I Voted Yes and I Am Still Mad

We have lived in Ashland since before the 1997 flood and I remember the water jugs in the bathtub, so nobody has to explain to me why the treatment plant should be out of that canyon. I voted for it. In November of 2024 it was on the ballot, Measure 15-234, and it asked whether the city could use revenue bonds to build the thing, and it passed about three to one, and I was one of the yeses and would be again tomorrow. I am writing because two years later I still cannot get a plain number out of anybody about what it costs, when it will be finished, or what the loan was for, and I have watched a great many council meetings on the city’s video page trying.

The reasons for building it are good ones and I want to say so before I complain. The plant sits below Reeder Reservoir in a canyon that floods, slides and burns. The public works director told the council in May of 2024 that if a toxin from the algae in the lake ever came through the treated water, the town would not be on a boil notice, it would be on a do-not-drink notice, the whole town, and that in 2020 right before the Almeda fire they got a positive test for algal toxin in the irrigation water they were running and shut it off. That is the argument and it is a good one and I have never heard anybody in this town argue against it.

What has changed is the price, and it has changed a lot. There is a memo the public works director wrote for the council in October of 2024 that lists every council action on the plant back to 2012, and it is in the packet for that meeting, and if you want to know where the money went it is the only document I have found that tells it start to finish. Reading it in order: twelve million in 2012, for a smaller plant than the one we are getting. Twenty-two and a half million in 2018, for the bigger one. Thirty-two million in the 2019 budget, then thirty-six million in August of that year when the design was thirty percent done. Thirty-five million in 2020, which is the number I think most people in town still have in their heads. Forty-four million in 2022, though that one was a borrowing limit and not an estimate. Fifty-five to seventy million in December of 2023, and the rate consultants were told to work off the seventy. Seventy-five million in March of 2024, borrowing limit again. Fifty-five to seventy-one in May of 2024 with a target of sixty-one, and that was called a one hundred percent design. Then seventy-three million and change in the capital plan the council adopted in April of 2025. It took me a while to lay that out and I am sorry for the length of it but there is no shorter way to say it.

I do understand inflation. Mr. Fleury told the council that construction costs in this part of the country went up about thirty percent between 2021 and the end of 2023 and I have no reason at all to doubt him. But thirty percent on thirty-five million is forty-five and a half million. It is not seventy-three. I sat through that entire May meeting, an hour and a half of it, waiting for somebody to walk the council through the rest of the difference, and nobody did, and nobody on the council asked. He said something that night I liked, that they did not want a Cadillac facility, they wanted the Toyota of facilities, and I think he meant it. A car is still not an explanation for a number doubling in four years.

The schedule has moved about as much as the price. In December of 2023 the council was told the design was ninety percent finished, that it would go out to bid in February or March, that construction would start in the summer of 2024, and that it would take about thirty months to build and another six to start up. In March of 2024 the council passed the seventy-five million dollar resolution and some people went out with clipboards and got it referred to the ballot, which is their right, and the federal loan office put the loan on hold until the election. In May of 2024 Mr. Fleury said the referral had slowed things down and he now expected construction in the spring of 2025. The vote went three to one in favor in November. Spring of 2025 came and went. The one thing that has actually been built is a culvert, which was finished last winter, and I have walked over it and it is a perfectly good culvert. In February of this year the city manager’s written report said construction was anticipated to begin “this winter.” In May she said they had hired a project manager and the contract would come to council in October or November. In June, at the transportation committee of all places, which is not where I expected to hear it, Mr. Fleury said construction on the actual site would not begin until early 2027 and would run about thirty months. And the August 4 report says the final design is going through a formal quality check with an owner’s representative, which as far as I can tell means somebody is now checking the design that was called one hundred percent finished in the spring of 2024.

I want to say one thing about the referral because it keeps coming up. If it cost the project time it cost it from roughly March to November of 2024, which is eight months. It is now September of 2026 and there is nothing in the ground at the site. You cannot hang two years on eight months and you certainly cannot hang it on the people who voted, since most of us voted yes.

Early 2027 plus thirty months is the back half of 2029, and then there is the startup, so I get 2030 before any of us drinks a glass of it. I would be glad to be told I have the arithmetic wrong. Nobody from the city has said a completion year out loud since the spring of 2024, so there is nothing to check it against.

The rates are the part that arrives at my house. There was a four percent increase in June of 2019 and then nothing at all until last year, which is six years of somebody deciding not to have the argument, and then all of it landed at once. In December of 2023 a consultant proposed ten percent a year for six years and the council did not care for that. In December of 2024 a second consultant, HDR, who I will point out is also the firm that designed the plant, showed the council a chart where a household using 700 cubic feet a month goes from about fifty-one dollars to about ninety-six over five years. In March of 2025 Councilor Bloom said what the public was seeing for the first time was thirteen and a half percent every year for five years, and that it was the only option, take it or leave it, and the council sent it back and asked for more. In May they picked one of the four they got back, three votes to two. On the third of June they adopted the rates, three to two again, Dahle, Bloom and Hansen for it, Kaplan and DuQuenne against. Councilor Dahle made the motion and said just before he made it that we really should not be here, that this should have been done in 2012. He is right, though it is an odd thing to hear from the man moving the motion, and the rates passed that night anyway.

I went and got the resolution off the city’s site and did my own bill from the schedules attached to it. Before I use one drop of water the fixed part of the water bill is $37.40 a month, which was $28.95 in 2019. In a winter month we use about 600 cubic feet and it comes to a little under sixty dollars. That is the water only. It is not going to put us out of the house. There are people in this town for whom another fifty a month is the whole argument, and Councilor DuQuenne said exactly that at a study session in April, that for some it is nothing and for others it makes or breaks them, and she has been saying it for three years to a room that mostly lets it go by.

While I was in the schedules I found something I would like somebody to answer. The table for this year says the cheapest tier in the summer is the first 300 cubic feet. The table on the same page for the winter says 500, and last year’s table said 500 in both. On what we used in August the difference is a couple of dollars, so this is not about the money. It is about a schedule that was adopted by a roll call vote and disagrees with itself, and about wanting the utility office to tell me which of those two lines my August bill was figured on.

A cubic foot is about seven and a half gallons, incidentally, which I had to look up, so the 700 cubic feet in the consultant’s chart is somewhere north of 5,000 gallons a month. I think they bill in cubic feet because the meters read in cubic feet. I do not know why the meters read in cubic feet. Nobody has ever explained that part and I did not really expect anybody to.

Here is the part I actually sat down to write about. In March of 2024 Mr. Fleury explained to the council that the resolution had to use the words “water revenue bonds” because that is what state law calls it, but that nobody was selling bonds, it was a loan from the federal government under a program called WIFIA, thirty-five years to pay it back. He said they would not know what they actually owed until the construction bid came back and that the bid would be their true obligation. I thought that was an honest thing to say and I wrote it down. In December of 2024 a finance slide said the loan would be about $61.8 million with a grant of about $9.3 million on top. In March of 2025 he said the grant was only on paper and they would probably see less of it. In May of 2025 the council was told the loan was in its final stages and expected to close in the middle of June.

That is the last thing about it I can find. I have gone through the meetings and the city manager’s reports since and there is nobody saying that the loan closed, or on what date, or at what rate, or for how much. The one place a number turns up is a slide from a consultant on the first of June this year, in a presentation about a wildfire bond, which says in passing that the recently approved WIFIA loan at $73 million will increase overall indebtedness. Seventy-three is not sixty-one point eight. It may be a ceiling rather than what the city will draw. Councilor DuQuenne said in April that they had not pulled on it yet. All of that may be perfectly fine and I am not saying anyone has done anything wrong. I am saying I found out the size of the largest debt this town has taken on in my lifetime FROM A SLIDE, in a presentation about something else, and nobody in the room stopped to say it out loud.

So I will be at the meetings this fall with my three minutes, and what I am going to ask is: 1) say the loan out loud, the date, the rate and the amount, at a council meeting, by somebody who works for the city; 2) when the construction contract comes to council in November, give us the number and not a range, because Mr. Fleury said in 2024 that the bid would be the true obligation and I am holding him to it; 3) say what year the water comes out of the new plant, and if it is 2030 then say 2030; and 4) tell me which line of the rate schedule I was billed on in August, and if one of those tables is a typo then fix it the way it was passed, out loud, at a meeting.

The woman who spoke for the measure at the podium in October of 2024 told the council the vote was not about whether to build the plant but about how we pay for it. I thought that was right at the time and I still do. The paying for it is the part I have not been able to get a number on. If somebody at the city has the loan figures, the editor of this paper says they will print them, and if my arithmetic is off anywhere I would rather be corrected than go on being sore about it.

Editor’s note: this is a guest piece by an Ashland water customer, published without a name. The opinions, citations, calculations and usage numbers are theirs. The figures are rounded in the prose the way the writer rounds them; the paper checked the publicly verifiable ones against the record before printing.