The sidewalk meeting did not go as anticipated. About 250 people filled all available seating, but the rest had to wait outside per orders from the fire marshal. On the way in, a group of drummers beat away, as if conjuring sidewalk energy. Two little girls offered people yellow “Sidewalks for Safety” stickers to wear, since people are not allowed to display signs at city council meetings.
The meeting had been moved to a church because the original public location was not air-conditioned. City Attorney Bob Oast said it would be OK, because council would be meeting in the cultural hall. People had to walk past a nativity scene and deal with banners about the church’s ministries and other religious themes.
Heather Goldstein, playing up her role as executive director of the Jewish Community Center, worked the audience. She’s running in the controversial Superior Court judgship race against Diane McDonald and Marvin Pope. Pope lost the primary, and so he and the others are running to fill a vacancy created just weeks ago.
City Manager Gary Jackson told early arrivers there was a gunman at the federal building. At the meeting, Mayor Terry Bellamy announced Councilman Jan Davis, whose business is almost nextdoor to the federal building, had a very important personal emergency and would be unable to attend. At the time of this writing, the APD is being politically correct about the situation.
As for sidewalks, the neighborhood group played a video with loud sidewalk music. It showed an ambulance trying to drive past a parade of protesters marching down the road with sidewalk signs. City staff made a couple presentations, including one with question-raising statistics: Asheville is growing slowly (but that is because it isn’t annexing, and it has nothing to do with density as claimed), Asheville’s daytime population is high (but that doesn’t mean the people who come in the daytime don’t pay property taxes for their business offices), the city lost $3 million in sales tax revenue (over an unspecified time frame from an unspecified total), etc.
Members of council explained building sidewalks was going to require partnering with state and local government. Congressman Heath Shuler is being lobbied for sidewalk money already. Bellamy told members of the audience they needed to stake a claim for funds or Raleigh, Charlotte, and Wake Forest would get Asheville’s fair share. An unspecified amount of porkulus is going toward sidewalks in the city already. Councilman Cecil Bothwell encouraged persons in the audience to vote for representatives that would be sympathetic. He also encouraged them to petition council at an upcoming meeting not to put transit funds into a parking garage that would encourage people to drive downtown instead of being green.
Most surprisingly, the meeting lasted less than two hours. Questions, commendably, were collected on index cards, so the mayor could set aside repetitive concepts. She promised, however, that all comments would be displayed on the city’s web site with answers. At least three times, people requested that taxes be raised to pay for sidewalks. The taxpaying status of the persons making the request is unknown. The question drew applause regardless.
