Asheville City Council and the Buncombe County Commissioners are holding their retreats this weekend. In Friday’s session, the commissioners discussed televising the public comment portion of their meetings. Activists consider the commissioners untrustworthy for silencing them, but even the public has grown weary of some of the regulars.
Asheville City Council turned its focus from synergies to meeting a $3 million budget deficit. Staff has already taken drastic measures to cut an additional $2.3 million off the deficit. CFO Ben Durant presented the financial report. Durant is a great CFO, always coming across as candid, credible, and confident. A couple times, the city manager and assistant city manager had to pipe up and tell council their dreams weren’t going to fly.
One bad dream was the mayor’s wish to hire diverse people. Speaking from experience, Assistant City Manager Jeff Richardson said, in not so many words, that the city’s partial hiring freeze, combined with likely consolidation was going to stress the organization. New hires would have to be highly-skilled. Hiring on the basis of shoe size would not guarantee the caliber of talent the city would need.
Another impossible dream was expanding community policing initiatives (the proverbial scene in which sworn officers don aprons and cut paper dolls with little girls in the name of building trust). Manager Gary Jackson said if the chief was going to have a smaller force, this was not going to be one of his priorities.
Staff also shot down the mayor’s request for across-the-board cuts, stating that strategy was based on the flawed assumption that all departments are of equal value and run with equal efficiency. Jackson then re-introduced one of the most glorious words uttered in government chambers: right-sizing.
Dr. Carl Mumpower was amazed his peers considered accepting grants from the deficit-running state and federal government a sustainable process and necessary. Mayor Terry Bellamy wanted to get Asheville, “a donor city†as she likes to say, stimulus packages. Robin Cape said the country spends its way out of recessions with government assistance. Obama’s strategy of giving people money was a whole lot more civil than his predecessor’s decision to start a war.
