How this site works
This site answers one question: is living in Asheville getting easier, and what are the people elected here doing about it? It follows housing, homelessness, Helene recovery, water, public safety, streets and transit, and the City budget through the official record, and every claim links to that record.
Who runs it
By the Record Asheville is built and run by one local Asheville resident, a registered unaffiliated voter who wants more accountability. It is not affiliated with any campaign, party, or government body. The code and every change to the record are public on GitHub.
Summaries are written from the cited records using fixed rules, and the record itself is always one tap away. Corrections are welcome and logged publicly.
Three layers, kept apart
- Community results
- What changed for residents: rent burden, homelessness counts, homes delivered, recovery dollars. These describe a place.
- Individual decisions
- How a person voted, what they proposed, or what they said, on the specific motion, with the roll call.
- Delivery
- What happened after a decision: funding, construction, occupancy, spend. Funding a project is not the same as delivering homes.
A community trend never establishes that an individual caused the change. The site keeps the three layers labeled so they cannot quietly blend.
How records get here
- Scheduled checks read the official sources (council agendas, minutes, state bill pages, election files, Census releases) on a fixed allowlist. Browsing this site never triggers collection.
- Nothing publishes without passing gates: an exact citation to the official source, a validity check, and a cross-check against a second official record when one exists.
- Published items carry one of two statuses: From the official record (transcribed facts) or Generated from cited records (composed summaries, each sentence traceable to a citation). The status shows in the record drawer on every claim.
- Three rules hold no matter how automated this is: no invented quote, speaker, or timestamp (a direct quote requires a matched transcript, otherwise you get a labeled paraphrase); no invented progress (an unknown stage stays “Not verified”); and no unverified item is ever shown as verified.
See something wrong? Every record has a “Report a problem” control. A report opens a public issue and triggers a re-check against the source; corrections land in a public, dated log, and a claim that cannot be resolved comes off the front page until it is.
Who can influence what
City Council decides local land use, city programs, and city funding. State legislators set state law, state appropriations, and the legal powers local government holds. Neither can do the other’s job, so their records are never mixed into one score. Each profile carries two plain sentences on what that office can influence.
Coverage and boundaries
Asheville City Council: all seven members.
Buncombe County Board of Commissioners: all seven members, and the three seats on the Nov. 3 ballot. The commission represents all of Buncombe County, including Asheville. Its housing, homelessness and recovery decisions are collected from its approved minutes.
| District | Share of Asheville | Note |
|---|---|---|
| NC House 114 | 22% of Asheville's 2020 Census population | District 114 also represents many residents outside Asheville. |
| NC House 115 | 0.38% of Asheville's 2020 Census population (about 364 residents) | District 115 intersects the city only at its edge (about 364 Asheville residents) and represents mostly Buncombe County outside the city. |
| NC House 116 | 77.6% of Asheville's 2020 Census population | District 116 also represents many residents outside Asheville. |
| NC Senate 49 | 100% of Asheville's 2020 Census population | District 49 contains all of Asheville and many residents outside the city. |
Boundary plan: the 2023 enacted legislative plans (House S.L. 2023-149, Senate S.L. 2023-146) govern both current service and the 2026 election, so there is no service-versus-election boundary difference to explain this cycle. Some covered districts also represent many residents outside the city. To find your exact legislators, use the state’s official Find Your Legislators lookup. This site never guesses from addresses.
Elections, in context
- Sat, Oct 31, 2026, 3:00 p.m.: One-stop early voting endssource
- Tue, Nov 3, 2026: General election day (polls 6:30 a.m.–7:30 p.m.)source
- Fri, Nov 13, 2026, 11:00 a.m.: County canvass: certification of the covered contests (statutory 10th day)source
- Tue, Nov 24, 2026, 11:00 a.m.: State Board of Elections canvasssource
- Nov 16, 2026 (county deadline, given a Nov 13 canvass): Recount demand window (county items: margin within 1%, demand by 5 p.m. the first business day after county canvass; state items: by noon the second business day)source
- Wed, Jan 13, 2027, noon: 2027 General Assembly convenes to organizesource
- Wed, Jan 27, 2027, noon: 2027 General Assembly reconvenessource
Election results change profiles only when results are certified, never on election night. This site keeps working after any election; the record is the product, not the race.
What this site doesn’t do
- No endorsements, no “best candidate” rankings, no party scores.
- No campaign-finance analysis (a later possibility, not here yet).
- No accounts or comments. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn't fingerprint visitors.
- No address-based district lookup. Use the official state tool above.
- No coverage of county commissioners or federal offices, yet.
Freshness, honestly
Last attempted check: Oct 18, 2026. Last successful check: Oct 18, 2026. Latest council minutes read: Sep 24, 2026. Latest covered council decision: Sep 22, 2026. Automated check by the scheduled pipeline. When a council vote is unanimous the minutes don't list each member, so individual positions appear only where the minutes name them.