Tuesday’s Asheville City Council meeting included approval of spending an additional $250,000 on paying all city employees a living wage. Outgoing Councilman Jan Davis objected, saying department directors will be cutting hours and jobs to meet budgets. The Civic Center (now officially the US Cellular Center, but the name isn’t catching on), for example, is an enterprise fund charged with minimizing general-fund subsidies. He said the Civic Center Commission was already wondering if they needed to increase, for example, ticket fees. Davis was treated as a child by Councilman Cecil Bothwell. The $250,000 was already in the budget, so nothing would be lost. Increasing the city budget by $250,000 a year works out to only about $8 more annually from the average taxpayer. Gordon Smith hoped the private sector would follow the city’s example of paying everybody (even incompetent me) a living wage.
Later, council received a report from the city’s financial advisor, Doug Carter. He was delighted the city now had a AAA rating from S&P. Working toward that achievement were an excessive fund balance, an ambitious capital improvement program, and investment in economic development. Outgoing Councilman Chris Pelly asked what it all meant for the taxpayer. He had cast a lone vote opposing a 1.5-cent property tax increase, arguing the city’s fund balance, at 24 percent of general-fund expenditures, was fat and healthy compared to the required 15 percent. Carter said it translated to lower interest rates for the city, which delighted Smith, because that would expand the city’s capacity to take on more projects.
Lastly, council adopted changes to their Land Use Incentive Grant policy. They had been told by many developers that the original policy only incentivized impossible projects. New features expand the rent controls from ten to fifteen years and offer more tax breaks for developers committing to 20- or 30-year rent controls. Requirements for energy efficiency were dropped, as city codes now pretty much forbid building non-green housing. The mixed-use requirement has been dropped to help the city focus on housing, and rather than being located within a certain radius of a bus stop, the new policy requires only that developments have “superior locational efficiency.”
