The Flavor of the Money

A little before eight o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, September 15, Councilor Derek Sherrell did something that happens about as often at the Ashland council dais as a solar eclipse. He said he had been wrong, and he named the person who had told him so.

The subject was the package of housing code changes that he and Councilor Jeff Dahle have been pushing since last year. It rewrites parts of Chapter 18, the city’s land use code, and is now draft Ordinance 3310. Among other things it would allow two accessory dwelling units on a lot instead of one, cut every zone’s minimum landscaped area in half, and make living in a recreational vehicle a recognized housing type. The schedule the council set in August would have had it adopted by December 15, and the Planning Commission’s chair, Lisa Verner, told her commission on September 8 that the pace put Oregon’s first statewide planning goal, citizen involvement, at risk. The paper covered that meeting here.

Pedal To The Metal

Sherrell took the item himself and spent four minutes on it. He began with the apology.

“And I have to take some accountability here and say that my schedule was a little bit tight and I think Chair Verner said it best. You’re pushing a little bit hard here. And we looked at the state standard, the local AMC standard and other industry standards, and we set some goals. And just because you can meet the schedule doesn’t mean that that’s best practice. And so in collaboration with the planning department, community development director and their staff as well as the deputy city manager, we’ve revised the schedule slightly to include some more public input.”

Later in the same turn he said he would “take responsibility for really pushing the pedal to the metal to a fault.” He also said the package had shrunk from eighteen items to thirteen, and that three of the biggest would go into a second phase on a timeline of eighteen to twenty-four months: flag drive standards, minimum lot sizes and what he called legacy streets.

The new schedule, which he and Dahle brought to the council as their own staff report, sends the draft to the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee on September 24, to the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee on October 7, and possibly to the Transportation Advisory Committee on October 15. The Planning Commission gets a study session on November 10 and holds its public hearing on December 8. The council has a study session on November 17. The table in the packet put both council readings in 2026, which Sherrell caught out loud. “We’re not going backwards,” he said.

Mayor Tonya Graham asked to move the first council hearing to February 2. The first council meeting of January is not held, she said, and a January hearing would be the first thing three new councilors saw. Councilor Dylan Bloom said that was their problem. “You don’t get an out,” he said. “You gotta vote. So be ready.” Deputy City Manager Jordan Rooklyn said staff would have trouble posting notices over the holidays with a skeleton crew and would prefer February. Dahle then moved the schedule with the first reading kept in January, on “January 19th, 2027 and February 2nd, 2027,” and it passed 6–0.

Before the vote, Bloom asked that if a committee cannot review the draft by its date, “it needs to just move on,” and Dahle told him “that is the expectation.” Councilor Eric Hansen said the opposite: “It’s gotta go through committees. Gotta have public involvement.” The housing committee’s packet had been held back that night until the vote went through, and when it went out the next morning the staff memo in it said this review was “HHSAC’s sole opportunity to provide input on these changes.”

Dahle, for his part, said he agreed with the new calendar and then spoke about the old one. He and Sherrell, he said, “aren’t gonna be here when some of you vote on this.” “This would be to our benefit to not bring this to people’s attention, like at all,” he said of the package. “To not even bring it up. And we’ve never used that to our advantage, but people could.” A minute later he said, “When we say slow down, it may be that what we’re used to is just too slow.”

Two residents spoke. Linda Adams argued from Goal 1 and asked the council to listen to the Planning Commission. The second, whose surname the captions did not catch, went through census figures on Ashland’s growth and finished with a proverb. “Please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” he said. “Keep our land use system intact.”

Not A Penalty

Earlier that evening, at about ten minutes to seven, the council had postponed Resolution 2026-26, a rewrite of the city’s financial management policies that Bloom and Dahle brought in July. The motion to put it off, to a meeting on or before October 20, was Dahle’s.

At four minutes past eight the council came to the $4 million. Asante paid it under what the staff report calls “the mutual termination, effective June 12, 2026, of the Affiliation Agreement regarding the Ashland Community Hospital.” The city’s policy for money it did not budget for, adopted in 2023 as Resolution 2023-09, requires at least 20 percent to go to the reserve fund, at least 10 percent to be set aside for long-term liabilities, and at least 20 percent to go to capital projects, which accounts for half the money. Following it, staff put $3.2 million in the reserve fund, including the half the policy does not direct, and $800,000 in the capital fund. This was the council’s third public conversation about the money, after study sessions on August 3 and August 17. The staff report gave the item twenty minutes, and it took an hour.

Five people spoke first, and Graham asked the room, as she does, to show agreement with a hand signal rather than applause. Dr. John Maurer, a surgeon in Ashland for fifty years, said the agreement’s authors put the $4 million in it to protect healthcare and that spending it on anything else “is a misappropriation of funds.” A registered nurse named Suzanne, fifty-three years in town and thirty-three at the hospital, said a friend with several illnesses cannot see a doctor until May 2027. Lori Hoagland, a nurse practitioner for forty-one years, described families driving children to Portland for chemotherapy. Paula Sole talked about her first grandchild, born at the Ashland hospital two and a half years ago. Barbara Cooper said she went into the emergency room recently and waited twelve hours before a bed opened in Medford. “I was kind of doing undercover work there,” she said.

Graham answered Dr. Maurer first. “This $4 million is not a penalty,” she said. “It is simply a contract, a clause in the contract that Asante had the authority to exercise if they so chose.” City Attorney Johan Pietila, asked by Bloom, said this was not misappropriation, which means spending money that belongs to someone else, like a lawyer spending a client’s retainer. Rooklyn said staff did not recommend a separate healthcare fund. The better way, she said, was to leave the money in the reserve fund marked as committed to healthcare. A later council could spend it by passing a resolution naming an emergency, and the council can define that emergency itself. She said the city’s auditor had confirmed that would be acceptable.

Rules Matter

Councilor Bob Kaplan moved to direct staff to bring back a resolution placing “the entire $4 million in a restricted account through the next biennium” for healthcare investments the council would decide on later, and Hansen seconded it for discussion.

Bloom then moved an amendment. It would follow the 2023 policy for half the money, put the remaining $2 million in the reserve fund restricted to healthcare grants, and have staff draft a grant program. Kaplan said that was not an amendment but a different motion. Pietila ruled that it was an amendment. Dahle seconded it for discussion, which he said was a first for him in four years on the council.

Bloom spoke to it for about two and a half minutes. “We claim to be good financial stewards of the city,” he said. “But what I’m hearing right now is complete disregard for a policy that is put in place for a reason. If this emotional argument wins today, because the cause is healthcare, right, it wins again next time for whatever cause has the most sympathetic advocates and the most public attention. A policy that yields to whoever argues most passionately in the room isn’t policy. It’s a suggestion.” If the council wanted to spend the money differently, he said, it should change the policy first and then come back.

Dahle said he liked neither motion. “Not 20 minutes ago, we had citizens stand at that podium saying, you’re going too fast for land use law,” he said, “but we’re not going too fast for core financial policies.” Councilor Gina DuQuenne, who brought the item to the council in August with Bloom, said she wanted half the money handled under the policy and the other $2 million held in the reserve for twenty-four months. She said it twice and never moved it. The amendment failed 2–4, with Sherrell and Bloom for it and Dahle, Kaplan, DuQuenne and Hansen against.

On the main motion, Dahle asked whether it did anything at all, since the money was not going anywhere. Rooklyn said the money was not going anywhere either way. “The only difference between when council decides if they want to commit those funds or not is the flavor of the money,” she said. “So right now it’s unassigned.” Kaplan said the problem was the 20 percent already moved into the capital fund, which he wanted back for healthcare. Bloom said he had to leave at nine and asked the council not to “just blow past a policy like it’s nothing.” DuQuenne said, “I just have a really, really hard time with not adhering to policy. I didn’t think that would ever come out of my mouth.” Kaplan’s motion failed 2–4, with Kaplan and Hansen for it.

Hansen then moved to commit the whole $4 million, in the reserve fund, to healthcare. Dahle pointed out that half of it, $2 million, is not tied up by the policy and “could be allocated or appropriated tomorrow if we so chose,” and closed, “It’s that rules matter.” Bloom had left by the roll call. The motion failed, and the only yes the recording makes out is Hansen’s. At four minutes past nine Dahle moved to put a discussion of “the possibility of an ad hoc committee with respect to healthcare” on a future study session agenda. DuQuenne seconded, and it passed 5–0.

What Should Happen

Sherrell deserves credit for saying in public that he had pushed too hard, and for changing course. The Planning Commission asked for more time and got about two months of it. The committees on the list should take the council at Hansen’s word, not Bloom’s.

The Asante vote is harder to be kind about. A majority of the council wanted at least some of the money held for healthcare, as grants or as a committed reserve, and no single way of doing it got four votes. Against the two motions to hold all $4 million, the objection that carried was the one Bloom put best, that the council should change the policy before it spends around it. The council had a rewrite of that policy on its agenda the same night and postponed it. The draft in the packet carries the unbudgeted revenue rule forward word for word.

So bring Resolution 2026-26 back by October 20 as promised, and put a sentence in it about money that arrives with a purpose attached. Then vote on the $2 million the policy leaves free, the same night, before budget season buries it. Nobody on the dais disputed what Barbara Cooper described. She waited twelve hours in an emergency room in Ashland for a bed in Medford, and the next person who does will not care which fund the money sat in.

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Sources: the caption transcript of the September 15, 2026 business meeting of the Ashland City Council, and the 413-page agenda packet published for it, including Rooklyn’s staff report on the Asante payment, the 2023 financial management policies, the draft Resolution 2026-26, and the revised Chapter 18 schedule that Councilors Sherrell and Dahle submitted as their own report. The description of Ordinance 3310 and the “sole opportunity” line are from the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee’s September 24 packet. Every vote tally here is the roll call as the recording carries it, and the minutes, which the council has not yet approved, will govern if they differ. They are most likely to differ in two places: the dates in Dahle’s schedule motion, which the mayor and staff had both asked to set in February, and the last failed motion, whose roll call is partly inaudible, which is why no tally is printed for it. Bloom is described as gone by that vote because he said he would leave at nine and does not answer to it. Quotations appear as the captions transcribed them, with the software’s errors repaired and the speakers’ own left in. The nurse who spoke second is named by her first name only because the captions give her surname two different ways. A second land use speaker is not named for the same reason.