Carl Mumpower    Photo by Adam Hillberry

By Adam Hillberry

Carl Mumpower was born in England, moved to Asheville as a child and graduated from Owen High School.

Mumpower sits as the only conservative on the Asheville City Council and began his career in public servitude disappointed with current community leadership. “I served on the Civic Center Commission for a time and became a little discouraged by the standards of local leadership and it bothered me,” Mumpower said.




Recently,
Mumpower left a formal city budget hearing abruptly, saying members of
the council did not permit him to speak openly about the pressing issue
of Asheville’s drug problem.



“I didn’t leave
a council meeting, I left a budget hearing. I don’t care if it is the
right thing to do. I’m going to get up and leave because I was being
censored,” Mumpower said.



Mumpower
received criticism about his action against drugs in the community as
he visited public housing developments intercepting drugs and turning
them in to the police.



“I went through
a lot of painful and dangerous moments to try to create the momentum
necessary to get a solid mandate for action from our city council. I
was successful. That mandate was to require the city and police
administration to come up with a comprehensive plan to eliminate the
open-air drug market in all Asheville neighborhoods,” Mumpower said.
“And immediately they tried to walk away from it.”



Mumpower explained his patience with the council but complained of their stagnancy on the campaign against drugs.



“I tried to ease
off the gas a little bit and allow them time to do their job but they
weren’t doing it. During that budget hearing, I tried to softly get to
the point of here is the mandate, where is the action,”
Mumpower said.
“If you don’t have a budget, you can’t hold them accountable and it
doesn’t get done.”



Mumpower says his war on drugs is a lonely vanguard in our community and one he is not ready to give up.



“I’m not going
to back off of this. I don’t care how many people I make mad at me. I
don’t care how much ridicule or the brunt of how many jokes I become. I
may fail and I may not succeed. But it won’t be for a lack of trying
and it wont be because I’m trying to protect my own interests. I get a
lot of grief from council and people in the community. This is a lonely
mission where I almost always feel very alone but that’s ok.”



Mumpower says
the responsibility of our failing education system lies not only with
city government or the school board but within the community.



“We have allowed
political correctness and a passive attitude toward the corruptive
influences of a hip-hop culture. Hip-hop culture teaches men to be
little boys and women to be sex toys and neither of those is the bridge
to a future of hope and opportunity. We’re losing far too many black
people in this community to dark lives.”



Unlike most conservatives, Mumpower believes small, local government is the focal point of change in the future.



“Well, I’m not a
believer in big government. I like small government and big people. And
I believe that local government across the country is one of the
greatest sources in erosion in personal liberty that is occurring in
our culture, and I want to resist this at a local level,” Mumpower
said.



The community
does better with people with those fundamental principles than we do
trying to create artificial hope through government handouts, according
to Mumpower.



“To me,
government has a very poor track record of helping people get to a
higher level. I believe personally that people make poor pets and
government builds poor kennels and public housing and what happens
there is a perfect example,” Mumpower said. “Instead of an uplifting
opportunity for a better life, our public housing have become
incubators for crime and deadly traps for people,” Mumpower said.



Mumpower thinks the community should place more focus on solving their own problems first.



“Everybody is
pointing a finger at everybody else and nobody is saying ‘I don’t care
what everybody else is doing. I’m going to fix my piece of the equation
and maybe that will be the beginning of fixing the other pieces.’ I am
an elected city official and the police and city administration come
under my responsibilities,” Mumpower said. “I’m going to push to get
them to do their part right. I’ve got to start in my backyard and
that’s the police.”