Asheville – It was the day after Labor Day, so Buncombe County Commissioners Amanda Edwards and Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, as well as Chair Brownie Newman, thought it would be nice to officially declare it Worker Appreciation Week. The proclamation was presented to Jen Hampton of Asheville Food and Beverage United, which is essentially a union but, due to state law, is unable to require employee membership or dues. The organization’s mission is to “fight for the interests” of Asheville’s food laborers, teaching them how to “build power in their workplaces” and “solve housing and transportation issues.” Like a union, it also provides immediate assistance to wage earners who don’t enjoy the safety nets afforded to salaried workers. Asheville Food and Beverage claims 1,800 members.
Hampton presented the commissioners with a petition with over 2,000 signatures demanding better parking conditions for Asheville’s food and beverage workers. It read, “We, the undersigned, want a solution that will provide low-cost or free parking as well as expanded access to public transportation for downtown service workers. We cannot keep paying to go to work. It’s not right and we demand action. ”
Representatives from the union were in the audience wearing T-shirts with its logo, the raised fist of communism clenching an empty fork, and a few of them spoke during public comment. Michael Schlotz said since he began working at an establishment with no employee parking last year, his household’s parking fees and fines paid and owed have constituted 7%–10% of their income. Many of the fines are incurred because he is half an hour late “feeding the meter.” Although he can pay by phone, he is often busy with customers and unable to use his phone, let alone take breaks. He was also concerned about the risks posed by inadequate parking for night workers. “To park outside the city is to expose yourself to potential danger,” he said.
Jules Blumenthal said he came from Virginia Beach, where he never paid more than $7 a day to park, and he thought that was extreme. Here, it costs $4 per half-hour to park in the Pack Square parking garage. Parking prices, he said, were destroying lives. Waitstaff might have to work their first hour every day to pay for parking; persons working back-of-house jobs, who don’t get tipped, have to work an hour and a half. He said he knew people who refused to work or visit downtown Asheville because of parking prices. Also, all the extra income that somebody must expect to be accruing from high-priced parking is obviously not being reinvested in garage maintenance.Adrienne Miceli Trask said she works at Asheville Bee Charmer. Employees often must travel between the store on Broadway and the one on Battery Park Avenue. Traffic is so bad and parking so scarce that it is not unusual for the trip to take an hour, which could make somebody waiting for a shift change late, perhaps messing with the schedule of somebody they were supposed to relieve, and so on. Not only does this wasted time “snowball,” it unnecessarily pollutes the atmosphere.
Karli Schwartz wanted to talk about what it’s like to have to park a mile away from work to avoid paying for parking and then go back to the car, carrying cash from tips, at midnight. She and others park on Cherry Street or in Montford, for example. “As you may know,” she said, “Cherry Street has been getting a lot worse, a lot more dangerous, and there’s a lot more people kind of lingering around the outer edges of Montford and Cherry Street, and just around the outsides of downtown more recently, since there’s a lot of people kind of congregating and things are harder financially for a lot of people, so they are living on the streets now.”
She said these social issues were “big city problems.” People move to Asheville because it’s a small town with a low-stress environment. She invited the commissioners to park in Montford and walk downtown between 10 p.m. and midnight, bringing their children with them, to see how it felt.
Newman assured those in the audience that the commissioners did hear them, and they were working on resolving the parking issues. In fact, earlier that afternoon, while those in the audience had been holding an “action” outside, the commissioners had been discussing options for restructuring parking rates in their briefing.The county’s Director of Economic Development and Government Relations Tim Love began with costs of parking in Asheville. Persons working fulltime downtown will spend at least $15 per day or $85 per month with a monthly pass. Prices vary among city garages. The median-wage personal care and service worker, scheduled five days a week at $13.57 per hour, would pay 1.7%-5.5% of his gross income in parking, provided he knew about monthly passes. If he didn’t, and Newman indicated a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of monthly passes, he could spend over one-fifth of his income on parking – provided he didn’t incur any fines.
Staff proposed two changes for the commissioners to mull over. One would subsidize parking for any downtown worker. There wouldn’t be any means testing, because, said Love, Preferred Parking, which manages the garage, didn’t want to deal with the overhead and hassles of enforcement. Besides, the only tool they had for enforcement was issuing fines, and that would not make parking more affordable. The second option would be to subsidize parking only in one garage outside the tourism milieu, where only downtown workers are expected to park, like the Coxe Avenue garage.
Love said staff would be happy to work with the commissioners on modeling optimum revenues, but either strategy would put the parking budget further in the hole, with losses in the $800,000s. Annual debt service on the parking deck is $1.276 million, Preferred Parking takes a 5% management fee, and no more spaces may be leased, as the bond agreement established a minimum amount of parking that must remain available to the general public. Newman’s wish to allow time for public input before making a decision was honored.