Asheville employs more municipal workers than similar-sized cities. Is it necessary for a busy tourist town or a sign of bloat?
Staffing under consideration as Asheville faces $26 million budget gap. The long-term challenge: building the tax base
by DAN DeWITT March 5, 2026
DAN DeWITT
David Moritz’s campaign for Asheville City Council ended with a loss in Tuesday’s primary, but he hopes his message about the root cause of the city’s yawning budget gap – bloated staffing – will linger.
Five years ago, employee pay and benefits consumed $100.7 million, or 54.5 percent of the city of Asheville’s total $184.8-million budget. These payroll costs have since climbed to $147.9 million – about 57 percent of the $256.4-million 2026 fiscal year budget.
“We’ve increased our spending way too quickly for the city to pay for,” said Moritz, a real estate developer who made city spending one of the central planks of his campaign.
The city’s authorized number of employees, 1,396, is higher – in many cases dramatically higher – than those of five of the six North Carolina cities closest to Asheville’s size, according to their fiscal year 2026 budget documents.
It has a larger police force than all but one and a larger fire department than the more populous cities of Wilmington and High Point. Its finance department is big compared to most of these cities’, and its human resources staff is the biggest.
The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Government’s Benchmarking Project, which compares a range of data from 16 participating cities in the state, shows that while Asheville had more than 14 employees per 1,000 residents in 2024, Raleigh had about nine.
But the project also backs the need for Asheville’s robust staffing. It’s home to more of several types of crime than the bedroom communities of similar size compared by the project, and its firefighters are far busier. With more such front-line forces, Asheville needs more administrative personnel to support them, said Lindsay Spangler, the city’s budget and performance manager. Cuts to staffing and services, she has also said, will be considered as the city grapples with its $26.4 million budget gap, down from the earlier reported shortfall of $30 million.
The number of budgeted city workers – 1,310 in fiscal year 2021 – has not climbed dramatically, and the increased costs reflect the City Council’s commitment to offering competitive pay in a period of high inflation, said Finance Director Tony McDowell. Comparing staff sizes is difficult because the disparate range of services provided by different cities, he also said, before pointing to the main reason for Asheville’s employee count:
As a tourist destination and a regional hub of commerce and employment, it has an effective population much higher than the 95,000 estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“This part of the state acts very differently than (any) other region in NC,” Vic Isley, CEO and president of Explore Asheville and the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority, said in an email. “For generations, the Asheville area has operated as the economic, health, retail and cultural hub not only for WNC but in many cases East TN, upstate SC and GA as well.”
But Isley also forwarded a 2024 presentation to her board that backs another of Moritz’s claims: restrictions on development in the city have helped create its low population relative to the surrounding region.
The city has amended some zoning laws and seen an uptick in multifamily construction in recent years, but the presentation detailed its long history of limiting dense residential development.
That has left Asheville more dependent on workers and shoppers from outside the city, Moritz said, and on fewer residents who pay property taxes, the single largest source of general fund revenue.
“We’re bearing the consequences of providing additional services to the people who come here during the day (and) we’re not getting the benefit of the tax revenue of the growth in the county,” Moritz said.
The influx
The city has been tracking the surge of out-of-towners since at least 2013, when a former city manager wrote a report called “A Community Crossroads” to address the challenges of recovering from the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
“Asheville has the highest daytime-to-resident population ratio among all cities in North Carolina with populations of 50,000 or greater,” according to the report, which was based on 2010 census data.
Similarly, the 2018 Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan found that commuters from outside the city accounted for nearly 75 percent of its workforce, or about 60,000 people added to the city’s daily headcount. “The swelling of Asheville’s daytime population due to inbound commuting is the most extensive such example in the state,” it said.
That trend has continued, Nathan Ramsey, executive director of the Land of Sky Regional Council, said in an email that included 2023 census data showing a net inflow of 41,250 private-sector workers into the city.
That figure, he added, “does not count tourists, shoppers, people who travel to Asheville for concert, meal, movie, shopping, healthcare.”
According to the comprehensive plan, Asheville is “the site of 54 percent of the region’s retail activity despite being home to only 20 percent of the metropolitan population.”
Then there are the nearly 14 million tourists who visited Buncombe County in 2024, 9 million of whom were day trippers, Isley wrote. “If you take that 9M and divide by 365, that is an average of 24,657 per day.”
Benchmarks
The Benchmarking Project provides details on how such surges impact staffing and services, at least for the three other similar-sized, participating municipalities – Apex, Concord and Gastonia.
The Asheville Fire Department is the city’s biggest department, with 304 budgeted positions. Its staff is also considerably bigger than the fire department of Concord (2024 pop. 112,000) and more than double Apex’s or Gastonia’s.
But Asheville’s firefighters, besides maintaining a rare Class 1 rating from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), responded to more than 250 “incidents” per 1,000 residents, compared to about 150 in Gastonia and Concord, and about 50 in Apex, according to the project.
They also receive more calls for service than Wilmington and High Point, according to data provided by department spokesperson, John Harbin, who added that those calls are more time-consuming in Asheville because of its hilly terrain and narrow roads.
The project shows Gastonia’s violent crime rate is higher than Asheville’s, but that city, as well as Concord and Apex, have reported fewer car accidents, burglaries and total property crimes in recent years.
Asheville Police Department spokesperson Rick Rice said that, though staffing levels have increased in recent years, it is still “operating below strength,” employing 207 of the 232 sworn officers approved in the budget. It’s 104,000 calls for service in 2024, he added, equated to about 520 per officer.
McDowell said his own department shows the difficulty of comparing the size of personnel rosters, because of the different functions performed. Asheville’s finance staff is unusually large, but so is its range of duties, which include risk management and strategic services, he said.
“You have to be really careful if you do those kinds of comparison,” McDowell said.
Services
Some of these comparisons show that many similar-sized cities provide major services that Asheville doesn’t.
Unlike Asheville, Apex offers wastewater treatment as well as water for a total budget cost of $31.1 million. And while Asheville relies on private Duke Energy for its power needs, Apex, Concord, Gastonia and High Point all provide electric services with large expenses and payrolls.
Gastonia, for example, has a smaller general fund than Asheville but a larger total budget, partly because of the $85.1 million devoted to the electric utility, which accounts for 49 members of the city’s much lower total workforce.
But University towns such as Greenville, North Carolina, can piggyback on services provided by the schools, which helps explain why, although Greenville’s population is about the same as Asheville’s, its budgeted transit costs are $4.9 million.
That compares to $15.2 million in Asheville, an amount that may increase by $3 million next fiscal year, Spangler said in a January presentation that highlighted this additional cost as a significant reason for the expected budget gap.
Gastonia, Concord and Apex, as satellites of Charlotte or Raleigh, also tap into the resources of nearby police and fire departments, McDowell said.
“There are fire trucks and police cars galore in this neck of the woods,” said Apex Finance Director Jon Griffin, who added that the current employment numbers lag behind need because of the town’s rapid growth. “We’re adding, like, 40 to 50 staff positions every budget year,” he said.
Coverage areas of city services also vary.
Greenville’s budget is inflated by the inclusion of a regional utility that supplies electricity, natural gas, wastewater treatment and water.
Asheville’s Water Resources Department is one of the city’s biggest city departments, with 179 approved workers and a current budget of $49.4 million. That’s $17.7 million more than the amount spent in 2021, reflecting extensive investment into its infrastructure, McDowell said.
Unlike the utilities in many other cities, the department serves a broad area – all of Buncombe and a “sliver of northern Henderson County,” Clay Chandler, water resources spokesperson, said in an email.
“It certainly costs more to serve an entire county rather than just the city,” he wrote.
Finding savings – and revenue
Whether or not the city’s robust staff is needed, it has already begun to dwindle and will likely continue to do so as the city addresses its budget gap, Spangler said last week in a presentation that included the lower shortfall estimate.
Because of vacancies in the Police Department and other sectors of the government, the current staff count is 1,294, according to a page on the city’s website. The city implemented a hiring freeze on Feb. 2 in response to the budget gap, Kim Miller, a city spokesperson, said in an email, though department heads can request exceptions “for critical needs such as public safety, legal mandates, and emergency recovery.”
Open positions are factored into projections and won’t impact next year’s budget, Spangler said. But her staff has identified other savings that can be brought forward to the next budget year, which helped account for the reduction in the estimate, she told Council at its Feb. 24 work session.
Cuts to staffing and services will be considered as Council moves forward with three spring work sessions scheduled before the July 1 start of the next budget year, she said. Also on the table, she said, will be an increase in property taxes, currently 44.19 cents per $100 of valuation.
“We don’t believe it’s possible to balance the budget with just budget reductions,” Spangler told Council. “That means we will have to bring Council options for revenue increases … including fees and charges and property tax increases.”
Mayor Esther Manheimer and Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley, in texts or emails to The Watchdog, agreed that Council needs to examine cuts to staffing and other expenses as the discussions move forward.
Mosley, one of six candidates to move on in the primary election, pointed out that public safety personnel, which “represents a substantial share of staffing,” is coping with both “ongoing service demand and (Tropical Storm Helene) recovery needs.”
Council member Bo Hess said he does not favor cutting jobs or the pay of “first responders,” but also said Council must work hard to avoid raising taxes.
“The answer cannot be to balance the budget on the backs of our residents, our young people, our working families struggling with the high cost of living in Asheville,” he said.
Building the tax base
Trimming expenses and finding revenue will be the focus of short-term discussion. The long-term goal should be to boost the population and value of property in Asheville, Mortitz said.
While census estimates show the city’s growth slowed dramatically between 2020 and 2024, adding only about 400 residents compared to about 10,000 in Buncombe, the 2025 Housing Needs Assessment for Asheville’s four-county metropolitan area shows a lesser difference between the city and outlying areas.
Relying on a variety of sources, the report, conducted by Bowen National Research, estimates the city’s population climbed 3.4 percent in those years to 98,000, compared to a 4.4 percent increase in the county as a whole. It also predicted the city would add about 4,000 more residents by 2029.
Regardless of which of these pictures is more accurate, there is widespread agreement among Council members about the need for “consolidated growth” – denser development near the city’s core. The goals of committing to this pattern include reducing housing costs, making more efficient use of Asheville’s transit system and transportation infrastructure and building a bigger tax base and a larger pool of workers who live in the city.
The 2024 presentations to the TDA board by Scott Dedman, former president and executive director of the Mountain Housing Opportunities affordable housing nonprofit, focused on the need to add density to combat high housing costs and low supply in Buncombe and Asheville. According to the Bowen report, the city needs to add 11,658 rental and for-sale units in the next 20 years to meet demand.
The Council made a grave misstep in 1997, Dedman’s presentation said, when it downzoned more than 7,000 acres of multifamily land while greatly expanding the area reserved for single-family homes, reducing the city’s housing capacity and creating barriers for minorities and economically disadvantaged residents.
“Single-family, low-density zoning not only increases the cost of development per unit; it has a discriminatory impact – discriminatory by income and by race – against many residents and potential residents of our community,” Dedman’s presentation says.
“City and county zoning codes … should be updated to increase dense development in downtown; near downtown; in areas near jobs, schools, shopping, and services,” the presentation concluded. “Elected officials who seek to meet every social policy goal with every new home, will build pretty much nothing, never.”
The Council has made strides in adding density, changing zoning rules to streamline development in transit corridors last year, when it also expanded the city’s capacity to add some medium-density missing middle housing. And in December, members all agreed to work towards implementing further recommendations of its 2023 Missing Middle Study.
The Bowen report also documented progress in adding rental units, finding that between 2019 and 2024 rental vacancy rates in the city climbed from 2.8 percent to 4 percent, the bottom of the range seen in “healthy” markets.
Hess has been an outspoken proponent of increasing density and said the budget gap should add urgency to this effort.
“We need to expand our tax base rather than raising taxes on the people who already live here,” he said, “and what that looks like is bringing in new housing, supporting local businesses and attracting employers who create good jobs.”
“Wish lists”
Despite the tax burden placed on Asheville residents, there are advantages to its role as a regional hub, including its ability to attract those employers, Ramsey said in an email:
“The larger we can make ourselves in terms of workforce availability, the better chance employers believe they can meet their talent demands by locating in our community.”
And Asheville, he said, is hardly alone in its dependence on out-of-town commuters.
“Over time, there has been a trend of people living in more suburban and rural communities and the jobs being located in more urban communities,” Ramsey wrote. “This is not a local trend; it is a national and perhaps global trend.”
It’s happening in the Raleigh area, which is one reason that Apex, with an annual population growth of about 3,000, doesn’t face nearly the budget challenges of Asheville, Griffin, the Apex finance director, said.
“Our growth is really Raleigh’s sprawl,” Griffin said.
Brevard, with about 8,000 residents, offers more parallels to its larger counterpart. Though far smaller than Asheville, Brevard faced some, but less severe, impacts of Helene. It serves as an employment and shopping hub, not for the region but for surrounding Transylvania County.
And, said Dean Luebbe, Brevard’s finance director and assistant city manager, it’s looking ahead to a tough budget year. He’s still working to pare down the “wish lists” of city departments, but they currently exceed projected revenues by more than $2 million, he said.
The root cause, Luebbe said, is a philosophy of governance Brevard’s leaders also share with Asheville’s. The left-leaning Brevard City Council is dominated by members who believe in providing a full range of public services, improving city facilities and paying fair salaries.
“All those are great things,” Luebbe said, “and all of those things take money.”
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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Dan DeWitt is The Watchdog’s deputy managing editor/senior reporter. You can reach him via email at ddewitt@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s local reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
