The public meeting to discuss Asheville’s Downtown Master Plan will be held tomorrow. Persons are expressing opposition, though part of the plan was supposed to involve ambassadors for drumming up support.

Activist Steve Rasmussen has written a critique denouncing the plan – not because planning penalties are the last thing Asheville needs in a wilting economy – but because the planners were not democratic. They listened to developers demand the right to develop their own property in their own way rather than taking the democratic approach of letting anybody make demands on how a developer should spend how much his own money. Developers are faulted for building according to their own whims.