On Wednesday, Asheville’s two mayoral candidates, Esther Manheimer and Kim Roney, attended the first major campaign event of the season at The Country Club of Asheville.
At the forum, which drew around 100 people, both candidates agreed that Asheville’s biggest challenges include affordable housing, homelessness and long-term recovery from Hurricane Helene.
But they expressed differing views on policing and their overall approach to politics.
Roney, 46, has served on Asheville City Council since 2020. She was “born and raised in deep poverty in the rural south,” she said, before graduating from James Madison University. She now works as a self-employed music teacher. Before getting elected to serve on council, she was on several city advisory boards. She also ran against Manheimer for mayor, unsuccessfully, in 2022.
The importance of transparency and public participation in local government was a huge talking point for Roney on Wednesday.
She argued for bringing back the city’s advisory boards, many of which have remained temporarily suspended since Hurricane Helene. During one exchange, Roney criticized the city’s use of “three-by-three” check-ins, a controversial practice where three or fewer council members hold private and informal conversations with city staff members.
“For me, it’s important to do the people’s work in public. Right now we have a series of three-by-threes and sometimes one-on-one meetings where staff might spend anywhere from, like, eight to 10 hours with agendas and presentations, counting votes throughout the day,” Roney said. “It’s a lot of staff time, but none of those meetings are public. And there’s no minutes.”
Manheimer, who is seeking a fourth term as mayor, pushed back on the criticism. The 54 year-old has served on Asheville City Council since 2009 and has been mayor since 2013. She works as a land litigation attorney at the Van Winkle Law Firm.
In contrast with Roney, Manheimer argued that private conversations are often necessary for the government to function effectively.
“I do agree that transparency is critically important,” she said, noting that Asheville streams all of its public meetings online. “But we also have to have discussions with one another. We gotta call each other back and be able to work through difficult issues. That's not a transparency issue. That's a functioning issue.”
“You’ve got to figure out how to have frenemies”
In her opening remarks, Manheimer touted her leadership through Hurricane Helene, listing her numerous trips to Washington, D.C. and the meetings she held with national policymakers, including leadership from FEMA, HUD and members of Congress.
“I left those meetings with nearly a billion dollars in funding that we are going to be able to invest in this community for our future,” she said. She described this recovery money as a “silver lining” for Asheville.
That’s money that can be used to repair everything damaged by Helene, and also represents “the, probably, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to receive funding to do incredible enhancements that really, honestly, we couldn't afford to do on our own,” she said. “For example, an $150 million project to add a water filtration system to the North Fork Reservoir, so that you never have to hear the word turbidity again.”
At a time when political headwinds have made obtaining recovery money more difficult, Manheimer identified her bipartisan approach as the most effective path forward for Asheville.
“When you're dealing with an antagonistic legislature, you've got to figure out how to have frenemies, if you will. You need to be able to have respected relationships with the people you strongly disagree with,” she said. “I have done that many, many times.”
Roney spoke about her own presence and leadership during Helene, but she put more emphasis on the community-led, grassroots efforts she helped lead after the storm, such as her collaboration with the flush brigade.
“We were carrying five gallon buckets up flights of stairs to make sure that our homebound and elderly neighbors were able to flush their toilets and stay healthy and safe,” she recalled.
Roney said she also worked with Local Progress, a national coalition of elected officials, to bring in a Level One Incident management team from New York City that helped assist the city’s fire department with emergency response.
Even before the storm, Roney said she advocated heavily for climate resiliency. In 2020, prior to getting elected to council, she worked with the Sunrise Movement to persuade Asheville to pass a “climate emergency” resolution. She said she also routinely leveraged her role as Council member to encourage developers to incorporate renewable energy into large-scale projects. And since the immediate aftermath of the storm, Roney has helped push the city to commit millions to the creation of resilience hubs.
“Real concerns” about police technology
One of the most contentious exchanges of the afternoon was a discussion over the city’s policy towards surveillance technology.
Roney and Manheimer argued over the city’s recent decision to accept $1.14 million in federal funding for the creation of a real-time intelligence center for the Asheville Police Department. The city has relied on the Buncombe County Sheriff’s intelligence center for years, but recently Asheville residents have grown more critical of Axon, the company that provides the technology for the center.
Earlier this month, Roney was the only member of Asheville City Council to vote against accepting the grant. On Wednesday, Roney again raised concerns about police surveillance technology and civil liberties.
“I have real concerns about the question of protecting our constitutional rights,” she said, referencing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements’ use of Axon’s surveillance technology. “And when a billionaire-owned, AI-fueled, for-profit tech company is working with ICE and Homeland Security and also the police department to surveil people without a warrant, there are real questions about protections of our constitutional rights.”
Manheimer, in contrast, framed the move as more of a practical and cost-saving measure. She insinuated that she was more of a team player, noting that Roney was the only person to vote against a grant that would help save the city money.
“Right now we pay the sheriff's department to have access to his intelligence center, which he's been operating for many years,” Manheimer said. “And we received a grant from the federal government to be able to pay for our own.”
At the end of the event, Jacqueline Hallam, a retired healthcare worker, said she hasn’t made up her mind yet on who gets her vote. She’s hoping to hear more nuanced policy on how the candidates will address homelessness, which has increased in Asheville for the last two years.
“No matter how much we talk about who's going to do what with affordable housing, the people who qualify for affordable housing can't be there if they're on the street, on drugs, because they need to have income or some type of stability,” she said. “I want to hear more about how we take care of the least of us.”
The event was the first in a months-long campaign season leading up to the November election. Early voting begins in mid-October.
