A drum beat wildly amongst other sounds audible in the chambers of Asheville City Council. I supposed former vice mayor, Chris Peterson, had hired a bunch of fake Occupiers to drown out the public hearing on the Business Improvement District. And I wanted to go out and show them how to really make some noise.

But I sat through the meeting. It wasn’t bad. Proponents of the BID spoke with tears and emotion about uneducated drama queens like me who don’t do their homework. Joe Minicozzi said it was a waste for great brains like his to have to pick up cigarette butts when dumb minds like mine were too lazy to ever pitch in for the city. (They must have been talking about me, because everybody I know is multitasking, giving 110%, arriving before they leave, you know.)

Then, Fred Guggenheim came to the microphone and started telling all the BID proponents what was in the 123-page economic analysis by Western Carolina University’s Steve Ha, which they kept citing as evidence. Ha essentially said there was insufficient data for a lot of the projections he would be providing or leaving alone, and didn’t explain some of his own numbers. You probably don’t need to read it to know the value of economic analysis. Advocates of the BID, however, were treating the percentages as immutable stone. Councilman Gordon Smith turned this on the BID advocates saying they had given council a 5% annual goal for increased business revenues. If the BID didn’t meet that goal, then it wouldn’t be working, and it could go bye-bye. Cecil Bothwell contributed that nobody defined the baseline to which the magic percentage was to be compared.

In the end, council voted to continue the public hearing until it would be too late to implement the BID program this year. Although they all gave warm and fuzzy reasons for liking the BID, they were taking action against it. As a couple speakers indicated, we all want beautiful, prosperous, safe, clean cities. We just disagree about how we shall make them happen.

As for me, I would like a beautiful, peaceful, comfortable world, too. My main beefs with the BID are:

  • I don’t like one group of people herding another group (planning). Pacifists will do the bidding of power-mongers. As a general rule, he governs best who governs least, and he fares best who is not micromanaged.
  • I don’t like programs at all. They generally work more for their own sustenance than for the care of those they purport to help. If by chance they are effective, it is because they provide venues for one-on-one interactions.
  • The BID would have been a layer of government added to the UN, the federal government, the State of North Carolina, Buncombe County, and Asheville City government; and it is supposed to be impossible to serve even two masters. Government is an abstraction to which people surrender individual power. Giving up personal power is a gamble; but in the transfer of power, as in the transfer of energy, there are always losses. In the case of power, the losses are for administration and overhead, for which 23% of BID funds were supposed to go.
  • Conservative think tanks were warning rash MBA’s right before the economic downturn that they were over-extending, but government knew better. Governments risked tax-increment-financing projects that came to grinding halts as people discovered there was more to building a lovely place than just having a dream. Unqualified borrowers were encouraged to buy big. Now, there is another plan to create a nice piece of utopia. How we get there from here is not clear. All we know is we need to endure a seven-cent tax increase.

There are other reasons, but I now have three months to write the book.