DavidForbes
@DavidForbes

Once in awhile it's useful to take a moment and briefly tally recent acts by local governments and institutions against our communities. So as part of our Blade Facts graphic series, we offer this:

  • Last week UNCA's highly-paid administrators (the chancellor gets $300,000 a year and a free mansion) proposed cutting four departments, including its widely-loved Theatre program.

  • The new director at the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville (HACA) is moving to shut down the Southside Community Farm, further hurting local Black communities already hit hard by food apartheid. Last year HACA also pulled one of the farm's refrigerators that offered free food. This is part of a long pattern of HACA attacking or harassing organizing it doesn't like.

  • Unlike even plenty of other "progressive" local governments in North Carolina, Asheville city council refuses to so much as consider a ceasefire resolution. Instead officials have repeatedly let far-right Zionists make openly racist and Islamophobic remarks while censoring pro-ceasefire locals for such acts as clapping or silently standing in support.

  • The Asheville city budget found plenty of money for massive pay hikes for the city manager and other top-level officials along with increased drone surveillance, but still doesn't pay firefighters a living wage.

  • Over the past years Asheville city hall has taken a particularly draconian approach to protest, mutual aid and even journalism that those running it don't like. This includes tear-gassing anti-racist protesters in 2020, the infamous Christmas night crackdown on a homeless camp (including arresting two Blade journalists), arresting mutual aid workers on false felony littering charges, surveilling a bookstore opening and breaking the First Amendment to target speech Mayor Esther Manheimer and city council don't like.

  • In the face of widespread public outrage Asheville city council passed a Business Improvement District, which will tax everyone in the center of the city and give the money to a private organization. This is being pushed by the Chamber of Commerce and other conservative business groups, who plan to use the funds to hire private security to crack down on "anything deemed out of the ordinary."

  • Under new police chief Mike Lamb the police department continues its history of "special operations" specifically meant to target the poor, especially the homeless, for daring to exist in public.

This is Asheville. This is where we are now, with those in power hell-bent on dismantling anything in this city that doesn't cater to tourists and the wealthy.

The question, as always, is what the rest of us are going to do about it.

Graphic by Matilda Bliss. Originally published on the Asheville Blade's patreon


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