October 5, 2026
“A free press is the guardian of a free society”
Art by CONTRAOctober 5, 2026 · by Nixie Worthington
The council votes October 6 on whether to renew Ashland's parks fee, and at its last look on September 14 it could not agree on what renewal should mean. One councilor will vote yes only with a new sunset, one wants the old sunset kept, and a charter amendment on the November ballot hangs over all of it.
Read →Sep 30 · Alan Decault
The first monthly Small Print: a consultant's notes marked confidential in a public council packet, a utility discount that asked 495 households for an energy audit and got six in its first year, $147,770 to design a school retrofit the same winter the district weighs a smaller footprint, and shorter items from September's packets.
Sep 24 · Nixie Worthington
On September 15 the council slowed its own zoning package down, 6–0, after a councilor apologized for pushing it too hard. Then it spent an hour on the $4 million Asante payment, voted down three different ways of holding some or all of it for healthcare, and passed a motion to talk about forming a committee.
Sep 15 · Nixie Worthington
The chair gave every speaker one minute, the interim director gave the commission six reasons, and after two years, 933 comments and about ninety seconds of roll call the Lithia Park bike trails were dead, two to three. Then the commission voted four to one to send the author of the proposal off to find another hillside. What the record shows about the evening, including the man who came to talk about a statue.
Sep 13 · Alan Decault
In February the superintendent retired the word consolidation and replaced it with Transformation. Everything underneath it stayed the same, including the committee charter that still says school consolidation, school mergers, grade level reconfiguration. Ashland's schools have lost roughly a fifth of their children, and the district has been telling us so one building at a time.
The long pieces — it is always Sunday somewhere
October 4, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
The pump that circulates the water at Ashland's only public pool came out of the duck pond seven years ago, when the real one failed the day before opening. Staff clean the filter by hand through an eighteen-inch porthole, throw the backwash lever through a gap of just over a foot while the water pours onto the floor, and drive to Medford for bleach. Fixing it costs about four hundred thousand dollars, which nobody on the commission has seen broken down, and the decision lands on a commission that has not been elected yet.
Read →September 20, 2026 · Nixie Worthington
A reader wrote to say this paper's coverage of the city manager never once mentioned homeless people. He was right. So we went and read the record — and found a city that knows what everything costs except the one thing it built behind the police station, a coordination failure documented in its own assessment, and a letter whose central accusation does not survive its own calendar.
Read →Sep 12 · Alan Decault
A twenty percent cap on flag drive grades failed three to three on August 25. On September 8 the same commissioner moved it again with a list of conditions bolted to it and it carried five to nothing, with two commissioners absent and one of them the one who had voted it down. Ashland's Planning Commission has now sent the council an ordinance the city's own lawyers advised against writing.
Aug 27 · Alan Decault
Five roll calls on the flag drive ordinance. Three of them tied. The Ashland Planning Commission rejected the staff language, rejected doing nothing, rejected a 20 percent cap, rejected a shorter steep run, and then voted 5–1 to come back on September 8 and try again.
Aug 20 · Nixie Worthington
At 9:31 the council suspended its own end-time rule so two councilors could deliver a hand-drafted rewrite of the land use code — sixteen amendments, due at the state in a month, for a planning department with a quarter of a person to spare. Also: neighbor notice eliminated, the parks fee's third near-death experience, a $50,000 childcare sneak, and the city manager's empty chair.
Aug 18 · Nixie Worthington
Monday's Council study session: the police chief credits the vibe for falling crime, a former dispatcher out-prepares the department on its own data, the building division gets the dedicated fund the hospital money can't have, and $4 million sits in a drawer.
Aug 14 · Alan Decault
Ashland wrote single room occupancies into its code for the first time — six to a single-family lot, and triple density in multifamily zones. In the same ordinance, mailed notice shrinks to a hundred feet and the only person who may appeal a housing decision becomes the developer. Recommended 5-0.
Aug 13 · Nixie Worthington
The joint Parks–Council session on the parks fee: the chair discovers what the money is for, a councilor's mental model is executed on live television, no decision is reached — and then everyone stays another ninety minutes for pickleball.
Aug 6 · Nixie Worthington
Ashland is deciding whether bicycles belong in Lithia Park: a mile of trail, $30,000, 390 comments, a master plan nobody on the commission can agree on, and the four real questions under the jazz hands. The long treatment arrives in our next Sunday Edition.
Aug 5 · Nixie Worthington
Seventeen citizens get one minute each, a committee is un-cut in real time, City Hall discovers it has violated its own window code for twenty years, and a ballot measure most of the dais opposes sails to November anyway.
Aug 4 · Nixie Worthington
The city manager's official term for the $4 million Asante hospital settlement is 'funny money.' Three groups pitch three futures for it and none brings a budget; the SERJ committee's anti-detention proclamation passes by acclamation in a session that cannot vote.
Sep 3 · an Ashland water customer
A guest piece. I voted for the water treatment plant and I would again. What I have not been able to get out of anybody at City Hall in almost two years is what it costs, when it will be done, or what the loan came to, and I have watched a great many council meetings trying.
Aug 25 · Nixie Worthington
Nine people got one minute each on herbicides. The eighth had spent fifteen years earning the policy she was defending. A letter this week asks where the real Tonya Graham went; the answer is in the packet, and it is worse than the question.
Aug 18 · Nixie Worthington
Ashland charges you a parks fee. Ashland does not have a parks fund. It has not had one since 2024, when the city's auditor told the finance department that a separate parks fund could no longer be maintained and the money was folded into the general fund like an egg into batter.
Aug 14 · Nixie Worthington
The room at the Parks Commission study session on April 1 was full in a way that parks meetings are not usually full. What they were fighting over was eight tennis courts at Hunter Park — and a shortage nobody has budgeted to fix.
Aug 11 · Nixie Worthington
Six studies, eighteen years, 351 pages, a 159-person survey, and a civic campus the Council declined nearly unanimously — while the buildings Ashland is keeping still have no costed plan.
Aug 4 · Nixie Worthington
A $6,000 rafter, five explanations for one locked City Hall, a roofer with a live warranty who never got a call, a police car in a journalist's driveway, and thirty Helman heirs with four lawyers.
Aug 1 · Nixie Worthington
Three public buildings you cannot go into, six unwritten rules that put them that way, and the short list of people who came out of the year with their record intact.
Jul 10 · Nixie Worthington
On December 3, 2025, the director of Ashland Parks and Recreation stood up in front of his commission and made a joke about painkillers. That was the last time the public saw him do his job. Nobody has ever said why. That is the story. Not the why — the nobody.
Mar 14 · Nixie Worthington
The structure was up. The chiller was paid for. The department knew in June what it needed, was told sixty days, and had no second engineer, no second vendor, and no written fallback when the call came the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
Aug 24 · John Stanislaus
Ashland's city manager was evaluated in July by seven elected officials, thirty-four staff members and one scoring rubric. The council's own instrument returns 151.6 points out of 250 — an average of 3.03 out of 5, which the form itself defines as meeting expectations. The three things it orders cured come due in November. The clause that protects her job starts in January.
