On the Record: Council member Kim Roney talks music and running for reelection

Kim Roney and I convene at an outdoor picnic table on the side of BattleCat Coffee Bar in West Asheville.

“This is one of my favorite spots for hiding out,” she says as we begin our conversation — the third in Xpress’ limited series, “On the Record,” in which I meet with individual Asheville City Council candidates, listen to their album of choice and discuss the local arts scene. Unlike my previous two exchanges with Tod Leaven and Kevan Frazier, who are new to politics, Roney currently serves on Council and is seeking reelection.

Her musical selection is Rodriguez’s 1970 album, Cold Fact. The only problem is the Wi-Fi is spotty outside, so we’re having a hard time getting the music to start.

Roney lifts her phone toward the coffeehouse window immediately behind us, but the issue persists. Meanwhile, I ask her about the album’s significance within her life. To my surprise, I learn she and a handful of other Asheville-based musicians toured as Rodriguez’s backup band in 2009.

“I played keys but also the string parts,” she says. “And we didn’t have horn players, so I played the horn sections on keys — which is not ideal.”

For those unfamiliar with Rodriguez, who died in his hometown of Detroit in 2023, his story is a fascinating one and the focus of the 2012 Academy Award-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. The film chronicles the musician’s popularity in South Africa in the 1970s, the mythology that grew around him and his eventual return to touring after decades removed from the music industry.

“Rodriguez writes about being a working-class person,” Roney says, as she continues to try to connect with the Wi-Fi. She also points out that he ran multiple times (albeit unsuccessfully) for public office in Detroit.

“Should we move to that other table?” Roney asks, giving up on the lost connection.

But just as we concede and begin to gather our things, her phone grabs the signal. And with it, Cold Fact begins, and so too does our conversation about the arts.

On the dial

As some voters may already know, Roney’s ties to the local music scene run deep. She is a founding member of 103.3 Asheville FM, where she served as station manager and executive director from 2012-15. She also plays drums for the local marching band Brash Your Heart, has been a piano teacher for over two decades and serves as secretary of Asheville Music School.

At an early age, she says, radio played an important role in her life. Growing up in a small, rural South Carolina community, her father would call into the local station every Friday night to request a song for Roney’s mother.

“It was part of the story of our family,” she says. “And the soundtrack to our lives.”

Later on, as a student at James Madison University, she worked at the independent radio station WJXM. And once she relocated to Asheville in 2006, WPVM became her entry point into the community. “It was that or [the Blue Ridge] Rollergirls,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Don’t make me break an arm down here.’”

But her life’s work, Roney says, is teaching piano. Seeing her students and their families struggling to afford to live here, she continues, is why she first ran for Council in 2017, before eventually winning a seat in 2020.

“I want a hopeful future for our kids, for our families, for our community,” she says as we sip our coffees and listen to Rodriguez strum his guitar.

Creative language

Affordability is a key issue for Roney. It’s also a topic difficult to navigate.

“It has been quite a challenging conversation at Council on what affordability even really means,” she says.

In part, this is due to the shifting nature of the issue. Over the past 10 years, she points out, “workforce housing” has become “affordable housing” has become “deeply affordable housing.” All of this, Roney says, “is just creative language for trying to differentiate between the affordable housing you can’t afford and the housing you need.”

But she is hopeful that Council is on the right track. “We’ve started to put some data and metrics behind what we mean when we say ‘affordable,’” she says.

Currently, Roney notes, the city’s Land Use Incentive Grant (LUIG) program, which offers developers tax rebates if they include affordable units in their projects, is under review, alongside a number of other items that Council is considering as part of its strategic goal of equitable, affordable housing. One key component of the conversation is potentially lowering the income levels that qualify for affordable units.

Meanwhile, Roney’s own understanding of incentive programs has evolved since first joining Council. “To incentivize good-paying jobs to be here is so much cheaper than building an affordable unit of housing,” she says. “Learning that has just been a total game changer.”

But in order to attract industries with good salaries, she adds, the city must “set a good example” with living wages for its workers.

And affordability, Roney emphasizes, goes beyond housing. Workspace is essential for entrepreneurs, but accessing it can be costly. One potential avenue to address this could be land trusts for commercial use. “So, for example, if you had artists studios that were in land trust, then [the units] could be more affordable because [the artists] wouldn’t be paying property taxes,” she explains.

Roney notes that land trusts are an approach that other cities and counties are exploring, but Asheville “is not there yet.”

Addressing costs associated with utilities and transportation is also of great importance to the Council member. “We’re looking at studies now across the country [that show] for every dollar that you save on rent by moving outside of a city center, you spend anywhere from 60 to 70 cents on the dollar for additional costs,” she says. “So if we can do more placemaking — not just for places to live but places to work — that will help.”

Taking advantage of opportunities

In between policy talk, Roney reminisces on some of what Asheville has lost within the arts scene. Downtown’s busking community is less prominent, she says. And the closures of music venues such as The Mothlight, where Roney previously worked, and Isis Music Hall are detrimental to the creative process.

“I worry about how we’re losing those venues where folks can incubate what it looks like to play on a stage. Like, what does it mean to go direct as a keyboard player? Well, it means you’re not using an amp. But that means that the sound person is going to control the sound of your instrument in the mix, and so you need to make sure that you can hear the house sound through your monitor,” she says.

Fewer smaller venues, she stresses, means fewer such opportunities for young musicians to learn the ropes.

But opportunities in the broader sense do still exist in Asheville, Roney adds. And she is an advocate of taking advantage of all that is available. She points out that anyone with a Buncombe County Public Library card can access a ZOOM Pass, which gives people free entry into a number of museums and other local attractions.

She’s also looking ahead at renovations to McCormick Field. In March 2023, Council voted unanimously to commit $20 million to the project over 20 years. The site’s future plans, she notes, include movie and trivia nights at the stadium, as well as live musical performances.

“There’s more ways for us to use our public park that has been superunderutilized,” she says.

‘This Is Not a Song’ 

As our conversation winds down, Roney points to her phone, which continues to stream Cold Fact. “This song is the one,” she says.

As the crisp acoustic strings are strummed at the opening of “This Is Not a Song; This Is an Outburst,” I ask what it is about the number that speaks to her. She turns up the volume and says, “I feel like it might speak for itself.”

Rodriguez’s vocals join the music as he sings, “The mayor hides the crime rates/council woman hesitates/public gets irate/but forgets the vote dates.”

We listen to the entirety of the song in silence: a track that captures a community overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next. Midway through, Rodriguez laments, “I opened the window/to listen to the news/but all I heard was the establishment’s blues.”

Roney lowers the volume as the song ends and recalls a previous conversation she had with the songwriter about his experiences running for office and trying to create new possibilities for constituents.

“It’s like, how do you use your creative capacity to imagine something different than what is already on the table and tell the story so that people also understand that they want that too?” she inquires. “That’s the role of a creative person in the political world. And it’s a daily, constant struggle.”