# The Tree That Broke the City Attorney

*Civic Beat · March 4, 2026 · by Nixie Worthington*

> A 250-year-old cottonwood eats forty minutes of Council, the sale passes with no tree protection at all, electric rates rise 5-1, and the city manager quietly telegraphs mid-budget staffing cuts.

Art by CONTRA — Collage: a stubborn tree standing through a torn stack of legal memos, a snapped pencil and a gavel at its roots.

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Tuesday's Council meeting opened in grief, a moment of silence for two young
women killed in last week's accident. "Words feel inadequate at a time like
this, but actions matter," the mayor said, and for once the ceremonial language
was equal to the occasion, and ran three and a quarter hours into the kind of
procedural collapse that this column was founded to chronicle. The instrument
of collapse was a tree.

## The Tree of Hope

The city moved to sell 380 Clay Street: a derelict house so dangerous visitors
sign a liability waiver, appraised at $250,000, and — the complication — a
Fremont cottonwood core-sampled at over 250 years old, "born" around 1776,
locally titled the Tree of Hope, protected since a 2009 subdivision marked it
for retention, its removal denied by the planning commission a decade ago.
Testimony ran rich: a former tree commissioner invoking the Takelma elder
Grandma Aggie's teaching that trees are "one-legged," warning that filling the
old well would kill it, a woman who has led grade-school field trips to it for
years, and Alan Sandler, the would-be buyer, rebutting the internet directly:
"some rich man... wants to purchase the property and cut down the tree... To
put that lie to rest", he'd keep the tree and build "four to six very low cost
townhouses."

Then the machinery seized. The mayor realized mid-item that the public hearing
had never been formally opened, and opened and closed it retroactively.
Councilor Hansen moved to attach a deed restriction protecting the tree, and
the city attorney — asked to improvise perpetual legal protection for "a living
organism" on the spot — visibly broke: "what's the penalty...? Is it a
reversion?... unjust enrichment... I have to look out for my client... An email
next time. If you wanna propose an amendment, give me at least half an hour."
Hansen: "shame on us for not having [an alternative]... I'm pushing right
back." The mayor gaveled him: "Counselor, you do not have the floor." Councilor
Bloom called it what it was: "This is a process problem... we should be tabling
this", and then the tabling failed, the amendment was withdrawn, the withdrawal
of the main motion was blocked by its own seconder, and the original motion
passed 4-2 with no tree protection whatsoever. Forty minutes of trying to
protect the tree produced a sale containing less protection than the packet
started with. Kaplan and Hansen, the two who tried, voted no. Councilor
Sherrell's epitaph: "This is just another good example of why housing is so
expensive. 'Cause it gets kicked down the road and down the road."

## Rates Up, Roofs Down

The electric rate resolution, the first increase in five years, passed 5-1:
about $3 a month rising to $3.23 by year three, driven by an 18 percent
Bonneville transmission hike and a system the staff would like to keep from
depreciating into anecdote. The comparison offered: even after the increase and
the city's own 25 percent electric users tax, Ashland sits 28 percent below
Pacific Power, which is up more than 50 percent since 2021. The reserves
defense was concrete for once: four linemen sent to Springfield's storm for ten
days billed "just under $200,000... And that's not a single piece of material,
a meal or a motel." Councilor DuQuenne dissented on urgency grounds and thanked
the utility director "for holding it down for the people for five years",
before voting against him, a maneuver this column has come to regard as her
signature.

Paul Mina, in his second appearance of the night, did the arithmetic nobody
on the dais volunteered: the rate increase times the city's 25 percent users
tax yields roughly half a million dollars a year of new general fund revenue,
absent from the fiscal impact statement. "Why can't you just tell the whole
truth to the people?" The question was, per custom, received as silence.

## The Quiet Bomb

Public forum carried six speakers demanding an ordinance against masked,
unidentified federal agents: "masked Jim Crow secret police," in one
formulation. "we do not want to wait," in another, and the dais, which had
proclaimed Women's History Month with the observation that women's gains "are
now under significant threat," said nothing about the masks at all. The item
was not on the agenda. It has not been on the agenda since November, its
advocates note, but six speakers is a constituency. This paper suspects the
agenda will discover them eventually.

And in the city manager's report, at the bottom of the night, the quiet bomb:
health insurance renewals are coming in "significantly higher than estimated
even what the insurance industry was estimating," and "my read right now is
we're gonna need to make some mid-budget adjustments in terms of staffing and
service delivery." Mid-budget staffing adjustments, layoffs, in the vernacular,
telegraphed in one sentence at 11 p.m. after three hours of tree law, the
budget committee reconvenes in May. Readers may wish to attend. On Tuesday's
evidence, the important sentences arrive when the room is tired.

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*Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the March 3, 2026 Ashland
City Council business meeting. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly
conformed to natural speech; the caption software recycles speaker labels, so
names are attached only where the chair's own words or self-identification
confirm the speaker. Allegations made in public testimony are reported as
testimony. Figures are as stated in open session.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-03-04-the-tree-that-broke-the-city-attorney