Last night’s Asheville City Council meeting illustrated yet another example of visionaries trying to impose their desires on others’ property. Recently, Asheville solicited input from all over, asking what people wanted to do with the property of business owners on Merrimon Avenue. The affront to property rights was so absurd, the Libertarian Party of Buncombe County responded with its own survey of leading questions. (Please check out the “Merrimon Avenue Liberation Project.”) Eight people actually bothered to find a stamp and mail their answers to LP-Buncombe. All respondents scored 100%.
Since then, city staff was able to assess the community input on building heights, setbacks, architectural styles, and landscaping to develop a new zoning district. Many business owners asked to be excluded from the rezoning. Jim Groce had just built a superfluous building, paved sidewalks and walkways, and built a bus shelter to appease the city’s requirements for remodeling a building, and he was not prepared to go through the process again. Albert Sneed, a lawyer, said his client had already sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project with certain expectations that he did not want to see change.
Randy Jameson, representing Ingle’s supermarket, explained that the store would have to go out of business during its next renovation to relocate the building where the parking lot now is, which the new zoning overlay would require. He would prefer to be able to renovate in stages and keep the store operating. “We’re not in the business of going out of business,” he explained to a city council who did not seem able to fathom the plight they were soon to impose on his thriving business. All the while, Councilwoman Robin Cape assured him she did not want to run him out of business.
Councilman Jan Davis tried to explain that there was some utility in drive-thrus, and that some businesses might choose to deteriorate before undertaking neccessary renovations that would trigger the end of their operations on Merrimon Avenue. He assumed businesses would relocate not too far away in Woodfin where regulations and taxes were less onerous, and where they wouldn’t be paying into Asheville’s tax base. He further did not see the pragmatics behind turning a north-south thoroughfare into a ped-friendly area when not too long ago a car totalled a building on that road.
Dr. Carl Mumpower continued to be amazed with the facility with which people like to control other peoples’ property, and accused the special interests in the room of trying to turn the road into a “yuppie,” “cookie-cutter” corridor.
Mayor Terry Bellamy observed that not a single business owner had spoken in support of the rezoning. She then asked, “What’s the goal?” Interim Planning and Zoning Director Shannon Tuch started flinging buzz words from council’s Strategic Operating Goals about. Bellamy said council was not looking before they leapt, and thereby creating a monster.
Just before council voted, and it appeared the business-owners would fall prey to government-knows-best, Brownie Newman called for a time out to give the matter more consideration. Council then voted to continue the hearing for a month.