Asheville – In response to a reader’s inquiry about the status of the $74 million bond approved by Asheville voters in 2016, there is growing concern regarding the allocation and management of these funds intended for transportation, affordable housing, and parks and recreation improvements:
“I enjoy Leslee’s articles and wonder if she might write an article about what happened to the $74 million of bond money (which was approved by voters in 2016) that the city of Asheville received. https://www.ashevillenc.gov/news/asheville-city-council-exploring-bond-referendum/
The bond was supposed to be allocated between transportation, affordable housing, and parks and recreation. The money allocated for parks was supposed to support repairs and upgrades, but in 2021, Jones Park playground in North Asheville was demolished because the city could not afford repairs. Some of the money was supposed to go toward repairs at Memorial Stadium, but it does not look like any of the money was spent there.
It looks like Buncombe County will soon be asking residents to approve another bond or increase taxes. I don’t think we should fall for another bond referendum if the money is being used for other purposes.
https://beta.ashevillenc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Parks-and-Recreation-Bond-Overview-and-Project-Details.pdf”
While the reader highlights the unfortunate demolition of Jones Park playground due to purported financial constraints and questions the visible progress at Memorial Stadium, it raises broader questions about fiscal transparency and accountability. With Buncombe County potentially seeking additional funding through another bond or tax increase, residents are rightfully cautious about supporting new financial initiatives without a clear understanding of past expenditures. This situation underscores the necessity for a detailed examination of the city’s financial decisions and the actual impact of voter-approved funds on community projects.
The writer is correct in foreseeing efforts by the city and county to raise revenue. He is also correct in believing it is not fair for the government to use its taxing powers to agglomerate more spending power to itself at the expense of hard-working citizens who can only dream of earning as much as a civil servant. Unfortunately, it would take more than a flyby reporter with no forensic auditing credentials to determine whether money was “being used for other purposes.”
To its credit, the City of Asheville has done a great job, in the name of transparency, creating a dashboard to track expenditures of bond revenues. While it lists projects with a descriptive paragraph and dollar amount, the line items are, as government watchdogs say, “wide enough to drive a truck through.” There is no telling how many golden toilet seats, unwarranted luncheons, weak negotiations, or just plain loafing on the clock lurk between the lines. While this falls short of the Nirvana local activists like Clarence Young and Don Yelton envisioned in a government that posts every single check online, it does provide enough for those with the time and resources to see if the contractors’ bids are reasonable.
Looking at the dashboard, one sees that the city has gone slightly overbudget with its plans for spending $32 million in Transportation and Infrastructure bonds. Reporting a budget of $34.8 million, the city has spent $21 million to date, with only $4.7 million remaining under contract. About half the expenditures have gone toward road improvements. The other half supports pedestrian amenities. Ten stretches of sidewalk and three of greenway are either in the works or already completed. Other projects include the installation of crosswalks, traffic signals, and bus shelters. Another $445,000 was spent on what is perhaps the greatest means of inducing motorists to convert to pedestrianism—traffic calming.
The city has spent $22.3 million of its $25 million in Housing bonds. Initiatives include investing in projects like the overhaul of Deaverview and various Habitat for Humanities constructions. Other expenditures include purchasing properties and paying for soft costs like due diligence. Looking ahead, Asheville has successfully distorted the local real estate market to create a missing middle for which it will require more bond revenue to study how it can be artificially recovered.
While the Parks and Recreation bonds were sold to the public at $17 million, funds budgeted in this category total $26.1 million, of which $20.1 million has been spent and $4.5 million is under contract. Expenditures supported construction for parks, playgrounds, courts, and recreation centers.
The story behind Jones Park is long and convoluted, as it involves interlocal agreements. The old Jones Park was built on land owned by Asheville City Schools, with labor and materials supplied by the community. The City of Asheville at first maintained the park, but it stopped doing so after a while, much to the confusion of neighbors and park patrons. The playground equipment was torn down after an independent assessor, Synergy Sports, deemed it unsafe. It was, after all, made of wood, and, at 20 years, the cost of repairs exceeded 50% of the replacement cost.
So, the community rallied again and collected the necessary capital and labor for the rebuild. Since it is Buncombe County’s role to oversee school capital projects, they were brought in to manage the construction. The community only asked that the city commit to maintaining the park for 20 years. The city agreed and said this would be funded out of the Parks and Recreation Department’s existing budget. The $17 million voters approved for Parks and Recreation Bonds was intended for capital improvements, so applying these funds to ongoing maintenance, an operational cost, would constitute misappropriation of the bond revenues.
While the city was accused of not being able to find funds to rebuild the playground, city representatives explained it was not a matter of getting the money together as much as it was getting the school, the county, and the city on the same page. Regardless, taxpayers believing that the city couldn’t find funds were miffed because, at that time, the city agreed to spend $1.5 million in bond money to purchase land from Carolina Day School in South Asheville for a park.
As for Memorial Stadium, the city budgeted $4,040,159 in bond revenues to cover the replacement of the existing turf and stormwater mitigation. As the project nears completion, the dashboard reports that only $1,710,900 has been spent. An additional $4,342,345 in bond revenues were budgeted to construct a six-lane, competition-grade track and a new restroom building; remove the old bleachers; expand the walking trails; upgrade the playground equipment; and realign stormwater mitigation.
While it would be nice if the Local Government Commission had the authority to police fraud, its role in bond oversight is limited to assessing a jurisdiction’s need for and ability to repay bonds, approving the borrowing, and selling the bonds on behalf of the city. Other than that, it intervenes only at the city’s request. And, while it oversees the city’s annual audits, those audits are not forensic but merely assure compliance with accounting procedures. Buncombe County, for example, kept submitting award-winning audits while a story was being written about kickbacks, junkets, gift cards, threats of retaliation, and a tic-tac-toe wall hanging.
It is a lot easier to decide if the line items represent the priorities of responsible leadership. The way downtown merchants are complaining about crime—a restaurateur complaining about vagrants coming into his business and stealing his patrons’ coats off the backs of their chairs, for example—is it a good use of taxpayer dollars to spend so much on parks and recreation? An emperor who embraces the bread-and-circuses model of governing would think so. In the same way, he would likely support extensive improvements to the pink palace downtown, calling it the people’s house and an architectural and historic treasure, as former gainfully employed taxpayers sit on the chilly streets, yearning for their next opioid hit.