Asheville City Council brings Tony Fraga project to screeching halt

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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I didn’t watch all of the proceedings on the city channel tonight (Tuesday), but I watched enough to get the drift — Asheville City Council was not happy with the scale of the proposed Haywood Park redevelopment project, which includes two giant towers to be built on little ol’ Haywood Street.

With the tide clearly running against Fraga, his attorney, former Mayor Lou Bissette, called for a time out. Before he left for the break, and when he came back, he gave council a good tongue-lashing about how messed up the process was; about how the Fraga project had passed the Downtown Commission, the city’s Technical Review Committee, the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, and was met with approval from the city’s Planning Department. Bissette made sure council knew that Fraga had sunk half a million dollars and six months of time into planning the project, which includes condos and 80,000 square feet of retail space. At the end, he clearly looked exhausted and frustrated.

Council members were unbowed. Councilman Carl Mumpower made sure that Bissette and Fraga knew that he believed the project was simply out of scale with everything around it. Robin Cape made similar comments. Brownie Newman echoed comments by Mumpower that noted that the project hadn’t really sailed through unblemished — that in fact a number of concerns had been raised in committees and commissions along the way of the approval process.

In the end, council agreed to table a vote. The project is now scheduled to come back before council for a vote on Nov. 11.