No Math After 2 P.M.

St. Patrick's Day at the Council, Chair Dale presiding without a stitch of green — "But you're forgiven," Dr. John Mauer ruled from the podium, "because of the Irish smile in your eyes" — and every vote of the night unanimous. Which is not the same as saying nothing happened. Three things happened, and one thing conspicuously did not.

The Flag

Councilor DuQuenne, at the top of the meeting: Governor Kotek had ordered flags to half-staff for the death of Oregon's first Black woman state senator. "When I came here today, I saw our flag is not half staff. And so for me that was a big disappointment and I wonder why not." The chair's complete response: "Thank you Counselor." No explanation was offered then, or later, or ever. A governor's order, a historic legislator, a city flagpole, and a thank-you. This paper asked the question again so the file shows someone did: why not?

The Bus

The Rogue Valley Transportation District came asking support for its May levy renewal — thirteen cents per thousand, unchanged since 2016, about $52 a year on a typical home — and brought the discipline of an agency that knows its audience: operations manager Kelly Matting announced "I'm here doing the facts and only the facts" while a board member handled what Matting herself labeled the "potential advocacy." The facts were stark enough: forty percent of service cut, nine routes gone including two of Ashland's, Saturdays and evenings dead, and a rider survey showing 70 percent of remaining passengers have no car in the household. Councilor Kaplan — who rode the bus recently and counted twenty-five passengers and a full bike rack — asked the question that should be taught in survey-design courses: you polled the riders who survived the cuts, so "how are you assessing the needs of people... who you didn't talk to because they no longer existed?" The honest answer was that they mostly can't, and the board member conceded the darker version: paratransit users stranded by the route cuts "we don't hear from because they just have to try to deal with their situation."

Asked for the true cost of a ride, Matting declined to improvise — "I really strive not to do math after 2:00 PM" — then delivered it anyway: $125 per service hour, a four-hour Route 10 run, call it $500 a circuit against a $4 round-trip fare. On cash fares: "We would love to go to a cashless system because we have to count that and it's kind of gross." The council endorsed the levy 6-0, with Councilor Bloom — a downtown night-shift worker — attaching the only demand worth the paper: "write the board and encourage them to expand service hours in Ashland. It is desperately needed."

The Two-Week Countdown

Public forum carried what the agenda would not: Asante eliminates inpatient services, the birthing center, and much of surgery on April 1 — two weeks out. Benjamin Ben Bruce compressed the obstetric geography into the night's unanswerable sentence: "Women in Ashland, when they get pregnant, tend to have generally two options... but with the hospital's actions, it's either have an abortion or leave the city. Seems really, really weird to me." Mauer: "You're carrying a card in your pocket entitling you to healthcare. That's not worth much... there's nowhere you can play that card." Suzanne Haberman: "Get the 4 million that's due us and start looking for new ownership." Paul Mina, meanwhile, reported an actual lawsuit — a terminated fire employee's case in which, he said, the city has not responded and default looms — closing with a sentence someone on the dais might have wanted to correct if it were wrong: "Councilor Bloom advised me that I should sue the city." Nobody corrected it. Nobody responded to any of it. The look-ahead lists a "litigation update" executive session; the public gets the closed door.

The remainder was competence at its most municipal: seven cleanup ordinances dispatched 6-0 in sixteen minutes, and then thirty-six minutes on wayfinding signage, in which two separate presenters cheerfully admitted not knowing what MUTCD stands for, a gateway sign was revealed to have been struck by vehicles five times ("fifth time's the charm" — it is being relocated, not armored), and Councilor Hansen asked the question of the season about the proposed sign district labels: "I've never understood what the Skidmore district is... It means nothing to me. What does it mean?" Staff: "I do not have an answer at this time." Ten minutes and one withdrawn motion later, the council voted — twice, unanimously — to get price quotes for signs it has been pursuing, by Hansen's count, for eight years. The signs will tell visitors where they are. On Tuesday's evidence, the value of that service should not be underestimated.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the March 17, 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.