By JOHN BOYLE, Asheville Watchdog, Asheville Watchdog
By now you’ve probably seen where Asheville and Buncombe County had a blockbuster, record-setting year in 2023 for tourism, luring 13.9 million visitors to our lovely mountain oasis.
As my colleague Sally Kestin reported, that means on an average day last year Buncombe had one visitor for every seven residents. I envision this hapless tourist being passed around between seven homes during his or her visit here, the locals curiously studying the creature like a lab animal, wondering, “What is it that drives this hapless being to keep coming here?”
Clearly, the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority juggernaut, which has a $34 million budget this year, continues to lure the tourists. By law, the organization has to spend two-thirds of its revenue on marketing and promotions, and one-third on local projects that can boost tourism and benefit locals.
It used to be a 75 percent/25 percent split, but the General Assembly changed the formula in 2022, after much carping from locals about how much money gets spent promoting the area versus contributing to infrastructure and local attractions.
While the TDA does spend a phenomenal amount of dough on advertising the area, it also sinks a lot into local projects, ranging from theaters and ballfields to greenways and ziplines. That comes via the relatively new Legacy Investment From Tourism (LIFT) fund, which provides financial investment from the TDA to tourism-related capital projects, and the longstanding Tourism Product Development Fund, which has provided more than $86 million for 40 community projects since 2001.
Tourism fuels $3 billion in annual spending, which is also great, but as I’ve noted before, the problem with the TDA is it has to spend the money it brings in, mostly on promotion, and that pot just grows with no end in sight. More hotels keep going up, and that generates more occupancy taxes, and that gives the TDA more money to spend.
The TDA is restricted in what it can spend the money on, so while local residents decry the lack of funding for, say, affordable housing or hiring more cops, the TDA cannot, by law, designate funds for those uses. Much grumbling has ensued.
State Sen. Julie Mayfield, D-Buncombe, worked on the formula change in 2022, and she’s been critical of the perpetual motion TDA tourism machine before. In a February column I wrote about an extravagant $17,000 retirement party the TDA threw for a longtime employee, Mayfield said she wanted to see LIFT funds go to affordable housing, and if they didn’t she would “introduce something to change it.”
This year the TDA did provide some funding for Buncombe County’s Ferry Road project, which includes some affordable housing, but they didn’t, or couldn’t, fund a Mountain Housing Opportunities project that was more purely affordable housing. As Mayfield said, the North Carolina Restaurant & Lodging Association “sent a very clear message that you may not use any of this (occupancy tax) money for affordable housing.”
Sure, we could digress here on the crying need for affordable housing for service workers who keep the restaurant, hotel and retail industries alive in our fine state, but let’s not be distracted by the needs of the common folk.
Last week I asked Mayfield where things stand, as far as she’s concerned.
“I still think that the uses of the money should be expanded, and that we need to have really a wholesale redo of the legislative guidelines that govern the occupancy tax dollars and bills,” Mayfield said. “That’s a very big lift, and all the tourism associations are opposed to that.”
Mayfield believes she has some legislative support for changes, but don’t look for any sweeping changes this year or next.
Mayfield said she’s been so busy with the HCA Mission Hospital issue that she’s not had time to do the groundwork and hold meetings with the TDA’s leadership and hoteliers to start the conversations this year. Mayfield has played a key role in the formation of Reclaim Healthcare WNC, a coalition of western North Carolina doctors, patient advocates, clergy members and others calling for HCA Healthcare to give up the Mission Health network.
“I’m not going to apologize for it — I’ve been busy trying to save our healthcare system,” Mayfield told me. “Literally, it’s a full-time job. And there was never going to be any (occupancy tax/TDA) legislation next year anyway, because this has always a multi-year conversation to get to a place of agreement. It is still on my list to do and to convene those conversations, but I just haven’t done it yet.”
So clearly, we have to take a different approach. Look, tourists have a lot to do here, including a gazillion restaurants, brewpubs, ziplines, and art galleries.
But with more and more tourists flooding in every year, is it enough? Won’t they get bored here without more to do?
I worry about them.
Some modest proposals
So I’ve come up with a few ideas for future tourism products and events that I strongly feel are solid gold. Feel free to share your ideas, but for now, here’s what I’ve got:
Tourist Reduction Zipline — We rig a zipline atop the Arras Hotel, the tallest building downtown, telling tourists it will drop them into Splashville in front of City Hall. Instead, it zips them down to Gastonia. Enjoy that gem of a city, folks!
Bridezilla Shriek-off Competition — We always have a plethora of sash-wearing bachelorette parties downtown, at Biltmore and at various brewpubs. As the night wears on and the booze kicks in, invariably the shrieking ensues. Sure, maybe sometimes it’s “wooting” or cackling, but it’s all the ear-piercing noise of excitable young women that shred the night, and our eardrums, with their racket. We should get some use out of the city’s rarely enforced noise ordinance and have some cops with decibel readers organize a contest for the year’s loudest shriek. Grand prize is a wedding destination package … to Gastonia.
Downtown Bathroom Bingo and Treasure Hunt — While I was downtown Thursday afternoon, nature called. Hey, I’m 60 and it calls a lot these days. My bladder is pretty much a spurned ex-girlfriend stalker at this age. It won’t stop calling. At any rate, I managed to find one of the few public bathrooms downtown, in Pack Square Park, and one of the three units was actually open. It was littered with a fair amount of trash, including a syringe cap. Which gave me an idea of a great game for tourists to play — find the downtown public bathrooms, and a list of search items. I say we start with a discarded item of clothing, inappropriately jettisoned human waste, a dropped food item of some kind (I once spotted an entire ham by the sidewalk near the library), and an empty plastic liquor bottle. First person to complete the list gets to tinkle in the nice bathroom in City Hall, by the security checkpoint.
Establish a “Strategic Asheville Tourists Amalgamation Neighborhood” — Sure, the acronym is unfortunate, but the idea here is tempting: We bring all the tourists into one area where we’ve located all kinds of touristy stuff for them to do, freeing up downtown and the RAD for us. I’m thinking the 10-acre parcel that UNC Asheville owns off Broadway Street, vacant for years now, would be perfect. Since it’s already terraced, it would be ideal for a couple of stages, portable toilets, a small brewpub, a taco truck and a small art gallery. Once the folks get suitably bored, UNCA might be able to recruit them as students. Hey, their numbers are dwindling.
LaBroom Bus Tours — This is a natural, although LaZoom might file suit for copyright infringement. Anywho, we load up tourists, ostensibly for a rollicking, wildly inappropriate tour of downtown, the River Arts District and other environs, but the bus never stops rolling until it hits downtown Gastonia. Ta-Ta, and please don’t spill your beverages, or your stomach contents, on their sidewalks!
Go-karts around the former Vance Monument site — Seriously, have you ever noticed how the site of the former Vance Monument makes a nearly perfect oval island between the Biltmore Building and the Asheville Art Museum? If the surrounding stretch of blacktop wasn’t just made for a go-kart track, I don’t know what is. If it’ll make the Asheville environmentalist types happy, we could make them soybean-powered go-karts and have the gaudy sponsorships come from Earth Fare and that place that aligns your chakra for a hundred bucks.
“How about electric?” Mayfield said when I told her this idea.
“OK, I’m putting you down in favor of that,” I replied.
“That is not what I said,” Mayfield said.
Look Senator, let’s not split hairs here on a brilliant idea.
But seriously
In reality, in a walkabout Thursday afternoon in downtown, the only supporters I found for this last idea were a couple of clowns hanging out at Pack Square. I’m not being disparaging here — they are literally clowns. Rigel the Clown and Mr. Face, for the record.
Mr. Face sat astride the bronze pig, the Urban Trail fixture denoting where the Buncombe Turnpike livestock trail once ran, one clown shoe firmly on the ground the other hanging off the pig’s face. Adorned with a purple feather headpiece and big red nose, he strummed a ukulele and sang as Rigel juggled.
“With go-karts, if that could be done here in a safe manner with insurance and everything, that’s not a problem for me,” Mr. Face said.
Rigel said he was on board with all of my ideas, including a not fully formed notion of providing tourists with water cannons to blast other tourists as they pass by.
As Mr. Face said, “Why should cops and firefighters be the only ones allowed to handle water cannons? That’s just not fair.”
Clearly, this column went off the rails a bit, but I’m proud to note that I have the clown vote solidly in hand.
More drinking! More music!
I did ask a handful of roaming tourists what they’d like to see more of to occupy their time here, and suggestions included another outdoors-oriented shop (like Mast General Store but with more outdoorsy stuff), a bike-oriented festival of some kind, and swear to god, two suggestions for more street partying.
“I wonder if they could close the streets off and have music downtown,” a gentleman from Winston-Salem suggested, as he sat on a bench on Battery Park Avenue with his wife.
I explained to him about the defunct Bele Chere festival and how it started out great in the 1970s and by the aughts had devolved into a three-day drunkfest that merchants loathed, and only partly because Foghat was the headliner one year. So that was a no-go.
Sisters Anna Oldham and Michelle Harrison, from Indiana, said they liked the public art and cool architecture downtown, but they had just come from Savannah, Georgia, where city leaders are more enlightened about portable alcohol.
“You’re allowed to open carry your drinks there — you can go from place to place with your drink,” Oldham said.
Which made me consider combining two types of open carry near and dear to North Carolinians hearts — alcohol and firearms. As we’re already open-carry on guns, what if we combine the two, and when you finish your beverage, you toss the glass up in the air and shoot it with your sidearm, like in the old West. What could go wrong? Really, ax throwing is so five minutes ago … although we could combine that with alcohol too.
On the way to my car, I bumped into Tom Williams, a retired Asheville High School teacher who now works for the Asheville Rooftop Bar Tour company. We talked about the record number of tourists here, not to mention the dozen or so rooftop drinking spots.
“Someone has done a great job of marketing Asheville, especially as a weekend getaway experience,” Williams astutely observed.
We also agreed that tourism is kind of a double-edged sword, giving us locals plenty of brewpubs and places to enjoy, but also resulting in huge throngs of people downtown and on the local hiking trails. This led me to share my idea of more things for them to do, which I suggested could include combining the rooftop bar tour with ziplining.
“Just getting some people on and off the van is an experience already,” Williams said with a hearty laugh.
OK, we’ll have to refine that idea.
But you gotta admit it would be kind of hilarious for a tipsy tourist to go zinging off the Flat Iron Hotel building in crazy high spirits, only to wake up in downtown Gastonia wondering what the hell happened to Asheville.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at [email protected]. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service please visit avlwatchdog.org/donate.
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Previously Published on avlwatchdog.org
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