Here’s the lowdown from tonight’s meeting of Asheville City Council:

  • The meeting started with a lot of employee awards to get everybody in a happy, big government mood.
  • The city approved its CAFR. The auditing firm, Cherry Bekaert, LLP did a great job in my opinion. As I indicated last night, I found myself gripped by the storyline after the first fifty or sixty pages. When something distracted me, I considered the peculiarity of the intensity with which I had been following the plot. Seriously. I couldn’t wait to pick it up again.

    That said, I left the sections on unfunded liabilities with a knowledge of what was going where, but unassured about whether what the city was putting away would be considered sound by a number of reasonable actuaries. Nobody from the city answered my email inquiring about the healthiness of the city’s contributions, so I spoke briefly before the meeting with audit partner Collin Hill. He answered my questions as well as could be expected; i.e., some of the questions didn’t have answers, and he was smart enough to know and articulate that in a kindly way.

    [ED NOTE: The city did respond to me albeit 46 minutes after my stated deadline. Happy happy, glee glee.]

    Anyway, I was expecting council to get into the nitty-gritty and challenge line items. Instead, I suppose to appeal to un-eggheads like me, they pretended to learn what a CAFR was. They were pleased to learn the initials stood for “Consolidated . . .”

  • Residents didn’t want Frank Howington to build in my neighborhood, so after a 3.5-year battle, the city finally prevailed in initiating a rezoning that dashed his dreams. One lady, who didn’t consult me before deciding to wear a dress I thought was very ugly and obstructive of my viewshed, played the safety card and framed the issue as a pitting of “private property rights” vs. “the safety and well-being of the neighborhood.” Well, council quickly decided tax revenue they may have received from Howington’s developments was nothing compared to the people who were going to die from all the traffic that was going to be squealing around those hairpin turns and killing children.
  • In another matter, Councilmen Cecil Bothwell and Gordon Smith supported a motion to deny a developer his request to subdivide property covered by steep slope ordinances. The other five on council outnumbered them.
  • Lastly, we had public comment. The big thing was appealing to council to consider the scientific data, as if the matters were settled in black and white, once and forever. One girl complained about e-cigarettes stinking up the whole subsidized-housing complex and spreading deleterious health effects. One guy complained about fluoride in the water. In the past he has advocated for legalizing pot. He sat with two other guys who told council they wanted them to agenda their resolutions. One wanted to legalize hemp for ropes and food, and another wanted to legalize pot for medical purposes.

    I wanted to get up and tell council I had a resolution for legalizing cocaine – for polishing my cookware, of course. But, I shouldn’t make fun of them. It would be good for the economy for us to all sit around and say, “Mmmmmm,” and wait for the free food to come.