# The Map With The Black Spots

*Opinion · August 25, 2026 · by 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.

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On the evening of June 3, in a joint session of the City Council and the Parks
Commission that had already run long, nine people signed up to speak about
herbicides and were given one minute each. A light on the side of the room went
yellow at ten seconds and red at zero.

The eighth of them was Julie Norman, who has lived here thirty years, over on
Helman Street. She held up a map.

"Back in 2008," she said, "every black spot on this map was a glyphosate spray
spot. And now the parks department has reduced it to very, very little
glyphosate use."

Norman was there when that happened. She sat as a support person to the ad hoc
committee the Parks Commission formed in 2009 and 2010, the one that produced
the integrated pest management policy Ashland still has. She got sixty seconds
to describe fifteen years of work.

I mention this because Tom Dimitre published a letter on Wednesday asking where
the real Tonya Graham has gone, and he invokes Julie Norman by name as one of
the brilliant founders of Headwaters — the organization Dimitre says the mayor
once led, before Geos Institute, where she has been executive director for
something like seventeen years.

Julie Norman was not a memory on June 3. She was at the podium, on the clock,
with a map.

That is the trouble with the letter. It asks a question about a person's soul
when the answer is sitting in the record, and the answer is worse than the
question, because it implicates a great deal more than one mayor.

## What Actually Happened, In Order

Staff laid the chronology out at that same meeting, and it is worth having
straight.

Ashland adopted its municipal pesticide code in **1996**. From then until 2009,
herbicides were used routinely in city parks, cemeteries, parking lots and
playgrounds — the black spots on Norman's map.

In **2010** the Parks Commission adopted an integrated pest management policy
making herbicide the option of last resort. In **2011** that policy was revised
again to replace synthetic pesticides across all Ashland parks — what a staffer
this June described as "close to a total ban."

That policy has held for fifteen years. It is, by every account I can find
including the city's own, a success.

Then, in **August 2025**, something changed. A resident who lives on Ashland
Street told the Parks Commission in December that she was "concerned about the
recent policies change apparently made in August of 2025 regarding herbicide use
and including the Ashland Street median plans," and that she "was appalled to
see them being sprayed last week."

Glyphosate. On the medians. In a town that is a **Bee City USA affiliate**, a
designation whose commitments — as a local beekeeper reminded the commission
that same night — expressly include reducing pesticide use.

By December 2 residents were at the council microphone calling it "a breach of
public trust" and describing spraying along the medians between Clay and Walker
and possibly into the parade route, "where children walk."

Nobody had announced it. People found out because they saw a truck.

## Who Actually Signed Off

Here is where the letter's aim goes wide, and where the record is more useful
than the accusation.

The decision to allow spraying on those medians was not a mayoral decree. It
came through a waiver, and a member of the Parks Commission described his own
vote for it plainly in December:

"I was involved in that vote and I voted for the waiver because of my concern
for the safety of the employees versus the automobile traffic. It's extremely
risky spot. Somebody's on the phone and they pop up onto the curb and maybe we
have a collision with an employee. And so that was — I'm very aware of
glyphosate, I was a commercial avocado grower. It is something to be used with
great respect."

That is not a villain's speech. That is a commissioner weighing a worker being
struck by a car against a chemical he has handled professionally, and choosing.
You may think he chose wrong. I lean that way myself. But anyone who pretends
that decision was made carelessly has not read it.

A fellow commissioner made the structural point in the same session: the parks
policy has narrow safety exceptions, and even those "you would actually have to
come before us and get approval." Parks did not hand its staff a spray can. It
required them to come back and ask.

Which raises the obvious question nobody has answered publicly. The parks
department has the strictest policy, the only certified sprayers on city staff,
and a commission that must approve every exception. The city's own code — the
1996 one — is looser. So when medians got sprayed, the town's most restrictive
body was the one everyone could see, and the looser standard was the one
actually operating.

## The Numbers, Since Somebody Should Say Them

The city's estimate, given to council in June: herbicide use saves roughly
**1,000 labor hours a year**, which staff put at seven-tenths to one full-time
position.

A resident that night ran the other ledger, in the plainest terms anyone has
used on this subject: the first-year cost of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is about
$200,000, Parkinson's about $82,000, a pediatric metabolic liver disorder about
$25,000 unless a transplant is required, at which point half a million. Against
a maintenance difference she put at **$13,714**.

"We are skimping pennies," she said.

I am not qualified to adjudicate the epidemiology, and neither is the council,
and neither is Tom Dimitre. Reasonable toxicologists disagree about glyphosate
at municipal application rates. What is not in dispute is that the World Health
Organization's cancer agency classified it as probably carcinogenic to humans,
that juries have awarded damages on that theory, and that a town which
advertises itself as pollinator-friendly has a credibility problem the moment
its own trucks roll out.

Another speaker noted the medians are often sprayed "on bare dirt where there
are very few weeds or even no weeds present," at roughly monthly intervals.

A thousand hours is a real number and a real budget pressure in a city closing a
structural deficit it has variously put between $1.5 and $2.5 million. It is
also the entire argument, and it was never put to the public before the spraying
resumed.

## Where The Mayor Actually Was

Now to Dimitre's question, which deserves a straight answer rather than a
rhetorical one.

His letter says Graham "tells us that she supports the use of herbicides and
pesticides throughout Ashland." I have gone through the record of these meetings
and I cannot find her saying that, and I would be careful about the claim.

What I can find is this. On June 3, in the middle of the median discussion, the
chair pushed the conversation wider rather than narrower: the packet covered
more than medians, grass medians "don't work anymore — they don't work for
temperature, they don't work for water," and a redesign was already being
contemplated. A speaker that night, Alan Peterson, opened his own minute by
saying, "I agree with the mayor that this discussion needs to go well beyond
medians."

On **June 16** the council put a **moratorium** on city herbicide use in parking
lots, medians and curb strips while staff develop a citywide integrated pest
management policy — a three-to-five month process. That happened under Graham's
gavel.

On **August 4** the parks policy came back for possible citywide adoption.

So the honest version is not that the mayor is out spraying Roundup. It is that
the mayor of a Bee City USA affiliate — a woman with a degree in biophysical
environmental studies who has spent seventeen years running a climate resilience
institute — presided over an August 2025 policy change that put glyphosate back
on public medians without telling anyone, and then, once residents noticed and
kept showing up, presided over the walk-back.

That is not a betrayal of principle. It is something more ordinary and, in this
town, more familiar: an operational decision with obvious policy consequences,
taken quietly, discovered by citizens, reversed under pressure.

We have seen that shape before. It closed a public building without a vote. It
lost a winter of ice. It sent a police car to a man's driveway.

## The Six Bullets

Which brings us to August 4, and to the part of this that should worry Dimitre
far more than the mayor's soul.

Staff brought the parks IPM policy back for citywide adoption, as directed — and
brought with it a request to exclude certain areas "for operational purposes and
fire control." Six of them.

A councilor, reading the packet, flagged what sat at the top of that list:

"Staff is asking that some areas be excluded and, you know, the top one being
where we get our water, like, doesn't seem right to me."

Where we get our water.

Ashland is being asked to adopt its parks department's protective policy
citywide, minus the watershed.

Council did not swallow it. Councilors said there were too few emails on a
sensitive subject to be sure the public had noticed, that fall rather than
spring meant there was no urgency, that "my position is that we use as little to
no pesticide as possible," and that the exclusions "kind of raise a red flag."
They declined to direct staff forward that night.

Good. That is what a council is for, and it is more spine than this body has
shown on several larger questions.

But mark the pattern once more. The town asks for a protective policy. Staff
returns with the policy and a carve-out. Nobody would have known which six areas
were carved out if a councilor had not read to the bottom of the page.

## What The Letter Gets Right, And What It Costs To Get It Wrong

Dimitre is right that there is a contradiction here, and right that it is
uncomfortable, and entirely entitled to be angry about it. He is also — and this
should be stated, not because it disqualifies him but because readers deserve to
know — a participant rather than a spectator: he has been working with Francis
Dunham and Alan Peterson on a proposed ordinance to end the city's reliance on
pesticides, and copies were handed to the council on June 3.

Where the letter goes wrong is in making it about one person's soul. "Find your
voice," "find yourself," "if not for me" — that is the vocabulary of a
disappointment, not an argument, and it hands the mayor the easiest possible
reply, which is that she has done rather a lot on this in the past ten weeks.

The stronger case does not require anyone's biography. It is this: a city that
calls itself a Bee City resumed spraying a probable carcinogen on public ground
in August 2025 without announcing it; it took residents four months to force the
subject onto an agenda; the policy that has protected the parks since 2011
exists because volunteers like Julie Norman did the work sixteen years ago; and
when the city was finally asked to adopt that policy everywhere, its first
counter-offer was to exempt the watershed.

You do not need to psychoanalyze the mayor to find that objectionable. You only
need the packet.

## The Verdict

Adopt the parks policy citywide. Adopt it without the watershed exclusion, which
should never have been typed. If there are places where a worker genuinely
cannot safely pull a weed beside four lanes of traffic, write that narrow
exception the way Parks wrote its own — case by case, before a public body, on
the record, with a vote — rather than as a bullet point in a staff report.

And publish the spray log. Every application, every location, every date, on the
website, the way the parks department has effectively been doing by being small
enough that people notice. The whole reason this became a scandal is that the
first anyone knew of it was seeing the truck.

As for the question in the headline of Dimitre's letter — where is the real
Tonya Graham — I would gently suggest it is the wrong question, and that the
right one is duller and more answerable.

Not where is the mayor's soul. Where were the minutes.

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*Sources: Tom Dimitre, "Letter to the Editor: Where Is the Real Tonya Graham?",
The Ashland Chronicle, Aug. 19, 2026. Meetings as transcribed from the public
record: Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission, Dec. 3, 2025; Ashland City
Council, Dec. 2, 2025; joint City Council and Parks Commission special meeting,
June 3, 2026 (Median Maintenance and Herbicide Use); City Council, June 16, 2026
(Consideration of Temporary Halt on City Herbicide Use in Parking Lots, Medians,
and Curb Strips); City Council, Aug. 4, 2026 (Review of Parks Integrated Pest
Management Policy for Consideration for City Adoption). Policy chronology,
labor-hour estimates and the list of exclusions as stated by staff in open
session. Public commenters are named where they identified themselves at the
podium; councilors where the chair named them in the room. Mayor Graham's
biography per the Geos Institute and Ashland.news. No statement by Mayor Graham
endorsing citywide herbicide use appears in the meeting record reviewed for this
piece.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/opinion/2026-08-25-the-map-with-the-black-spots