City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Welcome everyone to the Asheville City Council meeting. We'll go ahead and get started. Okay, I have a few announcements here that our city clerk has written out for me to make for you. So first of all, please silence your cell phones. There is a sign-up table outside. I think most of you already know that, but just in case you don't, there's a sign-up table outside if you'd like to sign up to speak under any item on the agenda. If we, as you probably learned if you did sign up, if we have more than 20 people signed up under one item, we'll go down to two minutes per speaker and eight minutes for presenters who are speaking for three or more people. How about this one? Once the chamber is full, are we full? Do we still, anybody have a vacant chair next to you?

We have three.

Okay, so three more or so. Once the chamber is full, all sign-ups will be on the first floor. So you're going to move, I'm sorry, Maggie, you're going to move the sign-up table down to the first floor? Okay. And there'll be sign-ups on the sixth floor? Yes. So you can sign up in either location if we reach that point. Okay, will you tell us if that happens during this meeting? Absolutely. Okay, thank you. Right, yeah, okay. You would like me to call out five names in advance in the event that, we'll only do that if we have overflow. Okay, so if we have overflow and you're sitting in an overflow room, we will call out names in advance so you'll have time to make your way to the chamber. Okay, and I see the other note, thank you very much. um all right those are the announcements if you would please rise for i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice Okay, I'm gonna read our chamber decorum statement that we read at the beginning of every meeting. 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. All right, moving into our agenda. We have one proclamation tonight, and that is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. And I have here that Debbie Robbins is here on that proclamation. And Ms. Robbins, if you have anybody else here with you, please bring them up as well. Whereas ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women, profoundly impacting patients, caregivers, and families across our nation and within our own community. And whereas public awareness is vital and there is currently no reliable early detection screening test for ovarian cancer, making knowledge of its subtle symptoms such as bloating, pelvic pain, difficulty eating, and urinary urgency the most effective defense. And whereas the dedication of advocates including local survivors and leadership from the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition plays a critical role in educating the public, supporting patients, and honoring the memory of the family members and friends we have lost to this disease. And whereas 19-year survivor and NOCC Vice Chair Debbie Robbins resides in our community and exemplifies the strength of our citizens and the vital importance of early detection, timely medical care, and continued research. Whereas the City of Asheville stands united with survivors, families, and medical professionals to raise awareness and improve health outcomes for all women. Now, therefore, I, Esther Mannheimer, Mayor of the City of Asheville, do hereby proclaim September 20, 2026 as Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in Asheville and encourage all residents to wear teal. Learn the symptoms and support the fight against this disease.

Good evening, Mayor and members of Asheville City Council. Thank you for the honor of being here tonight and for recognizing September as Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in the City of Asheville. I stand before you not only as an advocate, but as an ovarian cancer survivor, and I can tell you that when you hear the words, you have cancer, your world changes in an instant. Ovarian cancer is often called the disease that whispers. As mentioned in the proclamation, the symptoms are vague, bloating, abdominal or pelvic discomfort, feeling full quickly, Changes in bowel or bladder. bladder habits and fatigue. Because these symptoms can seem ordinary, ovarian cancer is too often diagnosed after it is already advanced. And there is no early detection test or effective screening tool for ovarian cancer. That is why awareness matters. Awareness means knowing your body. It means paying attention when something doesn't feel right. It means having conversations with your doctor and advocating for yourself. And it means making sure women and families know that ovarian cancer can affect anyone. As a survivor, I know how important it is to have people beside you during this journey. And as Vice Chair of the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, I've had the privilege of seeing the incredible strength of survivors, caregivers, advocates, researchers, and communities across the country who refuse to let ovarian cancer remain in the shadows. Tonight, Asheville is helping bring this disease into the light. This proclamation is more than words on paper. It sends a message to women in this community. We see you. We hear you. We support you. And if you are facing ovarian cancer, you are not alone. It also sends a message to those who have lost someone they love. Their lives matter. Their stories matter. And their memories can inspire us to keep working toward a future where ovarian cancer is detected earlier, treated more effectively, and ultimately prevented and cured. I am deeply grateful to the City Council for using its voice to raise awareness and to honor the women and families whose lives have been touched by this disease. Thank you for standing with survivors. Thank you for standing with families. And thank you for helping us make September a time to educate, advocate, remember, and hope. Together we can make sure that ovarian cancer is no longer a whisper and that every woman knows she has a voice.

Thank you.

Okay, council, we're moving on to the consent agenda. Do I have any questions, comments, or a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Second.

Thank you.

All right, I have a motion and a second. I don't have anyone signed up to speak under this item. Ready to vote? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, that was a unanimous vote to adopt the consent agenda. All right, we're going to move on to the manager's report. We have a lot on our agenda tonight, so we did strategize around trying to make the manager's report informative but quick. Yes.

Thank you. We have two items. One, I'm honored to introduce to you all a new member of the city manager's office team, Alana York. Alana has joined the city of Asheville as a Lead for North Carolina Fellow. a program supported by UNC School of Government and AmeriCorps. She is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where she studied management and society with a minor in health and society. Alana brings a strong commitment to public service, and she is already hitting the ground. I think she's been with us almost a month now, hitting the ground running. During her year-long fellowship, she will be working on several high-impact initiatives, including our five-year strategic plan, the annual budget process, and key projects throughout the community. So just help me welcome, please, Alana York to the City of Ashland.

Hi, everyone. My name is Alana York. I'm excited to be joining the team for the coming year, and I look forward to learning more about local government and getting to know the Asheville community. So thank you all for the warm welcome. Thank you.

All right. Up next is a brief update on our Azalea Parks infrastructure project.

Good day, Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council. I'm D. Tyrell McGirt, Parks and Recreation Director here. the City of Asheville, as well as staff liaison with the Infrastructure Recovery Board. Tonight, we're going to hear from Michael Miller, partner with the Olin Studio. He will review and share with you in the public the unified design concept for the Azalea Parks and Infrastructure Recovery Project, which also includes the Gashes Creek Bridge and Dam. Earlier today, this morning, the Infrastructure Recovery Board as well as the People and Environment Recovery Board met to hear a similar presentation from Olin, have a chance to ask questions, provide feedback. I think overall the questions, the feedback, the tone and tenor of the conversation went pretty well. recovery board members seem pretty receptive of the direction that we're going and the questions that they had fell into one of four categories wanting to know more about flood mitigation environmental restoration understanding a little more about the bridge dam and infrastructure design of the project knowing more about public engagement, community access, and then long term maintenance plans for the overall project. Again, Michael was going to go through the key updates and provide some next steps regarding this recovery project. Michael.

Thank you, Dee, for the introduction, and thank you all for taking the time for listening to an update on this project. I know you've got a packed agenda tonight, so we'll keep it nice and brief. Many of you are probably familiar with the project. Again, what we're looking at is recovery and resilience of Recreation Park, Azalea Park, and the Swannanoe River corridor through the city-owned lands there, which we're collectively referring to as the Azalea Park and Infrastructure Project. We recently wrapped up 30%, so schematic level design, and that's a lot of what we'll be sharing tonight. As Dee said, this morning we presented to the Infrastructure Recovery Board, and we'll be looking ahead to more public engagement this fall, as well as continuing to advance the technical design drawings. We last presented on this project in late February and early March of this year to the IRB, to a number of focus groups with both residents and city staff at an open house, a number of pop-ups, and also through an online survey that received a really robust response. In those presentations, we discussed two high-level concepts for Azalea Park, which really differed according to their approach to recovery and resilience. The first, repairing and rebuilding in place with greater resilience in those locations. And the second, looking at rebuilding clean damage facilities where possible on higher ground and using the available space for a thickened and more robust and resilient river corridor. We also looked at adding new park programs and amenities that the public was interested in, and greater pedestrian and bike connectivity. Those are the items you see on orange here. And notably, those are things that will generally not be paid for by FEMA, but are good to keep in mind as long-term aspirations for the park. So in that engagement earlier this year, overall, we heard a preference for that second concept of elevating where possible, really emphasizing the river corridor. And in addition to that, we heard a number of recurring themes on resilience and natural systems, an interest in removing the existing dam and greater ecological benefits that would bring generally nature-oriented resilient site features, resilient facilities. On connectivity and access, the importance of rebuilding the Gaseous Creek Bridge, establishing better trail networks and river access, and then amenities and operations, adding more to the JBL soccer complex, supporting year-round active and passive uses and additional amenities, shade, seating, that kind of supporting park infrastructure. So with all that in mind, we look towards developing a single concept that focuses on repositioning, restoring, and enhancing damaged facilities, increasing connectivity, strengthening nature and ecology as the site's backbone, and resiliency throughout the park. So this led to this preferred concept. You'll see it's quite similar in this diagrammatic form to that second concept you saw. Some highlights at Recreation Park, putting the pool, the building, those other vulnerable pieces of infrastructure on higher ground. A new loop trail around the JBL soccer field. This is something the community is very interested in. And that connective web of trails throughout the park. Again, this is a long-term aspirational concept for the park as a whole. So the next thing we did was to look at both the available and likely funding for the project and what could be built in the short term. Of course, FEMA funding is the core of that, PA, the damage recovery funding, HMGP for resilience funding. On top of that, the city has CDBGDR funding dedicated to this project and a number of state grants that they've been successful in pursuing that would be applied to support the project and close some of the FEMA funding gaps. So again, there's a little more detail. PA is largely focused on rebuilding damaged assets, the Gashes Creek Bridge, Azalea Road East, the pool of some of the buildings at Recreation Park, although not all were flood damaged, as well as the dog park at Azalea Pond. HMGP funding, which we're currently applying for, is focused on the river corridor and establishing resilience throughout that. And then the other funding streams are focused on closing some of the gaps in funding at Recreation Park, which has the most recreational program and then on supporting that trail at JBL. So we then advanced this conceptual plan, again, based on those short-term fundable priorities, and we'll step through the areas very quickly. Looking first at Recreation Park, this is an aerial rendering of the concept. So you see the swimming pool rebuilt on higher ground, about 10 feet higher than it was in its former location, a new pool building to support the pool and also other park uses, A terrace for community gathering, which is something we heard very strongly from the community they wanted, and new sports courts, and then paths leading down to a restored naturalized riverbank that is really the heart of the project. In the background, you can see beyond the JBL soccer fields and loop trail. Here is a similar thing in plan view, just looking top down. Again, that clustering structure high, the riverbank down low. Rebuilding the Gaseous Creek Bridge in a new location that allows for more convenient site circulation and also opens up more park space and we'll come back to the bridge at the end of the presentation. And then here's an eye level view with the sports courts to the right, small nature playground to the left, the new pool building beyond and you also see the bridge and the river corridor. Moving on to JBL, again, that loop trail, which extends off the frame here. It's about a mile all the way around. And then other things that can support the uses there, a picnic area and lawn area for food trucks. Again, the river corridor and places to get down. And here's a view from the loop trail, looking at the river to the right, and then picnic area to the left. At the area we'd be calling the river bend, the focus is really there on restoration, flood storage, resilience, with some trail access as well. And then at Azalea Pond, rebuilding the fishing dock, the dog park, other assets that were damaged, and then also trails connecting into the parking lot. So that's the park piece of the project. It's also an infrastructure project, especially considering the former Gaseous Creek Bridge and Dam that was in this location and severely damaged in Hurricane Helene. So you all probably know this, but the former bridge and dam was never designed as a flood control structure. It was built in the 1920s, first to impound a recreational lake for swimming, and then also to provide a small amount of hydroelectric power. It pretty quickly started filling in with sediment and was partially decommissioned in the 1950s, allowing the river to run through. Still in consideration of what to do with that structure, we needed to verify that it was not serving a flood control purpose, even though it was never designed for that. It's still an object in the river. And so we undertook extensive hydrologic modeling. and what we found is that the structure was not protecting the area from flood events and that rebuilding it would not offer any functional flood control benefit to downstream communities so this was really important for us to have confidence to go forward with what we've heard generally from the community and interest in dam removal and there are many benefits to that So there are benefits to the environment, restoring the flow of the river, its ecology, and also its natural ability to adapt to floods. The aquatic life that is supported by the river for recreational users, enhanced river safety, accessibility, and recreation opportunities. There actually is a benefit to some upstream property owners, some reduced flooding with removal of the dam, and also to the park itself within the park reduced flooding. And then for Asheville taxpayers in the city, elimination of long-term maintenance of a dam and lower liability.

I have a question about that.

folks come from Vermont and talk about their floods one of the things they were saying is something similar to this can you help to clear the pathway so you have less upstream impact yeah did the reporting or the study show the impact to the park like how how many feet are we talking about if we had the same situation today? Or is that not something that can be measured?

Like how many feet have changed?

Yeah, I'm just trying to understand if we're going far enough up with the pool and infrastructure.

Yeah, yeah. It depends on the level of storm, obviously, and it depends on where you are in the park. So for example, the JBL soccer fields should experience lower levels of flooding with the removal of the dam. They're still going to flood periodically. They're in the floodplain, but they should flood less. But even along that run, the fields that are closer to the former dam will get more of a benefit as you go all the way upstream along Azalea Road. You'll see less of a benefit as you move up from there. So this is what we're proposing. The gray line is the location of the former bridge and dam, which would be removed and decommissioned. The green line is the temporary NCDOT bridge that will be built along a different alignment. And then we're proposing a new bridge with the pink line there, which, as I said before, It provides better circulation, opens up park space, but also just logistically may be easier to build without being on top of the other structures that are in place. So more seamless transition from the temporary bridge to a permanent bridge reconstruction. So that's our update. Looking ahead to the fall, we'll be doing additional public engagement to really focus in on some of the design details and really continuing to make sure that everybody's voice is heard, that we're hearing from the full spectrum of Asheville residents, including low-income residents. I know there have been some questions about that. So we'll be continuing to do outreach. We'll also be advancing our design drawings, looking at a 60% design submission this winter.

Thank you Also, it's just very exciting I think that we continue to you know, we're getting closer and closer to the two-year anniversary of the storm and We're also getting closer and closer to seeing the opportunity for what rebuilding is really gonna mean for our community and I think it's worth it being excited about it after so much grief that we've all experienced. Glad to hear we continue to track towards dam removal. I think that's definitely better ecologically. A question is, you mentioned a little bit about wetlands and riparian buffers. We know that wetlands and riparian buffers better for cleaning the river essentially and all the critters that are in there but they also have flood mitigation benefits can you just give me like double click on tell me a little bit more about some of the design concept or what are you thinking or where they're gonna just help me understand the vision sure excited for that

So they'll be variable along the length of the quarter. So, for example, next to JBL, where you have the soccer fields built up close to the river, we're really focused on restoring the riparian vegetation, stabilizing that stream bank and some areas where there's more space, more room for the river. We're going to look at expanding natural vegetation versus what's there today and potentially doing some floodplain benching as well. So actually, you know these areas have filled in either by natural or artificial process so reconnecting the floodplain digging them down more providing more flood storage the benefit to that will likely we're still designing and modeling that would be primarily within the footprint of the park there may be some modest downstream benefit we're hoping to maximize that because that work is dependent on the hmgp funding and to achieve that we need to demonstrate downstream benefit

Great, and I had one more quick question. Did anyone talk about, I mean, we actually own a pretty long stretch of this river. Yes. miss a great swim hole that is not really there anymore. Did anyone talk about putting in boat put-ins and takeouts? That would be like a delightful tubing section with a small family from the top of the park to the bottom part. Was that considered or discussed at all?

Yes, we're looking at several different river access points along there. At the moment, they're not designed as formal put-ins and takeouts, just given that that is not established use on the Swannanoa. But something like going down there with a tube, you would absolutely be able to do.

Great. Sounds fun. This is really exciting. It looks awesome and it's badly needed in our community. So thank you for all the work. Can you tell me about the pool building? I see two outdoor pools. One is like a recreation, works for little kids, that kind of thing. One is a lane pool for competition or just swimming labs. Are we going to have any indoor pool facility?

The design does not currently include an indoor pool. We talked about that early on. Obviously, there's an interest. We know the swimming season here is very short. Right. The rub is just that even just getting FEMA to pay to replace the outdoor pool is a challenge. And so the additional funding required on top of that for an indoor pool would be very substantial. There's also typically a higher parking demand that goes with that, and it's a parking-constrained site, especially with the Nature Center. so currently the building to answer your question um it includes you know locker rooms bathrooms other support facilities for the pool like lifeguard station and storage the pump room it also includes on the lower level year rounds single seat restrooms to support other park uses and then outdoor kind of deck and gathering areas so Whereas today, there are a bunch of little scattered buildings, some of which damage, some not. We're looking to take all of those and cluster them into one new structure.

OK. So that's kind of, you know, FEMA is sort of saying, well, what was destroyed was an outdoor pool. That's what we're paying for. But we're still adding other buckets of money to this to be able to rebuild it in a much larger facility than what was previously there. So if there were a way to secure funds to enclose the pool or to make it an indoor pool, would the plan be adaptable at this stage of the game to be able to do that? I guess what I'm thinking is if the Tourism Development Authority came along and said, hmm, this one might qualify for a TDA grant. We'll pay to enclose the pool so it can be used year round. I mean, is there flexibility in the planning to be able to do something like that?

Yeah, if the funding appeared, the overall footprint, as it so magically does, the overall footprint of the indoor pool facility itself would not be dramatically bigger than what we've contemplated there. Again, the parking demand is something we would have to look at because it's a very tight site. So there would probably be some off-site parking, some shared parking with JBL, some orchestration of that that would need to occur.

OK, thanks. Anybody else have a question? All right, thank you. Thank you for the update. Thank you. Manager Wesley, does that conclude the manager's report? Yes. Okay, great. All right, we have two public hearing items. first i'm just looking around for clay mitchell i'll talk slowly so we can sprint in here oh there he is um the first is a public hearing to rezone 23 heritage drive from rm 16 residential multi-family high density district to highway business district you're fighting upstream yes

Good evening, Mayor, Councilors. This is a rezoning petition for a parcel of land off of New Leicester Highway on Heritage Drive. It's part of what was termed a commercial park when the land was annexed by the city in 2004. This is the parcel outlined in red. We did some research for the Planning and Zoning Commission and found out that the upper portion of that parcel was its own individual parcel, and it is now split zoned. So on the left, there is a zoning line that goes to that parcel, and it looks like when the property was annexed, The folks, the planners at the time, just continued that RM-16 line up through the parcel bisecting it. The current petition is to have that small parcel of land, which is not an independent parcel but area of land, rezoned to highway business, which is the same zoning for the entire commercial park there. Interestingly, the featured land use designation, however, is consistent. It shows the whole property as urban corridor, while the remainder of the RM16, that is yellow, is called traditional neighborhood. Therefore, there's no need to change the featured land use designation in our comprehensive plan. There are some differences in the uses. The owners, the ASPCA, although not required to submit a plan as part of this because it is not a conditional rezoning, have indicated that they want to use it consistent with the remainder of the property, which includes a couple of buildings, dog runs, potentially parking. All of those are permitted. One of the benefits of changing this actually to highway business is it requires a buffer to the abutting properties. So any use that they engage in will require a buffer to that residential area that was shown on the plan to the east of this little sliver. We find in our analysis that this is generally compatible. In fact, it's kind of hard to imagine that portion of property being used as an RM-16 because the access would have to come through the commercial park. So it seems like, I don't want to accuse anybody of a mistake, maybe an oversight in the past, that that zone line should have probably followed the parcel line around when the annexation took place back in 2004. We feel and recommend that this is consistent with the goals of the plan to encourage responsible growth and facilitate real estate development that maximizes the public benefit. We think that there are no cons with this rezoning. And in fact, that is only a probe that allows the property owner to use the property consistent with the land use on that property and the remaining area that is somehow distinct from that abutting residential area. The Planning and Zoning Commission reviewed it on October 5th and voted unanimously to approve it. And we concur with the Planning and Zoning Commission and recommend the proposed zoning to be approved.

Any questions? We're going to open them. There's no public comment. Any questions? I'm going to open the public hearing. I'm going to close the public hearing.

If there's no concerns, I'm ready to make a motion.

Please.

I move to approve the rezoning request for a portion of the property located at 23 Heritage Drive from the residential multifamily high density RM16 to Highway Business HB and find that the request is reasonable and is 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, ensures that new development has the appropriate infrastructure to support it, and two, establishes accessible and well-connected commercial nodes consistent with strategies outlined in the plan's growth areas.

I'll second. All right, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, I see unanimous approval. All right, now, folks, for the next public hearing item, item B, a public hearing to consider an amendment to the Unified Development Ordinance to permit duplexes as allowed primary use in all residential and certain mixed-use zoning districts, increase the maximum allowed size of accessory dwelling units, and eliminate off-street parking requirements. So you'll notice there's three things, but we do one public hearing for this, and then we do need to break it into three separate votes. And now Chris Collins is here to present them.

Hey, good evening, Mayor, Council. I'm Chris Collins with the Planning and Urban Design Department. As stated, I'm going to take you through some housing-focused zoning text amendments tonight. And at a high level to start, what you'll see are three amendments, one that focuses on the expansion of the allowance of duplexes in the city, allowing duplexes in more districts, and creating ownership opportunities for duplexes in some configurations. Some updates to our accessory dwelling unit standards, or ADUs, as you'll hear me say tonight, and we often hear them called, to allow larger ADUs and eliminate minimum parking requirements, among other updates to that standard. AND MINIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENT UPDATES, WHICH ALL REINFORCES NOW REQUIRED BY STATE LAW, BUT ALSO WE ARE ELIMINATING MANY PARKING REQUIREMENTS AND RETAINING YET SIMPLIFYING MAXIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENTS. Focusing first on the duplex allowance expansion, I'm going to talk a little bit about duplexes in Asheville. So what you see in front of you, our UDO, or Unified Development Ordinance, defines duplexes as a building that contains two dwelling units on one lot and requires that the units must share a common wall floor or ceiling. You see some examples of what this could look like. There are a lot of different ways a duplex can go, but that kind of gives you an example of what we could see and what we do see around town. Duplexes in Asheville, it's not a real hot permit application we get. Between April and April in one year, we saw about 18 permits applied for for duplexes. Those are allowed in 26 zoning districts. All of those are single family, none of which, sorry, are single family zoning districts. So this amendment would allow duplexes in all of the single family zoning districts as well as a few mixed use districts where they're not currently allowed. What that looks like, this map visualizes where we can and can't do duplexes now in Asheville. Everything in red is where duplexes are not permitted in the city. And everything in green is where we do permit them. So you'll see that's about half and half. We run about 50% allow, 50% disallow. Around 20,000 parcels right now cannot operate a duplex.

Are all of those 20,000 single family?

No, they're not all single family. It's a mixed bag of zones there. They are primarily single family districts, but... As you'll see, we're going to add some things other than RS districts to this with this proposal. So, the proposal leading into that shows the areas in blue, the parcels that would be added to the entitlement for duplexes. That would be adding the RS2, RS4, and RS8. Those are all our single-family zoning districts. Neighborhood business, or NB, and three sub-districts of the River Arts Form Code District. That's RAD, Residential Radd, Neighborhood, Transition, and Radd, Lyman, Hollow, those areas do allow more intense uses than duplexes right now, but don't allow duplexes, so we bring those into the mix. This adds about 41% of the city's zoned land, adds roughly 20,000 parcels where duplexes can be built. That's 43% of all parcels in the city. and results in a change to the red-green map of earlier. Again, green representing where you can do a duplex, red where you can't, to what you see in front of you. And the simplest way to look at that is an addition of 20,000 parcels moving us from 49% of the city's parcels where you can do a duplex to 99% of the city's parcels. also mentioned that we when we were in here with this code we took advantage of the townhouse provisions in the code by name only we're not really working with townhouses very much here to allow for some ownership opportunities with duplexes what the townhouse use does for us is gives attached units access to special standards that allow a minimum of lot size and lot width requirements and a waiver of setback requirements where a shared wall exists So what we're proposing with this within those RS2, RS4, and RS8 districts, the single-family districts, a new section in that special standards that would cap these townhouse developments at two units, so a duplex, thank form, right, but would allow a subdivision with a property line running down that shared wall And I'm going to give you an example of that here that makes it a little easier to digest. On the left, still left up there, yeah, you see a typical duplex configuration for a side-by-side where you have one lot containing two units and a shared wall. Let's say this is an RS8. You have a minimum lot width of 40 feet. This provision gives access to those townhome special standards, so you could run a property line down the shared wall with those units and create two 20-foot lots. and still be in zoning compliance. So it does create the opportunity for subdivision or ownership of the duplex as well.

Can you just give me the comparison right now? If this doesn't move forward, what problem is this solving in our zoning code?

Well, right now, if you were to come in, a duplex could not be a land ownership situation per se in our code. It would only be a rental where I suppose you could probably.

Because you can't subdivide the lot.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, then you can't separate the ownership. Yeah, great. Thank you.

Okay, so for duplexes, Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval of these by a vote of six to one. They did add a couple of things. These things are incorporated into the staff reports and ordinances that have come your way tonight. They did ask that we remove the existing provision restricting the maximum townhome cluster size to four units within the RM6 zoning district. Staff had no technical issues with that. Bill put in.

So it's been removed?

It has been removed, yes. And removal of an existing provision requiring townhomes to provide parking to the rear of the building unless a garage is provided. That was seen as a barrier to the creation of this type of housing. Staff had no technical issue with that, so that is removed in what's been brought to you tonight.

Thank you.

Okay, so I'm gonna take a quick pause for any questions on duplexes before we move on to accessory dwelling units.

I just want to compliment you on the extra work on the townhome duplex model. I think it's a helpful component. We just don't have enough home ownership opportunity. If this can crack part of that code, I love it.

All right, ready for IDUs? So let's talk about accessory dwelling units, ADUs. A lot of folks have become very familiar with these. Our zoning, our UDO defines these as a complete dwelling unit that is contained on the same lot as the structure of a single dwelling or business. That's a lot of flexibility. Here you see a picture of a detached above garage ADU, a detached standalone ADU, and attached to the primary structure ADU. You can see lots of configurations for this use in the city. So, what is being proposed through this text amendment is an increase in the maximum allowed size of an ADU from 800 to 1,000 square feet. I'll get into, like, proportionality and percentages in a second. And also of note on this, staff originally recommended an increase to 1,200 square feet. Planning and Zoning Commission recommended an increase to 1,200 square feet. state of North Carolina session law was signed into law that restricted us to a 1,000 square foot maximum on that. So that's why you see the change between staff recommendation planning and zoning was to comply with state law.

So can you do an ADU on a lot that already has Like, can you do a duplex ADU on the lot that already has a duplex? Yes. If both once put together, the duplex is less than 1,000 square feet.

So, one thing we're proposing in the last bullet on this slide is that right now, an ADU is only enabled in a lot containing a single-family dwelling. Okay. This proposal would enable an ADU on a lot containing a duplex. So, you have a lot containing a duplex, you would get one ADU allowance rather than two.

So, could a duplex be an ADU? I guess that's what I'm asking. fewer than 1,000 square feet.

Could a duplex be an ADU? Certainly, if it's in a district where it's permitted. I've had this conversation with people a lot. If you're in an RM district, for instance, you don't really ever permit an ADU because you're allowed to have multiple units on your lot already. Let's say if duplexes were passed into law here in the city, then that requires those duplexes to be attached for the definition that's in there now. A duplex could not necessarily be an ADU if it was a detached ADU. Sorry, there's a lot of scenarios here.

But I think you were saying can the ADU itself be a duplex? So essentially a duplex with another ADU. I don't think it can.

Basically, can you have four units on it?

Your primary structure is your primary structure if you're permitting under the ADU standards.

But now, if you did the duplex, Townhome with the two parcels, they could each have an ADU.

Right.

But not each, they wouldn't be duplexes in the ADU. Yeah. Okay. Follow that? I do. Yeah, okay.

And there's a lot of scenarios we can get into based, because we have a lot of lots, shapes, sizes, topographies. And we kind of did that at Planning and Zoning Commission. It gets confusing. Okay. But... Yeah, I think I got that answer. So, in addition to the increase to the maximum allowed size of an ADU to 1,000 square feet from 800, right now we have a requirement that it can only be 70% of the primary structure size. This has been recommended by the Planning and Zoning Commission to simply be smaller than the primary residence. And, of course, we are looking to eliminate off-street parking requirements for ADUs. That is now a state mandate, just like the other parking amendment we're looking at. And we just kind of covered this, but we would be looking to allow one ADU in a lot containing a duplex in addition to those containing a single-family residence. All right, so as mentioned, Planning and Zoning Commission did recommend approval by a vote of six to one for this ADU amendment. And they made the change, they recommended the change that staff had originally presented this at. The ADU has to be 90% of the primary structure size or less. They did ask to change that to smaller than 90%. We had no technical issue with that, so that has been incorporated into what you're seeing tonight. All right, pause for ADU questions. Can you go back?

Can you just, I just need to read it again. Okay, so 90% of the size of the smaller permit. Okay.

Okay, thanks.

I have one question. What became of the Since the state bill and the shrink to the 1,000, at the agenda briefing, I brought up that potential new height restriction. Did that become moot, or are we rolling that back?

That is in there as well, and I apologize that it didn't show up in the slides.

I just want to make sure we address it, so I do need to address it.

It gets a little complicated. Right now, we have a base maximum height of 25 feet for all accessory structures, including ADUs. there's a little bonus built in there that allows you to have one more foot of height per additional setback from the property line you are, from the minimum. So, basically, an ADU has to be six feet off your property line at a minimum. so in order to get 10 more feet you'd be looking at maybe 16 feet off of all your property lines with an adu for that reason i have no way to pull hard data on this but i've been with the city coming up on 14 years and heavily involved in permitting i have not seen that bonus used is the first thing i'll say so we for the most part, have a hard cap of 25 feet for the height. And we're looking to remove that bonus of one foot per one foot of setback. Sorry, I hope that was kind of clear.

So in the end, you are trying to cap it at the 25. Since we've shrunk to the 1,000 feet, I'm interested in just rolling back to what we have, where you can increase if you have a further setback. I saw that the language is actually in the staff report of kind of what it was, and I'd be interested in that. What about staff? Do you have any thoughts on that since it reduced to 1,000 square feet? That's kind of a...

We think the cap at 20, well, as I stated before, it's not something we've seen really used to get above 25 feet. We also have an interesting way of measuring building height here in the city of Asheville, which is from the fire department's primary point of access. to the ceiling of the highest occupied floor, which means we're not measuring to peaks or gables. We're not measuring from the midpoint of the grade or where the structure actually hits the earth. We're measuring from the front door to the top of the ceiling. SO THAT GIVES FALLOFF LOTS EXTRA HEIGHT AND EXTRA STORIES IN ASHVILLE RIGHT NOW, AND DOES STILL, EVEN WITH THAT 25-FOOT HEIGHT LIMITATION, ALLOW FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF A DAYLIGHT BASEMENT OR THREE FUNCTIONAL STORIES OR SOMETHING OF THE LIKE. WE, AS STAFF, proposed to keep that 25 feet in as a method to kind of promote neighborhood compatibility with single family home neighborhoods and offer a little further protection to neighborhoods as they look at these. So, as I said, I'm not sure how much utility it has either way, but it does offer some level of protection on the height of these structures.

I just hate to see us impose a new restriction. while we're trying to unrestrict some things and hope that it creates new building. I would love to just roll it back. I'm not going to make a big hoopla about it, because I'm really excited to have all of this in front of us. But if anybody's interested in rolling that back, if you go to the non-presentation information in your agenda, you'll find the language there.

Yeah, I want to look at that language.

This is what I was mentioning, yeah. And I actually made a few phone calls to just some builders in the area that build ADUs and a couple of the groups you would normally hear from and reached out to some P&Z members. And it wasn't really discussed. And I think in light of the shift to the 1,000 square feet, I don't know why we would further restrict the height. So I'm interested in seeing that lifted just to be simply back where it was, where the further setback would allow you a greater height.

If there's not... challenges of that technically, logistically, that I'm not understanding of that, I would be in favor of that as well.

I would be too. I'll offer you a simple answer. It wouldn't change this. It would not change staff's recommendation of approval of this.

What I will say is I was prepared to vote for this, and if you make that change, I'm not prepared to vote yes for it.

What's your concern about it?

Because of conformity or uniformity within the neighborhood.

It's our current rule, though.

I know, but since the size is changing, there's already consternation amongst some neighborhoods in particular. And part of their decision not to oppose was with the understanding that we wouldn't end up with, what are they called? Long, tall, tall skinnies.

We got one more to go, so I'm gonna keep going to parking. Okay, so the next amendment is minimum parking standards. Big parking lot there. So here's the main message on this that we've mentioned earlier. Recent state legislation has removed our ability to require a minimum number of parking spaces for development. So this amendment is required to bring the city's regulations into compliance with state law. We are retaining maximum parking allowances, which we have now. Those are in place to limit impervious surface and impacts that it generates such as stormwater runoff and heat island impacts and things like that we are also maintaining minimum bicycle parking requirements for multi-family and commercial developments just not vehicular or automobiles There are a couple slides I left in here because they really illustrate how parking works when minimums go away. And I think it's good for all of you and anyone watching the public hearing to have this data. So I left these in here anyway. But we do have a radius around downtown, the Central Business District zoning that is exempt from minimum parking standards and has been for many years now. Staff did a little analysis on 13 projects that included residential over the years there. Those were 13 projects making up nearly 700 housing units. Main messages here, they all provided parking and they only provided 7% fewer spaces than would have been required were they not exempt. One more piece of data for you. Again, I know we have to do this now, but it helps kind of digest this. In March of 2025, this council voted in some changes that included removing minimum parking standards for certain uses on certain transit supportive corridors. Since that time, we've had nine projects that have been approved that would have required or required parking. The main message is here when we aggregate those nine projects, they would have required a total of 170 spaces prior to that March 11th amendment in 2025. Now, upon approval, those nine projects are providing a total of 228 spaces. So, they are providing more than they would have been required to even with no requirement. So, that's some local data on this. Again, just some information on the specific session law and state law requirements for us to remove these parking minimums. Planning and Zoning Commission did recommend approval unanimously on this one with no changes. Any questions on that one before we kind of wrap it up?

Good job walking us through it. It's a lot. I'm really glad that we've gotten to this point. We made some moves towards this direction and then kind of paused for a while.

And I have just a couple more slides just to take you through comprehensive plan compliance and all that good stuff. Three main points here. These proposed amendments are going to add flexibility in housing type size and site planning capabilities. They are all supported by the comprehensive plan, missing middle housing study, and affordable housing plan. And again, I just keep saying it, but minimum parking provisions must be removed per state law. Comprehensive plan consistency, all three proposed amendments support the following comprehensive plan goals that you see in front of you. They do increase and diversify the housing supply. by creating zoning policies to promote more housing. They do encourage responsible growth by promoting small-scale residential development on lots with limits aimed at encouraging compatibility. There are further plan considerations. These amendments also support other plan goals outside of the comprehensive plan, such as the goal to reduce regulatory barriers to housing citywide, as found in the affordable housing plan, and zoning recommendation number four for the missing middle, three years since we got that study, I cannot get it out of my mouth right, the missing middle housing study, which was to allow a wider range of housing options through buy right review. There's a recap of recommendations. I'll probably leave us there. Do you have the suggested motions on the slides if you need them?

And I'm happy to take any questions. I had some more questions about what you were bringing up, Sage. Okay. I just don't know if I fully understand it. So what, like, give me the... sixth grade right now or is this am i getting it and then correct me right now there's a cap on how big your edu can be as in how tall it can be and uh we this would change it so that there is incentive to grow up

No, right now there is a cap of 25 feet, what we're talking about. But if the further you get from your neighbor's property line, which is called your side setback.

Either side, any side.

Yeah, you have to do six feet. And if you start adding feet, then you can start adding feet vertically to your ADU. So, he was saying if you moved 16 feet, if you added 10 feet off the line, you could add another story to your ADU, in theory. That's the current rule. And so, what's happened is this new restriction would be just kill the side advantage. So, you couldn't just be capped at 25, no matter where you were on the property.

So, it would be like an 800 square feet and this would move 2,000 square feet.

And it comes down to why I brought it up at the agenda briefing is because I love that we're trying to advance ADUs. They're one of the most underutilized opportunities for aging in place, for affordable housing, for backyard infill, building along existing infrastructure, and we don't do really well at them because the code's been hard. We've been adapting it several punches, right, three or four times back at ADUs. So I love what we're doing, but when we started seeing that the state was gonna shrink it back, You know, then we're back up against lot sizes and neighbors and setbacks. And when you're RM next to RS and you have a 20-foot setback, and all of a sudden we're not doing as much infill and your plate might be smaller, your floor plate, so you might need to be a little taller. I know not everyone loves the tall skinnies. I don't think it necessarily promotes that, but it might play into more of the sloped yards and... you know, it may not be as overwhelming. Like if I built one in my backyard, my neighbors would see it as the same height as my house because of sloped land. So I just didn't want us to necessarily impose a new restriction if we didn't have to, if what we had was working and there wasn't concern with it and no one was against it.

That's helpful. And I think, too, some of the concern I've heard from some neighbors, too, is the setbacks, which is how close some of these ADUs have been. And so really it's kind of a, Give the property line more space. Well, it could encourage, yeah. Give, take, get height.

That's interesting. It could encourage people to step farther back.

Okay. I mean, especially if we currently are doing this.

So the tradeoff is you're able to, I think the current square footage is 800 square feet. I mean, yeah, for ADU. So what this does is it increases that to 1,000. So kind of the trade-off is you'll get more space without the ability to build as high as you would have had before. So it would be an 800 square foot ADU that went up higher. than 1,000 square foot one that would go to whatever limits he was talking about. So that's kind of the trade-off.

That 200 square feet, ironically, could be a staircase.

I did have a different question. It's logistics. Because I want to make sure I'm hearing you. If we move forward step one together, then it sounds like more people can support it, and we can come back and make more steps later. But if we skip step one and move to step two, then we don't go together.

I didn't follow the step one, step two. Yeah. I'm not sure I followed that.

I mean, the goal that I'm curious about is how we can get more housing. I mean, I've told this story before, but I have two aging in-laws that are both in assisted living facilities. And if I had the opportunity to have them living in my backyard, that would be so much better for my whole family. Absolutely.

I agree. We just also did the tour with Shiloh neighborhood and saw the setback issues.

Right. And so this setback, this is an incentive to set back even.

But that neighborhood in particular really despises the slim tall.

It's interesting to me that staff said none have happened, though. So they haven't actually had this happen where someone has come and said, we're going to do this additional setback for the higher

height so it's actually not a problem we're not solving a problem but we may be creating one so um i think we can are we clear on what the options are yeah so let's do let's do public comment on this and then we'll have the opportunity to discuss it so you're the public's thoughts yeah if anyone has thoughts on that particular item please weigh in so again we're taking public comment on each of the three items adus um duplexes and parking although please note on the parking we're really just bringing our ordinance into compliance with the state law, which no longer allows us to require parking. So not a lot of flexibility there, depending on your opinion about it. So we have right now 17 people signed up to speak uh under this item so um each person will be allowed three minutes although maggie can you tell me what's going on here at the end with number one number one number i believe those people are now oh that means they're in the first floor okay but but mayor now i believe they're in the chamber oh they are okay somebody's fixing that all right that was code that i should have picked up on thanks all right so we've got um as i mentioned 17 speakers each of you will have three minutes because we haven't hit that 20 speakers The first person signed up to speak is Adam Christian, and then after Adam Christian is Nina Tovish. You'll just watch the lights on the lectern. Green means go. Orange means stop. I mean, orange means almost stop, and red means stop.

Great shirt. My housing shirts are out.

all right uh good evening city council and mayor my name is adam christian i'm a small business owner here in asheville and i work with asheville for all um first of all i know this is a contentious issue i know we've been back and forth um thanks for listening uh i appreciate your public service and i appreciate the diligence actually dealing with this i'm here to ask you to approve the duplex by right amendment Delay is displacement. We are actively pricing out people who make Asheville great, and the delay means more people are lost to our community. If we just talk numbers, a first year North Carolinian teacher makes $48,000 per year, a starting Asheville firefighter makes $52,000, and a Buncombe County childcare worker makes $33,000. And none of them can actually afford the $63,000 per year it would take for them to rent a modest two bedroom in this county without being rent burdened. More than 50% of renters are rent burdened in this county. So let's take care of the people who take care of us. And honestly, you don't need to take my word for it. Other cities have actually shown us a path before. So, for example, Portland, Oregon legalized duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes in 2021. And since then, their average price of new middle housing fell $200,000 per unit. So any new unit is now $200,000 per unit less, and their demolition rate stayed constant. So that means that they're getting more affordable housing while preserving the neighborhood character through infill, not demolition. And so a duplex is a gentle it's an evidence based reform. Asheville really can't subsidize our way out of our housing shortage at this moment, but we can stop making these modest homes illegal. And so please approve this amendment. Thank you.

Thank you. After we have the next public comment, can someone explain to me why people think this is a contentious issue? Just hold that.

The speaker remarked that it was a contentious issue. After, after. Not you. No, no, no, no. OK. Very good. All right. Nina Tovish and then Rachel Cohen.

Good evening, council members and mayor. I'm just here this evening to urge you to adopt these changes. In particular, they have the possibility of mitigating both ends of life transitions. For example, you have a single family house on a residential lot and The children grow up, and they're trying to get a job, and a miracle happens, and they manage to get a job in Asheville, but they're having a terrible time finding affordable housing. An ADU can solve that problem, whether it's on their own family's lot or on another family's lot. We can retain our young people in our community, which is something that I think we all know is very hard to do at this time. As you've mentioned, then there's the other end where you have aging parents and a young family where the aging parents can stay nearby as well, and that gives benefits both to them and to the whole family. This issue about the setbacks is interesting to me. I think there are some trade-offs there. My inclination would be to actually just increase the setbacks a little more and not encourage or allow people to build too high. The other possibility would be to tag the height of an ADU to the average of surrounding existing residences so that someone couldn't build something that would loom over other people's houses disproportionately. That requires a little more calculation and a little more fussing in the application process, but it might help to retain the character of neighborhoods even more. Just something to think about. Thank you for your attention to this. I think duplexes will improve the quality of life in our neighborhoods, and I'm excited that ADUs are moving forward as well. Thank you.

Rachel Cohen, and then after Rachel is Danielle Arustaki.

I had to go on a diet before I was allowed to comment on council. Hey, everybody. My name is Rachel Cohen. I'm with Sunrise Movement WNC. We would just like to voice our strong support for these amendments and thank you for considering them. So as we know, building more infill, more housing makes housing more affordable for everybody. When there isn't enough housing for the number of people who want to live here. There's a lot of competition for every single home, prices go up, and working people can't afford to live here. So, and everyone, regardless of whether they're working class, middle class, even wealthy, end up paying a higher cost for housing than they otherwise would need to. Why do we do that? Increasing housing options like this is also anti-displacement in action, as we've discussed. I think that's one of the reasons why some have thought this to be somewhat controversial, is because some people view anti-displacement efforts and more housing as in tension with each other, which I don't really think they are. So I'm just saying, I've heard. I'm not saying anyone in particular. So as people have spoken about, it helps prevent displacement by having more options that are more affordable so people can stay in the neighborhoods that they love and have grown their families in. It's also important that we have more info with these options because denser housing makes funding public services a lot more efficient. So we all know our transit, fire, water, sewer, sidewalks, all of these things are very costly to maintain. The denser we build, the more people live per acre, they pay property taxes, they help us maintain and improve our services. which we love. And finally, building desert housing in developed areas is environmentally sustainable, which is something we care about a lot. So it's the opposite of sprawl. Sprawl, as we know, means people have to drive more and further distances to get there where they're trying to go sprawl destroys our lovely mountains that we want to remain natural environments so the more we can infill and increase density it's going to help us with our sustainability goals which is very important for us now and in the future And lastly, just want to note, these are really modest changes, as we all really know. There's going to be a lot more changes to talk about with the UDO rewrite, and really look forward to digging into those with you all as the months and years progress. Yes, hopefully not too many years. But at any rate, we'd love for you to approve these changes. Thanks, y'all.

It's Danielle Arustagy, hopefully I said that right, and then Paige Husiak.

Hi, my name's Danielle Orozco. I'm a resident of Haw Creek, and I live next to an ADU that butts right up against my property line, and I'm speaking in support of the proposed amendments expanding where duplexes can be built and increasing the allowable size of ADUs. These are modest, context-appropriate options that fit into existing neighborhoods rather than requiring large-scale redevelopment. I think that they give homeowners more flexibility to add housing on land that they already own for aging parents, adult children, or supplemental rental income that can help people stay in their homes. I don't think this is a silver bullet. There's a lot more I think that we have to do, but I think it's a low-cost, low-risk step that the city can take right now, and it's consistent with recommendations that have already been adopted in our affordable housing plan and our missing middle housing study. So I would ask council to approve these amendments tonight and keep momentum going by removing unnecessary barriers to the kinds of housing that we need here in Asheville. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, Paige Huziak, And then Joel Schumann. No page? No? Joel Schumann? You kind of look like you're running away, but now you're coming back. Okay.

Hi, my name is Joel Schuman. I live next to that same ADU you were just hearing about from Danielle Orozco. About three years ago, my neighbor's landlord, the owner of the property, constructed that ADU. And now I have more neighbors than I used to. Three people live where two people lived before. He does acupuncture. Housing costs in Asheville have pushed working class folks further and further from the neighborhoods they want to work in. ADUs and duplexes won't fix that alone, but they're one of the fuel tools that we have to add gentle density. You've seen me here before speaking about housing in Hawk Creek. Now they're going to put much larger homes instead of the townhomes that we talked about a couple years ago. Here's a gentler option. So I do hope that you make it possible for my acupuncturist neighbor to stay in Hawk Creek and for us to continue to allow duplexes and other missing middle housing structures so that we can continue to welcome more neighbors. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Eva Snyder and then Matt Allen.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. My name's Eva Snyder, and I'm here today to ask you to support the two zoning tax amendments before you to increase the maximum allowed side of accessory dwelling units and to permit duplexes by right in residential zoning districts. I grew up in Asheville and my husband and I moved back here about eight years ago. We've had the pleasure of living in several of Asheville's most walkable neighborhoods since 2017 and our family has one car currently. We'd like to keep it that way. My husband is a mechanical engineer. And I work part-time as an operations manager for my parents' small trim carpentry business. We're renters who prioritize living close to downtown so that our daughter and I can commute on foot and by bike to daycare and to work. And we hunt for smaller and generally older housing options to fit our proximity preference into our budget. We would love to live in a duplex or an ADU, but these options right now are pretty few and far between. We would also love to eventually own our first home. And I see the potential to unit townhome typology as a smaller and less land intensive housing product that we might one day be able to afford. So I'm really optimistic by these changes as a way to hopefully allow some gentle density in our neighborhoods and allow more people to live closer to town and find housing options that fit their budgets. I want to thank you so much for your work and consideration on this issue and engagement with a lot of different stakeholders. I know it's been a lot of work by staff and by y'all to bring these amendments before you today. um and i really hope that we can find a way to or that you can find a way whether we increase the allowable sizes of 80 heights of 80 views or bring it back down to 25 feet i think with the fire access it sounds like practically we don't need to build a them taller than 25 feet, if we count from the entry. Anyways, sorry, that part, obviously not repaired. But thank you so much, and I urge you to support this amendment.

Thank you. Matt Allen and then Susan B.

Good evening, honorable counsel. My name is Matt Allen. I'm director of government affairs for the Land of the Sky Association of Realtors. We have 2,000 members in this region, and many of those people certainly work in the city, and many of them live here as well. And I'm here tonight on behalf of the association to speak in favor of these text amendments and ask that you vote yes on them. I'm just going to cite some statistics from the Bone Report really quickly just to frame this issue. The region is facing more than 34,000, a shortage of more than 34,000 new housing units over the next five years. That's almost 14,000 new rental units and a gap of more than 20,000 homes for sale. And then when we're talking about Asheville City itself, it needs over 10,000 homes added to its supply over the next five years. So these proposed changes can certainly make a difference in help in addressing this increasingly pressing issue. There are several examples around the country of local governments loosing their restrictions on middle housing, resulting in the creation of more affordable and attainable housing. Adam actually kind of stole my thunder. I was going to mention Portland, Oregon as a great example. I will just add when they did their big zoning overhaul, It went into effect in August of 2021. It allowed duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes in areas that were previously just single family zoning. And from its passage or from its effective date in August 2021 through 2024, they added 1,400 new middle housing units, including ADUs, duplexes, and small unit buildings in those districts that were previously low density. So passing these changes is also really important when you consider that staff has previously indicated they may not do much in the way of addressing housing changes while they do the comp plan and UDO update. So if that ends up being true, I feel like this may be one of the city's last chances for the foreseeable future to address our housing shortage by updating antiquated zoning laws. I just want to close with a saying that I think we're all familiar with. Perfect is the enemy of good. These text amendments are not exactly what I would have done, but they're good. And that's better than nothing when we're facing a serious housing shortage. So thank you for your time this evening, and thank you for voting yes to these proposals.

Thank you. Susan Bean, also making her way. And then Joe Huffman.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, members of council. My name is Susan Dean and I am the housing and transportation director for Mountain True. I learned last week that North Carolina is leading the nation in loss of farmland due to low density residential development. This is not a list that I want our state to be at the top of. The more that we develop our rural farmlands to turn them into large suburban developments, the faster we accelerate the impacts of climate change. What we need instead and what many people here want are housing choices that are closer to jobs, schools, and community. Duplexes and slightly larger ADUs would give people choices who are looking for a smaller, more affordable house. And as we have just recognized in trying to improve our transit system, we need our buses to serve more households within the existing service map because we cannot afford to extend it to new developments. So I ask you to support, to please vote yes in support of these amendments for a more sustainable and affordable Asheville. On the height question that has come up, I do support keeping the current language so that there is an incentive to push, bring it further back from the lot lines, lot lines, whatever, parcel edges. and allow extra height that way. I was talking to a builder this week in my neighborhood who's trying to build an ADU for a different neighbor, and just like the complexity of trying to fit the stairs and where the door's gonna open and where the bedroom's gonna fit. It just, I know, is difficult to make the space work. And so we're adding allowed square footage, which is great, but I do think that anything that we can do to increase the flexibility of how these things can get built in our weird mountainous, you know, strange lot sizes kind of city, the more likely that they are to get built. And I just really want more of them so that we have more options in our city, no matter how sort of funky or weird they might end up looking. I feel like the affordable housing and the more sustainable types of housing for me are a better solution than less options. So that's where I would fall on the pipe question.

Thanks.

Jo Hoffman and then Ken Brame.

Good evening. I'm Jo Hoffman, and I live in Parkway Forest in East Asheville, just this side of the city limits, so I'm in the city. I was born in Asheville in 1959 and lived in West Asheville. And that was before the interstates came. And a lot of change has come, like the cut through on 240, a lot of conflict on those things. But change is part of life. And I think the change that we need now are these recommendations for the housing options. I know a friend who was then my neighbor, and he desperately wanted to live in Asheville with his family. And a few weeks ago, he had to pack up his family because he couldn't find a way, couldn't find a job that paid enough. He was in a house that was not an expensive house. And he had to move to Arkansas where he could find such a place and a better job. It'd be better if we could provide places for people here in Asheville. There are a lot of people I know who come to work here as nurses or people in the hospitality business or so forth and so on who have to drive 50, 60 miles away. That's a two back and forth. That's 110, 120 miles every day. We'll talk about trying to be good to the climate. That's not good. And it means they don't get to enjoy the city the way we do because they don't live here. So I just want to speak out for them and say I would really encourage us to help this be different. And I think it can be different. I think the spirit of Asheville is different. So good luck. And thank you. I support you. Thank you.

Ken Brame and then Spencer Cargens.

Good evening. Well, first of all, I'm Ken Brame. I'm here representing the Western North Carolina group of the Sierra Club, and we're supportive of these amendments. But I want to just, first of all, thank you guys. You went to the table. You got a bond initiative approved four years ago. Now, I guess it is almost four years. And you've been able to leverage that money to create some affordable housing. But we all know the city is never going to have the resources to solve this problem. got to have our businesses, our developers working to solve this problem. If you drive outside the city limits, it's pretty normal to see a affordable house, which in many cases is a trailer, and right behind it is another trailer for another member of the family on that same piece of land. This ADU amendment you're doing is going to allow more of that in the city of Asheville. Right now, The size of those limits the size of a family that can be in those units. So having a bigger space allows more families, roommates, more people to live in one unit than currently is available. And opening this up to other people is important. Many families, as was mentioned earlier, want their kids to come to Asheville, particularly if they're getting older. They want a family member close by to help them. And being able to let them build an ADU in the back that would house a family or for them to move into and the family to move into the main house is important for that age category. And I can relate to that a little bit from that standpoint. And then secondly, we need more rental. We need more affordable rental. And it's much cheaper to have an ADU and rent that out and provide income to families that may be stretched financially. on how they can keep their house and continue to live in Asheville. So that's another reason to make sure we approve this amendment. The duplexes are another really important issue here. Right now, if there's a buildable lot in Asheville, somebody comes in and puts a $600,000, $800,000 single-family house on it, whereas you could put a duplex there and sell it for less than half of that to open Today, affordable housing is being driven further out into the county and into surrounding counties. That adds traffic congestion. A carbon footprint goes up. Forests are being cut down to build those places. And it's just not what we need. We need more people to be able to live in Asheville. Sierra Club is very supportive. So two small steps towards that direction. So I encourage you to approve these amendments tonight. And of course, the parking minimum, we have no choice on. Thank you. Thank you.

Right. Spencer Kargis and then Evan Garvin.

Good evening. My name is Spencer Kargis. I'm the organizer with Asheville for All. In light of the UDO updates coming up, you know, that are going to happen in the wake of this, I want to take you back to July 16th, 1996. Just over 30 years ago in this building, the UDO committee presented a list of items that they unanimously agreed should be included in the new 1997 draft UDO. One of them, quote, allowed duplexes in all single family districts and triplexes and quadplexes in all high density single family zoning districts. Obviously it didn't happen. About a year later, just a month before the final vote on the UDL, a public hearing was held and covered by Mountain Express. Civil rights and housing activist Minnie Jones had the quote of the evening. She noted that not everyone owns a home. Some people like her were renters and also lived in Asheville and they needed a place to live too. She said, quote, if God walked in here and said, I'm going to give everyone a house, where would you build them all? I think that's a really good question. I recently heard this phrase that I can't really get out of my head because it's so simple but explains this problem so succinctly. Quote, density is how people with less money outcompete people with more money for the same land. Density is how people with less money outcompete people with more money for the same land. The more land that we commit to single family only zoning, the more loudly we answer Minnie's question of where people like her could live with not here. We are saying rather explicitly that this town is only for the rich, that the price of admission or the price to stay is a $500,000 single family home. When a previous city council gave in to the loudest voices and failed to do what was right, they locked in over 30 years of displacement and stalled growth. Today you have a chance to start to right the ship. I encourage you to vote to approve these amendments. Thank you.

Thank you. Evan Garvin and then Scott Adams.

All right, good evening. My name's Evan. I've lived here in Asheville since 2016. I'm a part-time small business owner and part-time construction worker. And I'd like to tell you my story about housing in Asheville. After I moved here and had an apartment for a while, my first house that I purchased was on a flag lot, which is one of the ways that we've added density in this city. It was the cheapest house I could find on Zillow where I could walk or ride my bike to work. It was a great spot for a single guy. I adopted my dog the day I closed on it. It was over a two-car garage, and it was about 600 square feet. And it was fine. And then I got engaged, decided I needed a little bit more space. I was able to sell that house to a nurse at Mission, one of the people who makes Asheville a great place. And we bought an older home in Beaver Dam that had an ADU on it already. It was built back in the 60s. After I fixed up the house and we moved into it, I then was able to fix up the ADU and it's now rented out to a really great couple, both of whom work in nonprofits here in town. When I was showing the ADU to potential renters, it's just about 700 square feet, and we had a few couples with kids, small families that came to look at it, and none of them could really make it work given the size. I love the idea of Asheville being a place where people can raise a family, but the reality is with the cost of housing, a lot of people have to look outside city limits, outside county limits even. So by passing this amendment allowing larger ADUs and duplexes, we can reduce the displacement of those working class folks, of the nurses admission, of the nonprofit workers, and have better, more diverse neighborhoods. Thank you for voting yes. We really need it.

Thank you. Scott Adams and then Tyler Sullins.

Mm-hmm.

Good evening. Can you all hear me? I'm Scott Adams. I'm also with Asheville for All, and I'm not as nearly as good a speaker as Spencer Kargas. We're a housing advocacy organization, and I am urging you, we are urging you to please vote yes on these amendments, as they're incremental, but they're important. But why are they important? Well, because with housing, people tend to be loaded, limited, or lucky. If you're loaded, money's not an issue and you can generally be the highest bidder for housing. If you're limited, you may be lucky, and I use lucky in air quotes, lucky enough to qualify for a housing subsidy if you're very limited, that's capital A affordable housing. But if you're moderately limited, that's workforce housing and above, that leaves you relying on market rate luck. If you're plain lucky, maybe you don't have to worry about being loaded or limited. But true luck in the housing market is rare. So zoning reforms like these amendments offer greater opportunities for people across the limited spectrum by allowing a greater range of housing options across the city. Please vote yes on these amendments. Thank you.

Thank you. Tyler Sullins and then Steve Rivlett.

Hey, I'm Tyler, and I'm here just to repeat what everyone ahead of me just said. Housing pricing is a huge problem in Asheville. ADUs and duplexes can act as starter homes for people who are otherwise priced out of ownership and stuck in a rent cycle for the rest of their lives. Please remove these restrictions from the UDO and allow Asheville to grow the right way so that we don't continue to sprawl, increase traffic, increase our footprints on the environment, and allow people a stake in ownership. Thank you.

Thank you. Steven Riblett and then Marty Benson.

Hello, my name is Steven Riblett. I'm here with Strong Towns. I'm excited to hear that these amendments are up for a vote today. As was said in, what, 1997? We needed changes like these before today. And we're going to continue to need other changes to help fight the crisis that is affordability here in Asheville. The changes voted for tonight will not change things tomorrow. They won't even necessarily change things next month. It will take time for units to be built. What will be built will be more local, gently conforming into different spaces as capital, materials, persons, geography, et cetera allows. Everywhere in Asheville is under similar affordability pressures. The demand is shared across every neighborhood. By universally applying these amendments, we allow more opportunities for folks in our community to help fight the affordability crisis. Different types of units not only help new renters and owners move into neighborhoods, but they also help them stay. If financial, family, or other circumstances change, there is a higher likelihood that something, though smaller but affordable, remains. These help stabilize our communities as change happens. Again, please vote yes. With a stroke of a pen, we can lessen the crisis that's in front of us and help every citizen in Asheville. Thank you all.

Marty Benson and then Una Rowe.

Hello, friends. I'm not going to belabor you with what everybody already said. I'm very pleased to hear that this is not a contentious issue. I do believe that Single-occupant automobiles, single-family detached dwellings, especially exclusionary in zoning, are the chief enemy of rurality. They're the biggest threat to rural communities. They pose the highest increase in impervious surfaces, and they steal prospective property taxes from the town because one of the best ways to compete with higher income people is to live in a smaller dwelling. Similarly, you can increase the tax base of a piece of property while at the same time decreasing the per dwelling unit if you just increase the density. So what I would ask you here is to hit the accelerator on this non-driving mobile and let's start thinking about new things. One wrench that I will throw into the ADU conversation is that recently passed SB 445 does not require in my reading, that you set the maximum ADU size at 1,000 square feet. It just requires that if you do set a maximum ADU square footage, that it must be 1,000 square feet. Which is to say, if you don't set a maximum square footage for ADUs, and I live in a 2,000 square foot house, I can build a 1,999 square foot home and call it an ADU. That's an option. And it's already delineated in North Carolina statute prior to SB 445 that I personally own a 610 square foot house. I can only build a 609 square foot ADU, 610 square foot ADU already. And so it's already limited in North Carolina statute that you can't build an ADU that's larger than the primary dwelling unit. You do have the option at your disposal. to not set a max. That's all. Thank you for supporting these amendments.

Marty, I was hoping you wouldn't complicate this. Una Rowe?

Excuse me for being completely out of breath here. I think pretty much everybody's already covered, you know, the core of why ADUs should be allowed. I want to speak a little bit more about the nuance from an engineering or construction perspective. I think ADUs have been argued vehemently because it's pitted citizens and developers against each other. And I want to say that if we somehow allow ADUs and the timeline for constructing ADUs, like stretch out the timeline for constructing an ADU and the reason this The way that this may spur developer and construction support is that construction companies or skilled workers may be able to use an ADU under construction as a storage unit. And so when you're constructing something, you're always having to worry about your supplies or whatever materials getting wet. So if you allow in the timeline of construction, the ADU, be a storage facility, this can allow skilled workers the time to be able to come in and use the materials as needed. So in that way, we can have a much higher level of construction instead of having this very quick timeline where you get a construction company in, for like a week and saying it has to be done right now. This gives process builds a lot more time to build much higher quality. Oh, and please allow aid to use in the front.

That I actually think we're prohibited from doing by statute. Are we? Yeah. A little quirk in North Carolina law.

OK. That was all positive comments, wasn't it? Every single one. Yeah.

That concludes. OK. So, on that note, so that concludes the public hearing portion of this item. We do have to have three motions. If you'll hold on just a second, if someone would make a motion regarding the parking, because I know that that's not a problem at all. Sure. Yes, please.

I move to approve the proposed wording amendments to the Unified Development Ordinance, Chapter 7 of the Asheville Code of Ordinances. And find that the proposed amendments are reasonable, are in the public interest, promote compliance with North Carolina state statutes, and are consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and that one, they request... I didn't say that right. In the comprehensive plan, in that the request, one, promotes zoning policies to give more opportunities for housing, two, promotes flexibility for builders and developers to self-select the amount of land necessary for off-street parking.

Amen. I mean, second. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any... Questions, comments? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, the motion passes unanimously. And then can I get a motion on the duplexes?

Sure. I move to approve the proposed wording amendments to the Unified Development Ordinance, Chapter 7 of the Asheville Code of Ordinances, and find that the proposed amendments are reasonable or in the public interest, are consistent with the city's comprehensive plan, and meet the development needs of the community, and that the amendments will, one, promote zoning policies to encourage more housing, two, implement one of the suggested anti-displacement housing supply strategies identified in the missing middle housing study, and three, promote small-scale residential units on residential lots to encourage neighborhood compatibility and create flexibility within the planning, permitting, and construction processes.

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 unanimously. And now for the ADU.

For this one, Mayor, may I simply, before we just launch into a motion, just maybe do a nod or a, is anyone interested in the rollback of the height?

I am. And if you'd allow me to explain why that rollback matters more than it appears on its face. Sure, happy to hear your comments. So I think, was it last meeting when we did the anti-displacement resolution or meeting before? It was very recently. So before we voted on that, there was a bit of concern that maybe that resolution wasn't strong enough. But the folks who had been pushing for that resolution for years said, decided to place their trust in us because they believed that we were serious about giving them protections. With that in mind, when these issues came up, they were more than willing to come to a middle ground And as you can see, and as I think someone mentioned, no one stood up and said no, right? Part of that consideration had to do with the height. So if we turn around the meeting after we just did the resolution saying, trust us, we're going to work with you. If we turn around and add something that they specifically indicated they weren't okay with. We have just eroded trust. So while I have no doubt that we could push that through, I would encourage us to meet in the middle, get a unanimous vote to show our citizenry that this is in fact not contentious. because I can't in good conscience vote for something they specifically have indicated would not be suitable for them. That's just.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that perspective. I guess if we were introducing something that was different, but I'm just suggesting we just keep doing what we had. You know, it's not, I don't think we're creating

something new agree you know what i mean i understand i think your point but i guess it's just i'm interpreting it a little differently because we're not it's like a last minute new item so let me add to that then i've seen us uh a few people come up and say no sprawl right i had a wonderful conversation with my friend ken brain just yesterday And in that conversation, I said, I was talking about how living in Asheville and really life in general is all about perspective, right? So we often hear we're in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. Every time I hear that, I go, for whom? So I pointed out census data. So I want to say like in 19, sorry, in 2000, we were about 65,000 people, and about 17% of our population was black, right? Each subsequent... census when we got down to 95 i think we're now around eight percent black right so while every other demographic has increased the black population by number has gone down by 2 000. what that means is black people are the forbearers or forerunners of the sprawl we say we want to prevent. So it would seem to me that if we wanted to stop, am I getting ready to quote a phrase, black sprawl? If we want to work around that, we can come together as a community and work together because really the differences between the groups are like infinitesimal. So that's my read. But these groups are accustomed to being in the minority, hence why they keep going down a number. So they wouldn't be surprised if we pushed forward. I kind of want to surprise them and say we're actually going to, even though on a national level we don't do equity anymore, I think we can be inclusive in this moment. That's just my two cents.

there's so much there I appreciate you bringing it all to the table I'm trying to unpack all of it one of the things that I've heard from a lot of the neighbors who are concerned about displacement is the setbacks And particularly in Shiloh, it being built too close to the church.

Don't use their words against them. On this particular issue.

Ma'am, I'm not using words against them. I'm still talking.

On this particular instance. Could I continue? Go ahead.

Thanks.

You are more than welcome.

All right, let's just try to, everyone will have an opportunity to speak on it. And I'll recognize Councilman Ullman to speak on this item.

So I think that there's an opportunity to address the setback issue which has come up from lots of different neighbors and neighborhoods with this type of thing while also giving some flexibility on the hype.

Yeah, the reason I mentioned like the nod or the kind of discussion before, because I didn't want to launch into a motion and get us into a situation where we may not have unanimous support in an atmosphere where we might, right? So, and that's why I did that more respectfully in that way instead of just announcing. So, unless other people have more comments, I'm happy to just, is there an interest in the not increasing the height restriction.

So what you're proposing is to not change the current height requirement.

Just that one part, to not add a new restriction and to just default to what we have now, which actually wasn't in any presentations, I will say. It's a late add because we found it in staff report.

I think that's the problem. I think we've been doing a lot of work gaining stakeholder trust around these decisions. So, tonight, if there's even the perception that it's going to lead to misunderstanding or some unforeseen vulnerability, I would rather not, in hopes that we'll continue with the conversation and not continue mistaking gangs as potential consternation or an issue. There's no issue. Let's just vote as is, and maybe we can revisit the conversation later. It's not dead after tonight.

Should I read the motion?

Well, I was looking for nods before I made a motion. Does anybody else want to chime in? If you don't chime in, I'll just assume that you're not interested.

Bo looks like he's ready to chime in.

You know, I just, I wanna respect the community, and also I'm hearing what one of our public speakers said, and they said, let's not let perfect be the enemy of good, whatever that looks like. And I think if we can move forward together, that would be my preference.

So, as proposed. All right, so we're ready for a motion.

I move to recommend approval of the proposed wording amendments of Chapter 7 of the Asheville Code of Ordinances and find that the proposed amendments are reasonable, are in the public interest, are consistent with the city's comprehensive plan and meet the development needs of the community, and that the amendments will, one, promote zoning policies to encourage more housing, and two, promote small-scale residential units on residential lots with limits aimed at encouraging compatibility and creating flexibility within the planning, permitting, and construction process.

We have a motion. Is there a second? Second. Second. All right, we have a motion and a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? OK.

So I may ask that when we do get to the UDO, we bring this up. That's all.

A future seed. The UDO rewrite.

Yeah, just a future seed for this moment. Will be all things. Yes.

I actually would like to just make a comment. I was excited for us to go through all the motions really quickly, but I just would like to share some of my heart on this one. This has been long coming. I'm very excited. This job can be challenging, as I'm sure all of you can imagine. I'm sure all of us do it because we're trying to make our community a better place, and tonight feels like a really, really meaningful, successful step forward, and that's very hopeful in a time that feels a little bleak out there. I think that we could keep sprawling outwards, or we can make a little more room for people in our neighborhoods that we already have and These duplexes and ADUs, they aren't skyscrapers. They're places where grandmothers can be and teachers, and they're finding an apartment that someone can actually afford. It allows folks to stay here. I hear a lot of concern about, I finally made it to the place that I love where I belong, and I don't know if I can stay here. And I've had to leave twice because I was on a plateau that wasn't sustainable. So I think that tonight after years of debate, we're actually choosing progress. I'm thrilled that it's unanimous that feels Really really celebratory. So thank you everyone who's put so much work into this including our staff Who's done an amazing job with engaging community members on this?

Thanks mayor Thank you for that. I will say this has been a more than a couple years probably. And we did find ourselves at a pretty tricky spot several months ago. And I really want to help credit the manager for helping redirect us and working on bringing together a working group around this. And I think Asheville Watchdog did a like longer than necessary probably article about this, but one of the things that I said at that time was, you know, just because you have four to three vote doesn't mean you should use it if there's a way for us to reach consensus. and i'm really glad that we took the extra time and worked through it so that we tonight have three unanimous votes so congratulations and i applaud the work that council did around this and i applaud the work of the manager and the staff and the community to help bring us here and to have i always think it's a great success when you end up with an issue that might have started out controversial and ends up in a place where you have a unanimous vote and every speaker is in favor of the changes so so no small feat um hard to do and i i i really want to thank dk for for helping us navigate this challenging challenge mayor and i would like to

follow up by extending gratitude to our staff because they did the work. I just had to let them go and get to it. So Ben and Dawa and Chris, oh my goodness, it was multiple departments who worked on this.

And you gave us updates every week as to where the work was and that was really, really helpful for us. So thank you. All right. Hey, can you all do me a favor and raise your hand if you plan on leaving right now? okay so maybe we'll just take a five minute break and kind of do it in exchange and everybody who's down on one um i think we're gonna have okay we think we're gonna have room

Okay we're back. Welcome back to the Asheville City Council meeting.

We're going to resume the meeting.

And just so, since we kind of changed out all the people that are in here from the start of the meeting, I'm gonna go ahead back through the preliminaries. If you're wanting to speak and you haven't signed up, you can sign up to speak. Maggie, is it now all on the first floor? First floor. First floor. On the first floor, then your name will show up on our agenda.

On our public comment list.

um we also uh are going to go with two minutes per speaker because we have in excess of 20 folks signed up to speak i think right now we have around 37 folks but some of those people have ceded their time to a single speaker and i'll just reiterate the chamber decorum statement Members of the public attending council meetings are 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. Tonight, we have on our agenda an item titled, it's a resolution calling for the city of Asheville's manager to terminate the city contract with FLOC. Just one, a couple of comments here. Well, in North Carolina, we don't have a strong mayor system. We have a council manager form of government, and each city has its own particular charter. They're similar, but somewhat different. Our charter specifically prohibits the city council from directing the police department, essentially, as to how to do their job. However, the city manager serves at the pleasure of the council, and the city council can direct the manager to carry out various actions. Now the manager is the manager and has discretion to do what she wants to do. Obviously, since she serves at the pleasure of the city council, managers tend to listen to their city council and ours has done a great job of doing that. So just so you know, that is why this resolution is worded in that way, where it actually directs the manager to terminate the contract rather than the council being able to terminate the contract directly. Just again, as some contextual information, the city has 11 flock automated license plate readers. These are stationary license plate readers that are, the 11 of them are in various places in the city. And they are just that, license plate readers. They can read the license plate and the make model of the car, the color of the car. And so what this resolution does is call for the termination of that contract. The city does have other technologies that are used by the police department, by the fire department, and those include dash cams, so Axon is the provider and has been the provider for the city's dash cameras. Those are the cameras in squad cars. Also body cameras that are on police officers. just to provide some information there. In addition, there are other entities and individuals that have flock cameras in Asheville and Buncombe County that we don't have any control over, that they can decide for themselves whether or not they're gonna maintain their cameras. I'm calling them cameras, but they're license plate readers. And we don't have the authority to tell them what to do with theirs. We can only control the 11 that are, flock pursuant to a contract with the city. There are also other cameras throughout, obviously, throughout the city, the county. For example, I think I saw the housing authority director here. The housing authority has security cameras, I guess that's what you'd call them, and our police officers right now can access those security cameras by pulling up a laptop and entering a password and looking at the security camera camera footage in housing this is very important for residents of public housing i've in meeting with residents of public housing this is something that they feel very important for their protection and in fact want to make sure there is a strong camera program in that regard there are also cameras run by buncombe county schools asheville city schools The idea being that the APD should be able to have access to those cameras in the event of an emergency or a 911 call, God forbid there's a school shooter or something like that, you would want your police department to be able to see what's happening as they respond to a call like that. So I just want to give that context. I know this council is interested in hearing from the public, not only how you feel about the termination of the flock contract, which we've heard lots of support for, but we wanted you to understand, and I wanted you to understand kind of the other pieces of this that we're working through so that you have that information as you make your comments to council. And I want to be able to read the resolution first and then let's, and I'm sure other folks will have comments too. So this is a resolution calling for the City of Asheville's manager to terminate the city's contract with FLOC. Whereas the City of Asheville operates 11 automated license plate readers utilizing technology provided by FLOC safety. referred to as flock technology pursuant to a contract with flock safety. And whereas flock technology captures and stores information concerning vehicles traveling on public roadways and may permit that information to be searched, analyzed or shared for law enforcement purposes. And whereas the city, the Asheville City Council recognizes that technology can be an important tool for investigating serious crimes and protecting public safety, but also recognizes the legitimate concerns raised by residents regarding privacy, data retention, data sharing, government surveillance, and access to information collected by flock technology. And whereas city council believes that the use of such technology should occur only pursuant to clear policies that appropriately balance legitimate public safety needs with individual privacy and civil liberties and provide adequate transparency, oversight and accountability. Whereas City Council desires additional opportunity to evaluate the city's use of flock technology, including the circumstances under which flock technology data may be collected, retained, searched, accessed, or shared with other governmental or law enforcement agencies. Now, therefore, be it resolved by the City Council of the City of Asheville that... Section one, flock contract termination. Effective immediately upon adoption of this resolution, the city council of the city of Asheville directs the city manager to terminate the city's contract with flock safety. And pursuant to the contract terms, immediately request that flock remove their hardware from the city of Asheville as required under the contract. Section two, suspension of access and data sharing. Further, the city manager shall ensure that city employees do not access, search, query, analyze, or share data collected through the city's flock technology. Section three, existing data. Existing data shall be retained, preserved or deleted in accordance with applicable law, city records retention requirements and any applicable legal preservation obligations. No existing data shall be affirmatively shared or queried. Section four facial recognition prohibited the city of Asheville does not utilize any facial recognition technology. And no data collected through the city's flock technology shall be linked matched or cross reference with any facial recognition technology or database operated by any non city organization. Section five, review. The city manager is further directed to review the city's use of FLOC technology and provide city council with information and policy recommendations concerning, at a minimum, one, the categories of investigations for which FLOC technology may appropriately be used in the future. Two, appropriate restrictions on searches and access to FLOC collected data. three flock data retention and deletion four sharing of flock data with federal state local and out-of-state law enforcement agencies or third parties or other third parties five include an independent civil liberties policy reviewer with relevant experience advising north carolina municipalities six auditing and documentation of searches and access seven protection of information relating to immigration enforcement reproductive health care first amendment protected activity and other sensitive activities to the maximum extent permitted by law eight transparency and public reporting regarding the city's use of flock technology Eight, nine, mechanisms for oversight and accountability, including consequences for unauthorized use. And 10, whether the city should resume use of flock technology, and if so, what policies and safeguards should be adopted before such use resumes? Section six, no expansion during review. During the review described above, the city shall not purchase, lease, activate, or deploy flock technology or enter into a new agreement for flock technology. And the effective date of the resolution is upon its adoption. So that is the resolution before the council tonight. And we... Do you need motions to go into public comment? Yeah, we will need a motion.

Well, before we do that, can I make a statement? Because last time the statement got skipped because of the public comment.

Well, and if you, and Councilwoman Roney, and maybe you're going to be talking about the ACLU piece.

Well, I have questions as well for staff.

I will add the city attorney did provide us with a memorandum regarding the constitutional issues around the use of such technology. So if we're in need, you can expand on that.

So process-wise, we need a motion and a second just to entertain public comment. Right. Okay.

So in my conversation with elected officials across North Carolina about why they've resisted flock sales pitches or canceled their contracts, there was a common story about data vulnerability and the importance of maintaining public trust in their first responders and public safety services. And I have similar concerns after a second tour today of the city's real-time crime center and FLOC system with law enforcement professionals and regional subject matter experts in surveillance system security. I want to say thank you to Chief Stepp and the staff for making time today. I forwarded a report to staff and council urgently recommending review for potential breach of FLOC's contract, which is relevant for today. I understand that a representative, thanks to staff, from the ACLU will be part of future technology review processes for the city's public safety services. That's something I've requested, I've heard it from the community, and I'm grateful to see it as promised.

And I believe the chief actually is already engaging with such an individual.

Transparency is an ingredient in the recipe for public trust. I appreciate contracts being updated to the new technology dashboard and request to proactively add Axon's detailed purchasing list if other NC cities have also published. But my first question is, does staff have a plan to cover the flock cameras while we're waiting for the company to retrieve them to prevent the continued use without our consent?

We weren't currently attending to but can evaluate that as an option.

And then the second question is, I think we need to ask council request on the record that council get a follow-up notice when all flock data has been deleted in accordance with applicable laws and noted in section three of the resolution. So section three notes that we're not going to access and then we're also going to delete it. But it doesn't say that we will receive an update or when that would happen.

Right, we have a retention policy.

Yeah, we have a retention policy for the data to be deleted if it's not a part of a case, of course, at a certain time period, but that's not a problem. We can notify you all when that number three is completed. Thank you.

Just to make sure, I know that there have been recent investigations where some of this data has been helpful. Will we still have access to that?

I'll let the chief come up and answer that.

Good afternoon. So we do have a retention schedule. FLOC is currently 21 days. Anything beyond 21 days will be automatically purged. We can no longer access it. It is gone. Anything that's an active case investigation has been uploaded into evidence.com, and it is no longer stored in the FLOC platform, but it is now part of our evidence.com and falls on the retention schedule based on statutory requirements. Thank you.

And then last but not least, this is for my neighbors, because this has been a long time coming. Canceling the FLOC contract is an important first step. I appreciate that my colleagues are now joining me in considering the outcry of our community to protect our constitutional rights and safety. Automated license plate readers are designed for warrantless searches, are vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches, collect data that we can't promise won't be used by ICE or DHS, and are in a growing number of headlines about misuses, including stalking. This resolution claims to terminate the contract with Flock, yet multiple times mentions returning to the use of Flock in the future. Additionally, the people of Asheville are not confused. Shifting from Flock to another for-profit surveillance system still carries the same fundamental concerns. At the same time, families in our city are mourning loved ones lost to gun violence, and we talk about youth programming and violence interruption while our strategic partnership fund is still cut to zero. I know that we care about our youth more than zero dollars. but our budget says it's zero dollars everyone in our community deserves to be safe true safety is realized when communities invest in data-driven solutions and relational responses built on accountability and trust i'll continue to work with our council and our community to deliver real results which is why i moved to adopt the resolution instructing the city manager to terminate the city's contract with flock i'll second and i have a comment because um i

I appreciate what you said, Kim, but there was part that I have conflict with when you started by saying that we are joining you in canceling FLOCC. To my experience, six of us already voted to cancel FLOCC, and this is a additional movement to speed up the process, but to be clear, A majority of council has already voted to cancel FLOC. This is to speed it up. And I've read that out there in the world enough times that I just want to make sure that it's very clear because I'm getting lots of questions about why I didn't support it when I did. We all did. That's all.

Mayor, if you don't mind, and you tell me if it's inappropriate or appropriate, I'm glad you mentioned the CEO of HACA. She emailed, I had a phone conversation with her, and then she emailed and requested that I read part of her email because she didn't think she was going to be here in time. Please. Okay. And this is, she indicates that she's representing approximately 3,000 residents.

This is the executive director of the housing authority.

And just a portion of it. And other council members, there are also like maybe six letters from residents here. It reads, I want to make sure the voices of the housing authority's residents are represented in the ongoing conversation around public safety. Particularly because many of the residents most impacted by crime would not feel comfortable coming before city council to speak publicly. Their absence at council meetings should not be mistaken for silence, and their silence should not be mistaken for a lack of support for stronger safety measures. What residents are telling us directly is clear. They want safer communities. They want cameras. They want more security, not less. They want police presence in their communities. They want criminal activity addressed. And they want law enforcement to have the technology and tools necessary to do their jobs effectively. Residents have shared that they are afraid of retaliation and, in some cases, afraid to report what they see happening around them. That fear also makes it difficult for some to stand publicly and advocate for the very protections they are asking us to put in place. We hear from residents who want to be able to sit outside without worrying about criminal activity around them. Parents want their children to be able to play outside safely. Seniors want to feel secure walking through their communities. And families want cameras and other security measures that can help deter crime and provide accountability when incidents occur. And perhaps I'll have a statement after we hear what the community wants to say.

OK, anyone else before we begin the public comment?

OK.

All right, so we have a motion and a second to adopt the resolution before us, and we've got a number of folks signed up to speak, and I will try to give you a little heads up as to who's next. So the first person signed up to speak, and again, remember, you'll have two minutes. Watch the lights on the lectern. Green means go, orange means you're getting ready to stop, and red means stop. The first person signed up to speak is Dennis Campbell and then Sarah Kent.

Good evening, Mayor Manheimer and members of city council. First of all, having a mom who died of ovarian cancer several years ago, I thank you for your recognition of ovarian cancer awareness month. I'm standing before you tonight to urge this council to support the continuing use of license plate readers in our community. I frankly don't understand why the contract needs to be terminated and the equipment removed when you're, and then you're instructing the manager to review their use. It seems to me like this is a little bit backwards. Anyway, protecting our residents and our neighborhoods is the most fundamental duty of local government. To do that effectively today, we must equip our law enforcement with modern, objective technology. License plate readers are about identifying vehicles owned or operated, for example, by people with outstanding warrants, vehicles that have been involved in a crime, stolen vehicles, and most importantly, vehicles that may be carrying missing children. There are multiple laws that protect the law-abiding public from misuse of this technology. As a graduate of the Citizens Police Academy, I've realized that the most important thing I learned is that the officers of the Asheville City Police Department want to do the right thing. We have heard from the acting chief of police in our class about how these LPRs have helped in crime investigation or in apprehending people who have been involved in criminal activity. I've been shown the incredible value of LPRs in solving crimes in our community without breaching the law set aside to protect people who do not break the law. The only people that will benefit from the canceling of license plate readers are people who behave contrary to the law. If City Council cancels this important law enforcement tool, it announces to the city, to the nation, and to the world, and to the visitors that enrich our economy, that our political leaders are not serious about law enforcement and that criminals are more free to break the law in our beautiful city. Thank you.

Thank you. OK, everybody, you are not going to like everything a speaker says, and they might not like what you say. So let's all make sure we show each other the courtesy of being very quiet while we hear each speaker. Sarah Kent, and then it will be, well, then we have, oh, you have several people ceding their time to you, I'm sorry. If you have ceded your time to Sarah Kent, I'm going to call your name, just raise your hand. Steve Cooperman, okay, and Aaron Stahl, yep, and then Nicole Lopez. Okay, thank you very much. And so Sarah Kent, you will have, what did we say, eight minutes to speak. Thank you very much.

Good evening, city council members. I'm Sarah Kent, a resident of West Asheville. I'm an application security consultant, and I build AI-powered hack bots for a living. Let me be clear about where I stand. I oppose subscription model mass surveillance as a service. That includes ALPRs manufactured by Axon, Flock, and any other tech company. I oppose mass surveillance tools that aggregate our daily movements in the cloud and use AI to analyze them. I oppose ALPRs on drones, in police cars, and on poles, especially newer models. I'm not opposed to police body cameras or closed system cameras as long as there's public oversight. I'm here to request the city cancel flock and the Axon Fuses contract. Over a decade ago, I moved here because I wanted to join an inclusive community that fosters creativity and upholds live and let live values. Sadly, the wonderful, funky vibe that attracts millions of tourists here is eroding. Now, wherever we go, the panopticon of mass surveillance pervades, and we're imprisoned by our watchers. We can never know when or by whom our movements are catalogued, and I don't feel safe in my hometown anymore. Privacy lets the vulnerable shield themselves from the powerful. It's a fundamental right spelled out in the Fourth Amendment that helps us protect our First Amendment right to free speech. Architecting a mass surveillance state connecting Asheville with the rest of the nation is at odds with these rights and squanders our precious resources on data centers. It also sows fear and mistrust. At the May 12th City Council meeting, I talked about the metadata that Axon collects, controls, keeps, and shares for their own purposes. In addition to recording license plates, Axon turns every vehicle surveilled into a fingerprint of attributes by tagging unique details like color, make, model, stickers, and aftermarket accessories. It correlates that metadata with location, timestamp, and direction of travel, which are also metadata. Our metadata fingerprint is more than enough to identify us. As an independent data controller, Axon reserves the right to share our metadata with unnamed internal and external stakeholders. That's what they keep, and it cannot be clawed back. Axon and Flock may tell you that APD can shorten the file storage period. That sounds responsive until you read the fine print. In the case of Flock specifically, customers must opt in to change their retention policy. But an officer can flag an individual record as evidence, which exempts that record from deletion indefinitely. More importantly, none of this matters once another agency copies the data. Just ask City of Mountain View, California. A city audit found a sharing setting had been silently active on the Mountain View flock cameras for months without the police department's knowledge or permission, allowing over 250 unapproved agencies to run roughly 600,000 searches on the city's data in a single year. After that, Mountain View City Council unanimously voted to terminate their flock contract. You may assume that, you know, this isn't a problem. After all, you've been assured that the city still owns the video. It reminds me of what President Obama said in 2013 when he told us nobody is listening to our telephone calls. He said officials are not looking at our content. They're just sifting through metadata to identify leads on folks who might. engage in terrorism. This was his response to Edward Snowden's disclosure about the NSA's nationwide warrantless dragnet on US citizens. Not even a year later, the former director of the NSA and CIA, General Hayden said, quote, we kill people based on metadata. Today, we're watching in real time how the very definition of domestic terrorism can bend to suit the political whim of whomever holds power. Last September, an executive order designated Antifa a political movement with no formal structure as domestic terrorists. Days later, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 turned that designation into a governing strategy. These directives authorize the government to investigate anyone they deem as fomenting political violence before it occurs. They define political violence by ideological markers such as, quote, anti-American, which makes me wonder what they mean. Who gets to decide what is anti-American and who is a true patriot? What's particularly insidious is that neither document requires you to be a card-carrying member of anything. As long as they consider you to be acting on behalf of Antifa, you are now an enemy of the state. Axon is not just selling equipment. They are a data broker, and we are the product. The Department of Homeland Security is already a major customer with a $370 million contract. A subpoena or national security letter is all it takes to compel Axon to share our data, and we won't even know the disclosure happened. Soon other adjacent agencies like NC State Troopers will be deputized to act on behalf of ICE in compliance with 287G. They'll also get access to our data and Asheville won't have the authority to say no. Using AI powered mass surveillance assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Warrantless dragnets turn everyone into a suspect. The way you can protect us in this moment, right now, is to cancel Flock and not subscribe to Axon Fuses in the first place. Every one of you took an oath to this city, not to a tech company and not to whoever holds federal power. Right now, you have a choice. Plug Asheville into a federal surveillance pipeline we cannot unplug or refuse it while we still can. There is no version of this where you say later you didn't know. We warned you about the metadata. You were told about the subpoenas we'll never see. You know our neighbors could be swept up by nothing more than a definition of, quote, anti-American. that changes with whoever's in office. If you vote yes anyway, that is a choice with consequences. City Council members, I wonder, what will you choose as your legacy? Will you choose to be on the right side of history? How will we, the people, remember you?

Thank you. That was awesome. Really good.

I put the waving of, yes, perfect.

Okay, the next person signed up to speak is Honor Moore and then Andrew Gentry.

So much has already been said, so I don't want to repeat some of the things that other people have mentioned. I want to say welcome, DK, Wesley. We're real happy to have you. Thank you. And also, thank you to all of our public servants up there. It's a crazy year right now, isn't it? So many of you know that I graduated from the Asheville Citizens Police Academy. I've had the opportunity to learn quite a bit about all the departments and the high level of accountability that our police department has. A lot of people don't know that other police departments come to our city to study how we do it. That's how highly regarded we are in the state. So here's some interesting things that I've learned, that the flock LPRs that APD and the sheriff's office use are not surveillance cameras, per se. They don't capture any video. They do not capture snapshots of people. They solely focus on taking a moment in time to photo the vehicles and their tags as the car passes the LPR. So if you're on foot, a bicycle, or even a unicycle, it will not show up in the system. The data is only held for 21 days and then it's purged. And if the APD wants to retain any data from the system, the investigating officer must complete a sworn affidavit attesting to the reason why the data should be retained and they must file a new affidavit annually if they wish to keep the data for more than one year. Now that's actually enshrined in the North Carolina law and it applies to every police agency in the state that uses this type of technology. So here's an interesting crime that was solved, and I'd read about it. It was in my neighborhood. A very drunk man with his four-year-old in the back seat was driving down Charlotte Street, which is a road diet, a safe street, in the middle of the day. He ran, rammed into a city worker and sent him flying in the air. Thank you. We caught him with the lots.

Thank you. Andrew Gentry and then Patrick Conant.

brief, we have a tech professional to step up and explain the very real dangers of mass surveillance. I work with workers' rights in the community, and I hear a lot from the people that power this city. The general conversation that I've been privy to is that these are warrantless searches. We all are aware of that. We know who voted for what and why. The consequences of that will come out in the polls, I'm absolutely certain. The thing that comes to mind is A law is unjust. It must be disobeyed. There are people in this community that will stand up for their privacy. It's already occurring. It is unfortunate that this has to be a fight between the citizens and the people that we place in charge of this city. There are better ways to police a community. I leave that up to our lovely law enforcement folks, of course. And I'll end with this. A government that requires warrantless searches to control its population is not a government that is based on trust from the elected officials to the citizens. Without that trust, a government is invalid. If an elected official cannot govern a city without the trust of their constituents, they do not need to be part of that government. We have the ability to fix that pretty soon. Take that into account when you make your decision tonight. Thank you.

Thank you. Patrick Conan and then Aaron Dahlstrom.

Hey, I'm Patrick Conant from East West Asheville. I support canceling the FLOC contract, but this resolution doesn't go nearly far enough. The APD memo says the department is already working on expanding and integrating Axon's ALPR capabilities. Canceling FLOC doesn't end license plate surveillance in Asheville. The bigger system isn't addressed by this resolution at all. Tonight is about 11 fixed cameras. There are 162 ALPRs on APD vehicles right now. Last week, APD's own dashboard showed that system retaining 3.4 million plate reads for 90 days, which is three times longer than the city has publicly claimed you retain data. I documented that writing in writing to council on Friday. This week, right before this vote, the dashboard quietly changed. 21 days of retention with two and a half million records purged overnight. The numbers moved because residents were watching. Retention turned out to be a dial staff can turn overnight without a vote. Constitutional concerns, your own words, don't end at one vendor's logo. I'm asking for two adjustments tonight. First, expand the resolution to pause all ALPR use and equipment purchases for every vendor, fixed and fleet mounted alike. Second, commit to a real evaluation during the pause. Genuine public input, independent experts the community helps choose, and balanced public hearings so residents can decide if AOPRs are the right tool for our community. And the public still can't see what we're buying. The city is withholding Axon's price list behind over $7 million in public funds. To council, I ask, have you seen what we're purchasing from Axon? It's time to deflock and to ax off ALPRs in Asheville. Thank you.

Thank you. Aaron Dahlstrom and then Heather Diboki.

Hey there, council. Council is proposing to cancel the Flock contract while expanding the contract with Axon to include technology that is essentially a one-to-one replacement. This seems to suggest that Flock is somehow a bad surveillance company and Axon is a good surveillance company. So I want to share a little bit more about Axon so that Council can know a little bit more about their preferred surveillance vendor. And unfortunately, that means we all have to get in a time machine back to the first Trump administration, when in 2018, Trump appointed a man named Ron Vitilio to serve as acting director of ICE. Like most Trump appointees, he only lasted a few months, but he was able to leverage his connections to the White House to land a job in the private sector. Does anybody want to guess where? That is right, Axon, where he worked as the head of the Department of Homeland Security Program and Strategy, managing the relationship between Axon and the very agency he used to run. He was there for six years. During that time, Axon's lobbying spending increased significantly and their federal contracts grew with it. Last year, Axon held $32 million in ICE contracts. Earlier this year, ICE is pursuing a $220 million contract with Axon. a nearly seven-fold increase. Curiously, two weeks before that announcement by ICE, Trump bought as much as $5 million in stock in Axon. So why does all this matter? That's because the connections between ICE and Axon run deep, and the separation between their interests are paper thin. Speaking of paper, I've brought all of this information in a handout for council members tonight with links to verifiable, reputable sources of information, like the New York Times, CSNBC, Open Secrets. Canceling the Flock contract is a good thing and an important step, but replacing one surveillance company for another with even deeper ties to an increasingly authoritarian federal government is not what we are asking.

Thank you. Heather Diboki, and then Thomas Belmore.

Hi, City Council. Just, yeah. Okay. My name's Heather. I'm an artist in the River Arts District. And I was made aware last week that we have a flock camera in the district. I have a lot of questions about that. And I also realize that the flock, you know, may or may not come down, but I really don't want to see any ALPR in the district. I think it's a strange choice. And I'm not a speaker. In regards to this, I asked my fellow artists how they felt about this and came to you with a petition of about 45 names. It's in gel pen as for artistry. I will continue to grow this list because the artists of the RAD are deeply concerned about these kind of technologies. Artists are often protesters and provocateurs and it's troubling to us in general. I think surveillance creates a system or an environment where creativity can't thrive. So kindly, perhaps, take all the ARPs down. OK, thanks. Thank you.

and so just to clarify one more time so this is a resolution to remove the 11 stationary flock cameras that are and they are license plate readers and the city doesn't have any other stationary license plate readers so so if there are others they will they they're obviously operated by somebody else or pursuant to somebody else's agreement thomas bill moore and then it'll be nina tovish thank you

Council, we won't forget the May 12th vote to contract with Axon and create the RTIC using Futus mass surveillance AI to track innocent Ashevillians, but we can forgive you by reversing that vote. The resolution today to remove flock cameras after they're already being replaced appears to be a distraction from the unpopular mass civilian expansion already underway. We won't forget, but we can forgive. You can each be heroes by reversing course on ALPRs, surveillance drones, and AI networking technology used for mass surveillance. Today's vote won't make us forget Bo Hess standing with Chuck Edwards accepting $1.4 million for mass surveillance expansion. It won't make us forget Sage Turner's proposal to retain access to the flock network by keeping one camera pointed at a wall. member turn i don't want to pick on you but i have heard you say that we can not withdraw from the 7.5 year axon contract but cancel council voted to entangle the contract and you can direct the city to negotiate a pre-may 12th status quo madam vice mayor mosley council members olman and smith we will remember your may vote when we vote in november so we do have a um prohibition in the statement that i

read regarding making commentary attacks on candidates for political office. So if you'll just please.

I was trying to be respectful. I get it. You're telling. I apologize. I understand. Thank you. Well, Madam Mayor, you said that you have heard all the concerns and want to slow down to ensure that this technology does not get ahead of us. I encourage you to prove me or to prove that tonight's move is not a distraction. Pause and reverse the installation of all ALPRs, surveillance drones, and mass surveillance AI software. We can forgive May 12th, and you all can be heroes. Thank you so much.

I think there's a song. OK, Nina Tovish and then Walker Spruill.

Good evening. I'd like to pivot a little on the conversation here. I wonder how many of us in the room are surprised by the outpouring of concern and attention around this issue. Six years ago, we had a Citizens Police Advisory Commission. Now it's in perpetual cold storage. I would like to suggest that it would be wise to reconstitute an entity that can serve as an intermediate focal point for citizens' concerns and interests around questions of policing. We currently have nobody that does that for us. How helpful would it have been to have had an ongoing dialogue around these issues of surveillance and public safety in a way that included community members with lived experience, with professional know-how, and with roots in the community. That would have afforded an opportunity for members of the public to come forward and make their views known. It would have been an opportunity to consult and advise counsel on these matters. And going forward, if the current contracts stay in place, whether it's Flock or whether it's Act on Fuses, they provide an opportunity to provide accountability, oversight, and transparency so the public can be sure that these technologies are being used appropriately and in accordance with their civil rights. So I urge you to take CPAC out of cold storage, bring it back into life, stock it with people who care and know. Thank you. Thank you for your consideration.

Walkers, Bruhl, and then Rachel Cohen.

Walker, she, her, Asheville resident, long-time listener, first-time caller. Just kidding, I don't actually listen to what y'all say because we get a lot of lip service from up here. I'm actually here for y'all, the people showing up, and not my first time here. Y'all are lucky there's an overflow room because there are a lot more of us that are here, and these are just the people who are privileged enough to be able to show up. Not everybody's getting paid to be here. So I wanna say a big thing about government is it's hurt like wait, wait, wait, hurry up, get it done. And that is not the pace of Asheville. We're in the mountains, we need to slow down. I love that you want to talk to the community about these proposals to the amendments to the ADUs, not because they're going to fight against it, but because they deserve to hear from you as their representative that something might change. We need y'all to speak up for us because did y'all see that presentation about the new Azalea Park? Detail, understanding, research, history coming out in this beautiful presentation. What did we get about these license plate readers? We've got silence. We've got people backtracking. So instead, stop with the lip service. Example, the DOT I-26 connector. I know it's not y'all, but it's your boy, okay, NCDOT. Y'all worked with the community for years and destroyed the plan. cancel flock, slow down, be a part of Asheville, and help keep this community what we escaped the city for. Thank you. Thank you.

Rachel Cohen and then Joel Schumann.

I'm back. So thank you very much for considering this resolution. You should absolutely cancel the FLOC contract, but that is only the first step. The city should not use any nationally networked mass surveillance tools, including Axon AOPRs and FUSUS-powered surveillance, no matter which company sells them. They are incompatible with our rights to privacy. And since they collect personal data indiscriminately, they affect us on a mass scale, every single resident. At the very least, I ask that you vote whether to use ALPRs before deploying them in the future, since you're keeping the door open to Axon brand ones or other ones, because we deserve to know which ones of you support these mass surveillance tools. The city should also not use ALPR databases. Searching them violates our rights because of how the data was collected, regardless of who owns the cameras. That's irrelevant. We need to be honest about our lack of control over our data from nationally networked surveillance tech. The city may own it, but as we've heard, the bigger company owns the metadata, which they can basically use however they want. Once the data is in a networked system, it is out of our hands. That's a big deal. Also, we should ask these questions and put in place safeguards before we sign contracts like the Axon one, not afterwards. Lastly, I just want to note that I was so disappointed by the behavior of many of you at the RTIC public hearing. You are public servants, we are the public, you're here to serve us, so listening to us with respect, not texting at the same time, not looking away, guffawing, et cetera, is a basic expectation that we have, thank you.

Joel Schumann, and then Jen Hampton.

Winning City Council. I'm here to speak in favor of terminating the city's contract with FLOC, and I'm here today to ask you not to treat that as the finish line. Cancel the axon fuses contracts and stop the spread of mass surveillance. I'm a member of Asheville DSA. I'm also a data scientist that works on these kinds of national databases. I fully understand the power of these systems, and I'm not talking about how APD might use this. So I want to get to the core of the issue, We are turning on mass surveillance around the nation and here in Asheville at unprecedented speed. There's no emergency forcing us to have a step change in the level of surveillance in Asheville. There is no mandate to remove our citizens' right to privacy. I can name emergencies, affordable housing, healthcare access. We can't just cancel the impacts of Helene, but a surveillance contract is not like that. It's a choice and we can just say no. If we are really worried about crime, let's do what the city can to address the root economic causes. These systems are used against immigrants, dissidents, and anyone the government wants to persecute. The systems are used by billionaires to have AIs watch, track, and monetize our every move. The value of the company is not the service that they're providing to these cities, it is the data that they own. That is why they're worth so much money. reality is that these are already everywhere in the nation it happened suddenly in 2023 there was a few hundred cameras in 2024 low thousands in 2026 there are hundreds of thousands in 6 000 communities in four united states Some will say that if Asheville gets rid of the cameras and the other players do not, that it's just a gesture. But I'm asking the city council to take up the fight to prevent mass surveillance from spreading however much we can. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Mayor, can we ask if there are seats next to somebody if they raise their hand?

If you have an open seat next to you, can you raise your hand? Like five, six? How many people do we have downstairs?

Not many.

I think we can bring them all. We can fit everybody else. Okay. So Jen Hampton and then Paige Husiak.

Hey, y'all. Good evening. My name is Jen Hampton. I'm with Asheville Food and Beverage United and Western North Carolina delegate to the Southern Workers Assembly. First, I wanna say thank you for listening to the community and moving to cancel the flock contract. Supporting the termination of flock is a solid step toward protecting the privacy of Asheville residents, and it shows that grassroots community feedback actually matters and works. But let's be completely honest with each other tonight. This move does look like a total bait and switch. We want us to celebrate canceling FLOC while we quietly wade through a massive federally funded Axon surveillance dragnet. And let's call that what it is, the same exact police state, just with a different corporate logo. An independent analysis, which you've already heard earlier tonight, of these specific policies revealed that the promised civil liberties protections simply aren't there. There are no real safeguards against spying on political demonstrations, peaceful protests, or mutual aid volunteers going about their daily lives. Instead, it gives the police broad, unchecked authority to monitor anyone they want under the thinnest of excuses. If FLOC isn't right for Asheville, then an identical mass surveillance web built by Axon isn't right for us either. We urge you tonight to amend your decision. Don't just kill the FLOC contract and get the public off your backs. Explicitly include a complete pause on the Axon ALPR contract. Give the community the time that we need to review the data and make the decisions collectively that are right for our community. Let's not rush into another massive surveillance system funded by federal grants without real consent and discussion. So please pause the acts on contract. Let the public have a say in solidarity, y'all. Thank you.

Paige Husiak, and then, well, then we're going to get to James Risner, or Risner, Risner, and... Risner. Risner. Risner.

So what everybody else said, Axon poses the exact same problems that flock cameras do. But I also want to take a second to talk about the kinds of crime that are reduced by surveillance. It's petty crime. It's break-ins to cars. I ain't heard nobody been like, I'm not going to take my kid outside because there's been cars broken into. It's stuff like homeless people shooting up. Do you think they're not going to shoot up in front of a camera? They shoot up in broad daylight in front of God and everybody, but what's going to stop that is a camera? It's just petty crime. Violent crimes aren't affected by surveillance. All right.

James, James Reisner. Did I do it, did I say it right? Okay, there are several people that have yielded their time to Mr. Reisner, and if you'll just, if you'll just raise your hand when I call your name. Okay, Shahela Andreana Jason. Thank you. Micah Grant Tomlinson. Yep, okay. And Pam Brown. Okay, thanks. Thank you for having a really easy to say name. Really. Okay, you all set? Wait, you've got to hit. We're trying. You've got to do, oh, is it loading?

It's a PDF. I didn't think to convert it to PowerPoint.

Is this okay then for you?

It'll be fine. It's good for the purposes. You can see my wedding, so that's what we're here for.

I can see it. Yeah, and also you sent it. Well, I got to see it ahead of time.

Hello, City Council of Asheville, North Carolina. My name is James Reisner. I'm here tonight to represent myself in a private citizen capacity to explain to you how we can all create a win-win-win scenario for not only the City Council, but the police officers of this city, as well as the body of citizens. But first, I'm going to start out with a personal recollection of how automated license plate readers have affected David and I. David is my husband. He's over there.

David, you want to put your hand up?

Say hi. These are photos from our wedding that we had in Kennesaw, Georgia last year. In mid-2025, David was traveling home from work in Atlanta. Atlanta automated license plate reader systems, which is Phlox home territory, so it was likely one of Phlox cameras, triggered a felony stop with the response involving deadly force. with my husband in the car. He was riding an Uber that was registered to a victim of domestic violence whose husband, who was suspected of domestic violence, on the title as well, according to title records that were outdated or otherwise misinformed. That license plate reader flagged David's Uber or Lyft, whichever service it was, for a felony stopped by police officers and officers responded in Pretty good time, I think, and they did so and pulled over this vehicle with David in it along with the victim of domestic violence and pointed rifles at him. They detained David and this woman who was a victim for about a half hour and then they released them to continue their journey home. I don't really want to think about the alternative resolutions to that scenario. It's not a good scenario to dwell on, and it's frankly very tough to talk about. But I do want to talk about how Flock and Axon are not reliable narrators when they are selling you systems that cost citizens in this city millions of dollars and millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in other cities as well. There is a, well, here, let me scroll down here. There's a 37% error read rate overall on a per character basis, which means that if your Flock camera Is taking a photo of a license plate. There's a 37% chance. 1 of those characters is going to be misread. Just 1 of those characters, and that can involve a resolution to a different plate number. If that is what happens in the system does not flag it properly. I also want to emphasize that 10% of states are misidentified on the plates. So, if you have a plate from Alabama, and there's a. Alabama car in the state of North Carolina, it may not necessarily be able to detect the appropriate state that is actually on that plate. It may resolve to not only a different plate, but a different plate number as well, which means that your identity could be mistaken in many different vectors in many different cases. Per PhloxMath on their website and on their investor report, 1.4 billion Monthly misreads out of information. Extracted at 20B scans of license plate readers overall. This means that even though the error rate is 7%, because 20B scans are being conducted nationwide. 1.4B of those scans are false positives or otherwise errors themselves. In Gillum versus the City of Aurora, a mother sued the city because she also was the victim of a felony stop, and she was detained along with four children at gunpoint put on the pavement. This is not to imply that that scenario would happen here, but it could. And that is not to say that we want that to happen. I think we can all agree those are all scenarios we want to avoid, whether it's my husband or a mother or anyone else who would be innocent. I understand the police have a tough job. I get it. And we could terminate those contracts today with Flock and Axon because Flock and Axon could be out of business in Asheville, but that's not feasible. And I want to thank Kim Roney for explaining to me the nuances behind that. she educated me the other day in a private one-on-one meeting where i bumped into her at a coffee shop she educated me about the nuances and the challenges that the city is facing currently with the flock and axon contracts and how there are bottlenecks and wraparound services that are being provided by these vendors and so i get it it's a very difficult decision to make and it's a very controversial decision to make And there's a lot of pressure being put on the city council, I think rightfully, but also there is a feasibility component of it that makes your jobs more difficult, and I'm here to help solve that. So non-math surveillance hardware alternatives is something I want to talk to you today. You could still have a license plate reader in a local network that does not share data at all with anyone else. It doesn't necessarily even have to be connected to an external database. It doesn't have to utilize metadata or anything else that is proprietary to Flock and Axon. Previous speakers were correct when they identified derivative data, otherwise known as metadata, in previous speeches that are products of Axon and Flock's identity resolution process in which they are utilizing the license plate reads and, in some cases, even the devices that connect via Bluetooth to scan and conduct identity searches and even identify the social media profiles of potential drivers of these cars. So all this is to say is there are alternative solutions from alternative vendors. These open hardware solutions include body cameras that are manufactured either in the city, if that's what you all wanted, and I could do that for you, or using consumer-grade body cameras with weatherization and toughness enhancement. However, there is also Axis Open Platform with commercial Axis W102 and W120 body cameras with open APIs, which means that your technology department can figure out how best to interface with these cameras, both in a body camera as well as a license plate reader capacity. If that is something that you desire, you could dismantle your flock systems on a timetable about six months, as well as the axon systems, and I will help facilitate in a volunteer capacity alternative solutions that not only keep the city safe, people such as David safe, but also our police officers able to respond and engage in a productive fashion with our community. I also want to talk about another potential boon for the police force, which would be the five-year projected savings comparison between staying with the proprietary system, such as Axon and Flock and Fusis, And open source offering, which could result in a 5 year net impact of savings, which could then allow for officer retention to take place as well as bonuses for new officers to combat the shortage of officers that we have. So, that way officers could then respond and be present in communities that currently do not have the appropriate coverage that they need to feel safe in those communities as was specified by Councilman mostly who is the vice mayor. So, going through this just very briefly, we're looking at a $1.2 million spend on leased and bundled cameras and software. We're looking at cloud storage at $2.1 million, fuchsious, right? And then we're also looking at recurring expenses of $350,000, maintenance and upgrades occasionally, depending on how the schedules and the fee schedules work. It turns out it's $4.5 million total versus an off open source off ramp solution at $650,000. That's a rough estimate. If you hold me to that in six months, yikes, but you know, I can't cover that. Sorry. So on hearings, uh, but overall the savings could be in the millions of dollars at $3.9 million. I want to issue some closing remarks here, and I want to say I appreciate Councilman Roney for taking the time to appropriately explain and contextualize this situation that is very contentious. I would like to also additionally thank the council at large for listening, and I would like to make myself available as a resource to the city manager or anyone else who needs further context. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay, now Scotland Martin and then Bobby Skelton.

Hello, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council. I'm going to be brief, as many of my points have already been hit on. In your words on social media, we need to protect our citizens, we need to protect our civil liberties, but we also need to protect our communities, make sure our policies not only keep people safe, but protect people's privacy, end quote. If the people have been heard loud and clear and we need to keep our people and their privacy safe, then I wonder why on more than one occasion public comment on this very topic has been rushed out, not just for comment on the contract with Flock, but before one council member, sorry, all but one council member voted yes to accept a contract to create an intelligence center using axon fuses to expand automated mass surveillance. Not only has this entire process dealing with automated mass surveillance been undemocratic, but the agreement itself violated our Fourth Amendment right to protection against unwarranted searches. Terminating the Flock contract is a first step, but the people will not forget which of you voted for it in the first place, and therein violated the constitutional rights of the people of Asheville. You serve the people, not Flock, not Axon. Thank you.

Bobby Skelton, and then Elena Drachty.

What's up, y'all? How y'all doing? I'm Bobby Skelton. I'm a porter and I'm a member of the AFBU. First off, I'm just going to say most of this message doesn't even go to Kim at all because she voted no against Flock, against Exxon, against mass surveillance, and I think she actually really does care about the people in this city. The rest of you, shame on you. for voting for mass surveillance, for not actually doing your job to try to keep this community safe. It's disgusting. Here's the simple part. Number one, I demand for y'all to take action now. Stop wasting people's time and fully ban the use of Flock, Exxon, and any other poor profit automated license plate readers now and in the future. Number two, place a moratorium on the use of existing ALPRs, meaning Flock, Exxon, and any other for-profit companies in this field. Number three, remove any and all language permanently about using Flock, Exxon cameras, or any other nonprofit or for-profit companies in this field now and in the future. We have other things that we could be focusing on in this city and spending our time on. We need affordable housing. We got people who can't eat and feed their fucking kids. Sorry. But it is true. And we got more important things to do. And y'all need to be doing that. Kim, you kick ass. The rest of y'all, I ask that you resign if you don't cancel Flock and Exxon. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Elena Drotti and I hope they spelled it with a T. Sorry. Sorry about that. That's okay. Natara Kittles is after that.

Good evening, everyone. It's a tough conversation, isn't it? You're receiving a lot of honest conversation, a lot of honest feedback from us. My name is Elena Draughty. I was a journalist for 15 years, and then I started with the city of Asheville in 2022 in the Inhumane Resources Department. It was the most abusive place I have ever worked. I resigned the Monday following our one-year Helene anniversary. I'm sure you remember that. The reason why I bring up why the city of Asheville, the penthouse in particular, the good old girls club and the penthouse of this pink prison, is because the bullying there looks exactly...

Please direct your comments to the council, please.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. It's exactly... Same brand, same flavor of bullying that y'all are inflicting on us. This is not for you, by the way, Councilperson Roney. So please don't take my eye contact as in any way an indictment against you. You're endangering our very lives by creating a surveillance state in our city. I really don't understand why, though, because this affects y'all's families, too. Are y'all getting a payout? Like, I can't. I've been racking my brain since last year why you support this. And it didn't have to get this bad. We started our outcry in the public safety meeting with the former police chief, Mike Lamb, during Charlotte's wedding. Remember, we had that public safety meeting for two hours, and we called in, and we repeated over and over again, this is not okay with us. So, like someone else has also said, we've been ignored repeatedly. Our time has been cut off. Your amendment doesn't . So, this is offensive.

You think we citizens of Asheville are unintelligent?

We voted, hired you to work for us. We don't work for you.

You work for us. All right, thank you very much.

History will not remember you kindly. Shame on each of you.

OK, Natara Kittles. And then Javan Lap. And I probably said that wrong. I think it's Javan like Raven. Javan, thank you.

Hi, y'all. My name is Natara Kittles. I was born and raised here and currently live and work in West Asheville. I'm here to voice my support of canceling the contract with FLOC and I'm also asking council to amend the ambiguous language that leaves room for FLOC to be introduced in the future. The privacy and civil liberty concerns around FLOC have been well documented and council should cancel the contract in a definitive way. I'd also like to say that while Flock is the most spoken about mass surveillance company right now, the criticism of Flock applies to all for-profit ALPR systems, including Flock's competitor, Axon. I believe that council really has an opportunity here to rebuild some of the trust with the community and show us that you actually are listening and learning about these systems and not just trying to bait and switch conveniently before the election. Simply put, we don't want Axon ALPRs or mass surveillance either. I urge you to vote today to cancel FLOC without the possibility of reentering the contract. And I also urge you to cancel the Axon ALPR and FUSES contract. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Jayvin Lapp and then Elizabeth Rawlings.

You got it right the second time. Good evening, council. My name is Javen. I would like to voice support for counseling the flock contract. I hope this is a good phase step towards reducing dangerous surveillance, overreach, and not a cynical attempt at getting good headlines before an election while still planning to erect axon LPRs all over the city. I hope Council understands that the collective outrage over the RTIC and flock cameras is not about one company. It's about all forms of automated network surveillance, particularly those operated by for-profit corporations hungry for our data. These cameras are dangerous. They often make mistakes, resulting in guns being drawn, as was eloquently explained earlier, all over the country on innocent people due to errors in the automated systems. They're also ripe for abuse, as reported heavily by 404 Media and Ben Jordan. Today, my normal travels would take me by three of these cameras, one on Haywood Road, one on Brevard Road, and one near the airport. And I don't know which ones y'all control and which ones are the county or which ones are who. I managed to avoid two of them by taking longer and more annoying routes through neighborhoods, which I do every single time. Not because I'm committing any crimes, I'm going to work, but because I do not trust these companies with my daily location habits. So I'm asking you to put a pause on any form of ALPRs or automated cameras until a full and extensive public feedback process can be completed. And sometimes I hear the comments that once a crime happens, we'll all want these cameras, that the only reason we don't want them is because we don't understand. And I'll just say, 12 years ago, I was punched at 51 grill by a stranger. He broke my face three places right here. That crime was never solved. My father was killed by an unknown assailant in Dallas, Texas, also unsolved. I would not trade a conviction in any of those things for these cameras. I don't want these cameras. And it doesn't matter what random stories they can find that show convictions. These are violations of our privacy. Thank you.

Thank you. Elizabeth Rawlings and then Shawn Snyder.

Good evening, Council. I want to start off by thanking you for proposing to end the flock contract, and I would like to encourage you, like so many others have, to put a pause on all of these surveillance infrastructure that we have, purchase of any other ALPR tech, regardless of vendor, and take time to talk to the community about how they feel about having these in their neighborhoods. I am a pastor for community of spiritual practice in Asheville and most of my the people who come to my community are trans and particularly trans people of color and they are incredibly afraid all of the time about being followed about what might happen to them at the federal level and they are not people who are going to come speak here tonight in front of you because of their fears but They are very afraid that when this current administration decides that it wants to find trans people, it will use this kind of technology to do so. It is already doing it with immigrants. We know that. We know it's already being used to find women who've had abortions. And with the metadata, there is nothing stopping these companies from giving the metadata to the federal government, even in the contracts, if it says the pictures are yours. I also want to speak briefly about a fear that is mine and is personal. As a clergy person and a community organizer, I have had instances in other places that I live where the police know who I am. And they make me very aware of that. I have had friends who have had to move from the cities that they live in because the protests that they go to and are involved in make the police mad. And I tell you that because a couple of years ago, I wrote an email to counsel and Kim Roney forwarded it to the police chief so that I could get an answer to my question. It was about surveillance. And when I checked my social media later, I was being criticized.

thanks sean snyder and then um canyon deluca deluca i'm getting you with the names tonight

Hey, y'all. First, I want to thank you for pushing to end the fog contract. This is something that the majority of Asheville from across the political spectrum want, and I'm glad to see you move in that direction. With that being said, this cannot be the end to this conversation. I am a member of the trans community here in Asheville, and our ability to move freely is very important. Elders in our community used to have a PO box up in Virginia, which they used to get HRT. I have also heard at least one individual who travels here across the border from Tennessee to get care here, and many people traveled from different states for gender affirming surgery. AOPRs were used to track a woman who got an abortion in Texas, being in a state that makes this type of reproductive healthcare illegal. We in the community see these tools not being a tool to protect us, as they may claim, but as one to harm us. especially by the federal government, which considers us to be terrorists. If Tennessee decides to fully ban any gender affirming care, these cameras can easily be used to harm them. In case in Texas, states that claim protections for those accessing abortion still have their cameras searched, with them not realizing that's why it was being done. You keep saying you'll make sure that this is not used for ice activity, but I want to ask you, will you share data with Highway Patrol or Henderson County? Both of them are in the 287G program, which turns these departments into an arm of Homeland Security. Giving this data to them is giving the data to ICE. We are asking to cancel the FWAP contract. We demand a resolution be amended to pause all AOPR use and equipment purchases and demand a real evaluation during the pause with public input, independent experts, and a balance of public hearings. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, I'm ready for Canyon DeLuca, and then Lily Clark.

Hello, good evening, everybody. I think first thing I would like to say is thank you for allowing us all to speak. Last time I was here, we got cut off in an hour, so grateful for that. So just a couple of points that I want to touch on. I did some number crunching based on the misreads and the amount of scans that is posted online on our transparency board. Flock and the numbers came out to using that smaller 7% number, the potential for up to 25,000 misreads with Flock ALPRs and the potential for 58,000 misreads for Axon ALPRs. In light of that, I'm asking Councilmember Kim Roney, Esther, Sage, anyone who's been on social media on this issue, I would ask you to do a few things. Cancel the FOT contract. We support it. I know a lot of you want to do that. Also, we would like the resolution to be amended. pause all automatic license plate readers in use and equipment purchases. This resolution must apply to every vendor in both fixed and fleet mounted cameras. We demand a real evaluation during the pause, committed public input, independent experts, the community helps choose and balance public hearings, and also to remove all language about the ability to have these cameras be brought back in the future.

Thank you.

OK, Lily Clark. OK, Jessica Benitez. And then Sean Fern. Ms. Bennett, yes, there you go.

Asheville City Council. Companies like Flock and Axon aid in ICE's nationwide campaign to terrorize immigrants, their loved ones, and those who speak out to defend their neighbors. ABD claims that a filter will prevent Axon's system from being used by immigration enforcement, but ABD currently shares data with jurisdictions that participate in the 287 program. This program gives These agencies have power to enforce federal immigration law, essentially making them ICE agents that now have access to Asheville surveillance database. Although APD referenced San Francisco Police Department's use of surveillance technology as a success story, SFPD has been reported to have let out-of-state law enforcement run over 1.6 million illegal searches using their ALPR database. Asheville City Council has not proven that they conveniently guaranteed the safety of our undocumented residents. Given reporting by Open Secrets that Axon held $31.9 million in contracts with ICE in 2025 is a moral failure of Asheville City Council to funnel more money into a company that directly profits off of imprisoning, brutalizing, and murdering our neighbors. When I ask you to protect our immigrant community, I am asking you to protect the people that I love. I ask that you cancel the Flock contract, that you amend the resolution to pause all ALPR use and equipment purchases, regardless of the vendor. I ask that you include a ban of purchasing and using any brand of for-profit ALPRs, whether it be Flock, Axon, or any other company. And I ask that you commit to holding public hearings LISTENING TO INDEPENDENT EXPERTS THAT OUR COMMUNITY CHOOSES AND ACTUALLY LISTENING TO PUBLIC FEEDBACK DURING THAT CALL. THANK YOU.

SEAN FERN AND THEN MO KNIGHT.

THANKS TO COUNCIL FOR DOING THIS OFTEN THANKLESS WORK. especially Councilmember Roney for your consistency on this issue, and thanks to everyone who showed up to speak tonight. I appreciate the move to terminate the FLOC contract. I believe cameras from these surveillance companies offer a false sense of security that can just as easily be used against us, and they are no substitute for the hard work of building community where we look after each other. We have Asheville residents who are currently in ICE detention, and thanks to 287G, this surveillance will get more of us taken away. For these surveillance companies, we are both the customer and the product. We pay them for cameras as well as data they have collected. I ask for four further steps at this time. Publish the Axon contract and all associated costs. Cover cameras until they are taken down. cancel all subscriptions for access to give more money to these companies, and stop the use and purchase of all ALPRs for a period of evaluation with input from the community and independent experts. Thank you.

Thank you. And then Mo Knight.

the public isn't stupid we see that this is election season sleight of hand we know the metadata collected will be available increased to the increasingly hostile federal agencies the penal code is already selectively asymmetrically and injudiciously applied now the government designates people against fascism as terrorists People seeking reproductive care, queer people, and our immigrant community members are under constant threat already. Any citizen exercising their right to resist the Amir Israeli fascist Zionist genocidal entity we have become as a country is now at risk of being sent to ICE concentration camps where incels rape children. Prove you aren't being bribed or blackmailed. Save your souls and turn back now.

Okay, that concludes our speakers that have signed up under this item. Council, we have a motion and a second. Any other questions or comments before we vote?

I have a comment. I want to be clear that I have concerns about flock. I have concerns about privacy, data sharing, civil liberties, and accountability. Those concerns are not new for me. Long before I served on this council, I had the privilege of representing Johnny Rush alongside my friend and mentor, the late Attorney James Ferguson. I know why safeguards, transparency, and police accountability matter. I also want to acknowledge the APD of today. I'm grateful for the work our officers are doing, particularly in their partnership with the Housing Authority and its residents. And as Council's liaison to the Housing Authority, I have a responsibility to listen to the residents who may never come to this microphone. Some are afraid to speak publicly because they fear retaliation. This absence from this room should not be mistaken for silence. And I need to say something else plainly. This whole thing feels deeply political to me. We are in the middle of an election season and I'm uncomfortable making public policy, particularly public safety policy, in a way that feels driven by the politics of the moment. Civil liberties and public safety are not competing values. Protecting people from government overreach and protecting people from violence are both responsibilities of government. And good governance should not be about who gets credit for taking the strongest or most visible position. My job is not to participate in political theater. My job is to govern. I support strong civil liberties protections and meaningful oversight. I support carefully regulated public safety tools when they are effective, necessary, and accompanied by meaningful safeguards and accountabilities. I can hold all of those positions at the same time. And to be clear, This resolution may terminate a contract, but it does not resolve the larger issue before us. The questions about ALPR technology, privacy, surveillance, and public safety will still be here tomorrow. And because I believe this decision should be grounded in principle rather than politics, I cannot support this resolution in its current form tonight.

Anybody else? I'm only, I would like to hear if there's anything that would be adjusted that would, much like we did earlier, is there anything that you could bring to the table that might make this more of a... Well, my general concern is that what we're attempting to do, quite frankly, is a bait and switch.

And I think we're not giving our citizens credit for seeing that and so it is a vote based on principle i'm certain that this will pass but again i need to lean into my principles recognizing that this very well could cost me from a political standpoint but i believe that the members of our community will understand my know at this time

Anybody, anyone else need to speak?

I'll just shoot from the hip. I've been listening to this conversation for some time, and I've heard a lot of different views from a lot of different people. So when I read the resolution that is presented to us tonight, I read the language of the resolution, and I feel the sentiment in the room. It seems to me that the language is only to cancel, remove, evaluate, review, but what else? What do we do for people who feel vulnerable, who feel threatened, not about privacy, but about being attacked or whatever the criminal matter could be. I have not heard anyone come with the replacement. What do we do in the meantime? What do we do next? It seems like we're going home with the victory and feeling more. Well, yeah, Mr. Reiser, thank you for that.

You're welcome.

One in a million on tonight. Um, So what I would like to know, I'm fine with them. Yeah. What I would like to know is what happens next? Do you all care what happens next when it comes to safety? Because tonight I hear privacy over conviction, privacy over safety. privacy over justice. So if the conversation was balanced, then I'll be all for it. But I haven't really heard strong advocacy for public safety, even community-led safety. So I'll be voting now.

Thank you so much for saying that, Councilwoman Smith. I really appreciate that. I appreciate that perspective a lot. I will be supporting this tonight, but with some of what my colleagues are saying in mind because this exploration for me needs to cover that. It needs to cover the missing component. You know, we talked about housing earlier. When we talk about housing, we often say we're trying to build housing for people not in the room. They don't have a voice yet. Everything we do, when it was transit, we're trying to get people on the bus that can't get to the bus. Right now, it's similar. We're trying to protect people that are victims of crime that are not getting the solve rates and the response that they need. It's multiple layers. I need solutions for crime. I need support for our police department. We are working together better than ever, and I appreciate them, and I know this is a very difficult situation for them. Everyone is trying to do the best they can to keep this city safe. I have great respect for the privacy, civil rights, all of it. We have to figure this out together. It's not surprising to me that there's a big pushback in the community. There's a lot of pushback in a lot of communities because so many are trying to figure it out. It's moving fast. I really hope this evaluation period comes back with not just detraction, but also solutions. um i appreciate everybody's time tonight i also really want to say i appreciate the civility of it last time it was a little rowdy there was banging on the walls there was yelling over people this is so much more helpful i was able to understand and hear more perspective as a result so thank you thank you to everybody that came and spoke mayor colleagues um yeah i think my colleagues bring up a good point it is election season and this

really does play into the tech billionaires' wishes for us to invite among progressives. But I think if what folks described were accurate, I think We'd all be against this, but this isn't mass surveillance. We're not using artificial intelligence. If ICE comes into our community, how are we going to hold them accountable if we don't have cameras? I have heard from black, brown, trans, working class folks, not all of us are six foot two and 170 pounds and can afford to have violent attackers out there in the community be held unaccountable. Some of us are women, some of us are elderly. Some of us are LGBTQ. Some of us are part of these populations that you claim to speak for, which you don't. We're also not talking about ICE. We're not talking about IDF. We're not talking about Georgia. We're not talking about Texas. We're talking about our Asheville Police Department in Asheville, North Carolina, that is accredited to the highest standards. that I wish more people would actually take the time to get to learn their police department. Also, could you imagine going to some sort of sales pitch and saying, I have 40% error rates. We do have 5% error rates on these license plate readers, but our APD policy says that we have to double check, triple check. And that's why it's important to understand the facts. And errors that are human errors, when I did the comparison, were much larger than these ALPRs. Public safety and civil liberties, as Vice Mayor said, are not opposing values. and I also refuse to govern as though we must choose between them. I will support Indian Asheville's contract with Flock Safety because I do believe legitimate concerns have been raised about this company's national network, its data sharing practices, and whether Asheville itself can maintain sufficient control over our community's information. However, ending one vendor's contract is not the same as rejecting responsible technology, and I will not personally allow this decision to become a backdoor to weakening or defunding the Asheville Police Department. That doesn't make any sense that we would tie the hands of our own local police department while everybody else, including criminals, have access to this. They serve legitimate public safety purposes. They can help locate stolen vehicles, find missing and endangered people, develop leads after shootings as they have recently done. I'd like to remind my folks who apparently live in neighborhoods where they don't need police, and I would love to live in that neighborhood. Please let me know where that is. But we had a lady that was held hostage in a downtown store and then ran in a FedEx truck. Guess how we were able to track them within minutes. We had a lady that was attacked in Bent Creek. And guess how we were able to track and identify that person and hold that person accountable? We had a mass shooting in downtown Asheville where innocent people were murdered and more people were injured. And guess how we developed leads by this technology? Yes, as you said, our job is to protect. Our number one job as local government is to protect the public. And I plan on doing that. And I plan on allowing our law enforcement to have every single tool at their disposal. Now, these do require strong enforceable safeguards, restricted access which we have, documented investigative purposes which we have, short retention periods which we have, controlled data sharing, which we have, and even tightened up more, regular audits, which we have, transparency and real consequences for misconduct, which we have. And the public has been clear about that. And we support that, I support that. However, I'm also not gonna accept the argument that our police, our law enforcement guys, the people who we are gonna call if we're scared, who I have literally, as a gay Mexican person who is an elected official, have entrusted with literally my life. I'm not gonna sit here and accept that these are the only people in our society that we cannot trust with technology. Come on. Okay? Those who commit serious crimes, they adapt. The threats confronting our community, they evolve. And we cannot expect our officers to respond to modern dangers while leaving them in the dark ages and trying to put them back into the 1990s. Strong oversight protects our residents, and I do support bringing back the Police Oversight Commission. That commission goes directly to the Public Safety Committee, which I chair, and I've said that from the beginning. I think the more citizen involvement is best. However, I trust Chief Stepp's leadership, and I trust the professionalism of the Asheville Police Department. And I trust them to confront danger every day on behalf of this city. We have worked too hard, as Council Member Turner said, to strengthen public safety through improved retention, training, professionalism, accreditation, and accountability. And we're not reversing those gains now. We can demand accountability without abandoning our public safety goals. We can embrace effective technology without surrendering our constitutional rights. The people of Asheville deserve both, and I will continue fighting for that.

Alright, thank you.

I know we're getting ready to vote on this, but hearing my colleagues and the real concerns in our community, I'm going to be sharing a resource that has been shared by Ben Jordan, who's here today, called the Efficacy of Flock ALPR Systems. It analyzes data over a five-year period. I'm talking with elected officials across North Carolina. I'm talking with elected officials across the South in big cities and small cities and counties. And I have concerns about false positive alerts. about the homicide count shift, about the clearance benchmarks. It has not been shown to me that the clearance rates and justice have been realized by flock cameras going up in Asheville. That doesn't match. And I also am concerned about operational reliability. When I talk about that, I'm seeing across the country that when technology is used to send first responders on wild goose chases, there's a real concern that they're not answering actual phone calls when people call for help. That is more clear to me than the clearance rates in Asheville being connected to the flock cameras. because we do need liberty and justice for all, and we've committed to working on that. I certainly do. But yeah, I think we need to look at some more of the numbers. I think the Citizens Police Advisory Committee can help. So I do support bringing that back, and I'm glad to hear there's support for that now on council. But yeah, I think we need to look at some more real numbers to understand. that we're using the right tools.

And from what I understand, the technology actually helps. It's like a force multiplier. So I do understand your concern. You want our public safety to respond effectively and faster. And so when they have this technology where they are able to zero in instead of having a bunch of false leads, they can get a lead, maybe a tip, they can go and check okay does this track with whatever the technology is saying and then they can focus on the person or people who were there instead of kind of what you were saying going on that wild goose chase and that's exactly why uh we need this technology that quite frankly is decades old this is decades decades old we've used this for years um and and so uh you know I'm glad you brought that up so that we could clarify.

I have one final appreciation. It'll be brief. I think this is about to pass, so we'll go from there. But I want to issue my gratitude to the Asheville Police Department. Chief, I hope this makes it to staff because there are a lot of scary stories about what have gone wrong in other cities, things that officers have taken advantage of using this software. It's been... I'm not sure if they can hear me. I'll speak into the mic. I think that's what I heard. It's been a number of years that this software, block software, has been in Asheville. It's not new. We didn't just bring it in in the fall. It's been, I think, since 2021. So I really want to say thank you to the police department for not being one of those scary statistics, for maintaining this software while we had it under our purview safely. for not being one of those stories in the media and one of those cities that we heard horrible things about. I appreciate that.

Okay. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm listening to the conversation, and I do believe that I can get with the long game. Let's cancel the contract so that we can safeguard folks' privacy. But unlike any other moratorium or pause for review, the time of pause is life-threatening in a lot of situations. And I'm still not hearing from the council who are advocates for public safety, what do we do in the meantime? This is not a regular pause, right? like every second counts when it comes to the protection of life. So I haven't heard any resolutions. I haven't heard about replacements. I haven't heard about ideas.

What do we do? So I think that's a good question. So this resolution only calls for the removal of the flock system, and our flock system is 11 cameras, 11 stationary license plate readers. They are placed primarily, I believe, in downtown... but there are a couple, as we've heard, in the River Arts District, or at least one. So that's what this calls for. Now, we have a contract with Axon, as you've heard, and it provides a lot of, it has already, they've already been providing a lot of services to the city, including dash cams, body cams, other functions. This contract, the new contract, would allow for stationary license plate readers made by Axon to be placed in the city. They're placed on light poles. They're a little different. But what the manager has... has talked about is she's going to take this over. They can't just come in under cover of darkness and put up these cameras. We would have to tell them to go ahead and do it. And so this gives us an opportunity for her to look at that. and complete this review, look at whether our current policies cover this well enough, whether we need enhanced policies to deal with it, whether we want to move forward with that aspect of the contract or not. Those will be the decisions that she's looking at. I can only rely on what we're told by people that work on these systems. I listen to you all. And what you all have to say, I listen to people work in our police department and tell us about these systems. As I understand, the reason why nationally FLOC is the major focus of this effort nationally is because FLOC has an integrated national system where the data does not appear to be secured in a way that any one community can have assurance that their data is not being shared. Now, our police department is working with Axon currently. And Axon has what's called a closed system, or what I'm calling a closed system. And I know some people believe that if any image is ever captured on a camera, it is never safe, it is never secured. And I understand that. But we have not had any issues, as far as I know, with Axon to date. But as I've said before, this is fast-moving technology. I think one of the reasons Flock became so controversial is their system grew so vast that now everyone has access to this platform and all this data. So, Axon's system functions differently. I think we need to take a look at that. We've never had stationary Axon LPRs before, so, as far as I know. So, that's something new that we need to look at, but I think the managers heard the concerns and She will work with the chief to look at this and come back to us with information about it.

Also hearing your concerns, Shanika, one of the local subject matter experts I met with today was outgoing Chief Bottega with the ABC system. I call it beverage control. And he's explained to me how their closed camera system works, that it's secured and that a subpoena is required. But obviously, that's a different setup than automated license plate readers that are tracking people who are lost all abiding citizens, just because they happen to be moving in a direction. What I also understand is that they very intentionally purchased the same cameras for our ABC system that the housing authority also has access to. If the housing authority also had a secure closed loop system, they could also present evidence when there's issues. It doesn't, we are choosing to use for-profit AOPRs from data brokers. That is not the only choice for our community. That conversation hasn't been had and needs to be.

So, to clarify, in the housing communities, those are the sheriff's flock cameras. Those are not the Asheville City's.

There's two types of cameras there. They're not our cameras. There are the sheriff's cameras. Yeah, there's the sheriff's cameras. But there's also housings cameras. Right, correct.

There is a difference. See how much we have to learn? Right.

And then the same ones that the ABC system uses.

Right, there's a closed feed system, which they already have.

And we have volunteers here who have offered to help us with Okay, so I'm gonna, I think we've got a motion and a second, and I think we're getting to the part where we're gonna probably start, we're gonna need to talk about this more, but we're gonna need more time for the manager to work with the chief and come back. So, with that, we have a motion and a second? Okay, here's what, we're gonna do hands, because Maggie, are you ready, Maggie? Are you ready? Okay, all those in, are you?

I have a question.

It's okay, say it. I know you're working so hard.

I would not. I get you. I guess I keep hearing the concern that this is a bait and switch, like they're going to take down flock and then like the same electronic tech is going to just put up an axon. And what I'm hearing and asking the manager is like, is that happening? Have we signed a contract with Axon for ALPRs?

Yeah, I think I just addressed that. We did. That is one of the things that we voted for.

We haven't put them up or received them. But we haven't put them up. No. It's for next year.

OK, I'm going to repeat this. We have a contract with Axon. It covers a lot of things. We do not have stationary Axon license plate readers yet. We don't have them, let me just say. We don't have them. Okay, nobody yell at me from the crowd, okay? I'm trying to explain this. So I'm trying to also maybe move to a vote. But we have a contract where Axon will provide that if we want it. Right. I mean, we technically have to say, come and put them in our city. They're not going to show up and put them in the city.

That's some good clarity. I don't want them. I'm just going to say that. So if the manager is going to be looking for these, I don't think that's helpful to us. I think it turns up the pressure in our community. I do also feel...

I mean, I'd like to wait and let the manager do the research. I mean, I think we're hearing conflicting concerns regarding the balance between... those who we haven't heard from, who are not speaking tonight that are concerned about safety in their neighborhoods and our communities versus the privacy concerns and civil liberties concerns of the community broadly. So I don't want to encourage us to do anything other than

vote at this time and trust the manager will bring us back with that information and what we're hearing is until we hear from the manager nothing is moving forward on that front so i just want that to be very very clear that's right no one's gonna like in one day swap through there won't be anything nothing you know i think it's so important for us to all just listen to each other

Okay. All right. So we have a motion and a second. And did you want to say something?

I was just going to say just to lay it flat plainly. Lay it flat. Yes. So we do have a contract with Exxon. But before any conversation can happen around putting up the stationary, fixed location, ALPRs. We've heard a lot. I've heard a lot from council. There are different perspectives. There are different perspectives in the community, and there are things that we need to balance as a community. So absolutely not. We will not put those up until that community conversation happens.

Thank you. I know we're moving, but everyone else is just taking me a while to get my words. The other thing is I feel like the tenor of the conversation is that All cameras, all surveillance, any data captured is bad. And I just, I kind of reject that. I have cameras at my house to keep me safe after I had violence at my house. That helps me sleep at night. We have had hit and runs. One of our public employees was hit by an F-150. And that person who committed felony was able to be found, right? There's also negative examples that we see in the news where some of these cameras are not being used, but it's just so nuanced. And so I just want to, I need to speak my heart that like, this is so black and white, feels so... It doesn't feel true to me. It's super complex. It's evolving rapidly right now. And to throw out all tools, body cameras, y'all, we fought really hard for those for a long time. They're surveillance. It depends on what that word means, right? So in the public or in social media or when we're reading press headlines, and I know we all read all the fine print, right? No. The public narrative is surveillance is terrible. That's what I hear tonight. And I just I think it's way more nuanced than that. I think our job is to get into the complexity of it as a policymaker being black and white. Everything's good. Everything's bad. I don't think that does service to our public. So I am glad that we're having this conversation tonight. I will support getting rid of these flocks. I'm glad to hear the manager lay it straight that we're gonna have a conversation before any other action would happen. This isn't a bait and switch, okay? We have to learn and talk about it more. I don't know if that's coherent. Usually I write my points, I just need to get out.

So there you go.

You know, that's just not helpful. You can say whatever you'd like, but it's just not constructive.

Okay, we're going to vote. Are we ready? Ready? Okay. All those in favor, please raise your hand. All those opposed, please raise your hand. Okay, so the vote is five to two. You got that, Maggie? Uh-huh. Okay, we are done with this item for today on the agenda.

Does it help the city staff? I had prepared that, I wanted this one to be really clear, but if we provide instruction on a moratorium on the future purchase of the Axon cameras because it's in the existing contract and the agreement with the federal government regarding the grant, because I moved to have a moratorium on the purchase of new ALPRs. even though I know the city manager has let us know they're not going to go up, but are we gonna purchase them?

I think the contracts already exist, so that's not the issue. I mean, the contract exists, so. There's a motion on the table. Okay, there's a motion, or is there a second?

I thought we voted. We did, she just made a new motion. A motion to ban the purchase of new ALPRs while we're under review.

okay council just as a point of order it sounds like this would be sufficiently different from anything on your agenda you would actually need to make a motion to add this item before you could even consider it i moved to add this item to the agenda all right i've got enough faith in the manager to do what we just talked about so anybody have a second all right the motion pills for lack of a second All right, we're going to take a quick break because we've got a few, we're done with this part of the agenda. We do have a few people signed up to speak under general public comment. So five minutes or so. Okay, we are back in action. All right, we are to the portion of our agenda where we have general public comment. We have 11 people, 12 people signed up to speak under general public comment. This portion of the agenda is for matters that are not on the rest of the agenda. And the first person signed up to speak is Patrick Conant.

Thank you, Council. My name is Patrick Conant. I'm from East West Asheville. And I wanted to respond to some of the things that came up after public comment on the last vote. First, I heard there was a question around how long we've had ALPRs in Asheville.

We're not doing that anymore. If you've got something else to speak about, please feel free.

Sure. I'm talking about APD's technology and public safety page. It says on the page we've had ALPRs since April 2024. But what I really want to talk about here is around public records, something I care very deeply about. because I think there's a lot of confusion on complex topics in our city. And really, I think the more information the city makes available to the public, the better conversations we could have. The biggest thing I wanna highlight is the Axon quote list. The city has put out some of the Axon contract, but one item that hasn't been released is the price list that tells us what equipment we're actually buying. And there's even confusion on council tonight about are we buying stationary ALPRs or not. That has to be in the price list, whether you're paying for it or not. So I just want to encourage the city to consider making that quote available to the public. Even if it's deemed a trade secret under North Carolina public records law, you still have the choice to release it to the public. You're just not required to release it to me. So I just want to say, The city has put more information out about these programs than you ever have in the past, and I want to acknowledge that. But it's not everything. There's still information missing. And I just encourage council to do what you can to ensure the public just has all of the facts on the table. That way we can have informed conversations. I also just want to note, City Council cut public comment to two minutes tonight, and you all asked us to bring our concerns on the topic and solutions in two minutes. That's really hard. If you all want to have better conversations, maybe two minutes of public comment isn't the way to do that. Thank you.

Gino Perez. The seating time? No, I think this is Mr. Perez.

Mayor, he's got some people to seat.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just a little blurry here. Okay, we have three people seating their time to Mr. Perez. If you're here, please raise your hand. Pamela Lofton. Oh. and then Cameron Jones, and then Jody Stevenson. Thank you, all right.

Good evening, Mayor, council members. My name is Geno, and I run Better Together Transportation. The transit vote was pulled from tonight's agenda, but it will come back. Before it does, I want to address several questions Council raised last month. Councilwoman Turner asked the central question, why does the city need transit? Transit gives people choices in how they live their lives. One of those people was Noelle, a little girl about three years old who lived at Transformation Village. We drove her, her baby brother, and her mother out to the arboretum one day. She got to run around outside and explore the gardens. When I picked them up, her mother told me, I didn't realize how small my world had become until I stepped outside of it. Transportation makes the world bigger for families like Noelle's. Taking it away shrinks their world. That's what the draft network put at risk. It tried to improve frequency by redistributing the service Asheville already has. Some riders would go from 30 minutes to 15. Others would go from a bus to no bus. Council recognized that problem. You spent much of the last meeting trying to find another way to serve these riders. Staff is now examining the growth network and how to fund it. But until Asheville adds capacity, we are still working with the same buses, drivers and service hours. You raised micro transit, mountain mobility and partnerships as ways to preserve service. I looked at what each could actually deliver. As you move forward, here are three mistakes we cannot make. First, if you know what you're taking away, you should know what you expect in return. Your consultant can tell you how many more jobs someone could reach by bus. But the report itself says these measurements are not forecasts. And when council asked for a forecast, your consultant declined to give one. There's reason to question how much of that job access becomes ridership. The city's 2024 affordable housing plan says more than 75% of people who work in Asheville live outside the city. A job may be reachable by bus. That doesn't mean the worker filling it can get there. Second, do not confuse smaller vehicles with more capacity. Microtransit may be useful, but a smaller vehicle still needs a driver. According to ART's 2018 federal report, labor accounted for 74% of its operating expenses. On-demand service can be even more labor intensive. The ART Choices report says it can require more driver effort for each passenger. Transit makes more sense when you look at driver hours, not vans. Third, do not replace existing service with promises. Mountain Mobility was raised as a way to help people losing their routes. In March of this year, it reported 12 vacancies. By June 15, Driver turnover went from 2.6% in January to 7.9% by June. Last week we got a call. A woman and her husband, who lives with dementia, were scheduled to attend a support meeting together. Mountain Mobility called them and canceled their trip, citing a lack of drivers. Another woman called us. She'd waited nearly three hours after her appointment and thought she'd been abandoned at the doctor's office. Mountain mobility gave her the same reason, a lack of drivers. So how do we put more weight on a safety net that is already tearing apart? Then there are possibilities. Mayhek might run a shuttle. An employer might fund a ramp. a grant might come through those may become solutions but they are not replacement service until the ride exists if another service is going to replace the bus put that service on the road first then remove the bus councilwoman roni reminded us of something your consultant said When cities cut routes, they do not normally come back. 31 businesses originally supported more frequent service. After they saw the cuts, 11 withdrew. The public has told you what it wants. Keep the coverage. Add the frequency. The growth network should be the goal. Your consultant drew that network, but it requires 60% more resources. So the problem before you isn't really the map. It's how we pay for it. If Asheville cannot yet afford both frequency and coverage, protect coverage until it can. Mayor Manheimer said last month, In the future, if we're gonna grow as a city in a way that makes any sense, we're gonna have to figure out how to change how we're doing business. You are right. If Asheville is going to grow, its transit system has to grow with it. You also identified a way to pay for it. A quarter cent transit referendum. The county controls whether it reaches the ballot. And you said you were willing to go to the mat for this. Ask the county commissioners to join you. A countywide transit tax would bring money to both our and mountain mobility. Rather than one strange system rescuing the other, strengthen both. Instead of asking who loses service, ask, are we willing to build more? Mayor Manheimer also raised the objection voters will make. Why should I support this? I don't ride the bus. Because you don't have to ride the bus to care what happens to Noel and her family. We've already seen what this community does Helene showed us that. In Atlanta, I rode a MARTA train. It was a rail line that crossed miles of the city in minutes. Getting MARTA funded was not easy. Atlanta's first funding referendum failed, but its leaders reworked the proposal. Rather than cut one part of transit to build another, they asked the public to fund a larger system. better buses and rail together. Voters agreed to tax themselves to build it. More than 50 years after that vote, I rode a train that exists because Atlanta's leaders asked their community to build something bigger. Now put the question to the people. Will you make the world bigger for your neighbors and for your children?

Thank you. Thank you. Jen Hampton. Emma Hutchins.

Hello, everyone. My name is Emma Hutchins. I'm Just Economics Interim Executive Director. Isn't our community so smart and so caring? Just Economics works with bus riders, workers, and tenants across Western North Carolina. We were at the table through the process of the COA. And after two rounds of public engagement, it was clear that riders do not support the draft network as proposed. We are encouraged that the vote was removed from tonight's agenda. and we're hopeful that council will instruct staff and consultants to consider alternative options some of those options include implementing the coverage map which improves time transfers but keeps the coverage keeping the current transit map and working to increase funding to meet goals around increased frequency or adjusting the draft network plan to maintain more coverage while partnering with employers and service providers to fill the gaps We're also very encouraged by all the attention and engagement that we've seen from local business and the public around public transit. I believe that this demonstrates a shared and collective desire for Asheville to have a public transit system that gets people where they need to go and meets everyone's needs. Choosing between frequency and coverage as two conflicting options is an untenable choice for staff, council, and the public. People need a system that is reliable and efficient, and they also have to get to all the places that they need to go. Leaving transit dependent riders stranded is not the answer. Cutting transit rights doesn't get us closer to the public transit our community deserves. Creating the system Asheville needs will require increased funding and investment. And we ask that the city seek partnership and additional funding to make that system a reality. In the meantime, we urge city staff to go back to the drawing board and for council to reject the proposal on the table. In the words of our patron saint of Appalachia, Dolly Parton, sometimes if you jump into something too quickly, you can screw up something that might have been good two years down the road. Thank you. Our first Dolly mention.

Peace Lee Weaver. No, yes, no, yes, no. Pam Brown. Heather Smathers. Kristen Gall. Did I get one? Okay.

would ask you guys as my city council and mayor um to after this my first but not yours but very dramatic uh council meeting to take a breath picture yourself under the canopy of 20 plus 80 to 100 year old oak trees.

I'm sorry, could you speak into the microphone?

Oh, sorry. I would ask you to just picture yourself relaxing under 20 plus 80 to 100 year old oak trees. I am here today about Asheville's urban forest plan, which came across my Facebook page. Hey, we have this thing. And I looked over down the street where I've lived for 10 years. I'm a resident and a property owner in the South Slope. And I'm coming today, and I don't really know what I'm doing, but I was told this is where it starts. So there is a property, 11 Collier Avenue, which, this is how ChatGPT helped me articulate myself, should be evaluated as a priority for our new urban forest preservation site because it contains a historically significant stand of mature trees and it represents one of the remaining FOREST, LITTLE FOREST, IT'S ONLY A HALF AN ACRE ON THE SOUTH SLOPE AND IT'S ABSOLUTELY AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL AND HISTORICALLY WE HAVE TRIED AND MANY OF YOU WERE AROUND WHEN WE TRIED BEFORE TO PRESERVE IT AND WE GOT THE SELLERS TO GO HALFWAY DOWN ON THEIR PRICE FROM 1.2 MILLION TO 600,000 AND THERE WAS TALK OF DOING A LAND SWAP WITH THE CITY. but it fell apart, we couldn't get the money. But back then it was the Sierra Club, Asheville Greenworks, the Audubon Coalition, a whole bunch of groups got together. And I was like, we really should try this again. And so I started researching it and found out, which I never would have done this tonight, except for that on August 31st, this property is going up to auction for $300,000. And I called Keith Aiken, don't know if he's here, don't even know what he looks like, but he's a really nice fella. And he said that it had to come before you guys to try to make it one of the priorities for the Asheville Urban Forest Plan and that you guys may be able to direct him to ask them to hold the auction of this property or have some deeds put into it if one of the buyers were to buy it. The problem is it's on Collier, and if you're familiar with that, It used to be a very quiet street since Chipani moved to the South Slope. It's actually a very active street that doesn't accommodate the cars, but developers put forth proposals several times. It went through communities, your committees, and the developers always bail and sell the property because you would have to widen the road because public safety vehicles can't turn around on that road. So the investment would be huge to try to actually build something. So the urgency is that if there's anything you can instruct Keith to do or us to do, or if you know someone who's rich and has $300,000 and wants to preserve something in Asheville, it'd be great. Thank you.

And then Pastor Hardaway.

I'm Pastor Hardaway, Rock Hill Mission Baptist Church, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and all the other council people here. I'm not going to try to shame anybody. There's enough shame to go around, not just here, but all around behind me. Amen. I am going to say this. I have two things I'm going to say. I find it somewhat unconscionable to have a budget that does not include the strategic partners. Nothing in the budget. I find that unconscionable. We are to help. not just protect, but to provide opportunities for everybody to grow. I would trade green space for kids space, team space, young adult space. And it's unconscionable to have a budget and not include something for strategic partnership, i.e. strategic, to provide them opportunities to grow. One other thing I want to say with all the stuff that's been said, all the stuff that's been going on. Ben Franklin said, any society or community that is willing to give up a little liberty to gain a little security deserve neither and will lose both. That's it.

Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our public comment speakers. And so we are adjourned.