Not the Droid You're Looking For

The facilities presentation at Monday's Council study session opened, it being May the 4th, with the staff presenter announcing: "I'm not the droid you're looking for. Thank you. Goodnight." He then stayed another hour and forty minutes, because the droids this city is looking for are the ones who can explain how its own City Hall came to contain space heaters, air purifiers, asbestos, failing electrical, a leaking roof, and a cracked rafter — the rafter, at least, has been fixed — while the fund designated for fixing buildings contains, per the city manager, nothing. "Now we would like to put money in it."

The topic was the Facility Planning Study the Council itself commissioned and funded last biennium: whether Ashland should consolidate its scattered offices into a civic campus. Rough numbers from staff: a campus at 90 North Mountain, around $20 million at $600 a square foot; the Briscoe School alternative, priced at $15 million in 2018, now "significantly costlier," needing a parking structure, and — the disqualifier — it wouldn't fit everyone anyway. New construction generally: $400 to $650 a square foot. Best-case timeline for any of it: five to ten years. Supporting evidence that the public wants this: a survey of 159 people, in a city one councilor reminded the room holds "21,000 in change."

The room's verdict on the study it paid for was written on every face. Councilor Sherell owned his reversal outright — "That's kind of a miss. I, I admit that in my own part" — and supplied the evening's thesis: "You don't throw away your toys, you take care of the ones you have." Councilor Hansen supplied the history: "We've been kicking the can on city hall and now we're in a crisis, you know, previous councils have kicked the can and here we are talking about kicking the can again." Three can-kicks in one sentence is the kind of economy this paper respects.

The Warranty in Her Purse

The roof produced the night's drama. Staff reported patch quotes of roughly $44,000 and $23,778, and the unanimous professional advice that patching is, in the presenter's phrase, "tripping over a dollar to pick up a nickel" — replace the membrane, get a twenty-year warranty. He also stated he "wasn't aware" of any earlier roofing contract, the old facilities staff being long gone.

Five minutes later Councilor DuQuenne produced photocopies, made just before the meeting, of a 2014 roofing contract — $8,000 of partial roof work carrying a twenty-year warranty with twelve years left on it — and said: "Scott your signature is on this." The mayor moved swiftly to establish for the record that the presenter had never seen the document before that moment, which is either an exoneration or a deepening of the mystery, depending on whether the signature is his. This paper has not seen the document. Someone should. A city about to spend six figures on a roof ought to know whether it is already under warranty, and a facilities operation that has to learn about its own contracts from a councilor's purse has told you something about the filing system either way.

The One Decision

The Council did reach one unanimous conclusion: Briscoe School is out of the civic-campus conversation. Every councilor, plus the remote Councilor Kaplan — whose Zoom audio failed so completely that he spent the evening typing comments a staffer read aloud, the dais literally watching the typing indicator ("the three dots are moving," the mayor narrated) — said release it. Staff will also return in July with a real all-in number for North Mountain, and with Kaplan's overdue homework question: a business case saying which departments actually need to sit together, since nobody has yet established that the wastewater plant yearns for proximity to the utility counter.

The mayor's own preference — patch up City Hall for civic use, consolidate staff opportunistically, keep North Mountain in reserve — was offered for costing and politely declined. Councilor Bloom: "I would be voting no anyways until after next biennium. So that's, yeah, I would say it's just a waste of time." Councilor Dale wanted a number anyway, on the principle that "there's a difference between a $500,000 house and a $3 million house," while specifying his tolerance for detail: "I don't need the cubicle design."

DuQuenne's position traveled an interesting arc: the civic center "should just be taken off the table... not now, not in a couple of years" — followed, twenty minutes later, by a proposal to put it on this November's ballot. Bloom declined the trap on mechanical grounds: "I don't think that we can put on the ballot, Hey, are you interested in a civic center? Like that's a poll."

What Was Not Explained

Two items left the room unexamined. City Hall sits under some manner of deed restriction that legal has been briefing the Council about "over the last few months," the nature of which was never stated in open session, and which staff says should be resolved before major money goes into the building. And the city is, in passing, "looking at leasing a building for finance" — mentioned once, questioned by no one, in a meeting about how the city has too many buildings.

Not one member of the public attended. The mayor acknowledged as much — "There is a lot more interest in this question than what we see here." A $20 million question, a 159-person survey, an empty room, and a study session that took exactly one formal vote all evening: a motion, seconded and carried, to keep talking fifteen more minutes. They are not the droids we're looking for. On current evidence, the search continues.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 4, 2026 Ashland City Council study session. Quotations appear as transcribed; 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.