Give It Back

A special called meeting on a Friday afternoon is a rare species of civic event, and this one had a setting to match: the Council convened in the community center itself — the very building under dispute — with the mayor forgetting the Pledge of Allegiance until staff prompted her ("We haven't done these very, these special called meetings"). The subject: whether city administrators, evacuated from a structurally compromised City Hall, get to keep officing in the building the community waited seven years and $2.4 million to have back.

The special meeting was called by Councilors Bloom and DuQuenne. It was held — note the roster — while the city manager whose relocation decision was at issue, the city recorder, and the fire marshal were all out of town. The deputy city manager, filling in with a toddler at home and considerable grace, said it plainly: "the folks with the most knowledge to help provide that timeline are currently out of office."

The Rafter and the Ten-Million-Dollar Myth

Item one was the City Hall damage report: the cracked roof rafter discovered right before the snow, repairable for about $6,000, "we don't expect it to go above a $7,500 mark," bids closing April 6, done by early May — plus the familiar litany of roof leaks, dead water heater, exposed wiring, and pest control, sorted into immediate, primary, and secondary. Nobody may enter the building without fire-marshal preapproval, via a sign-in sheet whose purpose was explained with bracing candor: "if anything happens, we know to go looking for them." The engineering report adds that even post-repair the building shouldn't be occupied during snow, seismic events — or wind, a brand-new risk the mayor flagged ("This is the first time I've seen wind risk") that staff could not explain. Councilor DuQuenne drew the political conclusion: "it really breaks that myth that it took $10 million to fix City Hall" — the $10 million having been the demolish-and-rebuild number, according to staff, though no one could produce the actual figure.

Public comment supplied the history the packet lacked. Rick Vezie, 53 years in construction and on his "third go around with City Hall," reached back to the 1884 gift of the land: "That building represents our heritage... this is of by and for the people, not the bureaucrats" — and offered the most Ashland solution on record: "why can't we just kind of vacate the community center, all get together and have a beer and talk about it." Brent Thompson brought earthquake perspective from the 1993 Klamath Falls quake; Gail Patton's entire testimony was one sentence — "City hall is a very important part of downtown and it needs to stay downtown" — and should be studied by every speaker who has ever used three minutes to say less.

The Takeover, Reversed

Item two was the fight. Ten staff moved into the community center in March; the public learned mostly from social media; a resident named Pat Turner described discovering a sign reading "do not enter, do not disturb the staff" on the building her community had just reopened. Corey Frank: "We worked remotely during COVID. It wasn't ideal but it worked. Why can't we do that now?... Just a takeover. In my opinion, that's what it looked like." Julie Akins borrowed Thomas Paine and went further: "What is being written now in the architecture of Ashland is an authoritarian narrative which states all for me and none for you... Let me say it plainly, the community center belongs to us. Give it back." Linda Adams stood alone in the other direction and deserves the record too: the split rafter "was not a minor maintenance issue. It was a structural red flag," and the relocation was "a tactical necessity."

Bloom's motion — visibly drafted in advance, in polished legal language, at a meeting whose packet promised no motions — reserved the community center and Pioneer Hall for "public, civic, recreational, cultural meeting and other community serving uses," barred general administrative occupancy except in a declared emergency, and set a May 5 resolution deadline honoring staff's six-week moving request. It passed 5-1. Councilor Kaplan voted yes while defending the city manager's move as legitimately operational and correctly diagnosing the episode as "a crisis communication event, really more than anything else." Councilor Sherell voted yes with a public mea culpa — "I said most people don't give a damn... And I was wrong." Councilor Hansen cast the no with the fiscal argument: a special meeting "that I know costs thousands of dollars" over an operational matter, seven years of "lots of meetings, lots of opinions, lots of gridlock." And Councilor Dale, from Zoom, gave the episode its epitaph: "40 years of disrepair here, probably longer... all 21,000 of us are going to have to have very difficult discussions relative to limited revenue."

One thread left dangling, which this paper now pulls: Turner reported that a light fixture fell in the newly renovated building the day before the meeting — "I don't even know if it was installed properly." A $2.4 million renovation, a falling fixture, and not one syllable of follow-up from the dais. The people got their building back. Someone should check the ceiling before they use it.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the March 27, 2026 special called meeting of the Ashland City Council. 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.