Full open letter from Firestorm Cafe on the proposed Business Improvement District:
Dear [ Mayor Terry Bellamy / Vice-Mayor Esther Manheimer / Councilman Cecil Bothwell / Councilman Jan Davis / Councilman Marc Hunt / Councilman Chris Pelly / Councilman Gordon Smith ],
We are writing to you as a downtown business and community space concerned by the proposed Asheville Business Improvement District (BID) that will be considered by City Council on June 12th. As part of a formative network opposed to the BID, we want to share our concerns and extend an invitation to our community forum, to be held on Tuesday, June 5th at 5pm.
Business improvement districts began appearing in the 1980s and are modeled after shopping malls. Like malls, BIDs are viewed as distinct properties managed by a private entity and funded by their tenants. The problem of course is that our community is not a mall. Cafes, bars and public spaces constitute the core of our social vitality and the foundation of a functioning democracy. We should be wary of attempts to privatize governance over these spaces, particularly when such governance excludes the voices of average people.
The proposed Asheville Business Improvement District is explicitly plutocratic in nature. Its 13 member board will be comprised of 3 business owners and 9 property owners, with seats allocated on the basis of holdings. This virtually ensures that the BID will represent the interests of Asheville’s wealthy and not its workers, the unhoused, youths, ethnic minorities and political activists. This structure is undemocratic and, quite possibly, unconstitutional.
The proposed Asheville Business Improvement District is a misappropriation of public funds for private gain. In addition to a 7 cent tax increase within its jurisdiction, the BID’s starting budget will require over $300k in city and county money plus $130k in expected sales tax revenue distributed by the county after its first year of operation. This is a redistribution of wealth into downtown from parts of our community that are already underfunded and underserved. Further, as tax increases are passed on to renters, we can be sure that the cost to downtown will be squeezed from its tenants and small businesses owners, not the landlords who dominate the BID.
The proposed Asheville Business Improvement District is a civil rights nightmare. Over three quarters of the BID’s budget will be spent on a “Clean & Safe” program that includes the placement of private security officers in downtown to target quality-of-life crimes (loitering, panhandling, graffiti, etc). In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, our community is increasingly sensitive to the role of private security in public spaces and business improvement districts around the country have already been implicated in civil and human rights abuses.
In August of 1960, students from Stephens Lee High School staged civil rights sit-ins at Woolworth, the Asheville Public Library, Aston Park, local movie theaters and Winn-Dixie. Young people of color like these student heroes would undoubtedly find themselves on the wrong side of the Asheville BID “Clean & Safe” program. By adopting a BID, City Council would be responsible for opening the door to a new era of economic, and by corollary, racial segregation.
There is no mandate for the proposed Asheville Business Improvement District. Proponents of the BID point to its inclusion within the Downtown Master Plan (DMP), a process that launched with much fanfare in the public eye but ended behind closed doors in what one participant described as an “undemocratic delegation of power into the hands of appointed, insulated boards…” The BID emerged from just such a board, the Downtown Management Committee, whose only attempt to gather quantitative data from stakeholders was a 2011 email survey of business owners that included no questions related to the desirability of a BID. Nevertheless, several respondents chose to write in their objections to the creation of such a district and a third-party survey cited by the Mountain Xpress indicates overwhelming opposition.
Asheville is a unique city with colorful inhabitants and vibrant small businesses. We believe that the proposed business improvement district would do irreversible harm to the social and economic health of our community. The BID cannot be reformed as it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of our urban space. Downtown is not a mall — an expanse of sanitized corridors for isolated shoppers moving between commercial spaces. It is a commons to which we must preserve access for all and for which we must ensure domination by none.
Please join us at Firestorm Cafe & Books (48 Commerce Street) on June 5th for a public forum on the Asheville Business Improvement District, its potential impact on our community and the democratic alternatives that could ensure a downtown which is truly safe, clean and welcoming to all.
Sincerely,
Alex Chubbuck, Andrew Heintz, Caleb Magoon, Chrissy Lawing,
Julie Schneyer, Libertie Valance, Mecaria Baker & Travis Schuett
Firestorm Cafe & Books
ps… The venue for the community may be changed to the Pack Memorial Public Library to accommodate more attendance.
From the Asheville Grown article:
“The city provides downtown with a baseline of services, but there remain challenges and issues that the city cannot or will not solve for us.”
So the solution is for a few businesses to set up an independent entity within the city and put themselves at the head of the line for tax-supported services? I don’t think so.
That’s an interesting angle on it, but it’s not quite right. They’d be taking tax money only from property owners (not even necessarily business owners), so it’s all incredibly vague and weird although I’ve been assured that everything is perfectly OK because it’s been through committee a LOT and reviewed by LOTS of people and has LOTS of support.