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Asheville Bonds - What Would They Pay For?

This story first appeared as part of the WCQS 2016 Election Special which can be heard in its entirety here.

For the first time in two decades, voters in the city of Asheville will decide whether or not to let the city borrow money via bonds to fund a variety of projects.  All told the three bonds would total roughly 74-million dollars, and pay for a lot of road repaving and sidewalk construction and repair.  But that’s not all. 

It’s tough to say the Swannanoa River Greenway is ‘green’ in autumn, thanks to the fallen leaves that blanket the ground.  In a watery basin just off the greenway, litter piles up. In particular beer cans.  The city would like to spend $3.6 million to build up this walking/biking pathway and park that separates the Swannanoa from Wal-Mart and the River Bend Marketplace.  It’s the most expensive project under the $32-million transportation bond voters will be deciding.  There’s also a $17-million parks and recreation bond, roughly half of which would fund renovations to the Grant Recreation Center and Memorial Stadium.  The other bond, worth $25-million, deals with affordable housing, or rather the lack of it. 

“If people were making tons of money building affordable housing, we’d have an overabundance of affordable housing”, says Kit Cramer, president and CEO of the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce.  The group supports all three bonds, but the housing affordability one in particular.  Cramer says this is an issue government must get involved in, because the real estate market is reacting slowly to the problem of workers getting priced out of the city.

“If you’re a private developer and you have a choice of making substantially more on building luxury homes as opposed to affordable housing…and you have a limited resource of land…it’s just a math problem”, Cramer says.  $15-million would go to ‘re-purposing’ land Asheville already owns for affordable housing along the South Charlotte Street corridor, while the rest would go into a trust fund for the city to use on future projects. 

Opponents of the bonds, led by a handful of former elected officials, say that’s too vague a plan to trust so much money on.  They also argue a property tax increase would be needed to help pay off the bonds, a possibility the city admits is true. 

Credit City of Asheville website
What effect the bonds could have on property taxes in Asheville

There’s also the history of Asheville borrowing money.  Bonds used to pay for the construction of city hall and other projects in the 1920’s didn’t paid off until the 1970’s thanks to the Great Depression.  That stifled growth in Asheville, but supporters say that history is just that…history, and that Asheville is now in a much better financial place to borrow money to address the problems of now.

Click on images below to see the proposed projects that would be paid for by the bond (from city of Asheville website) - 

Credit City of Asheville website
Credit City of Asheville website