Bothwell for Asheville City Council

Background:

I was a co-organizer of Dean For America here in Asheville. I have been a progressive political activist for many years and created the Rolling Thunder Downhome Democracy tour event here (part of Jim Hightower's chataqua). I have been an award-winning investigative reporter and green builder, and lost my first bid for public office last spring by .8 percent. That was a county-wide race. Counting only city precincts I would have won handily. (I was endorsed by DFA in that race.) See my campaign bio on the Web site for more.

Goals:

I believe Asheville (and the country) are facing some very difficult decades as the current economic collapse segues into post-peak oil and the urgent need to address global climate change.

Asheville's economy is based on tourism and tourism as we have known it cannot continue if we are to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I want to help Asheville transition to tomorrow's more local economy while we still have the underpinning of tourist dollars to finance that shift.

We need to increase our reliance on local/regional food and manufacturing, keep local dollars local (to gain from the multiplier effect), and shift our planning from parking garages to public transit and walkable neighborhood centers.

Issues:

1. Uncap and Trade: A plan to conserve water by giving it away. Every household should get 100 gallons per day free, with rates above that raised to balance the books. Households which use less than that would earn credits which could be sold to larger users. Everyone would have an incentive to conserve and it would meet the demands of the Sullivan Act.
2. Use city borrowing to leverage energy audits and green retrofits of existing homes and businesses and make Asheville city government solar powered. (Build a solar farm instead of a proposed $16 million parking deck.)
3. Implement three-strikes corporate accountability law: prohibit the city government from doing business with companies which have been found guilty of three violations of employment, civil rights or financial law and at the same time require all city contractors to pay a living wage.

Grassroots Support:

We won the primary, coming in first out of 9 candidates. We have over 700 volunteers and over 500 donors (average about $50). We have built the largest grassroots campaign in Asheville city history. We are ready to rock the vote!

DFA Values:

I believe that the biggest single social problem in America is the war on drugs. Prohibition has failed for 100 years and the spin off has been prohibitively expensive: broken families, damaged communities, the growth of gangs and public corruption as well as creation of the prison industrial complex. This has fallen particularly heavily on the African American community because of differential enforcement. There is no aspect of modern life which has not been negatively affected by those policies.

While the city council doesn't control drug laws, it can shape enforcement policy, and more importantly, set the tone. We need to build community, not splinter it. Housing projects cannot be converted into virtual prison camps (as at least one Asheville council member would seem to prefer).

To that end I tutor/mentor at an inner city community center and encourage others to participate, to address social ills directly.

I am chair of the Human Rights Team at my church, advocating against the death penalty, for humane immigration law, against torture and infringement of civil liberties around the world and working to end slavery.

I lived off-the-grid for over two decades in a solar powered green home I designed and built out of largely recycled material. I know first-hand that the cheapest energy is the energy we don't use. That fiscal lesson applies across the board. When I later lived in a downtown condo, I used less than half the energy of my neighbors with the same appliances/insulation/air handling, etc. I've also been an organic grower for 40 years, and have a deep understanding of nature's economy.

Nature doesn't support endless growth, it supports self-nourishing cycles. A sustainable economy cannot use more energy than the current solar income of the planet (via direct solar power, wind and water power) or generate more waste than can be reabsorbed by the ecosystem. The only fiscally responsible approach to our future is to use full-cost accounting instead of externalizing costs as we do today.