Brevard Election in a Nutshell: Lots of Candidates Who, with One Exception, Mostly Agree

Other than challenger Ray Brewster, the six candidates for Brevard City Council say they generally like the way the city is being run.

BREVARD — The condensed view of this year’s Brevard City Council race: Plenty of candidates — six of them, to be exact — but very little controversy.

Unlike the last city election, in 2021, when most contenders for Council and Mayor positioned themselves as either adamantly with or against the established city leadership, five of the candidates vying for the three open seats generally agree with one another and, pretty much, the current direction of Council.

Creating affordable and workforce housing has been named by the Council as its top priority. The same is true of most of the challengers as well as the lone incumbent, Mayor Pro Tem Gary Daniel.

None of these candidates doubt that the city must replace a wastewater treatment plant so antiquated it threatens to stall growth, especially in the job-creating manufacturing sector.

The current Council is fully aware of this need, and the city recently learned of a $13 million earmark in the state’s proposed budget that would allow it to jump-start the project.

There is broad consensus among the candidates that building multi-use trails should be the city’s top recreational priority. But it’s hard to argue with the city’s work in this arena — receiving a recent federal grant to build a portion of the city’s Estatoe Trail and securing a whopping $46 million worth of federal pledges that should easily cover construction costs of the regional Ecusta Trail in Transylvania County.

Yet another example of unity: Several candidates said the city should keep working to realize the vision of its Downtown Master Plan, while most current Council members, including Daniel, say the same. Not only that, the city is now wrapping up the first phase of that project, the biggest downtown streetscape upgrade in decades.

The exception to all this harmony is challenger Ray Brewster, the lone registered Republican in the nonpartisan race, who did not respond to repeated emails, texts and voicemails requesting participation in this story.

He has spoken out at recent Council meetings and urged caution, for example, in the expansion of public drinking in the controversial downtown Social District. Later in that same meeting it was approved by a 3-2 vote.

His campaign website makes no mention of affordable housing or trails and says the city should “stop spending tax dollars that do not provide our residents with basic services.”

Beyond offering this clearly distinct option, the race will require voters to examine nuances of policy positions of the other candidates — or just go with the one they know best.

“I think this is going to be a tough one for voters,” said challenger Pamela Holder, pastor of Bethel “A’’ Baptist Church. “We need to get our names out there.”

The Incumbent

Gary Daniel (photo provided)

Daniel’s name, maybe more than any other candidates’, already is.

A 34-year resident of Transylvania, he is seeking a third term on Council and has established himself as a prominent member of its progressive majority.

Daniel, whose preparation for a career as a general contractor included a degree in sociology from Wake Forest University, also serves as the chair of the Council’s Housing and Downtown Master Plan committees.

In responses to NewsBeat’s candidate questionnaire, Daniel — 73, and now retired from the building trade — praised the actions of both Council and staff.

The decision to raise the city property taxes by three cents, he said, still leaves its rate in the “average’ range for municipalities of its size and was justified by the need to give needed overdue raises to employees and devote two cents, or about $264,000 this fiscal year, to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

This will give the city the power to provide incentives for what he called a “crucial priority,” he wrote, and he pushed back on the idea that the approved budget’s cuts to funding for Downtown Master Plan construction and work on the Estatoe represented a faltering commitment to this work.

For example, the city was already on its way to building the stretch of the Estatoe from U.S. 64 to Silversteen Drive and recently received a $528,000 grant that will allow it to build an adjacent .75-mile section to Mills Avenue.

“Finding funding for the (Downtown Master Plan) and the Estatoe Trail is a promise made that needs to be kept,” he wrote.

Consensus (Mostly) on Affordability

Pamela Holder (provided photo)

Though all the candidates interviewed say the city must work to solve the problem of inaccessible housing, Holder is the only one who wrote that she has been impacted by it personally.

She moved to Brevard to lead Bethel “A” two years ago, and has previously held jobs including high school teacher and director of development for the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce; her education includes a doctorate in religion from Living Epistle Bible College in Greensboro.

But during an unsettled time of her life in the late 1980s, “I did not have a home address and I was living in hotels. My story is very different from” that of most unhoused people, wrote Holder, 64. “But it is part of who I am. Very seldom do I climb into bed and fail to think about those who are sleeping under the stars, in the rain and in the cold.”

She wrote this to explain her empathy for homeless residents, whom she hopes to support by advocating for improved mental health counseling and other services. But it also, she said, applies to the need to provide reasonably priced housing for residents, including those working in crucial but moderately paid jobs.

She is a member of the grass-roots Brevard/Transylvania Housing Coalition, formed partly to combat the impact of gentrification of the historically Black Rosenwald Community, where Bethel “A” is located.

There and throughout the city, she favors a balanced approach to the affordability issue, preserving existing neighborhoods while promoting workforce and affordable developments that, given the city’s shortage of land, must necessarily be dense developments.

“I don’t see how we can get around multi-family housing,” she wrote. “However, I strongly disagree with building a multi-family . . . between single-family homes.”

“Brevard has a rich history of single family housing and we definitely want to preserve that,” she said in a follow-up interview. “In some of that housing, people are two or three generations deep . . . and not just in the Rosenwald Community.

Along with bolstering the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, the city has allowed triplexes and fourplexes in zones previously restricted to single-family homes and is exploring measures such as relaxed parking requirements designed to fit more residential units on less land.

Other candidates are all for, at least, this general goal.

Daniel voted in favor of a rezoning this summer that was opposed by most neighbors and that allowed a cluster of workforce units on land off Old Hendersonville Highway.

“To those who say that they don’t want this housing in their neighborhood I say and have said: The people who need these homes are people that you know, people that you interact with everyday,” Daniel wrote, a position echoed by candidates Lauren Wise, Wes Dickson and Madeline Hanley.

“I have also been in many city council meetings where people said they were in favor of this (dense) housing, just not near them,” wrote Wise, an architect. “There is very little developable land in the city, and so we have to work with communities to better understand and realize the benefit of multi-family residences.”

Dickson, a former Council member and business owner, supports both the encouragement of density and a recent city action designed to reserve more units for workers — the restriction of new short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods.

“I think we are making great strides to get more inventory available with multi-family, townhomes and tighter-density projects,” he wrote. “I also think we are making great strides reviewing short term rentals.”

Denser development will not just benefit families struggling to find a place to live, wrote Hanley, a remote tech worker, but the city as a whole:

“We're not only addressing a critical housing crisis but also nurturing the vibrant community spirit that defines Brevard. A diverse demographic, including families and younger residents is the lifeblood of any thriving city.”

The city’s current and planned efforts are focused on encouraging, not requiring, reasonably priced housing, and Hanley was the only candidate to come out in support of mandatory inclusionary zoning. This would require that developers of large complexes reserve a percentage of them for families earning less than 80 percent of the local median income.

Such measures have faced legal challenges in other parts of North Carolina, but she wrote that they are “a proven strategy employed successfully in cities like New York and Washington, D.C.,” and strike “a balance between growth and equity, ensuring that our community remains diverse and accessible.”

Preaching to the Choir on Trails

Madeline Hanley (photo provided)

Singling out a candidate with the closest personal connection to outdoor recreation and, especially, cycling, would seem to be obvious.

Dickson was the owner of the Sycamore Cycles bike shop from its founding in 2000 to its sale last year, and continues to be a top amateur mountain bike racer. But Hanley, 31, can also claim significant interest and experience in this field.

She moved to Brevard in 2020 to be close to her extended family — and to outdoor recreation hubs such as Bracken Mountain Preserve and Pisgah National Forest.

She describes herself as an avid cyclist and runner and, since graduating from Indiana University in 2015, has built a job history that includes developing software that helped developers address environmental and transportation impacts. She also worked for three years at Citi Bike, New York City’s bikeshare program.

“I worked on all of Citi Bike’s partnerships and sponsorships along with all of their social media,” she wrote. “It was fantastic exposure to public-private partnerships advocating for safer cycling.”

But her advocacy — and that of other candidates — in a way amounts to so much preaching to the choir; the city has already engaged with a wide range of partners to advance trail projects, most notably the 19-mile, multi-use Ecusta Trail, which will connect Brevard to Hendersonville.

The city took the lead in promoting the segment of the trail in Transylvania County in 2021 and received news of the two federal grants in June. And besides securing the recent $528,000 federal grant for the Estatoe, the city received $50,000 from the Transylvania County Tourism Development Authority that fills a gap needed to acquire an additional 34 acres of the Bracken Mountain Preserve, allowing for the completion of “beginner-friendly” hiking and biking trails, according to a city press release.

Dickson advocates more outreach to ensure residents are on board with promoting the Ecusta and Estatoe. “I think we really need to have a conversation with our citizens and ask them if this is a priority for us,” he wrote.

But he also backs dedicating funding to support them, he wrote: “We need to earmark a portion of our yearly budget to go towards those initiatives.”

Hanley, on the other hand, is the only candidate to specifically advocate the filling of what she sees as a missing piece in the city’s transportation network — protected bike lanes nearer to downtown, especially on North Broad Street, she wrote, “so that Brevard College students and residents alike can safely bike downtown, and to essential spots like grocery stores.”

The Architect’s View

Lauren Wise

Bike lanes — though not protected bike lanes — are also envisioned as part of the city’s Downtown Master Plan. Among the other similarities between work on this plan and the Estatoe: news of recent progress after a long history of sporadic effort and recent cuts to dedicated funding.

The nearly complete first phase of the downtown project included the replacement of decorative-but-invasive Bradford Pear trees and curb bump-outs that, controversially, eliminated parking spaces.

But this $1.7-million project renewed only two blocks of Main Street, a fraction of the area targeted in the latest version of the plan, and emptied out the city’s Downtown Master Plan Fund.

Lauren Wise, 55, an architect and US Army veteran, was recently hired by the PLATT architectural firm in downtown Brevard after several years spent designing homes in Asheville.

That means Wise has a close-up view of the work downtown as well as the professional experience to evaluate it.

He and his coworkers “were pleased not only by the speed but the quality of the work,” wrote Wise, who previously chaired the Transylvania County Planning Board and ran unsuccessfully for Transylvania County Commission in 2022.

The upgrades added seats and tables that are already frequently used, and point to the community-building benefit of this project, which, he wrote, are “critical to maintaining the quality and appeal of our city and cannot be looked at as just beautification projects.”

But critics of the project noted it clashes with previously completed work based on an earlier plan — a symptom, they said, of the city’s wavering commitment to downtown renewal. The city has also been blasted for previously using $445,000 from the Downtown Plan Fund to build the nearby Clemson Plaza, which Wise sees as less successful than the more recent project.

 Clemson Plaza “lacks a sense of scale, isn’t inviting, and is very hot in the summer,” he wrote. 

Though he understands the challenges to downtown improvement, including unpredictable construction costs and the need to fund other important initiatives, he says the city must remain focused on the work.

“Sadly, our city has put off projects like these for so long that now the improvements border on non-optional,” he wrote.

Sewage and Enterprise

Wes Dickson

Dickson’s time as a one-term Council member and business owner gave him experience in two connected issues facing the city: economic development and infrastructure.

He was on the Council in 2014, when former city manager Joe Moore, pushed the city to apply for a $9 million grant to upgrade its now 46-year-old wastewater treatment plant.

A later discussion envisioned taking on as much of $50 million in debt for these improvements and other city projects, a plan strongly resisted by Council members Maurice Jones and Mac Morrow.

Though discussion of that proposal  never “got down to brass tax,” Dickson said, he strongly favored seeking outside funding for the plant.

And while applauding the city for upgrades to utility lines that have greatly reduced sewage overflows into the French Broad River, he sees the city’s previous lack of action on the plant as a missed opportunity.

“Our Council did not have the stomach for this kind of investment into our infrastructure for the future,” he wrote. “We have been reactive to infrastructure issues in Brevard, and we need to get proactive.”

The price tag for the plant has soared to an estimated $65 million, City Manager Wilson Hooper said last year. Money from the state would allow the city to determine a more precise cost and create plans to better position it to seek future grants that will be needed to complete the project.

Though the plant currently has enough capacity to serve additional residential development in the short term, its antiquated processing equipment already struggles to treat concentrated industrial waste.

That is one example of how infrastructure is tied to enterprise. Dickson saw other needed improvements during his time owning the Pisgah Forest location of Sycamore, which is just inside city limits.

The lack of pedestrian infrastructure in the area, for example, required customers staying at nearby accommodations to drive to his shop rather than walk or cycle across the “quite terrifying” intersection of Asheville and Hendersonville highways.

Several candidates, including Hanley, noted the promise of one of the Transylvania County Economic Alliance’s main priorities — developing outdoor gear manufacturers to build on the success of the SylvanSport camper maker.

Hanley called it “a sector that aligns well with Brevard's natural assets and recreational culture.”

Maybe so, Dickson said, but he also said the city should not neglect existing businesses in the drive to attract new ones, and should work with economic development organizations to determine improvements these companies most need.

And, he said, the shouldn’t focus on any one sector at the expense of others.

“By no means do I know what Brevard needs moving forward . . . We need to be set up for any successful business,” he said.

After all, few people in Brevard — now home to at least four bike shops — anticipated such investment 23 years ago, he said:

“When I wanted to open Sycamore Cycles, I got looked at like I was crazy.”

The Job:

City Council members are chosen in non-partisan elections and serve four-year terms, receiving $6,700 in annual pay.

The Candidates:

Gary Daniel, 73

Personal: Married, no children, Transylvania resident of 34 years

Education: Bachelor’s degree in sociology, Wake Forest University

Professional: Retired. Worked as a camp property manager, general contractor

Public/Community: Brevard Planning Board, City Council from 2015-present

Wes Dickson, 46

Personal: Married with one adult daughter, Transylvania County native

Education: Brevard High School, Blue Ridge Community College

Professional: Founder and owner of Sycamore Cycles bike shops, with locations in Pisgah Forest and Hendersonville, from 2000 until selling to industry giant, Specialized Bicycles, in 2022

Public/Community: Brevard City Council, 2011-2015, Friends of DuPont State Recreational Forest, previous board member Transylvania County Tourism Development Authority

Pamela Holder, 64

Personal: Single, resident of Brevard since 2021

Education: Page High School, Greensboro, NC, attended Guilford Tech Community College, Piedmont Bible College, Montreat College. Doctorate from Living Epistle Bible College

Professional: Previously grammar and speech high school teacher, director of development, Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. Current pastor of Bethel “A” Baptist Church

Public/Community: Board member SAFE Inc. of Transylvania County, Rise and Shine/Neighbors in Ministry, Transylvania NAACP

Lauren Wise, 55

Personal: Married, one daughter, two grandchildren, Brevard resident since 2011

Education: Gaud High School, Charleston S.C. Bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, Warren Wilson College, Master’s in architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Professional: US Army 1989-1992, combat veteran, Persian Gulf War, Asheville-based architect designing both custom homes and public projects. Currently, architect/project manager at Brevard-based PLATT architectural firm

Public/Community: Former member and chair of Transylvania County Planning Board; county Joint Historical Preservation Commision, Ecusta Trail Advisory Board. Unsuccessful candidate, Transylvania County Commission, 2022

Madeline Hanley, 31

Personal: Single, Brevard resident since 2020.

Education: Hong Kong International (High) School, 2010. Indiana University Bloomington, 2015, bachelor’s degrees in east Asian Languages and Cultures, Fashion Design

Professional: Citi Bike, New York City; Software development, various positions, including 1Password and Cloaked online privacy tools.

Community/Public: School cross country and running club coach, member Brevard Bike Alliance

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com