COUNCIL VOTES DOWN DRUG INTERDICTION PROPOSAL

ASHEVILLE - After an impassioned discussion, Asheville City Council on
Monday decided against allocating up to $1 million for a drug interdiction
program focused on the city's public housing.

"I think the council just turned its back on a street-level drug
interdiction program," said Vice Mayor Carl Mumpower, who made the proposal
to allocate between $750,000 and $1 million toward interdiction. Mumpower
maintains that the city's housing projects are overrun with drug dealers
who cause other residents to live in fear and negatively influence
children's lives.

His motion was voted down 4-3. Mayor Charles Worley, Councilman Brownie
Newman and Councilwomen Holly Jones and Terry Bellamy voted against it,
while Councilmen Jan Davis and Joe Dunn supported Mumpower's motion.

Those opposed agreed that drugs are a problem requiring the city's
attention. But they advocated a slower, more methodical approach that would
attack the problem "holistically" by also addressing societal issues such
as jobs, underfunded education and after-school programs and inadequate
drug counseling.

"If we're going to do it, let's do it right, dollar-for-dollar," Bellamy
said during an impassioned soliloquy before the vote. "If we're going to do
a war on drugs, police are not the answer; dollar-for-dollar."

Bellamy, who is African American, also suggested that most of those
arrested would also be black.

The discussion Monday came during a budget workshop as council members
hammer out the city's spending plan for next year. The city manager's
proposed budget calls for $27.4 million to go toward public safety, out of
a total budget of $103.3 million.

At the Hillcrest public housing development near downtown, longtime
resident Kimberly Johnson said Monday that more enforcement is needed, but
interdiction alone won't keep children from choosing a life of drug use or
dealing.

"If they don't have nothing to do, eventually that's what they're going to
end up doing - selling drugs," said Johnson, a 26-year-old mother of two
and lifelong Hillcrest resident. "But first they've got to clean up the
streets."

Mumpower offered a second motion to have the Police Department design a
comprehensive drug interdiction program and bring it back to council within
two weeks, but that motion also failed.