AGR speaks with Asheville Mayoral candidate, Mickey Mahaffey

By Eamon Martin and Brendan Conley

Mickey Mahaffey, a local activist, announced his candidacy for mayor at a local venue on Sunday during a benefit for his School of the Traveler program and to raise disaster relief for India. To a large, cheering crowd visibly excited by his announcement, Mahaffey declared, “The purpose of running for mayor is not because I want to be mayor. With all of us together we can keep this community a great community. No matter what happens in November, we’re going to make an impact on this town. And the strength is you.” Drawing on what he considers to be the “powerful force” of creativity and diverse talent within the city — “a place of great wisdom and great compassion” — Mahaffey insisted that “with hearts full of compassion we can break down the walls that separate so many of us. Our slogan is ‘Community - Not Commodity’… There are many people in our area that would like to sell Asheville as a commodity. But we’re not for sale. We are a community of people who want to live and flourish and grow and give our healing out, give our love out so that all people of all races, all makes, all shapes and sizes can live together in this place in harmony.” Here, Mahaffey talks about his vision for Asheville, and for his campaign, in the first installation of a two part interview to be concluded next week.

AGR: What made you decide to run for mayor?

Mahaffey: For the past three years, I’ve been intensely involved in the politics of Asheville, going to city council meetings and learning a lot about how the city runs, and who’s involved in it, and in the last six months or so, I’ve come to the point of realizing that Asheville is at a critical crossroads. I think the decisions made in the next two years are going to determine the course that Asheville is going to take. I feel that there are a lot of voices in our city that really want to take part in this process, that need to take part in it, to offer a more balanced approach to the decisions that are made. And I don’t believe these people are really at the table right now, and so I’ve offered my services to the city of Asheville and to the people who would like to have more of a voice to come to the table and offer our ideas.

I think there’s a wealth of talent, a wealth of ability in our area, that isn’t being tapped, and isn’t part of the process. I’ve hesitated for a long time to have any official part in the local politics, but I think at this point that if we’re going to make effective change in our world, it has to start right here at home. When I look at the greater picture, the world picture, I don’t know how I can really effect any kind of change in the broader picture. But Asheville is our neighborhood. And I want to do everything I can, whether I’m in office or not in office, to keep our community a balanced community that exists for all the people. And I think that’s our great challenge, is that we’re such an extremely diverse community, and I would really like to be a part of this experiment in Asheville, of seeing how extremely diverse people can come together and make a community, make a neighborhood.

AGR: What is your vision for the city of Asheville and your vision for your campaign?

Mahaffey: First of all, my vision of Asheville has come from the ground up. I’ve lived in the streets, I’ve worked in the streets, and I’ve learned my politics from how it actually plays out in the community. Mostly politics is people looking down from the top, deciding on all the issues. I believe that for politicians to be effective, it must be a true call to service, an opportunity to serve the community, and I believe that the best way to do that is hands-on, to be right there with the people, to understand what they go through, to know what it’s like for someone in a wheelchair to try to get down our sidewalks, to really know what it’s like to sit at the bus station in the rain and the cold, and really experience that with the people and make decisions on our community based on hands-on knowledge.

Our strategy for this campaign is to emphasize that the most effective government is hands-on government. It’s just like in business — when I was in business, I couldn’t just sit back in an office and give directives for what people needed to do. I’ve always been an employer who worked side-by-side with the people who were working for me. And that’s the only way that a business or a government or anything else can really work, when there’s a hands-on, immediate and direct approach to the situation.

So in our campaign, what we are striving to put together is a way that all of us who are involved in the community can simply intensify our efforts and immediately become more involved in the process of decision-making for our community. We’re pulling together a lot of people who want to roll up their sleeves and get to work immediately in the issues that are facing our city. This is not going to be a campaign in the normal sense of the word — that we’re only trying to win an election. We want to run the campaign by being involved in the community right now, and then whether I am actually in office or not is immaterial in the long run, because we want to make sure that more and more people come to the table.

AGR: Tell us about your background — where you’re from and what you’ve done.

Mahaffey: Part of the reason I am so involved here is that this is my home country. These mountains have been my home since birth. I was born in Hendersonville, and I’ve moved around some, but I’ve never been able to get far away from Asheville, because I love this area more than any other. One of my childhood memories of Asheville is that it was a big deal, from little Hendersonville, to come over to Asheville for the weekend with my mom and dad. I can remember in the late fifties and early sixties eating dinner at the S&W Cafeteria. I can remember going to ball games at McCormick Field in the fifties and sixties. I can remember when I was a teenager, on date nights, we always went to Asheville, and went to a place that the old-timers will remember, on Tunnel Road, called Buck’s Drive-In. That was the big hang-out area. So I have a lot of great memories of this area.

For the last eight years, I’ve lived right in downtown Asheville. I had an apartment for a couple of years on Walnut Street. I worked in the kitchen at Beanstreets. So for the last eight years I’ve been able to really see Asheville develop, see how it’s grown from almost a ghost town eight or ten years ago to one of the most thriving communities around. In the last five or six years, I have consciously made the choice to live outside, and to travel, and to experiment with living the most simple life I possibly can, as close to nature as possible, and to view our culture and our society from that level, from the ground up. It’s been one of the most enriching and rewarding experiences that I’ve ever been a part of. I think I’ve learned more about life, about health, about nature and our place in it, from living this way, than anything else I’ve ever done. It’s been the greatest education of my life.

So at this point, after five or six years of living this way, I feel that my challenge now is to bring myself more into the community, to become more a part of the community, to offer whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve gained from those years of living outside and comparing the way different people live in the United States, viewing other cities from ground level, comparing our culture to other cultures like Mexico and Central America, Eastern Europe, Canada. I think all these things in my background have brought me to this point, and this is a wealth of information within myself that I can draw from and offer to the greater community here.

AGR: You said at one point that you wanted to distance yourself from local politics, but now it seems that you want to tackle it head-on. Was there anything in particular that motivated you?

Mahaffey: Very much so. I was content to be a part of the community, more on the outside, not very involved in the local situation, and then about three years ago, there was a change in downtown Asheville. We had lived, I thought, as a pretty peaceable community for quite a while, with all of our diversity, and all the changes going on, and living in the streets I’d gotten to know a lot of the homeless people, gotten to know a lot of the alternative crowds of people that were coming into our town. At some point, about three years ago, the powers that be in Asheville evidently decided that they didn’t want this happening in their streets. So the police started an operation called Clean Sweep, where they were using, in my opinion, some pretty arbitrary laws, to clear these types of people out. For example, there was a lot of panhandling going on in downtown Asheville, and the police came out with five, six cars of policemen to deal with one panhandler. I remember one day, I was up near the BB&T building, and there was this young kid who didn’t have his dog on a leash, and there were five police cars, with blue lights on, stopping traffic in downtown, to deal with this kid, with no leash for his dog.

I started seeing all these things happening, and I thought it was way beyond the limits of power that a police department should have. It really troubled me. I thought it was a highly questionable situation, and I felt that the people who had power, who had money in our town, were using that power against people who were basically defenseless and powerless. And ever since I was a kid, whenever the big guy was beating up on the little guy, inevitably I’d jump in the middle of it. So that was the initial reason I got involved in the community. I saw this happening, I didn’t believe that it was right, and I started becoming very vocal with my opinion of the course the city had decided to take.

At that point I started meeting a lot of the city leaders, I started going to city council, I started making every effort I could to understand the whole organization of our community, to understand why some of these things were happening, and what we could do to maintain a neighborhood and a community without the greater powers bearing down so hard on those who didn’t have as much power.

AGR: People might be wary of voting for someone with no experience. What are you doing to prepare yourself?

Mahaffey: I can understand people’s hesitancy. Very realistically, if the people of Asheville choose me as mayor, I certainly would have a lot to learn, there’s no doubt about that. But I feel in the last three years, in my involvement in many aspects of our city, that I’ve learned a great deal. But in my view of government, and especially in a town the size of Asheville, there are complex systems, but it’s really pretty simple. It’s really a pretty simple process. To me it’s a matter of understanding our community, understanding where it’s at, what our limitations are, what our strengths are, really understanding the whole strata of our culture as far as people without means and people with means, and simply looking at the basic things that a city’s supposed to do, to make the neighborhood and the community a livable place for all people. That’s a simple philosophy, but I believe that that’s all government is supposed to be. One of the things I’m very interested in doing is to really evaluate how much control government really has over our lives. I think that Asheville has a unique opportunity here because we are a growing, proactive community, and there are a lot of people who want to take part in the government process, and I believe that as the community does that, as the community becomes conscious and responsible for how the city is run, we will need less and less government.

In considering running for mayor, [I and the campaign committee] have made an intensive effort to educate ourselves on every single issue that’s before the city at this time. We’re doing a lot of homework, we’re asking a lot of questions. I’ve visited the department heads at city hall numbers of times, I’ve had lengthy conversations with many of them, trying to understand their jobs, and their place in the city. I’ve written for AGR and Mountain Xpress, and for those articles I’ve done a lot of research into the nuts and bolts of how the city works. For instance, last year I was very involved in the whole budget process. I did an intensive study of the figures, and how it all plays out. So I do have a limited knowledge of certain areas, but I think one of the strengths of someone in a government position is not to have to know everything that’s going on, but to know how to draw all of the community together to solve these problems — to bring in people who do know more about certain aspects than I might.

AGR: What do you think Leni Sitnick, the current mayor of Asheville, has done right, and what has she done wrong?

Mahaffey: I’m one of the many people who really love and respect Leni. I appreciate the care and attention she’s brought to city council. I think one of the most valuable contributions she’s made to the city is that she has opened the government up a lot more than it ever was. I believe that she’s opened the doors to city council so that people have more of an opportunity to speak and say their peace. I think she’s been excellent in that position of allowing the community more of a voice than they’ve ever had, at least in my knowledge of the history of government in Asheville.

At one point a couple of years ago, I did a little experiment. The newspapers were being very critical of some behind-closed-doors meetings, and that government people were inaccessible, so one day I decided to just go to some of the main players of our city, to see how open they were. I first went to see Mayor Sitnick, and without an appointment or anything, she just invited me right into her office, and we sat down and had a talk. After that, I went to the city manager, Jim Westbrook, and he was in a meeting at that moment, but they made an appointment for me the following day. I went to see Chief Annarino at the police department, and without any kind of advance notice or appointment, he immediately invited me into his office, and heard me out, listened to what I had to say. I’ve found that that’s been true of all the departments, and all of our government leaders. If you have a question, and you as a citizen want to find out what’s going on, their doors really are open. And I think that Mayor Sitnick has really done a lot to bring it to that point. I think she was in a very difficult situation. We’ve never had a woman as mayor of Asheville. I think that really broke a barrier. I’m really proud of our city that we elected a woman in a Southern town, and not only a woman but a Jewish woman, in an area that’s known to be a very strong Christian area. I think just those things alone have made her administration invaluable to our city. I think that as far as the environment goes, she and the rest of city council have done an amazing job. There hasn’t been one single time, on environmental issues, that I wouldn’t have voted the way they did. I think they have really led the way in this, when other government bodies in our region were not so easy to work with. So I would say that openness in government, her symbolic stance as a Jewish woman in a Southern city, and her efforts for the environment, are the greatest contributions she’s made to our city.

Please look for the second part of AGR's interview with Mickey Mahaffey in issue #114, available next Thursday, March 22.