# Full Tilt Boogie

*Civic Beat · August 20, 2026 · by 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.

Art by CONTRA — Collage on aged paper: a council chamber seen from the gallery, a clock past the hour, sixteen torn amendment pages pinned in a grid, a quarter-shaded circle, a woman at a mimeograph, and an empty office chair clipped to the corner.

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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 Sherrell 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. Cate Hartzell, 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 Sherrell and Dahle have
spent months assembling — and, by Sherrell'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, and their argument
has real force. "We've been reactionary to the state," Sherrell 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.

The distinction that matters here got made exactly once, by the planning
director, and then the room moved on. Ordinance 3307, an hour earlier, was
Salem talking: a mandate, a date certain, nothing on the dais to decide, and
the sixteen amendments are not that. Goldman put it in the flattest sentence of
the item, the urgency on these "relates to wanting to make changes that
facilitate housing development. It's not an urgency being imposed like the
mandate for state required land use changes that have to be in effect by a date
certain. So this is a council's direction in terms of what speed we move forth
on these. Is that fair?"

Sherrell did not blink. "That is fair. Yeah. That is fair."

What the state does require, in Goldman's own opening description of the
mandate, is that local standards "be modified in order to be clear and
objective", written so an applicant can read them and know the answer. Clear
and objective is not a synonym for fewer. Sherrell called his package "such a
clean, clear, and objective package," which borrows the statute's term of art
for work the statute never asked for. Goldman, for his part, said a number of
the sixteen could be handled administratively as policy without touching the
code at all.

None of which makes the package wrong. It makes it Ashland's — a deadline
Ashland set, at a speed Ashland picked, against work Ashland had already
scheduled — and setting those is what a council is for. This paper asks only
that each of the sixteen arrive with three things attached: the statute that
requires it, where one does; the housing that demonstrably did not get built
because of it, in units and in dollars; and the name of whoever absorbs the
impact the standard was written to assign. Slope rules, solar setbacks and
flag-lot driveways were not drafted to irritate developers. They exist because
water runs downhill, because fire engines need room to turn, and because a cost
a standard manages does not vanish when the standard does, but it moves to
somebody else's ledger. Strike the ones that cost more than they are worth.
Show the arithmetic first.

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. Sherrell, 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 tilt 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.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-08-20-full-tilt-boogie