From Asheville Citizen Times, • OCTOBER 4, 2009 12:15 AM

Asheville candidates make final pitches, trade jabs City Council primary is Tuesday

By Joel Burgess

ASHEVILLE — With just days to the City Council primary, mayoral and council candidates made final pitches and traded jabs, some saying money was playing too big a role or that candidates were camouflaging themselves with political labels.

Candidates talked Friday about issues they said had gotten little attention, such as crime, affordable housing, loss of private property rights and local energy supplies. Their comments came in response to questions from the Citizen-Times asking what issues they thought had been overlooked or if something about them had been misunderstood.

Some said they had been misrepresented as not interested in campaigning. One candidate, Cesar Romero, said he had been verbally attacked by an anti-immigrant caller during a phone-in forum. Candidates Robert Edwards and Denise Pendleton gave no answers.

Tuesday's primary will select two of four mayoral candidates to go on to the Nov. 3 general election. They are incumbent Terry Bellamy, Edwards, Shad Marsh and Pendleton. Voters will also choose six council candidates from a field of nine: Cecil Bothwell, Larry Chastain, Ryan Croft, J. Neal Jackson, Esther Manheimer, incumbents Kelly Miller and Carl Mumpower, Romero and Gordon Smith. Along with the mayor's seat, three council positions are up for grabs.

Some of the charges came from environmentalist Bothwell, who said Jackson, Manheimer and Miller were more conservative than they were telling voters.

“The press has overlooked the greenwashing that seems so prevalent, accepting candidates self-labeling as ‘progressive' without evidence,” the writer and builder said.

The issues

Fellow progressive Smith didn't bring up mislabeling, but said long-term issues for the city had been overlooked.

“How will we ensure affordable housing for the next 20 years? How will we rebuild an industrial base? How will we create dedicated funding for multimodal transportation infrastructure? How will we address our energy needs in the long-term?”

Jackson, a downtown shop owner, said he never claimed to be an environmentalist, and that he is interested in alternative energy. But he said he is more interested in the council getting more control of city schools, possibly implementing a student uniform policy and also reducing downtown litter.

“If you're going to talk about green, you have to talk about being clean first,” he said.

Manheimer, the only council candidate who is a woman, said she might have called herself progressive when asked by a newspaper to assign herself a label, “but nowhere on my Web site am I describing myself as a progressive,” she said. “It's really up to the voters to decide where I stand in their minds.”

The land-use attorney said her endorsements ranged from progressive Councilman Brownie Newman to more conservative Vice Mayor Jan Davis.

Miller, executive vice president with the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce, said he stood by his record “of consistently working for over 10 years in the Asheville area to bring sustainable concepts to small-business entrepreneurs.”

He and Bellamy also came under fire for raising the largest sums of money.

Campaign finance

Mumpower, a proponent for cracking down on crime in public housing, said he was raising no money and that others were “purchasing” seats.

“I have implemented my own campaign finance reform and term-limit policy by refusing contributions and spending zero funds,” he said.

Marsh, meanwhile, questioned why the mayor needed to raise nearly $30,000 “to run against two inexperienced candidates who have raised around $300.”

Miller, the top fundraising council candidate, with $25,242, including $9,000 he loaned his campaign, said people were investing in his “balanced, commonsense platform.”

Bellamy said she was happy to have people's support, though donations wouldn't affect her decisions. “I take each issue, one by one,” she said.

She in turn criticized the heavy use of satire and humor by Marsh, who has called for bringing tigers downtown and banning cars there “because there are no cars in the Bible.”

“If my opponent chose to do this as a joke, I don't see my city and hometown as a joke, I'm going to give it all I have,” Bellamy said.

Marsh has said his campaign is “no more of, or no less than a joke than anyone else running,” quoting punk-rock icon and San Francisco mayoral candidate Jello Biafra.

Misconceptions

Candidates who said they were facing misconceptions, included Croft, a self-labeled constitutional conservative, who has not participated in candidate forums because he said they were loaded in favor of progressives.

Croft said he is spending most of his time going door-to-door, talking to people, in part, about the city's agreement with an international cities organization whose goal is to reduce carbon output. “It's global governance, supposedly to save the planet.”

Romero, a Nicaraguan immigrant, said he had to deal with a caller at phone-in forum who said he couldn't speak English and should leave the country. “I was really shocked,” he said.

The transportation company owner said he has campaigned on help for small businesses, the elderly and disabled, and said some candidates are promising more than they can deliver and talk too much. “I leave those forums sometimes with a headache,” he said. He declined to name candidates.

Like Romero, Chastain said he would try to help the disadvantaged.

“The homeless, veterans and people with disabilities will always be high on my priory list,” the veteran's homeless shelter supervisor said. Chastain works at Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry and said his service there would be a good transition to the council.