The Asheville City Council got a compelling presentation on the rationale for an eight-month extension of the timeline for local reparations recommendations from Community Reparations Commission (CRC) Chair Dr. Dwight Mullen and Vice-Chair Dewana Little on Tuesday, December 12, 2023. We hoped that the City would respond to this clear ask with a clear thumbs-up to the extension, but instead they offered no such approval, or even a clear response at all.

Both City and County staff are recommending that their respective governments reject the CRC’s extension request, and to instead support their still unarticulated “workable plan” to conclude the work with only two additional months of work. We feel strongly that this is a huge mistake, for reasons we’ve been sharing with our community for the past week. There is a long list of reasons why this extension request is deeply justified (we invite you to scroll down and read our summary below). Perhaps the simplest reason the City and County should agree to it is because doing so would demonstrate their ongoing confidence in the CRC, and their commitment to local reparations - and not doing so communicates the opposite. There is widespread agreement that more effort needs to go into inviting Black community members into this process. There is also an understanding that an obstacle to successful community engagement is the understandable skepticism that many Black folks have that the City and County will actually act on the recommendations being drafted. It’s worth asking: if the City and County aren’t going to follow the lead of the CRC now, why would anyone believe they’ll do so later when the stakes are higher?

We have more analysis of this political moment and the importance of honoring this extension request below, along with our earlier posts about this issue. (We also invite you to watch Dr. Mullen and Ms. Little’s presentation before the Asheville City Council here.) When you’re ready to join us in taking action, fill out the brief form and click the "Start Writing" button to open up an email template you can use to communicate with the City Council and the County Commission. You can simply sign your name to our suggested content, or if you have the time and inclination, we encourage you to personalize your email or even write your own unique message.

Why is this Reparations Extension Different from Previous Ones?

During the discussion of the request by the Community Reparations Commission (CRC) for an eight month extension of their timeline on Tuesday, December 12, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer admitted that the City is “making this up as we go.” She referenced the fact that there are few other models of local reparations, and therefore no tried and true template for the City to follow. This is a point the Mayor has often repeated in the past three years, and we agree with her. This process has few precedents and therefore has had to adapt and evolve over time. That’s still the case.

It’s important for people to realize that this is not the first time a reparations extension has been proposed; it’s just the first time that the CRC has asked for one, and the first time the answer wasn’t an immediate “yes.” The original resolutions, passed by the City and County in the summer of 2020, called for the CRC to be established within one year. In the first timeline laid out by Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell in early 2021, she predicted that the Commission would be formed by July of 2021, a small one-month extension of the original timeline. Repeated delays followed that announcement, and the Commission wasn’t formed until April of 2022, a nine-month extension of the already extended timeline.

Each of these prior extensions was agreed to without any resistance by either the City or County. They recognized the fact that each iteration of the timeline was somewhat arbitrary and subject to change. That remains the case. We have to wonder: why were the City and County so unconcerned about granting extensions to themselves, but are now so resistant to granting one to the CRC? According to Dr. Mullen (and our own assessment), the CRC’s process has built some real momentum. At the City Council meeting on December 12, Dr. Mullen vividly described the progress he saw in the work and the level of dialogue and cooperation developing on the CRC. We join him in asking: “Why shut it down?”

City Manager suggests: wait until June to see if an extension is needed

Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell has suggested on several recent occasions that the City doesn’t need to endorse the CRC’s extension request because they could always do so later. She has cited the staff plan (once again, without offering any details) which asserts that the work could be completed by June, and noted that if that deadline proves premature, there could always be an extension offered at that point.

That might sound reasonable on the surface, but those of us who have worked under deadlines of any kind know that if and when a process is extended makes a vast difference in the quality and outcome of the work being done. For example, a reporter working on a story due tomorrow is going to limit how many interviews they do and how much research they conduct. If the story isn’t due until next week, the reporter's approach to the process will be different, which would likely yield a significantly different end result.

Similarly, the timeframe the CRC is allowed to operate under will make a huge difference to how their process plays out. If the City and County insist that the CRC operate with a June wrap-up date in mind, the CRC will have to structure all their work accordingly. If they:

• Need to make a data request, there may not be enough time to get a response.

• Want to make substantive changes to their recommendations based on the Stop the Harm Audit once it is finalized in February, there may not be enough time to do this intentionally with consistency across the five different Impact Focus Area workgroups.

• Want to solicit serious feedback on their recommendations from the Black community, there might not be enough time to meaningfully incorporate their input, which would be a waste of the community's time. With so little time, it’s more likely that the focus of community engagement would shift to informing folks of what the recommendations are, rather than asking for their input and suggestions. We would question whether that kind of limited outreach should even be called “community engagement.”

This is why the CRC is advocating for a December 2024 extension now, as opposed to later. We are asking the City and County to embrace this request, rather than suggesting, inaccurately, that there is no harm in "kicking the can" down the road.