1. How will you use your office to advance and build support for a federal and local Green New Deal? We will need a robust community engagement effort that addresses barriers to participation so our neighbors can engage in what a Green New Deal for Asheville means. This includes working with the City’s offices of Equity & Inclusion and Sustainability through workshops across the City with childcare, transportation shuttles, and language justice services made available. We need to prioritize our current tax dollars and future bond programs to address identified issues of: a fare-free, regional transit network at the intersection of equitable access, economic mobility, and environmental sustainability; deeply-affordable housing through creative and collaborative solutions; resilient food and water systems; and restoration of our tree canopy. In doing these things, we can secure training for quality, local jobs as we move towards community-wide efforts to transition from fossil fuels. 
2. Describe your vision for a just transition away from fossil fuels. Please include specifically what policies you would promote to achieve this and why doing so is important to you. The coalition that worked on declaration of a climate emergency in Asheville was a refreshing start, and the follow-up is going to be a tremendous amount of work. We have to stand up with people across North Carolina to demand an end to the Duke energy monopoly, work with state legislators to remove solar production caps, and get ready for cooperative energy ownership. A step we can make here and now is coordinating efforts with Buncombe County on solar for our schools and civic buildings. An example of effective partnership  looking like supporting Energy Savers Network, which is working with volunteers to make low-income households more energy efficient, saving folks money on their bills at the same time as skill-sharing. We need policies and community agreements so new development will be carbon neutral, and housing density on transit corridors which will keep people close to goods and services without a car while making housing more affordable by reducing parking and infrastructure needs. Addressing the opportunity gap in our schools, securing our formerly public-housing neighborhoods, establishing an eviction protection fund, and resourcing anti-gentrification tools will be important parts of ensuring equity is at the center of our resiliency efforts. We need each to strengthen our community bonds and invite accountability around our budget, planning, and policies so we can be better prepared for climate change and climate migration, which is what our next generation demands for a hopeful future.
3. What will you do to protect communities, particularly communities of color, from fossil fuel projects? Asheville has a long history of systemic racism in our budgeting, planning, and policies, seen in red-lining, urban renewal, building public housing on brown fields, and now gentrification. First, we have to stop the harm that is being caused. That looks like building coalition and leveraging to move the coal ash away from water systems, ending the Duke monopoly, pushing back against the Duke rate hike, following up on divesting our City through moving our bank to one that doesn’t fund pipelines, and advancing the work to ensure we don’t build new fossil fuel infrastructure like a peaker power plant estimated to cost taxpayers about $100-million dollars. Investment in fossil fuel infrastructure typically impacts low-income neighborhoods and communities of color because neighborhoods and companies with the most resources leverage politicians and decision makers, buying their way out of harm, which is why your pledge not to take fossil fuel money is an important tool in this work. Next steps look like ensuring quality land is made available to the Asheville-Buncombe Community Land Trust so neighbors can live and grow nutritious food and healthy community.
4. How do you plan to support affordable housing in office? After 5 years of advocating for housing for working and poor people, I understand that deeply-affordable housing is going to require creative, collaborative solutions:
   1. When the Unified Development Ordinance is reviewed, we need to ensure planning and policies that allow greater density along transit corridors for access to jobs, groceries, education, health care, and community without a car. The Urban Place zoning is a step in that direction, but we need high standards for affordability percentages and to lessen the need for parking by ensuring robust multimodal infrastructure.
   2. Equity-building solutions like the BeLoved Community Tiny Home Village is something we can get behind by making sure zoning supports tiny homes for housing, not short-term rentals. This will be part of expanding zoning use for faith communities and community centers.
   3. The Asheville-Buncombe Community Land Trust needs major support of  land and money as part of local reparations to ensure resilient neighborhoods that include housing, food, and access to jobs and education. I will continue to invite the community members taking the lead on this work to guide decision making.
   4. Affordable housing means keeping people in their home, and that means investing in a eviction protection fund and home repair fund, which will save taxpayers and vulnerable neighbors from the high costs of evictions and homelessness. A dental emergency shouldn’t be what puts someone on the street, and a busted water heater shouldn’t be the final straw for foreclosure. These kinds of solutions should be built into an anti-gentrification toolkit for the City and County.
   5. We need to ensure that all incentivized housing is required to accept vouchers, which means addressing the stigma in our community while resulting in rent being paid automatically on time for landlords.
   6. We must build coalition across the state to update our renters rights and legislation around mandatory inclusionary zoning. It’s also time for Asheville to pass a resolution for a non-discrimination ordinance for housing.
5. How do you plan to use your office to support voters rights? I have volunteered with voter rights advocacy for over a decade, and know that this fight will continue in Asheville and North Carolina. I am on the record advocating against the distrciting of the City as well as requesting our municipal elections be held in odd-year cycles to ensure fair, free elections as part of our Constitutional rights, and I will stay faithful to this work: https://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/2019/11/01/asheville-has-urgent-election-work-do-polls-not-opinion/4112930002/
6. Firefighters are putting their lives on the line and don’t even make $15 an hour. How do you justify that? We cannot, it’s shameful. In 2018, it came to question that high-level staff may have received performance bonuses as well as cost-of-living increases, which part of a conversation about how we are perpetuating a drastic wealth gap in City Hall. Lessening the automatic pay increase for high-level staff while we bring all City employees up to a base-rate of $15-hr, including our firefighters wages that are laging behind the City’s living wage policy, will make more employees eligible for the City’s Downpayment Assistance Program. We’re eagerly anticipating new data on housing costs, which will impact our county-wide living wage equation determined by Just Economics, where I volunteer as a member of the Policy Advocacy Committee. We must also leverage across the state in the Fight for $15 as a more just minimum wage, as well as for the low-cost, high-impact benefit of paid family leave.
7. How do you plan to expand transit in light of the budget cuts? With Better Buses Together, we are advocating for evening service hours to be expanded in this budget cycle. Starting June 1st, that would ear-mark about $100,000 of our $800,000 projected budget surplus so staff could start preparing for a full roll-out of evening hours this Summer. We have to ensure that our additional property taxes from the sale of Mission Health are allocated for transit instead of a structural deficit, which means prioritizing the needs of the people. At the same time, we need to press forward action for dedicated transit funds like a prepared foods tax at locations that serve alcohol, lessening impact of prepared foods tax on low-income neighbors, and work with the County on collaborative planning and funding to make sure we don’t lose existing funding streams. We must also leverage our occupancy taxes for the Downtown Shuttle that’s identified in the Transit Master Plan, which could be a historical nod to Asheville’s former trolley system while providing access to our workers and visitors. 
8. What are you going to do to ensure that people who work in Asheville can afford to live here? We need to look at all of our local resources, addressing the false narrative of resource scarcity when we have our City and County budgets as well as $24 million in occupancy taxes and $70 million in the Dogwood Health Trust that are being distributed this year. We also have to tackle our racial disparity in the opportunity gap in our Asheville City Schools, and equity in our budget, planning, and policies, so we can attract quality, living wage jobs. Refusing to join with North Carolina cities in advance of NC House Bill 2, the notorious “bathroom bill”, and HB 142 still causes harm today, which is a barrier to inviting economic development we want and need in Asheville and North Carolina. If we do the work to realize our potential to really be a city where equity & inclusion are our mission, where we take care of each other and the planet better, the high cost of harm will be addressed, and we can afford to Be ‘Bout it Being Better.
9. Do you support participatory budgeting? How will you help reshape our budgeting process to ensure that community needs are met? Absolutely! I first started looking into how it could work for Asheville after Councilwoman Sheneika Smith ran on it. I think it’s a powerful tool for healing and building trust, especially since neighbors can participate starting in middle school and regardless of documentation, so it’s truly a community effort. There are so many barriers to participation, and we need creative ways to include neighbors in advisory roles. Participatory Democracy is key to success during the budget input sessions: offering childcare, contracting language justice services, distilling information for the public on how to engage, opening more opportunities and mediums for participation, and partnering on people-powered solutions. Once we establish the process and trust with the people, my hope is we can join with other NC cities like Greensboro and Durham who are doing participatory budgeting to leverage a state-wide participatory budget process, which could mean ensuring our schools and educators have the funding they need regardless of who has the most power in Raleigh.
10. What other issues are important to you as a candidate? How does your concern about those issues relate to your concern about climate change and support for the Green New Deal? As a piano teacher, long-term accountability and transparency in processes is very important to me. We need courageous leaders on Council that will listen and work to build community with and for our youth. It’s not enough to be an alli, we need to work to shift hearts, minds, and actions as part of a social attitude adjustment. This work cannot be done alone, and I’m thankful our community is actively getting to work on these critical issues since climate change is the biggest public safety issue of our time. 

Is there anything else you’d like to share? I want to say “thank you!” After 5 years of showing up to civic meetings, reporting back through AshevilleFM, JMpro, and AVL Report Back, I’m so encouraged that my friends & neighbors are hearing the call to show up and demand better for our people and the planet. There is so much at stake, and acknowledging “our house is on fire,” we need a cause for celebration. Thank you for showing up and courageously doing the work!