Local elections shape the everyday decisions that most directly affect how Americans live — from the safety of their neighborhoods to whether they can afford to stay in the city they call home. In Asheville, North Carolina, a mayoral rematch is testing whether grassroots civic engagement can translate into real democratic change at City Hall.
Two-term Asheville City Council member Kim Roney is challenging incumbent Mayor Esther Manheimer for the second time, and her campaign strategy offers a window into how local candidates can use direct voter contact to build the kind of civic trust that sustains healthy democratic institutions. Roney announced her campaign on Labor Day 2025, framing her candidacy as a call for a new direction in how Asheville’s government relates to the people it serves.
“It’s time for change,” Roney told BPR News in an October 7 interview.
“And I feel honored to hold the container for hope.”
A Campaign Built on Voter Contact
In a democracy, few things matter more than candidates meeting voters where they are. Roney, 44, has made door-knocking the backbone of her campaign — a tangible form of civic outreach that reflects her broader belief in government transparency and public participation. In her first mayoral run in 2022, which she lost to Manheimer by roughly 3,000 votes, she knocked on about 6,000 doors. This time, with the help of campaign volunteers, that number has surpassed 10,000.
“At minimum, we’re having conversations with our neighbors, deepening relationships, changing hearts and minds and knowing each other better. And so that’s already a win,” she said.
The approach is more than a campaign tactic — it reflects her philosophy that democratic participation doesn’t begin and end at the ballot box. Roney came to politics through community media, serving as a founding member and volunteer station manager of community radio station Asheville FM, where she ran a news show covering local government. That background in civic information-sharing shapes how she thinks voters and their government should interact.
Transparency and Public Trust in Local Government
One of the sharpest fault lines in this race runs directly through the question of how openly local government conducts its business — a question with real implications for public trust in democratic institutions. Roney has made government transparency a central campaign issue, arguing that Asheville residents are being shut out of decisions that affect their lives.
A specific practice she wants to end: three-by-three check-ins — private conversations held among three or fewer council members that city officials say don’t technically violate North Carolina’s open meeting laws because they don’t constitute a quorum of four or more. Roney disagrees with the spirit of the practice, arguing it erodes the democratic process.
“If we’re ending the private, behind-the-scenes, borderline illegal meetings of Council right now that are fully staffed with no minutes and do the people’s work in public, I think we’ll get better outcomes,” she told BPR.
Mayor Manheimer has pushed back, calling Roney’s characterization “misdirected” and noting that the city
“has worked so hard over the last several years to create so many more opportunities for transparency,”
including livestream agenda briefings, committee meetings, and online access to minutes and documents.
Roney also points to the Weaver Park renovation — an $800,000 project that drew complaints from North Asheville Little League families when new dugouts were placed incorrectly — as evidence of what happens when the public is left out of the decision-making loop.
“It’s just another example of how we didn’t communicate with the public as decisions were being made and changed,” she said.
Her broader argument is that excluding residents from government processes doesn’t save time — it creates expensive problems down the road.
“When we don’t include the public, when we do the work behind the scenes, we end up with a lot of really expensive damage control instead,”
she told BPR.
“So, we can either do the people’s work in public and spend time in front and throughout and get better wins or we can do the public outrage at the end.”
Affordability, Transit, and the Barriers to Civic Life
Economic hardship and civic participation are deeply connected. When residents can’t afford to live or travel in the city where they work, they have less capacity to engage with local government and elections. Roney, who says she was
“raised in deep poverty in the rural south,”
has made Asheville’s affordability crisis central to her platform — and frames it explicitly as a matter of democratic equity.
A self-employed music teacher who once won a “Best Bartender” award in the Best of WNC competition while working at local venues including the now-closed Mothlight, Roney understands firsthand the economic pressures many Asheville residents face.
“When we ensure that Asheville is a safe, affordable, sustainable home for the people who live and work here, we can protect the very soul of our city,”
she said at a Leadership Asheville candidate forum in May.
Public transit is at the heart of her affordability agenda. In a striking show of personal commitment, she donated her car to charity in 2008 and has relied on public transit, her bicycle, and rides from neighbors ever since.
“Transit is at the intersection of economic mobility, equitable access and environmental stewardship. And it is really kind of absurd that we don’t do it better,” Roney said.
Her 2020 candidate questionnaire with Mountain Xpress included “moving toward a fare-free, regional transit system” as a goal. That hasn’t happened yet — the city’s bus system has faced funding shortages, declining ridership, and urban sprawl challenges. While fare-free transit no longer appears on her current campaign platform, she continues to advocate for a city-county regional transit partnership.
“What we can do to make our transit service better is partner with the county. I think we should have a regional transit system,” she said at the October 14 “Get There” forum hosted by Asheville on Bikes.
She also wants the city to deliberately build affordable housing near transit corridors and create what she calls “sector-based housing” for essential workers who can’t afford city rents. “What would it look like for us to build housing on purpose for downtown workers?” she said. “People who work in restaurants, people who are in the arts industry, someone who works at a bank. To be able to live close to where they work means reducing their transportation time and costs as well.”
Rethinking Public Safety
Roney’s vision for reimagining public safety in Asheville has also drawn significant attention during this campaign. She has consistently voted against expanding surveillance infrastructure — including Flock license plate cameras and a real-time intelligence center — and in 2025 was the sole council member to vote against an ordinance restricting verbal panhandling in certain city areas.
She has repeatedly called for Asheville to adopt a model similar to Durham’s HEART program — Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams — which integrates more than 50 mental health clinicians into police responses, sometimes sending clinicians to incidents alone and sometimes alongside officers.
Asheville has taken early steps in this direction. This summer, the Asheville Police Department launched a co-responder unit staffed with one full-time mental health professional. The Asheville Fire Department also runs the Resource and Engagement Support Team (REST), launched in 2023 to handle homelessness-related calls, now staffed with five firefighters, two peer support specialists, and one program manager.
Roney wants the city to invest more heavily in both programs and create an Office of Community Safety reporting to the city manager, following Durham’s model. “What does it look like for us to get serious about investment? That means moving real dollars,” she told BPR, calling it a “budget priority.”
Building a Coalition — or Standing Alone?
Perhaps the most pointed challenge to Roney’s campaign comes not from her policy positions but from questions about whether she can build the political alliances necessary to govern effectively. At an October 6 debate hosted by WLOS, Manheimer argued that Roney’s record as a council dissenter would make her ineffective as mayor.
“You’ve got to have four votes to support any one funding opportunity. And so, if you can’t build that collaboration, if you can’t convince your partners to join you in your effort, then you’re just going to be a lone vote shouting in the wind, and that is not an effective way to govern,” Manheimer said.
Roney disputes the premise. She points to the city’s recent decision to end its Flock camera contract — a motion she made in August that passed 5-2, with Manheimer voting in favor — as evidence that she can build coalitions around shared values. “People across Western North Carolina, it’s non-partisan, are pushing back against Flock and surveillance cameras,” she said. “So what it took is educating the public and showing a path to how we unplug from Flock.”
Not every motion has succeeded: at the same meeting, her motion to add a moratorium on new Axon license plate readers died without a second vote. But she remains focused on the power of an engaged public to move government.
“Council votes together often and it doesn’t get a lot of attention. But if I am appearing alone on City Council, I am not alone in community,” she told BPR. “And I’m rarely alone on Council.”
Her vision of the mayor’s role is ultimately one of civic facilitation — not top-down leadership, but creating conditions for residents to shape the decisions that affect them. “So the mayor’s one vote on council. What I can do is set the table for success,” she said. “I just think that by setting the table of the meetings differently, we’ll get better outcomes.”
For broader context on the Asheville mayoral race, Mayor Manheimer announced her bid for a fourth term in August 2025, and Western North Carolina voters can find early voting information at BPR News.
