Asheville City Council has been grappling for months with how to define parameters for a pending steep slopes ordinance. A three-year-old initiative to streamline the UDO to make Asheville more development-friendly went south under the direction of Asheville’s new Progressive leadership. City planners are now working to strengthen and broaden the UDO to protect the beautiful, green mountains that attract people to Asheville.

Unable decide what elevations and slopes constitute a fair trigger for more stringent ordinances, council has looked at maps, photographic elevations, and 3-D renderings. Many were surprised to find out that much of the central business district would be subject to the initially-suggested “steep-slope” elevation restrictions.

Batting numbers around in an intuitive recursion process, council finally settled into a maximum of regulation. At Brownie Newman’s suggestion, it was decided that the old hillside ordinance that applied to elevations above 2220 feet with slopes greater than 15% would still apply. Above 2350 feet, a more stringent steep slopes ordinance, would kick in.

As council was about to adopt the ordinance Councilwoman Holly Jones said she would prefer if council would mandate that houses on hills use paints with low light reflectivity values (LRV’s). Brownie Newman had tried before to mandate house color, but City Attorney Bob Oast did not think it would be constitutional. Instead, he worded the steep slopes ordinance so as to allow a density bonus for houses with low LRV’s. Robin Cape agreed that there was nothing worse than a white house on a hillside.

Dr. Carl Mumpower was embarrassed to be associated with a draconian discussion about the control of house color. He tried for the umpteenth time to inform his peers that council did not own the homes, people did. He saw council as grasping at numbers to indulge a special interest group that was overstating risks to impose their sense of aesthetics, with significant costs of compliance, on property owners.

All but Mumpower and Mayor Terry Bellamy voted for the ordinance. The regulation of house paint did not get enough traction to be codified and set the taxpayers up for funding more lawsuits.