N EWS
Sunrise Movement occupies City Hall over climate emergency “I went down to the mayor’s office and I took back what they stole from me,” sang over 40 members of Sunrise Movement Asheville as they lined the second-floor hallway of Asheville City Hall. After months of haranguing City Council over the wording of a climate emergency resolution, protesters occupied the government building on Dec. 6 to demand that Mayor Esther Manheimer and her colleagues pass the document as written by the climate justice group. As hundreds of marchers participated in the Asheville Climate Strike for a Green New Deal at Pack Square Park outside the building, Sunrise member Flannery Clark addressed why her group felt compelled to act. Although the resolution had been taken up in November by the city’s Sustainability Advisory Committee on Energy and the Environment, she claimed that the process had stripped the document of all mea-
ASSEMBLY HALL: Sunrise Movement member Flannery Clark addresses her fellow protesters as the group occupies Asheville City Hall. Photo by Daniel Walton sures that would hold city leaders accountable on climate issues. “If cities are declaring climate emergencies and there is nothing in it regarding legislation or accountability … it is a ploy to make it seem
like they’re doing something when they’re not,” Clark said. “And that’s unacceptable when our lives and our families and the places that we love are at risk.” Ashley McDermott, one of Sunrise Asheville’s founding organizers, noted that Council members Brian Haynes, Sheneika Smith and Keith Young had previously agreed to put the Sunrise version of the resolution on the agenda for Council’s meeting of Tuesday, Dec. 10. However, she said Young later took away his support and proposed his own “Green New Deal for the city of Asheville.” In a Dec. 6 message to Xpress, Young said that he had not withdrawn his support of considering the resolution on a Council agenda. He did say that he had moved the resolution to the agenda of Tuesday, Jan. 28, instead of Dec. 10, a shift of which he said he had
notified McDermott. Regarding his own proposal, the Council member added, “[Sunrise] knew about it before it was made public on social media. We met face to face about their issues on their own resolution, and no one offered critical crucial dissent in person to me about what I had crafted.” Because the mayor was traveling at the time of the protest, the Sunrise group hoped to speak with both Young and Council member Julie Mayfield, who also serves as the co-director of environmental nonprofit MountainTrue and has made “a homegrown Green New Deal for North Carolina” a plank in her campaign platform for state Senate. Neither met with the protesters during the occupation. Attorney Ben Scales, who has announced a run against Mayfield in the Democratic primary for the N.C. Senate District 49 seat, was
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