The Asheville Public Safety Committee voted unanimously July 31 to send a proposed expansion of the city’s public solicitation ordinance to the full City Council for consideration, after a lengthy public-comment period and a presentation from police on calls-for-service and pedestrian crashes.

The proposal would amend city ordinance 11-5 (public solicitation) to expand the existing high-traffic zone boundaries and add new high-traffic zones that Deputy Chief Sean Artema recommended include Patton Avenue (Regent Park to New Leicester Highway), the Haywood Road corridor, and South Tunnel Road; it would also expand Zone 1 to include parts of Merriman Avenue and the South Slope.

Supporters of the expansion, including Police Chief Mike Lam and Deputy Chief Artema, said the change is intended as a tool to reduce dangerous interactions between pedestrians and traffic and to give police discretion to enforce certain verbal solicitation in defined high-traffic areas. Artema told the committee that in the past 12 months the department recorded 67 pedestrian collisions citywide and 325 panhandling-related calls for service and that “one out of every four crashes occurs within 25 feet of reported panhandling locations.”

The recommendation drew dozens of public comments during the meeting. Jensen Galcon, a West Asheville resident, said he was “really concerned” the change would increase the likelihood of people receiving a $500 misdemeanor citation and asked the city to pursue traffic-engineering fixes first. Patrick Conan, another West Asheville resident, told the committee the data did not justify making all of Haywood Road a high-traffic zone and urged the committee to “look at all the tools in the toolbox” for pedestrian safety rather than expanding enforcement alone.

City Manager Deborah Campbell said the proposed ordinance change is “one tool in the toolbox,” and that outreach and other responses would continue: “This is not going to solve homelessness, nor are we looking at this to criminalize that behavior. There are certain behaviors that we hope we can mitigate, but it is not our intent to use this as a hammer.”

City Attorney Brad Branham clarified that the ordinance as written would continue to allow sign-based solicitation on sidewalks: “What they could not do in a high-traffic zone…is be in a place where pedestrians aren’t permitted to be,” he said, giving medians and travel lanes as examples where solicitation would remain prohibited. Branham and staff noted that city ordinance 11-14 addresses roadside impediments separately from the solicitation code.

Council Member Shanika Smith moved to send the proposed ordinance amendment and expanded zone boundaries to full City Council; the motion was seconded and passed by roll call with Vice Mayor Antoinette Moseley, Council Member Smith and Committee Chair Beau Hess voting aye.

The committee recorded a range of concerns in public comment and from members: speakers repeatedly warned that criminal penalties could harm people experiencing homelessness, urged that outreach precede enforcement, questioned the causal link between panhandling and collisions, and asked for clearer data and engineering fixes (for example, a no-turn-on-red at a blind curve on Haywood Road was suggested by a resident). Committee members and staff said outreach and nonlaw-enforcement options — including expanded co-responder programs, a 24/7 drop-in center, and housing supports — are being pursued alongside the ordinance proposal.

Next steps: the motion sends the ordinance amendment to full City Council for a future meeting (staff discussed targeting an August or September council docket). The committee minutes record that the proposed changes would require a formal amendment to city ordinance 11-5.2(a) to include the new zone boundaries.

The committee’s action was procedural: it forwarded the proposed ordinance language and map to full council. No new criminal penalties or enforcement practices beyond those in the existing code were adopted by the committee itself.