With such a clear gap in municipal responsibility to provide a safe, secure environment through effective law enforcement, should not the county/city focus on supporting citizen safety efforts before looking at marketing programs targeted at tourism?
— Dick Domann
Asheville
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Safety, security, and quality of life of citizens should be placed before everything else: tourism dollars, unwise development, and even the right to drink beer. But it seems we’re going to need a heat dome and a severe uptick in violent crime to wake local officials.
“…the right to drink beer”?
OK, you had me and then lost me.
Yeah, well, trying to wake people up…
Asheville isn’t safe. Please hurry up and reimagine policing and enact the reimagined because Asheville is NOT safe and it’s getting worse every day. West Asheville is going backwards to Worst Asheville very quickly.
Well they should care cause taxes pay them, but addicted to the tourist dollar
We’re all forgotten
Lived in twenty states and two other countries, never have I seen such an oblivious bunch of pretentious phony people.
Unkind and uncaring
A looming problem for the city is that residents now have contempt for tourists. When this contempt boils over into actual rage against visitors, what will Asheville’s reputation become? It’s simmering now…and now is the time for local politicians to be proactive to invest in our community and listen to residents who continue to raise the same issues over and over. How many warnings do they need?
The fallacy here is thinking that the city and county spend any money on tourism marketing. Of course, the TDA likes it that way.
Individual tourists don’t know that they symbolize the growing discontent. Nobody tells them where their room taxes are going when they make a booking. The political process is at an impasse, and the proposed changes to the distribution of funds are entirely inadequate. This is one reason why polite-but-firm direct action ought to be the way to fight the TDA from now on. It is better to make life uncomfortable for the hoteliers in the months to come than for things to boil over.