Weasel My Way Through This Slide Deck

The public works director opened Wednesday's two-hour study session on the city's buildings with a promise rarely made so plainly from a podium: "I'm gonna weasel my way through this slide deck that was created by ORW." What followed was an honest tour of a dishonest situation — a city whose facilities plan is eighteen years old, whose facilities fund is empty, and whose flagship building is closed to the public and, by the city manager's own mid-paragraph disclosure, possibly injuring an employee.

That disclosure, verbatim: "I now have a staff member who is having seizures based on the poor electrical wiring. And I don't want to rewire a building that I don't know what we're doing with." City Hall. A sentence containing a workplace-injury claim, a liability question, and a capital-planning paradox, delivered as a subordinate clause — and followed up by nobody on the dais. This paper follows up now: which building, since when, and what has been done?

The Numbers Everyone Agrees Are Wrong

The consultants' condition assessment scored the city's buildings one to five and concluded, per the city manager, that "the majority of our buildings are critical." The dollar figures attached carry a stated accuracy of plus 30, minus 50 percent, and Councilor Dale promptly demonstrated why even that flatters them: the airport terminal's replacement figure, he said, runs about ten times reality — the city's own recently built hangar came in nowhere near the study's assumptions. Staff's response was to ask the council to trust the colored dots rather than the dollars, whereupon Councilor Kaplan tested the dots: "Would you say the airport terminal building is one-tenth of one percent of a point better... in better condition?" The director, gamely: "I think so."

Dale named the epistemological trap out loud: council is being asked for direction based on numbers everyone agrees are wrong, so that the numbers can be refined after the direction is given. His refrain, adopted by half the dais before the night was out: where are the commas and the decimal points? The director promised to "ballpark you within a comma on the three zeros," which is the most honest commitment the facilities file has produced to date.

Other facts deposited in the record: the city's two maintenance technicians cover more than 200,000 square feet against an industry standard of one per 35,000 to 50,000; the B Street yard relocation has swollen from roughly $2 million to over $5.5 million; the twenty-year plan assumes zero staff growth, a premise its own presenters questioned within minutes; and the fix list for occupied buildings includes doorknobs, blackberries, and "rats and hornet's nest fumigation." The mayor's summary deserves the wall of the next budget retreat: "Doing nothing is not free. It is actually the most expensive option."

Downtown or the Compound

The real fight, conducted with perfect politeness, is between staff's stated preference — consolidate operations at 90 North Mountain — and the mayor's sustained case for keeping civic anchors downtown: pull them, she argued from thirty years' residence, and "you cannot put it back." The deputy city manager's economic data gently complicated both positions: downtown commercial space is the highest-demand, lowest-supply square footage in the city, which argues someone would buy a vacated City Hall — and also that the city is sitting on its most marketable asset while renting space elsewhere. The last bond attempt failed in May 2020, a result the mayor attributes to pandemic timing, a theory she herself cautioned against over-reading. Nobody said a bond number all night. Everybody knows one is coming.

The evening's small comedy belonged to Councilor Dale and the deputy city manager, who guessed twice at what he was asking — "the bond conversation?" "No." "Making the case for one location?" "Nope." "Okay. I'm apologizing. Lost." — and to the packet itself, which announced "information only, no action required" directly above a list of suggested actions. Dale: "I've had this for five days." The city manager, instantly: "That's not true. You've had it longer than five days." She was right; he conceded it a half hour later, which is more correction-taking than this column usually gets to report.

Direction, such as a study session gives: staff returns by summer with the cost of doing nothing, order-of-magnitude options, appraisals of the divestable buildings, and — the city manager's own commitment — a facilities fund with actual policies, since the last one was raided for operations, "the case of municipalities throughout history." No member of the public attended. The mayor invoked "a very vibrant community conversation" several times. The conversation, on the evidence, is scheduled; the community was not.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 14, 2026 Ashland City Council study session. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech; 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.