Full Tail Boogie

At 9:31 on Tuesday night, three and a half hours into its August 18 business meeting, the Ashland City Council voted to suspend its own rules — specifically the one that says meetings end at 9:40 — because two of its members had rewritten the city's land use code and were not going home until the body voted on what to do about it.

"I'd like to move to suspend the rules under AMC 2.04.010(E)(1)," said Councilor Dahle, with the fluency of a man who had the citation ready before dinner. Second, roll call, no debate permitted, all in favor. The council would stay late. The town, most of it asleep, was about to get a new theory of how laws are written in Ashland: by two councilors, overnight, at what one of them cheerfully called breakneck speed.

It was that kind of meeting. Before the night was over the council would eliminate the century-old practice of telling you when something is about to be built next door, put the parks fee through its third near-death experience of the month, quietly turn $30,000 of childcare money into $50,000, forget to hold a public hearing and then hold it in nine seconds, and direct its planning department — current long-range staffing: one quarter of one full-time employee — to deliver a sixteen-part housing package to the state by September 17. The city manager, for the record, was not there. We will get to that.

The Part Where Your Mailbox Gets Quieter

The evening's first big item arrived wearing the state's clothes. Ordinance 3307 implements three years of Oregon housing legislation — Senate Bill 974, House Bills 2138 and 4037 — and most of it is mandatory: housing applications that meet "clear and objective" standards now get approved administratively by staff, no public hearing, no neighbor appeal, notice to property owners capped at one hundred feet. The council had no choice about any of that, and planning director Brandon Goldman walked the dais through it with the patience of a man who has attended, by his own count, hundreds of hearings.

Where the council had a choice, it chose more. The state capped mailed notice at a hundred feet. Ashland's council, warming to the theme, asked why mail anybody at all. Councilor Dahle, self-described technologist: "I'm sitting here looking at our GIS application for free on our website in real time... I don't need to get something in the mail." Councilor Shirell called notice "a built-in exclusionary zoning that is gonna take staff time." Councilor Bloom suggested that if eliminating notice proved legally awkward, "we could do five feet. 'Cause technically it's not eliminated."

Goldman, given several opportunities to bless this, kept declining. Sending notice, he offered, has surfaced property-line disputes and phantom easements before the concrete gets poured. And then, in the evening's gentlest correction: "with all due respect, counselor, [people] aren't looking at the what's happening in my city on a weekly basis and may not know of a development happening next door to them until construction begins." His planning supervisor, Derek Severson, supplied the case study: a project where notice was skipped, a neighbor spotted the construction, appealed, and "it delayed the project 12 years. So I mean, and that would've been alleviated by 14 days of notice."

Fourteen days of notice against twelve years of litigation. The council heard this math and voted to remove the notice, pending a staff check on whether that is even legal. Kate Hartzel, the only member of the public to testify on the ordinance, told them: "part of me is sitting here aghast... cutting off notice is one way to signal to them that you want to shut them out." Councilor Hansen, attending by video, registered the night's full inventory of caution: "I appreciate the caution in leaving the notice in there and that's all I wanted to say." It passed unanimously anyway, Hansen included.

For the record, this paper thinks the state's streamlining is defensible and much of the council's reasoning was, too — the housing shortage is real, the old appeal machinery really was weaponized, and a checkbox application should not need a jury. But there is a difference between the state capping notice at a hundred feet and a council volunteering zero, and the difference is the part Ashland residents will discover the way Severson described: when the excavator shows up.

Two Councilors, Sixteen Amendments, Two Weeks

Then came the reason for the late night. Councilors Shirell and Dahle have spent months assembling — and, by Shirell's account, one overnight session drafting — a package of sixteen amendments to Chapter 18, the land use code: slope rules, solar setbacks, flag-lot driveways, the works. Their argument has real force. "We've been reactionary to the state," Shirell said, "and this is an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is." His summary of the alternative was the most honest sentence of the night: "That sounds exactly like we've always done things and we get the results that we've always gotten."

The trouble is arithmetic, and for once it is not this paper doing it. The planning department's long-range capacity is 0.25 full-time equivalent — a quarter of a person, split between Goldman and Severson, after the long-range position was cut in a prior biennium and another 1.5 positions went this year. Acting city manager Jordan Ayars listed what the blitz will cost: staff pulled off the state-mandate implementation they passed an hour earlier, the construction excise tax conversation delayed, and the community development department's participation in the Transportation System Plan — years in the making, consultant hired, timeline set — on hold. Then she added the detail that deserves framing: between a planning conference and scheduled vacations, "that 30 day window is probably close to two weeks for staff time."

Sixteen amendments to the land use code. Two weeks of staff. The motion set a September 17 date for submission to the state, a November 10 planning commission hearing, and a November 17 first reading — which is to say, the whole package lands before the new council is seated, a calendar this town has learned to read.

Councilor Hansen, who spent the evening as the council's designated brake, finally used the word: "I just feel like we're being bullied... I think that the TSP has been years in the making, it has a way bigger impact on the livability and the sustainability of our community." He voted no, alone. Mayor Graham voted yes and delivered, on the way, the speech the room needed twenty minutes earlier: "there is a power differential here. And when this body says to prioritize this over everything else and make it happen by a certain day, we may feel like there is a little bit of flexibility in that date, but that is not how it comes across."

The public's sole voice on the item, Jay Reek by video, urged a no, noting the planning commission is already separately working one of the sixteen issues. Motion passed, 5–1. Shirell, to his credit, did not oversell the landing: "we're gonna see how good we are and see how it ends up." Neither will we. The paperwork is due at the state in twenty-eight days, and this paper has recently developed opinions about paperwork produced at speed.

The Parks Fee Survives Its Third Execution

Also back, because it is always back: the parks fee, $5.15 a month, scheduled to sunset in 2027, subject of the August 12 joint session this paper covered under the title "With All Due Respect, That Was All Wrong." Six days later the question returned in fresh clothes — should the sunset simply be removed now? — and the council discovered it had feelings about its own process.

Ayars laid out the stakes with a bluntness her boss's office has rarely managed: without the fee, the structural gap the city must close in the next biennium grows from roughly $1.5–2 million to $2–2.5 million, and it is "time to make a major structural, programmatic change to fix it rather than doing a lot of small changes." Councilor Duquenne wanted the fee dead as promised: "People gave their $5, now it's five 15... it needs to sunset in 2027." Hansen wanted it saved tonight, moved to strike the sunset, and watched his motion die for lack of a second — the parliamentary equivalent of a room looking at its shoes. Duquenne, for her part, tried to move a charter demand that the parks commission file monthly financial reports and was ruled off-agenda. The council settled on the middle path: run the new public-engagement process it had adopted an hour earlier for exactly this kind of fee, and decide in October. Watch that space; the smart money says the fee lives, wearing a "progressive fee structure" it does not yet own.

Small Mercies, Briefly Noted

The rest of the evening, in the order the gavel found it. The mayor opened with a proclamation opposing any ICE detention facility in the Rogue Valley, to jazz-hands-adjacent restraint from a full room. In public forum, Alex Sol delivered the night's hottest three minutes — executive raises, glyphosate on "my daughter's parade route," and a direct address to Councilor Kaplan: "You knocked on my door and you asked for my vote and I gave it to you. I didn't give it to Cotta" — a sentence this paper will let stand as its own civic weather report. The council converted $30,000 of leftover childcare grant money into a $50,000 endowment seed after Councilor Bloom confessed, verbatim, "I figured I'd sneak that in" — over the objection of Kaplan, who did the arithmetic (4% of $50,000 is $2,000 a year) and voted no with Hansen. A new fast-track for selling "small, isolated, constrained" city scraps passed once the word "undevelopable" was added and staff confirmed, for the record, "we're talking feet not acres" — Bloom: "Sounds like we could have used this two weeks ago when we did the Briscoe thing." A Winburn Way property-line swap nearly proceeded without its legally required public hearing until the city attorney interrupted; the mayor then executed the entire obligation in one breath: "I opened the public hearing, I closed the public hearing." The airport got $394,000 for the soft ground under its runway, ninety percent federal. And the wastewater plant's fifty-year-old headworks got an $803,000 design loan at 3.1 percent with up to half the principal forgiven — the kind of financing that made Hansen cheer "go staff, love it," and the kind of item, it must be said, this government handles beautifully.

The Empty Chair

One more thing, noted quietly at the eight o'clock mark. When Councilor Dahle asked whether the projects the council set in motion these past months are on track, the answer came from Deputy City Manager Jordan Ayars: "I'm currently acting in Sabrina's stead. I'm still getting my arms around the full list of projects we're working on."

City Manager Sabrina Cotta is, as this paper understands it, on a four-week leave. Set the calendar entries side by side: out of town for the Friday special meeting called about her own facilities decision in the spring; a finalist in Tigard in June and absent around that process; on leave in June when her own proposal for a new executive aide reached the agenda and died there unanswered; and on leave now, while the council rewrites the land use code at midnight, re-litigates the fee that funds the parks, and hands her deputy the structural-deficit speech that was hers to give. This paper has already said what it thinks should happen to the city manager's contract, and will not repeat it. It will only observe that the town is now conducting some of its most consequential business in the manager's absence, that the deputy is doing it in plain declarative sentences, and that nobody on the dais seemed to miss the difference.

Meeting adjourned at 10:19, thirty-nine minutes past the rule the council suspended in order to move faster than its staff can follow. As Councilor Hansen put it, in the phrase of the night, the big projects need the community development department "on full tail boogie." They have it. All quarter of a person of it.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the August 18, 2026 Ashland City Council business meeting. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech with bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive; the caption software recycles speaker labels, so names are attached only where the chair's own words or self-identification confirm the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session. The city manager's leave is as understood by this paper; its duration has not been announced from the dais. Prior coverage of the parks fee, the facilities episode, and the city manager's tenure is in this paper's Civic Beat and Sunday Edition archives.