We Changed 'Em Like Underwear Around Here

Javier Dubón, interim executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, opened his presentation to the Council on Tuesday with "I feel like I'm on Judge Judy" and proceeded to deliver the most honest institutional autopsy this chamber has heard in years. On OSF's leadership churn — six executive directors since 2019, five with no prior OSF experience: "We changed 'em like underwear around here." On the economics of his own industry: "It's a horrible business to be in. And if you wanna start a theater company, just please don't, I've warned you." On donor psychology: "People don't wanna support losers... They wanna support successful organizations."

The numbers behind the candor are genuinely turning: ticket sales up 42 percent over 2024 to nearly $15 million, double the pandemic trough; a $5.1 million gift from a longtime donor; August attendance — smoke season — up 80 percent in 2024 and another 40 percent last year, because indoor variety absorbs what wildfire cancels: "our variety is our superpower." The best advertisement OSF ever ran, Dubón confessed, was a cheap phone video of a restaurant and Lithia Park with "maybe five seconds of OSF" in it — the town sells the theater better than the theater does. And the roof over the Elizabethan that everyone asks about was studied at "like $125 million" — "if you have that, let's talk after the meeting." He closed with founder Angus Bowmer: "We are not a museum." On Tuesday's evidence, the festival has at least stopped embalming itself.

The Hospital Gets the Silence Again

Public forum — eleven speakers, ninety seconds each — belonged largely to the other anchor institution, the one that didn't get an agenda slot, slides, or thirty-five minutes of councilor questions. Suzanne Haman, at the hospital since 1974: "Do not let Asante destroy, annihilate, kill Ashland Community Hospital... We are the golden goose." Dr. John Mauer reported Asante leadership churn "that rivals exactly what OSF went through. Its credibility is in the toilet," and praised the neonatologists who "stood up for the most vulnerable, those one pounders." Mary Hughes reached for Hemingway: "How did we lose control of Community Hospital? Gradually and now suddenly." Debbie Matson inventoried the senior facilities clustered around the Ashland campus whose residents will now ride to Medford. Wes Brain asked for exactly what OSF received: "a position like Shakespeare did this evening." The comparison is now unavoidable: one wobbling institution gets a love-in; the other gets the mayor's standing disclaimer and the next agenda item.

Clarinda Mein, meanwhile, performed the evening's audit from the podium: the council spent "over an hour and 11 minutes out of an hour and 15 minute session" the previous night on how long a candidate must live here before running — against a deficit its own retreat forecast puts at the door "at worst next year." Her prescription — preface every agenda item with "how will this affect the looming deficit?" — is better fiscal governance than anything in the packet. Her closer: "you spend an hour and 11 minutes on a phantom problem. Do better." And former councilor Kate Hartzell raised something this paper is still chasing: that the city is in some manner of legal fight with the heirs of the family that granted the City Hall land a century ago — "asserting some kind of legal squatter's rights... An embarrassing absence of integrity. I hope I'm misunderstanding the facts." Nobody corrected her facts. Nobody addressed them at all.

Thirteen Ordinances Against the Clock

The legislative portion was a footrace: the city attorney arrived with thirteen cleanup ordinances for first reading and an 8 p.m. procedural cutoff, and got through eight, all 6-0 — an Office of the City Recorder (over two citizens' objections that putting the elections officer under the administration "gives us zero transparency"; Councilor Hansen's counter: "Alyssa's crushing it... we want to be able to hire somebody with the skills as opposed to somebody who's very crafty at getting elected"), public art rules, a surplus-property threshold leaping from $10,000 to $250,000 (Mein again, in opposition: "opens a hole for corruption that I believe is needless and self-inflicted"; the mayor's rebuttal was to invite the public to bid on GovDeals — "we'd love to sell you"), emergency chain of command, hazardous trees, electric-system regulations, and two dog-barking measures, one of which staff explained already does what its citizen critic demanded: after 10 p.m., "one big gnarly bark" can qualify. Five ordinances died at the buzzer, to return.

The night ended with the Council doing something fast for once: a support letter for SOU, whose finances Councilor Bloom laid out with the regional stakes attached — $282.5 million in county economic output, 2,146 jobs, "If it goes, the city can follow" — plus the line that should be mailed to Salem: "The state of Idaho per capita spends more on higher education than the state of Oregon. That should be embarrassing for us." Done by direction rather than motion, because time was of the essence. When this Council wants to move, it can. The hospital coalition, eleven strong on the sign-up sheet, may draw its own conclusion about what wanting looks like.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the February 3, 2026 Ashland City Council business meeting. 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. Allegations made in public testimony are reported as testimony. Figures are as stated in open session.