Asheville’s per capita debt higher than recent city claims

According to Barbara Whitehorn, the city’s finance director, juggling multiple projects — including a $25 million debt issue and a $74 million bond proposal — led to an accounting error that resulted in the Mayor Esther Manheimer and other city officials understating the city’s current per-capita debt by more than half. “I take responsibility for it,” says Whitehorn. “The mayor has been using figures I provided, and those were not correct.”

The city’s per capita debt was $234, Whitehorn says, as of June 30, 2015, the end of the city’s 2014-15 fiscal year. It continued to be true until June 26 of this year, when the city increased its nonenterprise debt load from $25 million to $49 million. At that point, the per capita debt went up to $550.

Prior to City Council’s decision to bring the bond referendums to voters, Whitehorn continues, she assembled much of the data about the city’s debt levels in early June, before the new debt was issued. Her mistake was in not adding that prospective debt to the city’s total debt load, she says. The documents that the city submitted to state regulators (and which were approved) were dated June 30, 2016, and included the lower pre-June 26 debt totals and per capita debt figures.

Of her Oct. 1 statement that the current city debt is $234, Manheimer wrote in an Oct. 17 email, “At the time I made the statement, I thought it was the current debt per capita until staff later informed me that due to new debt being issued, the current debt number is $550.”

If all of the proposed $74 million in bond debt were issued at once — which is not the city’s plan, Whitehorn says — the total per capita debt would be $1,378. Compared with 2015 figures, that would be higher than all but two of the 18 largest municipalities in the state, Charlotte and Raleigh. — V.D.