- Title
- U.S. Representative, NC-11 (R), the congressman who secured the RTIC’s $1.14 million federal earmark
- In this role since
- January 2023 (previously NC state senator)
- Current term ends
- January 2027; he withdrew from the 2026 race on Aug 5, 2026, after the House Ethics Committee recommended his censure (Jennifer Balkcom replaced him on the ballot Aug 10)
- Next voter decision
- He isn’t on the Nov 3, 2026 ballot (that race is Jennifer Balkcom vs Jamie Ager), but he holds the office, and the accountability, through January 2027 · Election 2026
He is on his way out. He is also the reason the money exists. Council’s May 12 vote was framed as a choice about accepting funding: funding that existed because Edwards requested it, twice, in writing. Those letters are public, and they are the weakest part of the whole paper trail.
The two request letters
Members of Congress must sign and publish a disclosure letter for every Community Project Funding request. Edwards signed one for the RTIC on May 22, 2024 (his office’s PDF · local copy) and a nearly identical one on April 28, 2025 (PDF · local copy). The entire written case for the project, in both letters, is this:
“This project is a good use of federal funds because it will improve operational efficiency and enhance community safety, which would enable the Asheville Police Department to protect and serve residents more effectively.”
That is the full justification. No data, no crime figures, no cost analysis, no comparison to alternatives: one sentence, submitted twice, a year apart, word for word. Set it beside what the sourced record actually shows about these systems: Asheville’s RTIC claims and the record · Camera network misuse, documented cases.
The request doubled. The FY2025 request was $529,692 (his FY25 disclosure page). The FY2026 request was $1,141,255.50 (FY26 page), more than double, with zero change in the justification text. No public explanation for the increase has been found. His FY2027 request list contains no RTIC item.
The timing. Per CAMS, the funding was requested in 2024 without Asheville City Council being informed: the May 22, 2024 letter predates council’s first RTIC vote conversation by months, and predates the May 12, 2026 vote by two years. By the time council “decided,” the money was already sitting there. See Timeline.
Who initiated, in APD’s words. APD’s March 2026 slides to the Public Safety Committee, posted on the city’s Technology and Public Safety page: “In 2024, APD was invited to complete a questionnaire provided by Rep. Edwards’ office requesting funding to assist in implementing a Real-Time Intelligence Center (RTIC).” The May 12, 2026 staff report: “APD was contacted in April 2024 by a representative from Congressman Chuck Edwards’ office regarding potential funding.” Both are the department’s account; his office’s has not been published (request 14 · the federal grant and the city’s share of the contract).
Who called whom: an open question. CAMS and BPR report the earmark came at APD’s request. Mountain Xpress, citing a city report, describes it the other way: Edwards’ office contacted APD in April 2024 about potential funding, and the department pursued it. Both versions trace to city documents; the underlying report would settle which door opened first. That’s a records request; see Records Center.
His statements on the earmark
His one known on-record interview advocating for the project: WLOS, June 2024, under the headline “NC Congressman Edwards pushes for $500k AI initiative to fight Asheville crime”:
“It’s easy to surmise that we have a crime problem in Asheville… We definitely have a real problem out there, and it’s my intent to not only criticize the problem but to help where I can… I recognize [this] by helping to bring a half a million dollars to Western North Carolina to these police officers to do their job, and it’s simply the right thing to do.”
Two things about that interview hold up badly:
- The crime claim already had an on-record rebuttal, from the sheriff who built the camera network. At Edwards’ own 2023 anti-crime summit, Sheriff Quentin Miller said Edwards’ crime characterization was “not supported by statistics” and called it “irresponsible to have a conversation not rooted in data”; former sheriff Van Duncan added that Buncombe’s crime rate was down 9% year over year (WLOS). When APD later made its own shifting crime-number claims to sell the same project, the same problem appeared: Asheville’s RTIC claims and the record.
- It was sold as an “AI initiative.” That’s WLOS’s framing of the project in June 2024, in a story built on Edwards’ cooperation. Two years later, selling the same center to a skeptical public, APD emphasized what the system would not do: no facial recognition, no AI analysis (Promise Tracker). The two descriptions contradict each other.
When the FY26 money passed, his office claimed credit in a January 12, 2026 release: “$1 million for the Asheville Police Department to establish a Real-Time Intelligence Center,” under his quote about “ensuring federal dollars are spent responsibly and directed where they make the greatest difference at home.”
Statements since April 2026
Through the April 14 meeting where 40+ residents forced the vote off the agenda, the May 12 midnight vote, the “Shame!” chants, and the months of coverage since, no statement from Edwards or his office about the RTIC has been found: not in BPR, Mountain Xpress, WLOS, or 828NewsNow coverage, and not in his own releases (his January 2026 appropriations recap lists five NC-11 projects and omits the RTIC). Absence of a found statement isn’t proof he said nothing anywhere, but the pattern is: advocacy in 2024 when it was a crime-fighting announcement, silence in 2026 when it became a fight.
The 2020 police budget statements
In 2020, as a state senator, after city council shifted $770,000 out of APD’s budget, Edwards called the decision “an absolute travesty” and “bowing to the radicals that are asking for police departments to be defunded,” and said the state “has the responsibility to insist a city takes actions”, while developing legislation to strip state funds from the city (Mountain Xpress). In 2020 he moved to punish Asheville’s council for a police-budget decision; in 2024 he routed federal police-tech money past that same council entirely. The consistent through-line is that Asheville’s elected officials weren’t the ones deciding.
What is pending with him
He holds the office through January 2027. Questions that are still live: Why did the request double? What analysis, if any, sat behind the one-sentence justification? Who initiated the April 2024 contact (APD’s account: his office did)? He also remains a named figure in the Records Center requests that would answer them.
Sources: primary PDFs linked above (archived locally and at the Wayback Machine; house.gov pages are typically purged when a member leaves office); WLOS; Mountain Xpress; BPR; CAMS