted. But in hindsight, I wish I had worded it differently. I wished I had not used the word encouraged. I wished I had used the word on the condition of this additional analysis, because it's that important. So there is another option to study. described our condition extremely well. We've got critical pockets of need in our city that have low demand. So our study takes one solution approach. It says we need to run large expensive buses on fixed scheduled routes to cover everything including those critical points of small demand. Well, for The last decade or so, there's been another option that many municipalities are studying and implementing with sometimes great success, which has to do with a completely different option. And it employs two conditions that we haven't looked at. One is it looks at lower cost buses, so it's less expensive in certain places. And it looks at on-demand service, picking up your phone as opposed to a fixed route. So those two concepts are creating a plethora of other alternatives for city transit today. And my point is we haven't looked at them yet because it wasn't in the scope of the study. So the facts in our case are pretty dramatic. It costs our city $800,000 a year to run a bus for the full year. It's 5,100 hours of service. It's $800,000. We can have a smaller bus operating cost of $280,000 a year, full in, total cost, maintenance, labor, everything, compared to our 800. Now, it's smaller. It has less people. But then that's the point. We've got places in our network that have small demands, and we've got other places in our network that have large demands. So we call this a hybrid network. It's a network where we can deploy different buses to serve different needs. And when we do that, we potentially run into a situation where we don't have to make trade-offs. This whole conversation, has it not been about trade-offs? We gotta pull the tether and we either get more coverage or we get more service. We cannot do both. These options I'm describing to you that other cities have deployed can potentially eliminate that trade-off. So that's why I'm encouraging us to postpone until we expand this to a point at which we look at those things. And I want to say secondly on that, I have studied this carefully. Some of you have seen my work, and I would like very much to provide it to you and present it to everybody else on the panel, if at all possible, because what I've found in these conversations is that they're extremely engaging, more valuable information is coming forward, and as yet, and I've shared it with Transportation team and Ashley, I've shared it with some of you council members. I've shared it with the CEO of Grove Park Inn. I have yet to receive a no. Now, let me say, I'm not making a recommendation, but I am saying this is worth studying if Asheville wants to achieve what we want to achieve. That's all it says, and I'd like to ask every one of you to... to hear me out, if you possibly can. Not right now, of course. And I'll also say, it's not going to take a year to do this. And it may not even require another consultant. As many of you have said, we've got qualified staff, and I agree. We've got resident subject matter experts that can chip in. We've even got external non-paid support that would be glad to vet this out as well. We can certainly do more and get to a next step without having spent another year or spend another consultant dollar if you don't want to do that. Like many of you, I'm concerned about some of the comments in last week's meeting that seemed to suggest that the survey results were insignificant. I agree with most of you. They are definitely significant. A two to one no for 1,350 voters is a big deal. To me, that's significant. I don't know how you see it. We're all entitled to our opinions, but that's a big deal. So I want to close by just saying, look it, with all due respect, why do we need to force a decision on a scope we made last year without including other things that could potentially be lower cost, offer greater service, and offer more coverage. Why do we make a decision unless we see that? That's my request to you. And I'll tell you in the pitch you'll see from me, I've made a couple one-off examples of where I'm applying these two options to different places in our network. And in each case, now it's just two cases, but in each case, It's a 20% cost reduction, it's more service, and it's more coverage. So my ask is to let's postpone until we expand the study and cover everything we should cover, because as we hear from the audience, we need all this transit to be extremely effective. Thank you.

The next speaker also has several folks yielding their time. The speaker is Paul Howell. And please just raise your hand if you're yielding your time to Mr. Howell. Justin Tucker. Thank you. Natasha Swade. Thank you. And Robin Smith. All right. Mr. Howell, you'll have 10 minutes.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members, City Attorneys, City Managers, Assistant City Managers, then I'm going to miss Maggie. All right. I've always been told that one bad decision will lead to adverse consequences. March 24th, 2026, y'all voted to extend the contract of this transit service that we got now instead of terminating it. And in that contract, agreeing to the contract, they was given $55 million for four years of service, which I think is approximately $13.75 million a year. We didn't know y'all was going to give them all this money for them to cut service for us. We didn't know that. But I'm trying to figure out why would they have to cut service when you got 32 buses on your fleet? Five of them are electric ones that don't work, so discount them. But you got 27 buses on your fleet. You got 18 routes. So you're running 18 buses a day. So now, if you want more frequency and more ridership, you still got some more buses over there to use that's being paid for that's not being used. Put them to work. You got plenty of drivers. You got more drivers over there than you got at the gumball rally. You got plenty of drivers. Now, if there's anything that we need to have done, you want more ridership, perhaps you have the transit people let's see, checking out the bus stops and clearing the bus stops from the transit that's taking over the bus stops where people don't feel comfortable standing at the bus stops. I watch people avoid getting on the bus because they didn't want to go to the doggone bus stop because they were scared. And it don't help when you got bus stops that are dark. Now, I sit up here and I listen to the Out of all them 18 routes, did we have somebody that was consulting get on each bus and ride that bus all day long to check out how many riders there was, what the traffic was like, or whatever, all that, on each one of them buses? Did they take time to ride each one of them buses all day long to get all that information? Or what did you do? How did you go one bus and decide, well, we're going to do this for that day? How did you get the information for all 18 of those routes? Because I know I didn't see nobody sitting on them every day, all day long. And I ride the bus every day. Every day. Now, why do the people that need the bus the most got to suffer the most? It's not their fault that these places that are built here in Asheville are out of the way places. It's not their fault. Maybe the people that designed stuff and built this stuff should have thought about that, when you're going to have poor people using these places. I mean, 11 people going to Mayhack. That's not a bad number. It really isn't. Imagine how many people out of this 1,300 or some people on this survey, you said you got 4,300 average daily riders. Imagine if more people could have commented on this survey. I don't even think y'all read my feedback on the thing. I listened to the meeting. I didn't hear my feedback read. But I'm going to stand up for the people in this city and the people in this community and tell y'all, we don't need y'all cutting our service. We really don't. Maybe what y'all need to do is take Kim up on her invitation and come and ride the bus.

Ride the bus around a little while and just check out where it go.

You'd be surprised at the number of people that be on the bus. You'd be surprised at the number of people that don't be on the bus at certain times. I mean, that's just how it is. 7 o'clock to 9 o'clock AM. 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock PM. The worst times for traffic in this city. No buses going to be on time. I don't care how many buses you're running. That time of day, the traffic is just backed up. So, I mean, have they took that into consideration? Did they take that into consideration? Did you take into consideration about the drivers having to use the bathroom? So I'm saying, you want more ridership, but you're not doing nothing to earn it. You're not doing nothing to earn it, because you can't provide safety for your riders. You got homeless people getting on the bus with machetes down their back, big sticks. You got people getting on the buses with dogs that aren't service dogs. So instead of cutting the routes, fix the people that you got operating the system. Fix the route, fix them. I mean, I don't want to ride the bus out to Bingham Heights at nighttime because the people got to get out with the bus over there on the dark road and then walk around the darker road to get to their apartments. I don't want to ride that bus at night. I'm a man. And I can just imagine the women getting off from work out there at night, having to walk around there. Take these extra buses that we got and put them to use. Like the gentleman said just a minute ago, use special buses to make them little 15-minute trips. You can use one bus to do the 15-minute trip down to Biltmore and the 15-minute trip down to Hillcrest. But you got two buses going to Hillcrest already. And then most of these buses, that you got out of service going to, some of them don't really have service on the weekends until maybe after nine o'clock in the morning, when Hillcrest is turned out. But still, you gotta go to the road park, cause people work. The bus does not go to Mayhead. Social services don't serve their service, so they cut that out out of the way. I'm saying, don't keep compounding bad decisions with more decisions that's bad. Start listening to the people that you work for. Listen to the people that you work for. We do not want our routes cut. That's all we're saying. Find a way that y'all can make all this happen without anybody losing out. That's all I got to say. I don't even need to hold 10 minutes. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, the remaining speakers are three-minuters. So the first is Gino. I don't have a last name. So Gino. Gino.

Good evening, Mayor, council members. My name is Gina, and I run Better Together Transportation. I transport people who cannot drive, who cannot walk long distances, and who cannot replace lost service. You hired Jarrett Walker to design a new bus network. In human transit, Walker writes that no formula can tell a city whether to prioritize ridership or coverage. That choice reveals what the city values. The city asked over 1,300 residents if this draft would improve our public transit. Across age, income, and bus use, every group rejected this plan. They rejected it because it cuts the bus to Transformation Village. Women overcoming addiction and abuse live there with their children. It is also a Code Purple emergency shelter. Cut this route and homeless people lose their bus to shelter on freezing nights. It cuts the stop at Mayhek. To reach a doctor, an elderly, pregnant, or disabled patient must now walk up a steep hill on Henderson Mill Road. It cuts the route to the Social Security office. Seniors and disabled residents depend on those benefits to pay rent and buy food. The city showed that coverage could be preserved if the buses came less often. Council chose ridership instead. So what does the city gain? Buses will run more often on some routes. On paper, the average resident can reach 10% more jobs in 45 minutes. In practice, a mother, a patient, and a senior lose the bus to shelter, healthcare, and benefits. The people say this plan will hurt them. Your consultant says transit choices are not right or wrong. They reveal what a city's leaders value. You value a theoretical gain in job access over the people who depend on you to survive. Please reconsider this plan. Choose coverage over ridership. Build a transit system whose core value is love for our people. Thank you. Thank you.

No clapping, but you get to... This is your I agree with the speaker movement. Or I don't agree with the speaker.

Michael Stratton.

Hey, everybody. I'm glad we're still here. I thought for sure we were going to get knocked out by the storm. But that tends to be what the case is sometimes.

You've got to get in.

Okay, okay. We've got to really get in there. How's that? Honestly, I can't believe we're still talking about this. I came to council for the first time in 2019, and the thing that brought me here was talking about the bus. the lack of service. It just tends to be an ongoing issue here in Asheville. But the idea that we spent another $300,000 to answer a question that we already knew just seems a little asinine to me. We had a transit master plan that was very explicit. It said, we need both coverage and ridership. It said, it's going to cost money to do that. And then it became incumbent on the elected officials to figure out where that money was going to come from. And I think, honestly, you guys failed. You failed because you've yet to create a partnership with the county, which is instrumental to getting this whole thing done. We need a quarter percent sales increase from the county. And I know that's not your purview, but you work with the county, and you should. And if you haven't, then it's not enough. I'm so tickled to death that my S5 was preserved when this initially came out and hit the fan about a year ago. It wasn't on the map. And it freaked me out. It freaked all my neighbors out who ride the bus. And we got pretty active. And I see that it's now preserved. But you know what? That doesn't help the people who are going to be cut. And I don't just ride the S5. I was on a long run the other day. I was in North Asheville up near Grove Park Inn. And it's hot. And I had to get on a bus and go home because I couldn't make the whole way back. And we were too far away from, you know, water fountains, which is a whole other thing. But I was so thankful I was able to get on that bus and make it home. But what has happened here, you guys, is I think you guys have presented a false choice. You said status quo, which we all know is not great. It could be better. There's a lot of problems with it. Or the alternative is what I'm going to call the stagflation bag of chips. We all know what I'm talking about. You go to the store, and instead of the chip manufacturer raising the price on the bag of chips, what they do is just give you the same size bag. You open it up, and you're like, what the hell? Half the bag is full. What's all this air here for? And I think that's what you guys presented us with when we had the survey to talk about. So that said, I think option C, which I'm advocating here for, is pause on this, Do not pass go. Let's wait until we've figured out where our funding is gonna come from as opposed to giving me the half bag full of chips. That's it, thanks.

Now you're gonna make us hungry, but okay. Nina Tovesh.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and Council members and staff. When I moved to Asheville 14 years ago, I really had no idea how car-dependent this city was. I had lived in relatively big cities my whole life. I grew up in the Boston area, which had ancient but actually functional public transportation. Then I was in graduate school, I was in Rochester, New York, which had an adequate bus thing, although I hardly ever used it because I walked everywhere. I lived in DC, which has pretty good public transportation, fast, efficient, clean. And then I moved here. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be needing to use my car a lot more than I expected. And that's despite living within easy walking distance of at least two bus lines. When I heard this evening that the new proposed draft would cause some number of people who are bus dependent to have to think about getting a car that they can't afford or a new job. I don't know if y'all have noticed, but jobs are hard to come by in this town, especially ones that pay enough to help people who have to take the bus afford a car. Or maybe they just should move. The callousness of that shocks me. A public utility like transportation should serve first the people who need it the most, not the people for whom it would be nice or occasionally convenient. I'm all in favor of increasing ridership, lowering our carbon footprint, all those good things, reducing traffic congestion by getting cars off the road, absolutely 100%. But if we don't start by providing transportation to those people who need it the most, who have fewest alternatives, and for whom the options are extremely limited and dire, then we are failing as a community. Let's look at microtransport, let's look at alternative sources of revenue, and let's not adopt this proposed solution. Thank you for your consideration.

Thank you. Vickie Meade.

Good evening, council and mayor. My name is Vicki Meath. I'm the director of Just Economics and also served on the COA core design team. At Just Economics, we believe that meaningful public engagement should shape public policy. That's why we appreciate the extensive public input that has been part of the comprehensive operations analysis process. Riders, workers, employers, and community members participated because they care deeply about the future of Asheville's transit system and they deserve to be valued and listened to. Just Economics did outreach on both surveys, but we did not take a stand or advocate on how people should respond to the survey because we truly wanted to hear from transit users. The message from that public engagement has been remarkably consistent. People do not support the draft network proposal as is. We believe that feedback deserves to be taken seriously. The current draft network will cut off services to places like Transformation Village, the outlet malls, Mayhek, and the West Asheville Library, which is a voting location. We encourage council to reject the current draft network and instead consider alternatives that better reflect both the public input and the goals of the COA. One option is to return to the coverage map that was developed during the process. It improves transfers and travel times while maintaining the broad coverage that so many riders depend on. Another option is to modify the draft network to preserve service in the areas that generated the greatest concern. Where changes may still be necessary, the city should collaborate with the county and major employers and service providers such as Mayhek, Social Security, and Grove Park to identify transportation solutions that ensure people can continue accessing jobs, healthcare, and essential services. A third option is to take a pause, leave the current route network in place for now and instead focus on the real need, increasing investments in transit. More funding would allow Asheville to improve frequency, reliability, and ridership without riders having to choose between better service and losing access altogether. I hope we don't lose sight of the larger lessons in this process, that our system is working, but it needs greater investment, that the city should continue to try to work with the county, and that future land use plans, especially as we're recovering from Helene and revising the UDO, need to consider transit. Finally, I want to name that I appreciated the process and the work of the consultants. Jarrett Walker and Associates was great to work with. I really appreciated the whole COA process. The comprehensive operations analysis has given us some valuable information, and I want us to take that information, the lessons that we learned from the survey, and input from the community to advance better transit. Thank you.

Thank you. Austin Jones.

Good evening. My name is actually Austin Hughes. They might have misheard me. That's completely okay. But simply, I'm here to discuss the changes that are being proposed. I think a lot of people have already iterated exactly what I was going to say, which is essentially, you know, taking the coverage away from MHEC, Transformation Village, outlets, Social Security, all very vital services for us. Now, the proposed changes with the every 15 minutes in ridership in town, I don't really see that as important. If you can't wait 30 minutes, I'm sorry, but, like, come on, dude. The world isn't built for one specific individual. We're here to service everyone and the greater everyone. And clearly, by they're no longer up there, but 59% disagreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed that this would be helpful. Now, that is more than most presidents win by. So I think that is a very significant amount of people that have said that this would not help them at all. And while I do appreciate all of the proposed changes that we could make, I think those are all options to consider. I think the council should explore them. We can explore them together. But I believe that it's completely okay. If people have to wait a little bit longer, if that's if we change that to sacrificing coverage to certain areas. I mean, you can't really invest in a low-income place like Transformation Village and then not provide transportation to it from that. I mean, they're already low-income. How do you expect them to afford a new car, too, when they're already struggling to try to rebuild their lives? And I think a lot of other people outside of that in Asheville share that same story where they're simply trying to rebuild their lives, whether it's from Helene, whether it's from family trauma, whether it's from drug abuse. I think there is a lot of people in this town who are trying to improve their lives actively. And taking away some of these routes would actually go against that progress that they've made. such as myself. I work at the outlets. That is how I get to and from work. Now, I have been actively trying to save for a car, and I am a manager, but I don't really make enough in 2026 to be affording that. So it's a slow process, and I am actively working towards that. But I think that it's important to have these services in place, even if I did have a vehicle. I mean, it would just be nice even for those that, say, had to get to an appointment, but their car broke down that day or something. It's important to have these in place so that everyone feels welcome to use them. Thank you so much.

Mike Holmes.

I have to get real down here. It's a little too tall. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Mike Holmes, a Buncombe County native and community organizer at Just Economics, which I'm sure you are familiar with. I'm here to ask you to strongly consider a few things in the next step of the COA with our transit system. It is imperative that you all consider the results of the public input for the draft network, where it's clear that riders have made their voices heard in disagreeing with this draft. Making decisions that affect those most impacted while disregarding those voices of the public only continues a long trend of harm that the city claims to be steering away from. Cutting public services that give people access to jobs, education, and healthcare while the city and county still recovers from a devastating natural disaster is a tremendous misstep. While canvassing to make sure riders were aware of the public input for the draft network and could take the survey, I met a senior citizen who was upset about having to potentially find a ride to the Social Security office. For someone on a fixed income, paying for an Uber to get back and forth may hinder their ability to pay for other expenses. I met another resident at the transit center who had just been accepted to attend UNCA, but due to living in an area where routes would be cut due to the draft network, panicked at the thought of making it to campus without reliable transportation. These are just a couple of the examples of the hardships people may face with route cuts such as these that have been expressed to me and you all have heard a myriad of other ones throughout this night. This is why I ask that you all and city staff consider two lessons learned from the COA, that our system is working and it just needs more investment. You need to explore ways to increase funding to meet future transit goals instead of trying to improve the system with the same budget.

Listen to that sentence.

This should include in strategies to work more of the county on future transportation needs, such as applying for transit-oriented corridor funding through HUD, which you can do each year. That gets into my last point. We should also take heed to what the consultants consistently mention through this process, that future land use planning should prioritize transit. So just to reiterate, public engagement has shown that citizens do not like this plan, and since the city put a great deal of time, energy, and money into collecting public input, city council should listen to that input. It's not worth it to cut routes to folks who rely on public transportation to access jobs, healthcare, education, and other basic services for routes that people are predicting will boost ridership based off of assumptions. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Rachel Sorenson. I'm sorry, Rochelle, sorry. Please accept my apologies.

Council, Mayor, I come before you as a necessity bus rider. I have a long relationship with the art system, and I love the art system. I love public transit. If I go anywhere and I get to use public transit, I'm going to post about it. If you've been anywhere near my Facebook, you know that I do. I also have a sort of little blog called Life on the Bus, and I'll tell you how I got there. In 2018, I got a DUI, and that landed me a fast track sideways for a hot minute. I'd ride the bus everywhere. To say that it was life-changing is an understatement. It changed everything about everything. Where I could live, where I could work, who my doctor was, whether or not I was able to get my teeth cleaned, changed everything. At one point, I worked four miles from work, had an hour commute. At one point, I lost a job that was dependent on the S3 and the S6. frequency Try getting a new job and then telling an employer that you have to leave at 10 minutes to the hour because you've got to Catch the bus and you can only work until 8 until 7 50 because 8 o'clock is the last time the w-2 rides That was me. I was that writer catching the w-2 to go to my job at 50 years old making less way less than minimum wage and trying to get there by bus. Getting there by bus. Successfully rode this bus for seven years everywhere. Oh gosh, I digress. I just, please don't cut routes. Cutting routes? It's crazy. Honestly, ironically, I became a necessity writer at the same time the master plan was being designed. And I sat in those meetings and I was so excited and I was like, we're going to do it. We're going to get a sexy system because buses are sexy. I was just in Chicago. I didn't get in the car because I didn't have to. Airport to train, train to town, town to bus. I went everywhere, everywhere from the Obama Center to Navy Pier. I saw it all. on public transit, check my Facebook. $200 was my entire transportation budget for the year. Because what I don't like is random rides from strangers, so I don't Uber anywhere. That model also puts more cars on the road, increases traffic, and just trouble. They make unsafe spots. Who hasn't been in the middle of the road hopping in an Uber or had to wait for that? We could be so creative and so collaborative. What if a kid could get out of school at Asheville High School and ride to transit and then take the W-2 to the myriad of fast food places that are there now and work a job? Buses are equalizers.

Don't cut. Kara Wheeler.

Hi guys, I'm Kara Wheeler. I'm your neighbor in West Asheville. I took the bus here. It was 53 minutes from my doorstep to City Hall. The bus was delayed due to car traffic. I'm here today speaking in favor of the draft network. The underlying question the COA asked is, with the funding we currently have, are we spending our transit dollars based on our values? Let's remember the 2018 transit master plan. I know you've read it. I know you've memorized it. So section 7, page 82, is the implementation The 10-year phase of implementation. The 2018 master plan calls for doubling service hours over the course of 10 years. It's a beautiful plan. It has beautiful plans for routes, increasing and adding routes. It has beautiful plans for increasing frequency to 15 minutes on main corridors. It does it all. But we didn't do it. We didn't implement the majority of the plan. We didn't magically find money. We didn't collaborate with the county on a dedicated funding source. We didn't lobby the state to allow cities to raise that same funding source. The federal government did not change the FTA funding allocation for transit. It's been eight years since that transit master plan. So going back to the COA's original question, with the money we currently have, not with what we hope to have, Are we spending it based on our values? The draft network is a nudge toward frequency. It adds 15-minute service to Hillcrest, Rad, and Biltmore. It adds frequency to many other corridors that are designated as transit corridors in the Living Comprehensive Plan. I work in manufacturing on Hendersonville Road with 800 other employees, and I live in West Asheville. Where I'm at on Hendersonville Road, the bus comes every hour and a half. It's the S3. If I were to bus home, that would be a 75 minute commute. If I can pick my leave time, I would need to leave at 4.30 or at 6 p.m. to hit that 90 minute frequency. But the standard shift hours end at 3.30. This means the same 75-minute commute plus one hour waiting or changing shift schedules, if you have that luxury. With the draft network, the frequency changes to every hour on Henderson Mill Road. Now I could leave work at 3.30, 4.30, or 5.30 and still make it home. The draft network gives more options and more freedom. A bus that comes every 90 minutes technically provides access. A bus that comes often provides opportunity. The draft network moves us closer to a transit system people can actually use, not just one on a map. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, Stephen Rivlett.

Hello, everybody. My name is Steven Riblet and I took the bus here. I'm really glad to have heard so many passionate points about transit. This is what we need. I'm hearing we need more. But we were asked, what could we do with what we have? Could we do more? And with that, I'm here to ask you to support nudging some version of the draft network. to help support frequency and ridership, focusing on the total number of trips and the impact that could also have, which has not been brought up much in this discussion tonight. We should think of investment in our transportation system, not individually in terms of choices, but as a combination. Helping frequency, while let's say also allowing mobile pay, would help amplify each's contribution focusing on frequency and then finding other sources of funding would then help to reinforce the network we would have, et cetera. A lot of these increases won't be as grand with only a coverage model. Thinking in a visionary mindset, by increasing the number of riders and specifically the number of trips, other improvements will have that greater impact. By having more riders, we can better justify spending on transit. By investing in transit, we help mitigate impacts to the environment while also helping to densify the city. This results in a lessened need for parking and cars, helping to make spaces better for people. This comes back to us because those businesses would then have more of traffic, more human traffic, which in turn would help increase their land value, helping to raise money to pay for things like transit. Regardless of your decision tonight, I want to thank you all for joining in in this passionate conversation and have a good day.

Christopher Koski, I feel like this is gonna be Krosky, but it says Koski, okay.

Hey everyone, I'm Chris Koski. I'm also here to speak in support of the Giraffe Transit Network. I live near Hillcrest on the N3 route and I try to use the bus whenever I can. I also took the bus here today. There's almost always other people on the bus when I'm using it, traveling between different neighborhoods, downtown, to work, shop, support local businesses. If the bus came every 15 minutes on this route, it would make it a lot easier for me and other people on this route to take the bus to and from downtown. And increased service would mean you wouldn't have to really plan around a timetable. You could just walk to the bus stop and If it's only 15 minutes away, it's not nearly as long of a wait. This would also mean that there's gonna be less traffic on our roads, more foot traffic for small businesses, and easy access for residents who rely on transit every single day. Frequent reliable transit would just make it easy for riders to choose the bus over driving. Making it easier to choice to ride the bus is gonna help make our neighborhoods more connected and our downtown more vibrant. So I urge you to vote yes on the draft transit network. Thank you.

Thank you. Tyler Solis.

Hi there. A lot of people don't use the bus because it isn't frequent. Those that use it are forced to suffer a time tax of half an hour to an hour due to the low frequency. The current network simply does not work for the majority of our citizens. As we continue to debate new options and alternatives, we continue to disincentivize people from using public transport and continue to burden those that do use it to pay with their own time. If we choose to reject or delay the proposed network, we can't afford to pay and wait for another study. We need to improve the frequency of our network today and take action based on what we know. Thank you. Thank you.

And then Anthony Mejia.

I was once told that politics is warfare without ever firing a shot. I didn't know what that meant until I saw lives affected by paperwork. I know none of this is a perfect system. I know hour-long wait times suck, but when we're talking about this here, decisions, lives, people we make, I've said it before, it kills people. We're talking about Mayhek. We're talking about a Social Security office. I've worked security at the Social Security office. The people who come there don't have shoes. They have rags on their feet. And they're trying to get their Social Security number so they can have the first job they can have in years. Mayhek, I'm sure, stops a lot of people from killing themselves. We have a lot of problems. A lot of you know my problems with this city and with this council. But the solution I've never seen is to take more away from our people. It sure is to give more funding, access, availability, time, employment, gainful employment, enough money to support this system, and always asking where this money comes from. I listened as one of the city managers detailed to you how our homelessness programs works when we have federal funding. We don't have federal funding. For lack of a better word, the federal government has shit the bed. And now is the time for it to do it ourselves. Find the funding, find the people, find the support locally, and find solutions that won't kill people. Because I know you don't believe me, we already have. With the programs we cut, the federal funding gone, people have died cold on the streets, they have overdosed, they have left, they have ended up in jail for needlessly. And I promise you, I was a parachute rigger in the military. It was my job to ensure people lived every day If I didn't do my job, they wouldn't. I am waiting for you to understand that your job saves and kills people. This is warfare without firing a shot, and you need to start shooting the side. I'm getting really fucking tired.

Okay, those are the speakers under this item. Again, we're not voting on this tonight. We'll be voting on this at our meeting in August, which is August 21st. 25th. So you'll have an opportunity to comment again then or in the interim send us an email or phone call or however you'd like to communicate with us. I did want to say in the PEDE committee, I did a really thorough review of this proposal and had a fantastic discussion. It's worth reviewing. There was a robust discussion around funding, and I want to push back a little bit on the folks who are sort of shaming us around failing to figure out how to fund transit, and I would say that transit funding is incredibly difficult. It is funded primarily out of our general fund. We do use some parking revenues for it. As we discussed many times here, some cities our size in North Carolina are able to have large partners that help them with transit like UNC Chapel Hill or Eastern Carolina University or UNC Wilmington. These are towns that are similar in size to us that have big partners that help offset the cost. Doesn't even cost any money to ride transit in Chapel Hill and they have a great frequency and easy use. My kids use it when they go to Chapel Hill. But there is the one big option in the state of North Carolina to fund transit, other than trying to craft these partnerships, is to have a referendum on the ballot for a quarter cent sales tax for transit. The only counties in North Carolina that have passed a sales tax for transit are Durham, Mecklenburg, Orange, and Wake. Those are Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area, that's it. And I will tell you that some of those it's a half cent and the reason was because they were really hoping to be able to get light rail and that's a whole other story in the Triangle area. So, you know, there are larger counties than us, like Forsyth, Guilford, who have not passed this referendum. Believe you me, we have had long discussions with the county commissioners because it is up to them whether or not we can put a quarter cent sales tax referendum on the ballot. It has to be a countywide vote. And we did lobby the legislature to try to make it a citywide vote. Julie Mayfield did her best, a major transit advocate, as our state senator, to try to convince the legislature to allow us to have just a citywide referendum and a citywide sales tax. We were told over and over the problem is the Department of Commerce only collects sales tax revenue on a countywide basis. They don't have a system to allow citywide sales tax collection. Right now, that's what they continue to tell us. We have not seen legislation successful in just allowing us a citywide referendum, which personally I think would pass in Asheville. Countywide, much more difficult discussion. When you have the city only having a third of the population in the county, that's a pretty challenging discussion and would take a pretty heavy-duty campaign to... to convince voters to support a quarter cent sales tax for transit we've seen a huge campaign around these transit taxes in these other jurisdictions where the municipalities are the majority of the county's population so um it's not that easy is all i'm saying and that's no excuse i'm willing to go to the map for this and i have tried to go to the map for this but we have not been able to get traction no pun intended around getting a quarter cent sales tax on the ballot as authorized by the county. But I wouldn't tell you to go run over to the county and ask them to put this on the ballot because it's gonna take more thought and strategy than that.

It will take a pretty long campaign to get buy-in from voters.

Why should I support this? I don't ride the bus. That kind of conversation we need to have as a community before we can get you know, momentum around supporting a tax like that. So when people say, go out there and get the money for transit, you know, understand what the options are in North Carolina and understand that we've tried to explore them and we will continue to explore them. We now have a city manager who used to be with the county. Maybe she has some kind of like magic mojo, you know, to help us with that. But it's been, I don't know, I'm not putting that on you.

That's a lot of pressure.

But anyway, I just wanted to give that context around the funding challenges.

I appreciate that, Mayor. I want to layer on just one more thought. I thought you were going to get there at the end, actually. You know, this idea that I really appreciate the comment about the model chosen or the coverage or the frequency is kind of a a moral decision of the council. And I want to push back on that a little bit in that I don't know if people realize when you saw us go through our very difficult budget year, this year was very challenging. Last year, it's getting more and more difficult. We were... going back and forth around little things that were $100,000 here, $150,000 there, that we were desperate to try and work into the budget, save a program, save a job, get a closer living wage, whatever it was. And I don't know if people realize that general fund where we do all that magic, we have pretty much status quo expenses. But then when we want to do something new as a community, we have the general fund to work with. So transit in this particular budget used $8.4 million the general fund now that's kind of a standard it's gone as high as 10 million if I recall but I don't want folks to think that this council isn't putting transit at the forefront of their mind when budgeting because there's a lot of things we could do with 10 million and we are saying we need this transit but right now what we're feeling is it's not quite all of the goals there are more on hand that we need to figure out. So I just wanted to share that for perspective. I don't think anybody's really saying this doesn't matter to us.

Council, does anybody want to tell DK anything now about this in terms of further direction before our next meeting? Or obviously you can do that after this meeting as well. But if there's anything specifically about the recommended nudge towards ridership, this was a good time to give some feedback.

We have a meeting soon, but I feel like maybe you understand my thoughts that I've shared. If not, let me know.

I know one person brought it up, but the mobile fare that Kara Wheeler didn't mention in public comment, but somebody else did. Kara is a member of our transit committee and brought this idea up that instead of us spending, I think our last number we looked at was 900,000 to develop an app to take people's money over time. It was like so expensive. We applied for these grants and it was just like, how are we spending so much money to take people's money? It doesn't really make sense. But the mobile app is something that we could do without the necessary infrastructure. And so we could make it so that when someone gets to Asheville and the airport, they could get on the bus because they wouldn't have to get a ticket downtown and they wouldn't have to have a dollar in cash as cash circulates less frequently. So there are some solutions that we could use to make transit better and better funded that are on the table. They're community-led solutions. I want to see us move that forward as quickly as possible. I think it's really unfortunate that we're scrapping here. For me, the best solution still is to see what the county learns, keep working towards an Asheville Transit Authority so we reduce the duplication of costs, keep working on the funding strategies, go all in on that. I just, I can't see us making the cuts, especially when I don't know what that means for mountain mobility in our paratransit.

It sounded like the mountain mobility would run anywhere in the city regardless, right? Didn't I hear that?

That's a really nice idea, but it's unclear promise.

Yeah, we have that as a follow-up to bring back that information, but our paratransit runs across the city.

Yeah, I didn't realize that, so that's helpful.

Okay. That was the manager's report.

Well, I thought we were having this because we were going to give staff instruction, but I don't really hear staff instruction. So I hope that's good enough.

Yeah, if anybody else has any other feedback. I mean, I opened it up. So if you have anything else to feedback.

Well, I will say I have a real heartburn about... Transformational Village and the outlets. I have a similar heartburn about the Social Security office in West Haywood. But the Transformational Village folks, they're expanding over there. Again, I don't think we're taking future housing into account. I think we need to move faster on alternative funding, whatever that looks like. Maybe not putting something on the ballot, but things that we can do just as a city now. Maybe renegotiating our partnerships with places like Mission, Grove Park, see if they are able to contribute anymore. But that's where I am right now.

One follow-up to that, I know during Code Purple, because that was mentioned for Transformation Village, that we sometimes change the rules and the buses run differently, or they'll take you to the final stop. Just that might be some good follow-up to make sure we're not, I don't think that we're leaving that critical hole, but maybe double-check.

I have a curiosity about if we were to add in, for instance, the outlets, it seems like it would take two buses in order to create the 15 minute frequency on that route. So is it possible that one of the buses can maintain the 15 minute frequency and not go all the way to the outlets while the other one does? Can we get creative with the routes that we have here? When we add them back in, can one bus go the route, go the full route to Mayhek, Transformation Village, and the other, while one maintains the frequency? And can I piggyback really quickly?

Yesterday in a meeting with Grove Park, they even mentioned not needing it as many times over the course of the day. There are certain times where workers are more likely to need to get to work and leave work.

Sure.

And it'll probably be hard to do it on demand, because other people on the bus probably have to make their destination at a certain time. But if we had a fixed route that went the total mile,

So the route that we have that has 15-minute frequency from Hillcrest downtown and District, that's the full Route 2. And then that segment that has 15-minute frequency, that is one additional bus that we're using there. And so if we were to put back service down to the outlets along Brevard Old Way, that's the bus that we would be using. So it's just one bus that's coming out of there and to provide the 60 minute frequency down to the outlets, it would be, that's the trade-off. Either the 50 minute frequency on the inner part of two or the bus that goes down to the outlets.

One thought that when you said that though, that made me think about the outlet malls is do y'all remember not too long ago when we shuffled the police resource center to the outlet malls and the outlet malls made a sizable contribution so that city services would be out there perhaps they'd make a sizable contribution to ensure that their workforce can continue to get there.

I really like the way, I like this. Yes, because, so what about if we just had like, one bus the express route yes and did all you know kind of did a circle of the city you know what i mean and we were able to keep that again i'm throwing so you know we're dreaming here but we what do you think

Do you guys love when city council designs bus routes?

All the way around.

One of the really powerful things of this network is the time transfer, having all the routes come to downtown. That works really well when we have clock face frequencies, frequencies that are 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, because the bus can come at the same time. If we do one really long route with one bus, that might end up running every 90 minutes, every two hours. And if we do that, then we are covering those areas, something that's possible. It would be service that would not be very useful to a lot of people and would make it very difficult for people to transfer to any other routes. Transfers are really important in transit system because not everything that you want to do is in just one route. So being able to transfer to other routes really allows you to reach more of the network, and that's why the time transfers are such a strong part of this draft plan and potentially whatever we come up with in the final plan. But doing something really, really big that does something like that wouldn't make transfers easy, and it wouldn't be very useful to a lot of people.

I heard Sage ask a question during the PED meeting, and I'm not sure of the response, but can MHEC provide a shuttle?

They used to, right? They had one. I recall they have a shuttle, but I don't know what it does.

So we did speak with MHEC. a few weeks ago. They did used to have a shuttle. They couldn't remember the year and this was before I was here as well. They stopped having the shuttle when we started providing the bus. They understood the reason why this is in the draft network. They said that They would be willing to continue to talk with us. They did not say that it was off the table. They understood that it's a business decision for, that this was not a values-based decision, that this was a numbers proposal. That sounds a little hopeful. So it was not, they didn't say no, but it's obviously financial. You know, our intention would be with all of these partners is to talk with them about what options might there be. You know, I think in some of these instances there could be shuttles that could be very useful. And I think that is a good location for that. That's helpful. Thank you for talking with them.

So I'm not hearing any consensus around adding back any particular route. So that's kind of what I needed to hear tonight. If there was consensus around adding back any of the A through D, we would go back. And can you go to the next slide?

And so A through D represents 93 riders a day impacted.

So if a good majority of you all felt strongly about any one of those, we would go back to them.

I feel strongly about all of those. Yeah, draft plus at least the top three.

That's what I need to hear. Are any of those you want us to go back and look at?

All of them.

So that's the maintainer. That's option three. Okay. So that's option three.

Actually, what I was thinking was someone came up with, What is the pedal thing? Come on, Mr. Lopez. I'm really interested in his presentation. Variable fixed route.

That's why we were saying that we could press pause and look at the variable fixed route that Bill spoke to but has not yet presented. His presentation, it takes a little time. It's worth looking at. Essentially, the way it works right now is each one of our routes in the transit system works like a blade of grass. It grows from the heart of downtown, the transit center, and it goes in one direction out. Instead, we have it in our living actual comprehensive plan of development nodes. And so imagine that you, instead of a blade of grass, have a stem of a flower, and then from out at that flower's center, there's petals. And so, for example, you would go up North Asheville in a frequent corridor with a fixed route large bus because it would have a lot of people because it would be running frequently. And then when it ends at the grocery store, because the grocery store has the most on and off boarding, which is very common in transit systems, and it's true in ours as well, north, south, east, and west, you would then run a corridor service, and it could be on demand, but it would provide better coverage over a larger swath of area than the blade of grass because the pedal reaches out into the neighborhoods. An example of this would be if instead of running the blade of grass fixed route transit to Kenilworth, I'm sorry, Klondike, you would instead go from Klondike down through Montford and over to Broadway, which doesn't currently have service, and create essentially a circulator. Another way that you could think of a pedal is the downtown circulator. It's in the transit master plan. It would serve the people who live and work downtown and visit downtown. And it doesn't necessarily have to go all the way to the transit center to function. These are the kind of conversations we didn't put in scope and why we can listen to the little subject matter experts.

It sounds like that gives you coverage and ridership.

Right. Which would be, I think, a different, deeper analysis than what we would be able to bring back to you on the 25th. Which is why I think you said, let's look at that.

That sounded to me like up to a year and another study that could be responding. Well, I don't know how long. I didn't think it was a study. He said it, and a consultant. Yeah.

I don't know how long that would take, but based on the information that we currently have, these are the three options that we see for you all to consider for the 25th. One option is this.

I would be in favor for option two. Okay. Okay.

See, we are voting tonight.

Any consensus around us taking a look at that for you all to vote for?

So option two is like a menu, though. Are you saying, Shanika, to pick them all or some of them?

We could do it all, yes.

Well, doing them all is option three.

No, none of them.

You mean the four in option two, not all seven.

Right, so there are seven routes currently proposed to be cut in a draft network. That would be option one, if all of those are cut. Option two adds back one or more or all of the four options that you see here. We could do that and still, it would be some trade-offs, so you'll lose some of the performance that's in the draft network, but... you could do it and not totally maintain, you could gain some increased performance.

Just pointing out also that none of the workers at Grove Park are in that first batch. Or Vivard or Transformation Village. Right, do we need to pause and figure out, can we get a variable route? Maybe on the times, as Vice Mayor said, they might need. I think it's worth looking at to get it right. I mean, this is a, this is a.

This is an illegal, I mean. Do you, staff, you know, I mean, I did the numbers for the Mayhek riders. I can see it's $31 per ride per day for each rider. So do you know what the cost is for the city of Asheville to get 40 people out to the Outlet Mall, Brevard Road, Transformation Village? Do you know what the cost is for the Social Security office? And I'm asking because, I mean, if we're gonna pursue a partnership, say, with the Grove Park Inn, I'm not saying that, but if we were to do that, I mean, this is a company that makes

A lot of money.

And I feel a little strange as a taxpayer offsetting the costs of them doing business if we're paying for their employees to get to work at like 40 bucks a ride. I mean, I don't know. Does anybody think? I mean, I feel for the employee. And it is the taxpayer.

But we do that for everyone.

Well, I think that's what this is taking a hard look at is why are we doing this? Does that even make sense?

Well, I thought the whole point, and I'm not disagreeing. I just don't like the notion of talking about one business in particular. No, no, and I'm just throwing that in.

One more second.

When the goal is to get people to jobs. 100%. So why that employer?

Well.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, this is a philosophical problem in America. Do we spend a fortune serving the one, or do we spend a fortune serving the masses? I mean, this is, you know, we don't want to see one little baby in the NICU not get half a million dollars to keep them alive, which we don't because they're a little baby in the NICU. And we don't want to not get 11 people to Mayhek because they need to get to Mayhek, right? We don't want to ever do that. But as a society, we also... i mean to me to me to get more people to be able to use this and to grow ridership so that we're getting less people in cars and less congestion and more people to have reliable ways to get to work to me is a way you grow a city period we're thinking about right now frozen in time but in the future if we're going to grow as a city in a way that makes any sense, we're going to have to figure out how to change how we're doing business.

And really, the private industry has to be our partner, and sometimes not by choice. Just like Mayhek had a shuttle until we offered it.

Yeah, I mean, Tanger Outlet... rolled out the red carpet for the police department to be able to have an annex there because they wanted to make sure they have an annex there. Tanger Outlet sponsored the Performing Arts Center in Greensboro to the tune of $7 million. Tanger Outlet can also partner with us. So, I mean, I don't feel like... I mean, and ABCCM is doing such great work, but they are a multi-million dollar operation. Make no doubt about it. So, I mean, I do think that... I don't think it's the burden of, true, but that doesn't mean we should shoulder all of the costs.

And the taxpayers, really, because again, the 8.4 from the general fund.

I just wish we would have had those conversations before we jumped in and said what they will do or what they can't do. Because I know what it's like to be a worker at a place, and you don't know what they're going to do. Right. And then you have people who are least equipped to do something kind of left hanging. Now, I get how there are fewer riders and someone has to pay, you know, and someone will, you know, fall short. I get it. I just don't want us to be as flippant. And I'm not talking about literally you. I said us.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think one of the problems, and you warned us, you said, when I give you suggestions for how to move to a ridership model, you're going to feel this pain. People are going to come, and you told us, they're going to come and they're going to tell you, please don't cut my route, please don't do that. but you're gonna increase ridership dramatically. And we said, bring it to us. And we didn't know what you meant. I mean, we didn't know what you were gonna propose. So to your point, we didn't know what the list was gonna be. So yes, we gave you the instruction to bring us the list. You've done it, and now we're complaining to you about it. No, no.

Complaining about her. If I can just add, so I would like to discourage calculating the dollar figure for particular places because, as Councilwoman Mosley mentioned, like, yes, Tanger Outlets is the end of the line, but there are so many other things in between. There's like 12 hotels and there's restaurants and so many other places. So, you know, That just becomes really difficult for us. But think about it.

I mean, one of the reasons staff looked at these routes was not only because of how far they are, but they also looked at the ridership.

We did.

So that's what I'm talking about.

Right, yes. So we made these choices based on ridership numbers, and we looked at residential housing and low-income households. Those were the guidelines that we tried to stay within.

Were there any other items on the list of cuts that maybe didn't come to us that maybe some folks that want to see assemblage of some cuts, not others, might like to see? Like other suggestions you didn't make? A different route that could have been cut? I don't know how you weighed, I guess I should be asking you, you must have made a tier, they weighted them somehow, and these are the most, I mean, it's so complicated.

There are myriad options, and there are ones that are in the bottom, like Beaver Dam. That was one that was a rather, I would say, easier option.

Well, one comes to mind, it's like we're still sending a bus to Black Mountain.

Correct, and that is not part of the study because...

They're funding it.

Okay, I heard that.

So I'm just wondering, I don't want to open up the Book of Worms. I'm just wondering if my colleagues, in a chance to get us to a more consensus, if there's an interest in any of that or if it's just the seven we're looking at and it's... That or stay, no go.

I think that you would find that any other cut that we could suggest, you probably would find even more heartburn over.

That might have been helpful, actually, to see if cutting eight riders to Social Security is very different than a route that has 400. I just don't know the scale. You know what I mean? I don't know how many routes have eight a day. I know they're not all that low.

So can I just circle back to, you were talking about being flippant. Are you, and I'm trying to understand, are you saying like, we don't have enough time to stew on this? Like it's too quick of a decision given that we're looking at these now.

Yes. And again, I'm really interested in his proposal because just when I'm out and about and when I'm in a HACA meeting or even when I went to TDA, it's landing on, as a cut. People don't care if there's more frequent services to someplace they don't wanna go. And people, some people, and I used Hillcrest as an example, if I have to ride the bus, I don't care that it's coming every 15 minutes to go somewhere I don't need to go. If I have to go work at Grove Park from Hillcrest, I'm riding the bus. And then I might leave Grove Park and not come back home. There might be somewhere else I need to get to from Grove Park. It might be my second job. And I'm tired and I don't feel like walking down the hill after I've been carrying a tray all day. I don't feel like going up the hill when my shift starts at 530. And it sounds like we don't get that. I'm not saying that we don't. get that. I'm saying that's how it is landing. And anytime I find people that seemingly wouldn't necessarily agree, agreeing, it always gives me pause. So when people in Hillcrest are saying this is crazy, when TDA is saying this is crazy, when business owners downtown are like, oh, my staff members are coming to me saying, why are you making these cuts? It gives me pause.

Gotcha.

Okay. but it's not personal saying that, let them eat cake or anything.

That's good. Okay, any other? I feel like this is probably not that helpful for you in terms of our direction. So we're gonna have to, I think we're gonna have to figure something out. Okay, all right, we are going to, now it's 8.30. Okay, are we good? Yeah, maybe another tornado will come and we'll be rescued.

If anybody was here for the transit conversation, we're now moving on, so it'll be back on our agenda for August 25th, unless something changes, right, DK?

That was, yes, I mentioned that, yeah, that we will be doing this again on August 25th. We have now a public hearing to consider amending the conditional zoning for 301 East Chestnut Street for the purpose of amending project conditions. And we will have a presentation regarding the same.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, members of Council, Will Palm Post with Planning and Urban Design. I'll be presenting this request to amend the conditional zoning at the Princess Anne Hotel at 301 East Chestnut Street. The hotel property is located here just north of downtown at the corner of Chestnut Street and Furman Avenue. It's a historic building and a local historic landmark. The existing zoning is institutional conditional zone from prior conditional zoning that I'll speak to momentarily. Future land use is neighborhood centers. No change in that is being proposed. So essentially, this property has been under conditional zoning since 2006 for a hotel use, a 16-room hotel. It was amended once in 2018. There are some very specific conditions about the types of uses that are allowed at the site currently, such as that the lower level of the hotel can only be used for apartments, for hotel and restaurant staff. The applicant is requesting an amendment to the conditional zoning to allow for some additional uses in conjunction with the existing hotel and restaurant uses that are currently on site. There are no planned expansions or additions to the structure and all the other relevant conditions are being retained in the revised project conditions. So this is what the project conditions for the land uses would look like under this proposed amendment to the conditional zoning. It would include the 16 guest room hotel. It would allow eating and drinking establishments generally, so they could be continued to use the restaurant dining room main area without a seat restriction. It could also allow for the conversion of the lower level into eating and drinking establishments. It could allow for dwelling units generally. retail sales, barbershops and beauty salons, and also special functions as described here, which was a carryover from the prior conditional zoning. Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval at its July 1st meeting. So this is the description of the neighborhood center's future land use category that talks about a mix of uses in residential areas, things like restaurants, pubs, small retailer office, for the convenience of residents of the neighborhood serving as a focal point for the area. And then also staff finds that the proposal supports a number of goals in the comprehensive plan, such as to increase mixed-use development along transit corridors, promote great architecture and urban design to enhance placemaking, and celebrate the unique identity of neighborhoods through creative placemaking. Therefore, staff concurs with the Planning and Zoning Commission and recommends approval of the conditional zoning amendment. I will have the answer to any questions you might have.

It's currently operating as a hotel? Or it's just permitted to? Why is it read that way?

Oh, it's been operating as a hotel for 20 years. It's currently not open. It's under new management.

Oh, it's currently not open. Has it been not open for a while?

I don't know if it's been a very long time or not. I know the applicant's, I think, here this evening, but it hasn't been closed for a very long time.

I was just a little confused about the way it was written. Okay.

No, it would be a continuation of the use, essentially. Okay.

So they don't need our permission to do a hotel. Correct. They just want our permission to allow these other uses.

Yes. They want to consider some different uses than on the lower level. That's currently only allowed for three apartments for hotel and restaurant staff.

Okay.

This would allow a little more flexibility down the road as well with this proposed wording so they wouldn't have to come back in another eight years or so to revise it further.

Did anyone come up with a single thing that was a negative about this? I didn't really hear any downsides.

Staff has not identified any. P&C either? No, there was not much discussion at Planning and Zoning Commission. It had unanimous support. There was no public comment at Planning and Zoning Commission. We have not heard any pushback from the neighborhood. I think it could add some neighborhood serving retail or restaurant uses to the area. That could be a convenience and amenity for the neighborhood.

Thanks.

You're welcome.

OK, I'm going to open the public hearing. We do have one person signed up to speak, and that is Anne McDonald. Miss McDonald, you'll have three minutes.

Hello, I'm Anne McDonald. Thank you for hearing me today. I share a driveway with Princess Anne. And so there's a joint driveway that goes to their parking lot and then my parking pad. And adding business, which is downstairs, it's on the lower level, would require more parking. And as is, both Chestnut and Furman, you one side of the street parking and you cannot have two cars pass. So right now it is congested with traffic. Adding businesses below would make driving there even more challenging. It has been closed since January and I've just noticed even since it's been closed, there's much more ability to drive on the road because even when it was a hotel, the staff would be parking on the street if the hotel was full. That would also increase the traffic going right next to my house, and it would be going multiple times a day. When it was a hotel, generally people were checking in, people may go out for dinner, but really at this boutique hotel, traffic pretty much quieted down by 10 or 11 o'clock at night. And it really didn't start until late morning after people had checked out. But if there's businesses in the bottom, you're going to see a lot more traffic. And besides, they're taking away three apartments, three housing options. On Charlotte and Chestnut, there is open land that is still yet to be developed, which will be mixed use. So there already is in this neighborhood businesses that align with some of the philosophy of moving this city forward. And if we get rid of the bus line going up to the Oak Grove, it is not on the transportation line. So thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to... Close the public hearing. Councilor, questions, comments, or a motion? Okay, please come forward and tell me your name. There's not someone else on my list, but it may be under a different one. Please, this is the... Yeah, if you... This is the conditional zoning on Chestnut Street. Well, you can wait. You can wait. Yeah, we're not quite there.

Okay, the. Council, I move to approve the conditional zoning request for the property located at 301 East Chestnut Street, so an institutional conditional zone, and find that the request is reasonable in the public interest, is consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and meets the development needs of the community, and that the request, one, incentivizes redevelopment, especially mixed-use development that contains housing within identified transit supportive corridors, Two, promotes adaptive reuse as a means of conserving materials, history, and embodied energy in buildings. And three, encourages planning strategies that support the development of locally focused neighborhood amenities, including restaurants, pubs, and other neighborhood services.

Point of order. The motion says contains housing, but this removes housing?

Is there housing left after we remove the housing?

That's why I was kind of confused about the language. Is it a hotel? Is it empty? Is it housing?

The motion says contain housing, but the presentation says remove housing.

That's correct. Dwelling units would be a permitted use under this conditional zoning. So the applicant may be able to speak about the specific intents of what they're planning on, but they did want to retain the ability to have housing as an option in those units. So that would be a possibility under this conditional zoning.

So we definitely don't want to remove the housing language, but it does almost read like we're doing this to preserve the housing. Yeah, it says contains housing.

That could include housing.

I made the motion, I'm not sure.

It's fine. Maybe some of the translation coming from the comprehensive plan where the strategies don't always fit perfectly.

I missed a word. I meant to say, one, incentivizes redevelopment, especially mixed-use development that may contain housing.

There you go, okay. We have a motion, do we have a second?

Second.

All right, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, the motion passes six to zero. All right, moving right along. The next item on our agenda is a public hearing to conditionally rezone 3862 Sweeton Creek Road from RM-16 residential multifamily high density To residential expansion conditional zone.

Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor, members of council. Again, for the record, my name is Sam Starkbaum. I am a planner three with the City of Asheville's Planning and Urban Design Department. It's good to be with you this evening. What we have before us today is a conditional zoning petition at 38 Sweeton Creek. I will casually refer to this as the Ardmore Apartments. I believe that is the name that the applicant will be going with. my presentation like all my presentations will take place in three parts we will first look at context look at maps where we are what is the zoning what is the future land use the second part we'll look at what is being proposed and then finally we will conclude with how this does or does not conform or align with city documents this master plan future land use map and of course the living Asheville comprehensive plan So where are we? We are, of course, in South Asheville. You have seen a number of Sweet and Creek apartments in this year, frankly. This is a little different. This is far enough along Sweet and Creek that this is considered part of the Hendersonville Road Airport Road intersection that is just less than six tenths of a mile from that intersection, which you can see on the bottom left corner. And you can see that this is near the lake on the vicinity map to the right. This is currently zoned RM16 and there are a number of other projects in the area, including Dunbar Place, Avalon Park at Sweeton Creek and the colony developments all within the immediate vicinity, which are also zoned RM16. in this area this is going to residential expansion cz as it is proposed i do want to spend some time talking about why this is before you this evening this is only in front of council because residential districts your rs and rm districts were not part of the zoning text amendment thresholds that we took through in 2025. this would be a by right development as a level two if this were zoned anything different that we change for thresholds under those zoning districts. So this is before you because RM was not considered part of those threshold districts. So this is why this must appear before council for a residential expansion request for a conditional zoning petition.

We didn't really do corridors.

Yeah, I'm thinking. So Brad, we didn't really up zone the corridors. We up zoned the zoning classifications.

Correct. Yep.

So this one wasn't under it. Because we can't just pick a sum of a zoning classification if it's along a corridor, unless we have an overlay. You just didn't want to get us to turn it around, did you? Okay.

And there was also express direction to avoid residential districts at the time.

Okay. That's helpful. I mean...

So, okay, I'm going to argue about it, but I don't remember that expression. Well, we can move on. Then this is, it is worth noting. And I will talk about this again in that third act where I talk about conformance and alignment with city plans. This is in the residential neighborhood, future land use. This is something that. does contemplate historically developed following a single master plan, usually with one way in, one way out in terms of ingress, egress. The RM 16 and what you find in this area along this corridor are appropriate for residential neighborhood. This is even called out on page 346 of the Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan. It says that RM 16 and corresponding conditional zoning districts are appropriate for this area. So that's where we are and what we're looking at, what the zoning district is and what is being proposed. Here is the site plan. It is five buildings. It is 130 units. And it is along this area. It is one entrance in from Sweeten Creek. I do want to note that this is technically two parcels, which totals 12.06 acres. It is environmentally designed in a way to preserve the tree canopy to the north. And so the buildings have been shifted south. There are two sidewalks. It does have a six foot sidewalk along Sweet and Creek Road with an eight foot utility strip. And then it also has six feet internal sidewalks. All other landscaping components will be met. We will also talk about that a little bit at technical modifications. I also want to talk about parking briefly. When this started the process, this was a site that had a minimum, and this was a project that had a parking minimum of 173 spaces. It had a parking maximum of 300 spaces. The site plan before you shows 200 spaces. This has changed a little bit, right? So, since this has begun the process, and even since getting all the documents to Maggie with the deadline, HB 162 passed, which eliminated parking minimums. So that calculus has changed. So the applicant will speak at their presentation about how they are going to lower their parking. range that is in exhibit e the project conditions that number is going to be lower than 200 it is going to be closer approaching to one parking space or 1.25 per dwelling unit but again the applicant will address that we anticipate this number of provided 200 spaces will go down now because they are seeking nchfa funding they are still required to provide parking So that is a little bit about the site plan. These buildings are predominantly a three, four split because of the topography ranging from north to south. You can see at the top elevations what that looks like with that unit level change. And then the bottom elevations are what you would see for buildings B and D, sort of the larger buildings. And the materiality for these are very much in alignment with what you see for a modern mountain aesthetic. It is something that is common throughout Asheville with your brick foundation, board and batten, and fiber siding, and a shingle roof. So insofar as project conditions go, all units, 130 units will be designated affordable for a minimum of 20 years. And these affordable units will be at the 80% AMI or less. Again, they are seeking NCHFA funding that has not been rewarded yet, but I do know this is important to council. If they receive NCHFA funding, they are then required to accept vouchers. I know that is something that is often asked about. So I wanted to put that there as well. And then there are 3 technical modifications for this. I talked about the sidewalks in a residential expansion district. You are required to have a 10 foot sidewalk. The applicant is proposing a 6 foot wide sidewalk with an 8 foot wide utility strip along Sweden Creek road. They are also proposing a 6 foot wide minimum sidewalk internally to the site. The third technical modification relates to Section 711 of the UDO, which is landscaping. You are required to have street trees, and your street trees can be no further than 20 feet from the road right of way. Because of site triangles, because of NCDOT requirements, they are proposing to have that be up to 40 feet. Again, that is for traffic and vehicular safety, as well as pedestrian safety along those sidewalks. So they will propose to have that 40 feet. It is likely that those will only impact the four southernmost trees, but that is something that they still did request as a technical modification. And this brings us to the third part of the presentation, which is alignment and conformance. The Technical Review Committee reviewed this on May 4th. They approved this with conditions and then Planning and Zoning saw it recently at June 3rd. This was approved six to one, recommending approval. And then we do, again, find that this substantially aligns with, not 100%, but substantially aligns with what is envisioned in the Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan. This is consistent with that future land use designation of residential neighborhood for the reasons I talked about. This is a master plan community with limited access into and out of the site. It matches the buildings and the mix that is called for on page 346. And then it also supports the following goals in that plan. It encourages responsible growth. and increases and diversifies the housing supply. So that is quite a bit out of me. I will be happy to stand for any questions you may have. Thank you.

Thank you, Sam. Are they requesting any further subsidy from the city or anything to accomplish the affordability? Do you know?

I'll let the applicant speak to that.

My evergreen question is always, is there anything preventing future solar at this location? Are they already considering it?

There is nothing preventing it. I will let the applicant speak to whether or not they are considering it.

On slide number five, there is like some green that's outlined there. Is that forest? Stormwater?

Those are wetland delineations. So there is a jurisdictional stream, which is in blue. There are jurisdictional wetlands as well, which are designated in green. The topography and the existing environment have driven the design of the site to keep the bridge and the elements away from them. So there is a separate stormwater and stream preservation process that is concurrent.

So there seems to be a forested area there. So I know that we have some tree canopy ordinances. Correct. They're planning on... I mean, that's a... A lot of trees to cut down.

This is the site plan. This is not the landscaping or tree canopy preservation plan. That is something which is in the materials, and I believe the applicant has a slide they can show. They are preserving their requirements and actually going above that for the TCP requirements under Section 719. That is all in this. I'm not sure if you can see the cursor there, but it's all in this north side. This is only showing the site plan. The canopy is preserved there. Thank you, Sam. And it's 1.6 acres of tree canopy they'll be preserving.

Thank you. Okay, do we need to hear from the applicant regarding the question about money?

And parking?

Sure, and parking. And solar, down there.

Good evening, members of city council. My name is Jesse Swords. I'm a land use attorney with Allen Stahl and Kilbourne, and we represent Atlantic Housing Foundation on this project. I'm here with a couple members of the project team, Robert Sessoms from Atlantic Housing Foundation and Austin Greenhalgh, who's a civil engineer from Seaman Whiteside. First, I do have an updated site plan to hand out. And this does show the parking reduction that we were able to achieve. It is, we got down to a one to 1.25 ratio. That ends up being 162 and a half spaces, which we round up to 163, down from 201. And so that will also will propose a changed parking condition in the written conditions. And the change would be to language, Uh, something like parking will consist of approximately 1.25 spaces per dwelling unit. And I just want to, you know, before I turn it over for more specific questions, uh, to the other members, uh, I can answer the one about city funding. Uh, they actually did request it and were denied it. Uh, so.

This was in that group.

No, no additional. Uh.

Thank you. But they're still moving forward.

Trying to, yes. And on the solar, it depends on whether there's funding available for that sort of thing. This is 100% affordable LIHTC project. This is how affordable projects get done in Asheville nowadays. Until we have something to replace Luigi, these are federal dollars coming to Asheville to subsidize our housing, which I think most of us would agree is a good thing. Do any of y'all have any specific questions or questions for the project team?

Everybody got their questions? Because we have a few people signed up for public comment, so.

Go ahead.

So just before that, I do suspect we'll hear about the tree canopy. We are preserving quite a bit of tree canopy. I also suspect we'll hear about traffic on Sweden Creek. This is a little bit different than projects that are kind of in the belly of Sweden Creek. We're way down. near where it comes back to Hendersonville Road and where Sweden Creek turns into Airport Road. So we won't just have people on Sweden Creek. There will be more options. And in fact, it's so far down there, we don't know if people are going to be coming and going from Hendersonville or Fletcher or Asheville. So it's a little bit different of a traffic situation. And I'm not a traffic engineer, but I can access the NCDOT's interactive traffic volumes map. And after clicking around, A few times. Those numbers are, there are 15,000-ish cars on this section of Sweden Creek a day.

They need more frequent bus routes.

There's no bus route on Sweden Creek right now at all. But we are talking about adding 130 units here, which versus 15,000 cars puts it in perspective.

Right. That's a good point. More coverage and more ridership. Previous discussion. Thank you for that. The tree canopy, are they just meeting the bare minimum? It looks like a lot. Are they surpassing the minimum required?

I will let Austin speak to the details, if you like. Would you like him to come up now?

Sure.

Mr. Swords, before you walk away, can I clarify something? Based upon your new site plan with updated parking, I heard you suggest that it would result in a modification of what will be on Council's Exhibit E to the project conditions. That specifically is Condition 6. It currently states that the project will comply with minimum and maximum parking space required under the UDO. Are you suggesting that we add to that, that the project will include I heard you say approximately 1.25. It's difficult for us to use words like approximately in conditions. Is it putting the applicant in a bind to say 1.25 parking spaces or would you like to have a higher number?

So I think it's hard to commit to an exact number on something like parking because, you know, the site plan can change a little bit and you lose a parking spot or dam or whatever.

A range is okay. We would prefer you to have a ceiling number that you could give us that your applicant could live within rather than having an approximate figure.

Can you discuss that real quick?

Certainly. Sure.

Yeah, well, I think Brad's decided the new way we should do this is do ceilings instead of minimums. Like, promise you won't have more then.

Well, and remember, when you're doing the LIHTC program, they have their own parking requirements. Well, I remember that.

Yeah, I just... I mean, there are some, while they're concurring over their developments, that would build way too many parking spaces, more than they need in that effort.

If it's council's preference, we can do it as a minimum. It seemed as if they were asking to redo it. Can we do it as a minimum? Certainly.

Wait, I thought we just, when's the legislation take effect? October 1 or something?

I think it's already in effect.

Well, then how can we do?

You can't do the minimums on this. What I suggest is for this particular project, obviously, has parking for its own financing needs. But because the applicant is suggesting lowering the amount of parking, we're trying to memorialize that reduction from what they previously stated. Because in the current condition, it lists the maximum.

Well, what do you say?

So, ranges being a little bit tricky, what if we said under 180?

I mean, how many is on the site plan right now?

This one, that one has 201, I believe. The one I just handed you has 235. Okay.

Okay, yeah, I mean, this seems a little more technical part of it, so.

Do those numbers include handicap?

Yeah.

I believe the total number does include the handicap response.

Okay, do we need the, is there anything that you weren't able to answer that the applicant needs to be able to answer before I go to public comment? Also, it's nine o'clock.

There's a question about the tree canopy.

Oh, but you don't need to answer, okay. Come on up. I'm just curious if you're meeting it, surpassing it, barely scraping by.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for your time today. My name is Austin Greenhalgh. I'm with Seaman Whiteside Civil Engineering. So, to answer your question, the site's 12.06 acres in total. We are going a little above that 20 percent open space requirement with our calculations, which would put us at 2.41 acres of open space required. We're at 2.45, but to answer your question about the tree canopy preservation, we're at 15%, which is the minimum.

So you're at the minimum, okay.

Yes, yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

That's correct. Any other questions?

Okay, thank you very much. Okay, I'm going to open the public hearing on this item. I've got five people signed up to speak, and each person will have three minutes. Please watch the lights on the lectern. The first person signed up to speak is Nancy Copenbarger. You're gonna tell us.

Good evening, Mayor, council members, and staff. My name is Nancy Copenbarger, and I reside at 3844 Sweet Creek Road, which is directly adjacent to the proposed development at 3862 Sweet Creek Road. This year, 650 new apartments have been proposed along Sweeten Creek Road. This is a primary corridor in Asheville that is already operating over capacity and is notorious for backups. I was in one as I was coming to this meeting. Widening this road has been talked about for over 20 years, but in 2025, NCDOT shelved the project. Currently, there is no room for emergency vehicles to pass while making a call, making this road dangerous for all who utilize it. Increased traffic on Sweeton Creek is detrimental to public welfare, adding congestion to an already overtaxed roadway. This project is slated to be affordable housing, however, It is proposed in an area with limited existing transit options. It is .9 miles to the nearest bus stop on Hendersonville Road with no safe way to walk there. No sidewalk, no crosswalks, not even a viable shoulder on the side of the road. This is not in keeping in line with the vision of affordable housing that Asheville is striving for. My driveway is directly onto Sweet and Creek Road. Routinely, I have to wait three, four, five minutes to pull out safely onto the road, especially when turning left across traffic. The proposed development has one point of access, which will cause backups within the development itself. Additionally, the access to Sweeton Creek is within 10 feet of a driveway for the condos on Carrington, which shares with Arden Ridge Health and Rehabilitation, which will cause further congestion and make egress more dangerous and difficult for all involved. While considering your vote on this project, I implore you to contemplate the health and safety of the current residents and all who utilize Sweeton Creek Road Please vote no. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Casey Coppenbarger. Barger. Barger. Coppenbarger. Coppenbarger. Wow.

Four syllables, three letters each. Thank you for listening to me tonight. As you heard from my wife, within the 5.4 miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway overpass to the airport road intersection on Sweeton Creek Road, we have the highest density of apartments, townhouses, and condos feeding directly onto a two-lane road in the entire city of Asheville and Arden. For strictly two-lane roads, Sweet and Creek is the single most densely packed residential corridor in the city of Asheville. As my wife had pointed out to you, if you look at the information when I go on to your little website, and it shows the information that the proposed subdivision had given you, it said that Sweet and Creek may be But we've been looking at that for 20 years. In February, the state announced that they were defunding and shelving that project because they could not afford it. That means that it'll be a minimum of 10 years before they readdress that. It will not be more affordable in 10 years. The amount of building on Sweet Creek just makes it impossible to buy people out in addition to spending millions and millions of dollars on a road. The nearby two-lane connectors of Mill Gap and Weston Road have a high number of residential homes and developments. They tend to funnel onto Sweeton Creek Road. The developer was saying that, well, it's only 15,000 cars a day, and they might go a different direction. Well, that drive comes out right before the crest of a hill. When people are at Pensacola and Christ School Road over at the Shell Station getting frustrated waiting at that light for people to make left-hand turns and stuff, if on the rare occasions that traffic isn't at a standstill, they speed and they come over that hill. If anybody tried to walk up there to go to the bus stop over on 25, it would be incredibly dangerous. Also in their information that they supplied to you, they said that this was very similar to the Colony Townhomes Avalon at Sweeton Creek, which is 192 units, Dunbar Place, which is 74 units. We also have Rowe Pines Village Townhouses, Carrington Place Condominiums, those are 60 units and 36 units respectively, Weston Bridge Apartments, which has 22 units. It's an old place. But the reference to them being very similar is all well and good until you realize that all of those housing developments are within two tenths of a mile span. You can throw a ball from this driveway over to the 192 units at Avalon Place. So this is a very congested and dangerous part of the road.

Sharon Summerall?

Council Mayor, I'm Sharon Summerall with the Coalition of National Neighborhoods. And I'm picking this development to talk about the affordability process. And I have knowledge of how the process works that communities will call me and they'll ask me to explain what's going on with conditional zoning. So when developers go to the TRC during the CZ process, there's generally no mention of AMI percentages at the beginning of the development, unless a project's being funded by an outside source, such as Dogwood, and then generally it will state how many units and at what percentage. As the development winds towards going to planning and zoning, then they will attach numbers to the units with the bedrooms, And in my experience, these are hopeful numbers. They're not real numbers. They'll say 60% or 50%. They're kind of a gimme number when they get to planning and zoning. I'm sorry, Sharon, can you talk into the microphone? Sorry. And then... By the time the project gets to council, then there's generally has been some review of the project behind council doors, and then the particulars get hammered out during council meeting with the city attorney supplying the language. I've heard that happen a lot. This way of processing affordability has to stop. Affordability needs to be discussed at the beginning. The amounts designated must be hammered out with the powers that be so that when the development comes to council, everyone knows exactly what the AMIs are and how many years. 20 years is not enough on this project, especially. It costs more to build low-cost housing than to repair existing, so therefore, if new construction is going to focus on low cost, then it must be low cost. 80% is workforce. For most of us, that is not low cost, and I find the term low cost is used as a gimme to get a development to go through. So everyone should know that the project hits council and the debate then can be transparent within the community and the neighbors. Now I know with funding, with especially NCHA funding, it got to know ahead of time. But the percentages have got to be, when we hear 80% low cost, that is mostly not low cost. We need to call it workforce and not low cost, even though it may not be standard. So what I'm here to say is that I'm watching a lot of these that are going on, as mentioned on Sweet'N Creek, Swannanoa, all these apartments are going on, And the word is low cost. When we should be using the correct terminologies workforce, then we know it's 80% low cost at 50%, 40% are truly low cost. I'd like us to see us change the process and the language of how we go about our quantifying what is low cost. So thank you.

Thank you. Carolyn Kovash.

good evening mayor and member members of council my name is carolyn kovash i live at 14 holiday drive in the royal pines townhome community our community is located immediately downstream of the proposed development on the other side of sweet and creek I'm not here tonight because I oppose housing. I'm here because I believe growth should be matched by infrastructure that can safely support it. Over the past several years, I, along with members of our community, have been documenting stormwater conditions in the natural drainage corridor below this property, some of which took place during Tropical Depression Fred, Hurricane Helene, and other notable storm events. I shared those photographs and videos with all of you prior to this meeting because they show the conditions that already exist today, not conditions we fear might happen in the future. As an Asheville slash Arden resident and homeowner, I don't have the expertise to determine whether this development can be safely accommodated. That's your responsibility, informed by your staff and the evidence before you. But I do know what I've observed, and I believe those observations deserve careful consideration. When I spoke before Planning and Zoning Commission, I raised concerns about stormwater, traffic, and the cumulative impact of continued development along Sweeton Creek. What gave me hope was those concerns did not end with public comment, they became part of the Commission's own discussion. These comments should matter to you. Commissioner Faircloth lives in Royal Pines area and said he reached his tipping point with continued development along Sweeton Creek Corridor. He made it clear he supports affordable housing, but believes the existing transportation infrastructure has reached its limits. He voted against recommending approval. Commissioner Sekel addressed concerns over stormwater design and stated that he'd like to see projects designed to a 100-year storm standard. noting that the 100-year storm is no longer what we once thought it was. He also expressed concern about whether runoff from portions of the site would effectively reach the proposed stormwater system. It begs the question of whether this proposal at this scale is the right fit for this particular site. The notice mailed to nearby property owners from the city of Asheville states that city council has the authority to approve a less intensive zoning classification or a smaller portion of the property than requested. That tells me this decision is not simply a yes or no. You have the ability and the responsibility to determine whether the scale of this proposal appropriately reflects the realities of this site and how it will impact its neighbors. I respectfully ask that before approving this rezoning as presented, you consider whether the existing drainage characteristics, the cumulative transportation challenges, and the questions raised during the planning and zoning hearing have been fully resolved. Thank you so much for your time.

Vanda Fredericks?

Good evening, everybody. My name is Vonda Fredericks, and I am a neighbor to Nancy and Casey. I've been here, this is my first year in Asheville, and I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot of development, and I have a question for you. Does it always have to be on Sweet and Greek Road? This proposed development will drastically increase vehicle trips on Sweet and Creek Road, which is already a heavily congested corridor. Our streets currently lack the pedestrian infrastructure, such as sidewalk and safe crosswalks needed to handle the surge in daily traffic. Adding 130 apartments, I really wanna know how you guys gonna get those 162 and a half cars out of the bottleneck at eight o'clock in the morning. When we stay in our driveway up to five minutes just to make a right turn, I'm not even talking about left turn. It's just impossible to get out of our driveway as it is. There must be more appropriate areas with easier access, lesser traffic, better stormwater runoff, also and primarily talking into consideration the complete loss of wildlife this project would bring. Furthermore, this project threatens a vital piece of natural environment. The proposed site is currently a natural corridor that supports native flora and fauna. This area has seen long-eared bats, red-cockered woodpeckers, salamanders, and of course bears. Not all of these are protected, but some are. Developing it at this density will destroy established wildlife habitats, displace local species, and reduce our urban tree canopy. We must balance our city's growth with responsible environmental stewardship. We are not fundamentally opposed to housing and development in Nashville, but it must be done reasonably and responsibly. This specific proposal is simply too dense for our neighborhood's infrastructure to handle. I urge you to vote no on this proposal or require to developers significantly scale back the project to protect our roads and wildlife. Considering all these challenges, I decided to start a petition with support of my daughter, who is an environmental engineer. And I currently can tell you that as of five minutes ago, I checked, we have 460 signatures opposing this development. So please take that into consideration. And don't shut those 460 people down. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, council, questions, comments? I'm closing the public hearing. We don't have anyone else signed up to speak under this item.

I have a question for staff about LIHTC. If I remember right, we have a limit to the number of LIHTC projects that will be approved this year. And so what happens to this project if it doesn't get awarded?

You mean awarded by the LIHTC agency, yeah. We asked for two awards this year, but we typically get one. Oh, there's 9%. I'm sorry. 4% for a rolling application. You can do many. There are 4%. I apologize.

I just wanted to confirm that we're not going to see a funding problem with that later. I've been consistent in voting for Sweet Creek Road improvements for so long, and I voted against some housing on this corridor because it's at a tipping point. And I knew that housing like this would come and it would preserve and it would be affordable for workforce. Thank you, Shannon. And that it would be hard to say yes, because we haven't invested in the roads. And that was a decision that the state maintained roads for the Metropolitan Planning Organization. Yeah, I have the same infrastructure concerns that I always have for Sweet Creek Road. But I also know that we need this housing. It does always seem to fall on South Asheville. And that's a problem for us.

Councilwoman Roney and I sit on the MPO together, and I think we've had this discussion at another housing review not too many months ago about how is this going to get fixed? Because the gentleman that spoke in the public comment is accurate. The financing model for the state is really in 10-year swaths. So it is going to be a long time. And there's a philosophical question of, what happens? Do we stop all housing because the state isn't funding it? Or do we put enough housing that eventually the state has to fund it? And it's chicken and egg. It's really hard to know. I did want to share, just kind of like zooming way out, I was thinking about these developments in South Asheville that have happened, and generally the bigger ones across the city, and I think we're honing in on a better process. We must be, because we used to really upset everyone about tree canopy, and we worked so hard on the tree canopy protection ordinance, and now we're not. We're not hearing that concern, so we're getting there. We're focusing in on more affordable housing, so we're getting there. I don't know that we can ever fix traffic. I mean, I think we'd all love to fix traffic, Our hands are kind of tied. We don't have a budget to widen the road. I mean, DOT doesn't have a budget to widen the road. So it's tough. And we, meanwhile, need thousands of units. And I feel pretty strongly that we need affordable units. So, you know, the five of you that spoke in the area, I empathize. And I don't know that there's much we can do about the traffic.

Sort of sounded like a motion, but there's... Yeah, are there others that want to speak?

Go ahead.

Okay, we're ready for a motion.

Okay, I'm trying to get to it.

Council, I just sent you actually an amended motion, which includes the updated condition.

You made it confusing, Brian. Updated condition about the parking maximum thing. It is also not in my...

I make a motion to approve the conditional zoning request for the property located at 3862 Sweeten Creek Road from residential multifamily high density to residential expansion conditional zone. RSEXP-CZ. I don't have to say that, do I?

You're good.

And amending condition six on exhibit E to read as follows. The project will comply with parking space requirements of section 7-11-2 of the UDO, but still have no more than 180 total spaces. and finding that the request is reasonable, is in the public interest, is consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and meets the development needs of the community in that the request, number one, prioritizes greater density of development overall throughout the city as appropriate, and number two, increases the supply of housing, including affordable housing in proximity of schools, transit, and parks.

I'll second.

I have one more question. I hope it doesn't. So, Jesse, is it possible, like, for the affordability of 20 years, would it change your LIHTC application so much to make it 30 years? Is that possible?

Sure. Thank you. Good afternoon, Robert Sussums here with Atlantic Housing Foundation. So we're a nonprofit. So all of our projects maintain affordability through the duration of our ownership. And typically it's 40 years or more. And we typically don't sell our long term boulders in the community as well. So once the project gets to the point that I need to get rehab, we rehab it. And we believe in the communities that we develop. So minimum 20 years, but more than likely 40, 40 plus. That's your business model. Yes, correct.

That's wonderful. And state the name of your?

Atlantic Housing Foundation.

Atlanta Housing Foundation. Thank you.

Did you say Atlanta or Atlantic?

Atlantic. Oh, Atlantic. Thank you.

Thank you.

That's helpful. I'm glad you asked that.

Okay, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, the motion passes 6-0. Okay, next we have a public hearing to rezone 3 South Tunnel Road. from urban place to regional business. And Vadilla is making his reappearance to present this item. We could have used you earlier, Vadilla.

Good evening, council members and members of the public.

Wait a second here.

This is a straight rezoning request for the Asheville Mall. To remind you, straight rezoning does not come with conditions. So the applicant is coming to us and asking us for a blanket rezoning. We have no idea what is in store for their plans. This first image is the aerial of the site. Outlined in yellow is the property. It's 40 acres immediately off of South Tunnel Road. And you can see it's strangely shaped because it's part of the Asheville Mall mixed in with other properties. This is the view from the street. I'll read off some of these statistics. The parcel size is 40 acres. It is a one-story mall. It's been in place since the 70s, and it's valued at over $90 million. You can see here that there's a large parking lot. In the image here in the screen, you can see that that parking lot is big. It's about four acres just in the front there, and I'll talk about that in a little while. This image shows the existing zoning on the left, urban place, and the proposed zoning regional business, which would be a reversion to previous zoning that we had before we implemented the urban place initiative that was a part of the rollout of the comprehensive plan. So today it's urban place and they want to revert it. So they're looking to, they're asking for a more permissive zoning for this district. Again, we don't know what they're looking for, but they want less regulation, less restriction. This is an image of the future land use map, which is the directive from the comprehensive plan that identifies how we wanna grow. So in the red, what you see is what we call town center. in the Future Land Use Map, and I'll just read some of the description. It's described as areas that are able to support strong growth as Asheville's population continues to increase in the future. These areas include commercial areas with large surface parking fields, such as Asheville Mall and the Asheville Outlets. In these areas, residential uses are currently not common, but should be a focus of future redevelopment. So when we implemented the Urban Place Form District, we embedded rules that effectively require residential over a certain size and we incentivize affordable housing as part of that regulation. This came to the Planning and Zoning Commission last month and they voted to disapprove of the recommendation and aligned with staff's recommendation to not approve it. I'll quickly summarize some differences between urban place district and regional business. And on the right hand, you see some examples of what is not permitted in urban place. Let me start with those examples first. You see gasoline sales, car washes, I'm calling out these smaller sites because this could be something that the applicant may be wanting to build on the front of their four acre open parking field. We don't know because they haven't submitted their intentions, but it could be something like this. Ultimately, Urban Place Farm District requires more regulation to ensure that we have designs that align with the comprehensive plan for better walkability, having a design that makes more trees, and a safer design for pedestrians. I can get into more details if you want to, but it's very late, so I'll leave that if it's a question for you later. Some pros and cons. The only pro that we could list here is it could be argued that any rezoning that could lead to reinvestment is good for the city. And this logic is building anything is better than building nothing, right? So we'll give them that. Cons are that it does not align with their comprehensive plan. and related issues, that it does not provide the mixed-use development that we're looking for, for bringing more of the growth that is coming to Asheville. We don't want it all to come to Sweeton Creek. We want some of it to come to other places in the city. And Conn is more of the same development. If we revert back to regional business, likely what we're going to get is more car-oriented development, not the transit-supported stuff that we're looking for. And so that's a transition here to the compatibility analysis. The comp plan and this zoning that's in place is about transit-supported development. We talked a lot about ridership tonight. We have to get our ridership right and we have to get our land uses right. They're not working alone. And a big part of that is for us to create regulations like we've done here, and sticking with them. This isn't to say that there aren't some things here that can change and can be made better. And we're actually, we just are working to hire consultants to help us rewrite the UDO. So if there are problems, and we've heard this from the applicant, with the zoning, we can adjust those with our upcoming revision of the unified development ordinance. Briefly, this is a nice image that gets at what the intention is what is effectively today, this is like an image of the site today, single story, mostly parking lots to zoning regulations that try to force those drive aisles within the parking area to become streets, to put in curbs so you can walk around. And this allows for a lot of development as well. It just takes more creative design. So in sum, I'll just say that tonight you're being asked by an out of area landlord with a $90 million property to grant rezoning to a less restrictive district that allows uses that conflict with our long range plan for this area. And frankly, we cannot evaluate the full risk because the applicant has chosen not to share their actual intentions, which they don't have to as part of a straight rezoning. And without transparency, we cannot ensure accountability. So for these reasons, we strongly recommend denial. I'll take any questions if you have them.

So just interesting, the little table that you made. And so I guess technically they could put a gas station or a car wash there. But also they could make- If it's rezoned. Right, but also they could make multi-family housing there as well. They could do mixed development there still, correct?

Under today's regulations, they can do mixed-use development. Under today's regulations, they cannot put in a gasoline station or a car wash.

But what I'm saying is that if we change the zoning, they'd still be able to do mixed use development, correct? Correct. Okay. Yes. So something you said really struck me. You said urban place was made to, I think these are your exact words, incentivize increasing affordable housing. And I know this has been in place, I don't know, five, six years. What projects are in one place?

Six years. How long is 21, maybe? When did the rezone? 2021, we did 120 acres. In 2022, we rezoned another 120.

So which projects actually...

Like, has that incentivized? So, were the affordable housing projects... None, none. I don't think we've had any.

We haven't had any, have we?

We haven't had any. And large projects, many times, take a very long time. So, none.

Does that incentivize increasing affordable housing?

The way that the regulation is written to incentivize affordable housing is that you're allowed to build a certain amount of commercial square footage. And after that, you can only build more based on the amount of housing that you build. If you build one unit of market rate housing, you get 1,000 square feet of extra commercial space. If you build one affordable housing, you get more commercial space.

So there seems to be just a disconnect between the spirit of the ordinance or of the zoning and the actual impact or effect that is happening. Because you're saying that there actually hasn't been any

Well, there hasn't been much time.

Correct, there hasn't been much time.

Well, I think there was one that came around, but then Helene hit, right? Like, there was something on Thompson Street. It came up in the agenda briefing.

So, I'm sorry, one project hit. I mean, incentivize increasing the forward. I'm thinking, you know, we're pumping these out in urban place all over the place, but it doesn't.

No, no, we haven't had any mixed-use developments in urban place. There aren't actually that many districts, but we haven't had any yet. And you will hear that there are some complaints about the zoning maybe being too restrictive in some places. And we're open to and understand that all of our zoning districts have some issues that can be worked on.

And in fact, we are- But to clarify this, so we did have a lawsuit brought by Ingalls because primarily their properties were the subject. And maybe Brad can speak to this because- The result of that lawsuit is that Ingalls is not subject to this zoning restriction. So what properties remain in the city of Asheville that are subject to it? Is that legal? There's three areas. Do you know where the spots are that are left?

No. Planning staff can probably speak to some of that better than I could. The lawsuit that you talked about did involve several different landowners. I think there were maybe three different landowners or four at the time. that owned some of the properties, but not all of the properties that had been rezoned urban place. And we resulted in a resolution to that that preserved urban place, but also allowed for an alternative zoning for a temporary period of time. I'm not sure exactly where all the remaining properties were that were not associated with that lawsuit, but maybe planning can speak to that more than I can.

On this image, it's just one property primarily here, the Sears site that was part of that lawsuit and settlement. So of what you see here on the left that's urban place, there is, well, it's a couple of parcels, and I think the applicant will show this, that are not part, they're still zoned urban place, but they're not required to be held to the urban place standards. They can choose whether they want urban place or the previous zoning district.

And where else in the city do we have any?

The other properties are just south of here on Bleach Tree Boulevard, the Walmart, and a couple others there, North Asheville, Ingalls, and I think it's Steinmart, and a couple properties around there.

But that wouldn't be, they'd get to pick. Right, Ingalls and Steinmeier.

Correct, they're not required to comply with urban place.

So I've noticed a pattern here that the places that do have this are actually some of the places that we're dealing with no activation that are just sitting there.

They had been for a long time. And they had been for a long time.

And I don't think that is our vision. This was a response to that.

This was a response to some of the vacancy. We had the Kmart Plaza in West Asheville sitting vacant.

But that was never an urban place.

It was, and then it was withheld. No, remember they came? Yes, that's what we're talking about. That night when we voted, Ingalls stripped that property and this one in the corner. Well, they didn't strip it. It was excluded. We didn't vote for it. It was excluded from the urban place. But when we started, urban place was supposed to be at West Asheville Kmart. It was supposed to be at the Asheville Mall. The one you just mentioned down on Bee Tree, there was one more, a side mart. So that were the four. And then we removed the West Asheville. We partially removed some of this one. So we're at two and a half of the four. But the point was, I was trying to make, is that they were vacant and struggling before, which is why we became innovative. And I guess what I'm confused, and I asked in the agenda briefing is, what are we running up against when these developers come? Because it sounds like only one made a formal application, but I know two were in the wings. What are they running up against that needs to be fixed in the urban place zoning as opposed to just scrapping it all is more my issue. And then I learned from our attorney that normally when these things come to us, it's more of a conditional zoning. And we'll see pictures and elevations and things like Sharon said about AMI. and you get what's gonna be built there. We're talking about straight zoning. And apparently you cannot do a conditional zoning in this agreed upon master planned urban place zoning. Am I saying that correctly?

Yeah, this was actually brought to our attention simply because of this particular application. There is a provision, a couple of provisions, in fact, in our UDO. Number one that says that urban place requires you to have a master plan over a certain size, which is going to be all the urban place. And there is a separate provision in your UDO that says that Any site requiring a master plan is not available for a conditional zoning.

But we could change that, right?

So we've been in discussions, I think, with the planning department about where that came from. It precedes, I think, all of our knowledge. We're not exactly sure where that actually came from or why it was ever included. So I believe planning has already instituted the process to bring forth a text amendment to remove that requirement, the result of which would allow Urban Place to go through a season.

And for council, that process of a text amendment to an ordinance, isn't that like a double hit? You've got to hear it, wait, vote again later? Hear it twice?

I'm just wondering, if we were to take that move, what does it impact this project?

Is it a month's delay?

Council could make that change fairly quickly. It would only require a vote at the same hearing. It would require, since it is a legislative development decision, it would require a trip through planning and zoning.

Right. And then, of course, the applicant would have to want to do a conditional zoning and do that process.

Exactly. I was going to say at the planning and zoning commission when this issue came up, the applicant was making the case that this error exists and at the same time they made the case that they don't want to pursue a conditional rezoning.

So there's that issue.

I'd like to just address Commissioner Hess's important issue which was the concern that is it the case that urban place is inhibiting development from happening? I think that's what your point was. And it's very hard to know because there's so many factors involved. We have had developers come to us and look at certain sites, and we've had design meetings with them for these sites. So there's been some interest, but they haven't moved forward. And we will acknowledge that there are some things that we could do to clean them up, and we are going to do that as part of our complete UDO rewrite. I would suggest that the best time to do that would be as part of that rewrite, not to give a current applicant carte blanche to do whatever they want to do without seeing a development plan because you're giving away a lot of opportunity here in a crucial node that is identified in the plan that was developed by the citizenry for intense mixed-use development and it's on a transit corridor. So it might not be the best place to allow this reversion to regional business where you might end up getting a car wash.

So you're saying delay for the two years until we do the UDO rewrite? I mean, I guess if you're acknowledging that there is some things that we need to adjust here, to me, that means that we need to look at this and adjust it. I don't think we need to wait two more years for nothing to be put here. Especially when multifamily and many of these things that we want could be and are available uses for that space. For sure. And I would suggest there's something holding back.

Are you at all worried about creating another Patton Avenue at all? Like, that's what I see when I see these drive-thrus.

I mean, tunnel road. I mean, tunnel road.

But no, I see drive-thrus. Tunnel road isn't drive-thrus and car washes all entirely. It is also commercial. It's not Patton Avenue. Patton Avenue is very distinctly car wash, car wash, car wash, car wash. There's no housing. There's no, it's very structured. Yeah. I just wonder if, I mean.

It's a car wash across from a car wash on Patton Avenue. If there was an opportunity to build something else, then it's a car wash across from a car wash. So, interestingly, I went to the mall on Friday night. Is it? Because I wanted to know, what does our mall look like on the weekend? And it was bopping. There were so many people. There were so many cars. There were so many local businesses who had moved into the affordable rental spaces in the mall. And I was like, oh, it's not all chain stores anymore? Because I don't go to the mall very often. But on Friday night, it was very heavily utilized. And I was imagining, because there was an option to have housing at this location before my time on council. And I was like, maybe that was a mistake to not have housing here. So many malls across the country are realizing that they're the right spot for housing. There's already a food court. Usually there's transportation options nearby. It's a place where people can age in place. So it does seem to be a down zone. If we just allow, oh, that was hard for a short period of time, but we let our long-term visioning go by, then it'll be drive-throughs, and it'll block the thing that we really need, and maybe we're just so close. But maybe the UDO is the right time to take this up and say, are we getting in our own way? It seems like giving up a leaderful vision for a short-term gain. if we go in that direction. That's why I won't be supporting it tonight.

I'm kind of curious if... Do you want Adela to sit down? We do have... Well, it was going to be a question for Adela, actually. Okay, never mind. So I'm kind of wondering, like, abstractly, if, let's say we did... We... Anything that's built here that's going to be substantial, over 50 housing units, right, is going to require coming to council. Anything over 100,000 square feet is going to require coming to council. This is all very large. It's probably going to come to council, whatever the design is, right? Or are we just...

If it meets those thresholds.

Yeah, or it's going to be much smaller, which is what I'm getting at because I want it to be bigger.

Right. Well, I think if this is granted, you're offering, allowing this developer to do a lot of other things that they couldn't do today. They can today, but in housing. So whether that's coming, we just don't know.

Yeah. Thank you. It's okay. I'll do what you need to do.

Are you all ready? Yeah. Go ahead. I have to sit back down for a moment. Oh, I don't know. Okay. Back up here again. My name is Jesse Swartz, land use attorney with Allen, Stell, and Kilbourne, and we're representing the Asheville Mall. I'm here by myself tonight. Our client representative has a two-week hold at home and has opted to skip this hearing, which I think is a very good excuse for that. I want to respond to a couple things right off the bat. You could do multiple drive-throughs on this site by right under the existing zoning right now. We want better than that. So we're asking for more flexibility. Addressing that, because I hear that, is a worry that comes up again and again. So let me start at the beginning. Asheville Mall property was previously zoned regional business. The urban place form district came in In 2021 and at this point in 2026, most of the urban place land no longer has to comply with urban place zoning due to a settlement agreement with the city. Those properties can choose urban place or their previous zoning designation. I think in some cases they're even exempted from level three development. And the owner of most of that land has still not done anything with it. The Asheville Mall actually wants to invest in activating what is currently an unbroken sea of asphalt surrounding the mall and to redevelop and adapt the mall in other ways, but they're subject to urban place, which is unworkable. I'll get into it. We just need to give them a zoning code they can work with. So again, the mall was zoned regional business. We're asking to go back to regional business. This slide shows the zoning before it was rezoned. And our request is not entirely inconsistent with the comprehensive plan. This land was regional business. There's a large amount of regional business and highway business. Those two districts are near twins. They are 97% the same on the table of permitted uses. Lots of highway business and regional business on the Tunnel Road corridor. And those designations do make sense given the comprehensive plan, future land use designation of urban corridor. This slide shows the regional business and highway business that exists. The red is HB and RB and the blue is urban place. In any case, the comprehensive plan is a guide. It's the homework that goes into setting policies. City Council decides the actual policies. And if we want land that is already developed to get closer to the city's land use goals, we need to allow it to redevelop. The mall site was developed mostly decades ago with decades-old development standards. We are talking about a sea of unbroken asphalt. And under urban place, nothing will be redeveloped because, again, it is unworkable. The problems go deep. The extreme housing requirement that we've had three different groups come through our law firm trying to make an urban place development work. None of them could make it pencil. The block structure, which I'll talk more about in just a moment, is impossible on many sites, including the Asheville Mall. And the project-specific conditions method that's kind of inherent to urban place is legally flawed. And finally, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details in urban place. It is a very long form code. All right, so moving on, back in 2021, Gerald Green, who you may know, spoke to council, and the quote is up here. I won't read the whole thing, but the gist of it is, urban place is too drastic. It ignores market forces, site constraints, and other impacts, and it will stifle development and not promote it.

Former planning director.

In the case of the Asheville Mall, one of the constraints is how it's owned. This is the mall site. The Asheville Mall property... Our client's property is the light blue. Then we have red, yellow, green, purple, and the gray cloud hanging over all of it. These are other property owners. And try to bear with me. One of the signature features of urban place is that development projects on larger sites are required to put a block grid into place. This is impossible on the mall site unless all the property owners happen to want to develop at the same time. Staff showed this drawing at Planning and Zoning Commission with an example of the block grid. It looks nice, but it illustrates the problem that roads cut through the existing building where it's not even owned by our client. And by the way, our applications for the Asheville Mall property, the other owners were interested. They're not planning on doing anything. So what I take away from that, and as we heard mentioned, UDO says we can't use conditional zoning to fix these problems, even if we wanted to. And I'll just briefly mention, you know, CZ is not the solution to every problem. It comes with its own problems. Let's see, I do wanna go back to this block grid for a second, because it illustrates, to realize urban place, Among other obstacles, the mall would basically have to be torn down and we'd have to start from scratch. That is not being considered.

Wait, say that again?

To realize urban place in this block grid structure, what would likely have to happen is the whole mall be teared down and we start from scratch.

Let's talk about that. 10 million dollars? 20 million? How much to tear down the mall?

I don't know, but it would also, again, require basically everyone to coordinate a And as Councilwoman Roney just mentioned, the mall is bustling, it is productive, and nobody's talking about tearing it down. Keeping urban place would mean nothing is redeveloped and this area would continue to decline and decay. And I know y'all have been out to Tunnel Road. I personally do not want to see Tunnel Road beyond Thunderdome before we realize the vision of urban place. We need redevelopment to bring the city closer to its land use goals. Also back in 2021, Wyatt Stevens pointed out that redeveloping these decades old properties with just the current UDO standards then would represent a massive improvement. And I have a simple, very visible example. This is an image from GIS. It's from 2006. This is showing kind of the front parking lot of the Asheville Mall and what is now Whole Foods. This is a sea of mostly unbroken asphalt. I don't know when exactly these were initially developed. I think the mall dates back to the 70s, maybe. But they were developed in compliance with some very old standards. This image is from 2010. The Barnes and Noble at the mall was redeveloped according to, it was zoned regional business at the time. And it triggered new UDO standards that were in effect at the time, like parking lot islands and landscaping. And of course there are other improvements like stormwater, which are not visible. And then this picture is from 2024. This shows the Whole Foods redevelopment, I think, happened around 2013. Again, it triggered new UDO standards. Again, I think it was regional business. It could have been highway business at the time. And you see the parking lot islands, the landscaping, pedestrian accommodations. And note how nicely the trees in the Barnes & Noble parking lot have grown in in the meantime. So this is a straight rezoning request. We're not talking about a specific project. My client wants to activate the sea of largely unused parking outside the mall. Housing is also a goal our client has for this site. Now, required housing is one of the main features of urban place, but to be clear, A vote in favor of our zoning request tonight is not a vote to give up on housing at this site. We are much more likely to see housing at this site under regional business because we will not see anything under urban place. We also think the site can realistically support more housing under regional business than it could under urban place. Finally, we all know that Tunnel Road is having some We all know the causes are complex and they're difficult to address. Well, we think revitalized development and adding new programming is likely to help rather than hurt. And here we have an existing property owner who is asking to be rezoned back to the previous zoning so they can invest in their property, which has the added benefit of providing new positive programming along this corridor. Isn't that something we want sooner rather than later? Why would we wait? We don't wanna wait for the UDO rewrite. We don't know what's gonna happen with that. Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions.

I do have a question of clarity there. You made the claim that we could see more housing under the zoning that's being requested. And I did notice in the slide the height that's allowed as used by right. But what would make you think that there would be more housing under the zoning that's being requested?

Well, for one thing, to build anything larger under urban place, you would have to do that block grid that has the challenges that I explained. So it would likely have to be something much smaller that wouldn't trigger the block grid thing. And with RV, we do have a higher height limit and better ability to fit those buildings onto the site as it exists with it. and site constraints.

It's hard to imagine that 40 acres and all that parking just can't somehow become housing under a more agreeable place. I mean, I understand that the applicant is saying we're likely to do housing, but I'm unlikely to feel confidence in that because I know the market and the conditions and the cost of things, and it's all escalating. And I lose my confidence. And that's why we work so hard on zonings. This is why we work so hard in conditional zoning. This is why we sit here, really. Because if we didn't want certain outcomes, we wouldn't have this process at all. And I'm really concerned about what I do feel like is down zoning this. And I want your applicant and your project that you think may happen to occur. But for me, the best avenue personally sounds like alleviating this CZ and urban place zoning to allow it to go through a process whereby the community and us get a full view of what might be developed there, what the plan is, if there's any affordable housing, if it's a sea of parking, if it's a bunch of commercial, if it's a car wash. Because it's such a pivotal intersection. It's such a pivotal parcel And if you can't accomplish all those things on 40 acres at the mall, I don't know where else in the city we will.

You can see where you're coming from. You know, we're asking for a more flexible zoning. It's certainly not a down zoning.

Well, it's just that you can't in this process guarantee that those things will be created. So I, you know, it's not like a... It's nothing personal. It's just this process doesn't give us a document that says housing and commercial space will be built there.

If we keep it the same, can we guarantee that that would be created?

No, I don't think so. I think the mall may continue to suffer. And what I said in the agenda briefing is the one reason I have some hesitation, because normally I would just be 100% where I'm at, is that you're right about Tunnel Road. You're right that Tunnel Road is going through some challenges. I think activation is the answer. But I'm not sure that a car wash or a drive-through is the activation I'm thinking about. And again, you can't promise me it'll be more.

And it's tempting to want everything to be conditional rezoning because, you know, change is scary and uncertainty is scary and we want to know these things. But everything... can't be conditional rezoning. It comes with its own problems. And it was repeated a couple of times that we don't want to give somebody carte blanche. Well, it's not carte blanche. It's the UDO standards. It's the standards of that zoning district and everything else that is generally applicable, such as parking lot landscaping, stormwater, everything.

Are we ready for a motion? Because I have one. We have to do public.

Oh, we have one person signed up for public. Ready for that? We have one person signed up under this item, and that is Dave Nutter.

I am Dave Nutter, council. The Asheville Mall is part of us. It is now 54 years old. I have walked observed and shopped in it for 17 years. Its first anchor, Sears, is long gone. JCPenney's, also long vacant, has now been purchased by Buncombe County for an emergency operations center. The mall has served many, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, like any good democracy. It is now like an aging man. In the tower, sailing to Byzantium, the great poet William Butler Yeats wrote, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress. The mall still offers quite a bit, but is deteriorating almost contagiously. Something needs to be done before it deteriorates further. The pragmatic problem is that nothing is happening except for an agonizing persistence of deterioration of uses. Asheville has always tried to do something. We should here. Conditional zoning is needed. The expertise of a competent developer is needed. Private redevelopment is needed for strategic assemblage. Please approve the rezoning. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, now I will close the public hearing. We're ready for a motion.

I move to deny the rezoning request for the property located at 3 South Tunnel Road from Earth Place Form District to Regional Business. And finally, the request is unreasonable, is not in the public interest, is not consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and does not meet the development needs of the community. In other requests, one proposes a zoning district that differs from the vision outlined in the city's comprehensive plan, and two, does not fully reflect the community's goal of transitioning this key growth area into a more walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood with a mix of housing and business.

second you got that maggie we have a motion to deny we have a second okay council are you ready to vote on this everybody ready and yes is a denial yes yeah yes is a denial all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed no hold on okay hey maggie that's about to go All those in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. All those opposed to the motion, please raise your hand. All right, do we have another motion? I'm sorry, four to two. I'm sorry, two to four, the motion fails. The motion fails. Right. Fails.

I move to approve the rezoning request for the property located at 3 South Tonal Road from Urban Place Forum District to Regional Business and find that the request is reasonable, is in the public interest, is consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and meets the development needs of the community in that the request, one, proposes a zoning district... congruent to the vision outlined in the city's comprehensive plan and fully reflects the community's goals of transitioning this key area into a more walkable transit friendly neighborhood with a mix of housing and businesses. Second.

Okay, we have a motion and a second. I will just say, I think we made a good effort to try to work with this zoning classification. We did see an application once long ago come forward that proposed mixed use for the Sears end, and then that failed to go, and then Ingalls ended up buying Sears. And I know the county is now buying JCPenney to move emergency operations into that building. So, you know, I guess I'm... when i look around the country at places where malls have been converted into some pretty robust mixed use uses including retail housing and other uses done in a much more urban style they're large cities they're large cities with high costs of housing where they attract multi-million dollar investors um and i'm i i don't know that we can expect that kind of partner in our community in the next, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years. And in the meantime, we do have this, we have an issue on Tunnel Road that requires us to do what we can to try to activate it. In fact, we just heard today that a Sheetz gas station may buy the Mountaineer Inn. And we've had so many complaints about the Mountaineer Inn and what a blight it is on that area. I even had folks today who are supportive of affordable housing in that area come and say, just, that would be great. We need some way to activate the spaces so that they're safer and more active. This is not my, I do not personally care for this type of development myself. But I don't, I'm very frustrated to see that we're not able to, you know, see any successful applications come forward under this aspirational zoning. Hopefully we have other opportunities, so. All right, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nay. All right, so you got that, that was a four to two, the motion passes. Okay, we have the next item on our agenda. Are you trying to leave, Steph? We're going to need you to come back here, ma'am. We're going to need you to come back here. Steph, we're so sorry. We just wanted to formally acknowledge your... You're not calling it a retirement. It's called a... A rewired.

Thank you so much Council, Mayor and Council for everything that you have done in my 21 year tenure here. You are amazing humans that give your life every day to this community. So honored to have worked alongside you and so many other Council persons and Just thank you so much. Thank you. You can't just walk away.

You can't just walk away. I don't know if people really fully understand the extent of the impact on the River Arts District that this woman right here had. Now there are times that we made it through Helene on the River Arts District that are literally like those paths and everything that was salvaged is because of the plans that you were behind. You've personally led that project. It was an enormous project. It was how I met you on one of those bus tours, giving a very exuberant, excited tour about what was going to happen. And I was so inspired by you. And I appreciate everything you have done for the city. You have done an amazing, lasting impact that millions of people are going to use forever. And I so appreciate your dedication to the city for so long. And I thank you so much. I wish you best in your rewirement.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Seth. all right okay so for people who are waiting patiently or not very patiently to participate in the general public comment which comes at the end of the council meeting We have two more items, I'm sorry, under new business. Blame the tornado. But we have two items of new business and we've got folks signed up for public comment under these items. And then we will finally get to general public comment. So if you're signed up for general public comment at the end of this meeting, it could be another half hour. I don't know. I'm totally guessing. Okay. Yeah, so I'm hearing a lot of, so if that's not gonna work for you, we do meet again at the end of August. So, okay, all right. I just wanna set expectations. All right, Sasha Vertinsky is here to take us through this next important project, a resolution approving a home repair policy and allocate three million of the 2024 affordable housing bond funds for the home repair program. Take it away.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. And I don't have anything interesting or quips to say, so I will say that I hired Stephanie. She got to sneak away without you. Yes, so I'm here to talk about home repair policy and potential allocation. A few key takeaways. First, we've been working on this since December of last year. We created this policy with an eye towards simplicity and flexibility. Home repair is one of the anti-displacement strategies outlined in the affordable housing plan and is also a part of the anti-displacement affordable housing project, which you'll hear more about in a minute. AHAC made their recommendations at their May 14th meeting. And we're recommending adoption of this policy and an allocation of $3 million out of the 2024 bond funds. Really quickly, just a little bit of background. I've already talked a little bit about the anti-displacement piece of this. Right after Tropical Storm Colleen, this council allocated 1.465 million of returned bond funds quickly towards storm-related home repairs. Out of those funds, 52 households were served. 40% of those households were at or below 30% AMI. 40% of the households were between 31% and 50% AMI. And the remaining 20% were between 51% and 80% AMI. And then AHAC convened to help staff develop this policy. So I'm just going to try to quickly, this is kind of Boiled down presentation, I'll quickly go through the elements of the policy. So the baseline requirements are that households must be at or below 80% of area median income. The awardee, the homeowner, that's their principal residence with no other residents owned. If they're listed on an heirs property, we've made that, that won't disqualify them. We have a five-year residency requirement because we're trying to reach long-time homeowners in our neighborhoods. And there can be exemptions for folks who had storm damage. And then property value tax, property tax value, excuse me, capped at $1 million. The priorities for the program, and this partly came from your recommendation, low income folks at or below 60% AMI, vulnerable populations, seniors, families with children, people with disabilities, long-term homeowners facing involuntary displacement, and the neighborhoods identified as vulnerable to displacement. And this is a list of the eligible and ineligible activities. Basically, we want to make sure that people are able to stay in their homes, and we're getting those things done, and they're not cosmetic. We're not doing any new construction, and we're reimbursing for work after it's been approved. So the assistance terms is that the maximum assistance available per home is $40,000. Up to $25,000 would be a grant. and above $25,000, it becomes a 0% deferred forgivable loan for repairs up to $40,000. Loans would be forgiven in full if the homeowner remains in for five years, and it'll be reduced by 20% per year until it's fully forgiven. Now, if that person needs to sell their home or they pass away, it can be transferred to a new and verified income-qualified household, including family members. Otherwise, if it went out on the open market and it sold for market price, then that loan would need to be paid back. Really quickly, a timeline of where we're at. As you recall, we were in front of PFI last month, and you all gave some feedback. We are hoping to release, if this is approved, we will release a call for proposals at some point in August and go through our selection process in August and September. AHAC, the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, held three meetings, January, March, May, or sorry, December, January, March, to really reflect, gather data. They heard from program providers about home repair. They, on May 14th, I brought them a draft policy. They reviewed it and they made some recommendations. And we have incorporated most of those recommendations into the policy. with the exception for this last one where they had wanted to move those priority pieces into requirements. And then this is just an overview of the bond funding and how we have spent the bond so far. So last September, you all allocated 10 million for multifamily rental housing at the WNC Affordable Housing Loan Fund that's administered by Self-Help. Last June, you approved 1.5 million for phase one of 319 Biltmore. Last month, you approved 1.6 million for Oak Hill for home ownership. We're proposing three million for this item today. leave a total allocation of $16.1 million of the $20 million bonds. And so that would leave $3.9 million remaining. And then we have another $1 million or $1.1 million in returned funds for the HTF. So it's in the staff report as well. AHEC did a bunch of data investigation, and we know there is a lot of repairs out there that need to happen, both in homeownership situations and also so rental. This program's only for homeownership. We also know that 20% of homeowners in the city limits are cost burdened, and when you're cost burdened, you're less likely to be able to keep up with the repairs to your house. And our housing needs assessment in 2024 showed that 57% of homeowners live in homes built before 1970. So big swaths of our community are those homes. I've already talked about the funding that you all allocated in 2024. We've also invested $177,000 of steady state CDBG funds for urgent home repair with Habitat. With the $3 million investment, we could expect somewhere between 68 and 108 homes, and that's really just math. It could be more if some of the repairs are much lower in cost, but using those $25,000 and $40,000 numbers. Bond funds are an ideal source for this project because they can really help with these smaller scope home repairs, and they don't have the same requirements as federal funds do. So I have a suggested motion for you. Happy to take any questions or comments.

I move to approve the whole thing. Wait, wait, wait. I have a question. I'm right there with you, but let me just ask one question. Sorry. I'm curious about the million dollar house value cap, why it's so high.

Right. It is high, agreed.

But there's income restrictions and stuff, so I'm picturing it's like maybe someone has generational housing, and the house is worth a lot, but it's in need of repair, but they're on low income. They're a senior. I don't know.

I think the discussion was something around that we... You know, there's been a lot of discussion in our community around tax values and appraisals. And sometimes houses are appraising for a lot more than maybe they would actually sell or somebody can keep.

But if I own a million dollar house, do I need a $25,000 grant? Like that's just a little.

Well, yes. If you don't, if you're below a certain income or you might be credit strapped. So the inability to get.

Right. I mean, I think it's very unlikely. Right. So, I mean, if you think about... Not likely to happen, you mean?

Not likely to happen.

Because the other qualifies. And also, the scope of the grants are so small. Yeah. Like, if you have a house that's... A million dollars. It really needs a full-scale rehab or, you know.

Yeah, okay.

No, that makes me feel better.

I just, I kind of needed to hear it.

I think it was also placed high just so that it's not... being changed every year. And then the Archer folks could apply to this, right? Yes.

And I liked how their data summary also helped drive some of the cap, like the five years, the $25,000, it all makes a lot of sense. Go ahead, Kim. Go ahead, Shannon.

Move to approve the home repair policy and allocate $3 million of the affordable housing bond dollars to home repair.