As Asheville takes steps to reckon with its long history of systemic racism and economic inequity, local business owners are wondering what impacts the city’s ambitious initiatives will have on them.
Addressing the Council of Independent Business Owners, an Asheville-based trade group, on Jan. 15, Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell shared an update on her 30/60/90-day work plan to address racial inequality. Last summer was marked by a series of “extremely intense conversations with the community,” Campbell told the group, the most contentious of which concerned the Asheville Police Department budget.
Rehashing the events of the summer’s back-and-forth budget process over the Zoom call, Campbell reminded participants that she and City Council had only cut the APD budget by about 3%, far less than the 50% reduction some activists had demanded. Conversations on next year’s budget will resume later this month.
Attendees posed a series of questions about department morale and APD body camera footage in the online meeting’s chat box; meeting moderator John Carroll only asked Campbell about current staffing levels. She replied that the department currently has about 50 vacancies.
Street renaming also ranks high among the city’s priorities, explained Ben Woody, Asheville’s director of development services. City staff have identified 120 streets that share the name of a documented slaveholder, he said, though he assured attendees that not every flagged street would promptly change names.
“There’s a whole element of research that still needs to happen to make sure that the street is indeed named after a slaveholder and that we are correct in our assessment,” Woody said. “If the city does decide to change the name of the street, we will follow the statutory process to do so that involves public participation, a public hearing and City Council consideration.”
Asked if business owners will receive compensation to offset costs for marketing new business names and addresses necessitated by the street changes, Woody said the city hadn’t yet made that decision. “I agree that there is a cost for a business that has to reimagine branding, but I don’t think we know enough yet about what streets may change names and whether they have businesses on them,” he said.
City officials are not considering changing the name of Asheville, Campbell added. The city is named after Samuel Ashe, an 18th-century North Carolina governor and slaveholder.
CIBO members also asked about the current status of the Vance Monument. In December, both Asheville City Council and the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners voted to accept the Vance Monument Task Force’s recommendation to remove the monument. The city has requested bids for the cost of removal, Campbell said. She expects formal budgets to go before both elected bodies in the next month.
And city officials have not forgotten about their commitment to pursue reparations for Asheville’s Black community, Campbell emphasized. Although the aforementioned initiatives are “related to reparations and repairing the harm that has been done to people in our community,” she said, the city and county are working to firm up the structure and responsibilities of a Reparations Commission, as established in the July Council resolution supporting reparations. These recommendations will be ready in the next 45 days, she said.
So many better options and avenues to right injustices other than renaming streets. The Vance monument definitely needs to go asap but how many fellow citizens are really and truly distraught over renaming streets?
With the pandemic crushing our small business communities of every color do we really need to be focusing on street names? The rebranding of business addresses, refiling with changes to the Sec of State, and just the general administrative time wasted on dealing with non revenue generating processes is a burden.
Why not align the focus to providing more community health and education opportunities. Increase accessibility to transportation is disparaged neighborhoods. Generating more revenue for underserved areas through hotel taxation, and on and on.
Will removing the Vance Monument or renaming streets improve governmental race inequities today, or improve race relations, or in any realistic way make anything significantly better? The Vance monument has been there more than half of the time Asheville has existed. Rename it, save the few hundred thou for more worthwhile purposes. Why the constant need not just to forget the past, but to erase it when possible? Will erasing the past change anything? Will it make it not to have happened? Will it magically right the wrongs it will be easier to forget once the reminders are themselves erased? By the way, Governor Ashe for whom the city is named – slaveowner. Colonel Buncombe, plantation and slave owner. George Washington, likewise. The state is named after Charles II, whose Royal colonies all welcomed slave owners, and Charles II granted all of Carolina to the eight Lords Proprietors, who were to a man happy to sell land to people intending to become plantation and slave owners. Of course its easier just to inconvenience locals – make businesses buy new letterhead, residents contact everybody to give their new address without having moved, give the Post Office another headache. When there’s a hole in the ground where Richard Sharpe Smith’s Obelisk of Shame once stood we can rename it the “We’re Sorry For Every Damn Thing Anybody Ever Did Park” and all our problems will immediately turn to pixie dust and rainbows.
I agree, Al, and I should know, I’m the Witch Queen of Asheville, who knows from activist experience how winds of change or desperation can be used to make politically expedient, Orwellian “memory holes” that eliminate community identity and history like ‘pixie dust.’ Many deserve reparations and equity: Native Americans; women (equal pay); families destroyed by the ‘war on drugs’, etc. ad infinitum. Naming buildings, highways, parks, schools, and streets after humans has long-term consequences and implications: Such can be used to gentrify neighborhoods to appeal to big-city spillover; raise property taxes; apply a pastiche of respectability to hard-scrabble or industrial areas, and more. Such is a short-sighted, costly pretense that smother dire needs blanket-style. Arbitrary action is inequitable and once begun, difficult to stop: As pointed out, both city and county names are suspect. The obelisk has been, and should remain, a unifying center for protest, rites, and other events. Remove the name and let it stand as a mark of all who have, and continue, to appreciate Asheville’s goodliness and work for positive change. As for street-name changes, if it’s a fait accompli, I suggest naming them for natural or geographical things hard for developers to destroy, for example, “Maple street” for the line of endangered old trees on Vermont Ave. in W. Avl. Finally, if folk be truly intent to rectify wrongs, I declare it hypocritical to ignore re-naming the “Billy Graham Parkway” in our midst: Goddess knows he stood for sexist submission of women to their husbands, and biblical racism.