Smells Like Strawberries

Every recorded vote at Tuesday's Council meeting — all six of them — was 5-0. Unanimity is the sound a council makes when it has decided not to argue in front of company, and Tuesday had company: essay-contest middle-schoolers whacking the gavel from the mayor's chair ("I'm just really glad to be a part of this community," said overall winner Coen Nunes. "It gets better like every year"), and, later, the people of the night lawn, about to have their hours reversed for the second time in two weeks.

The City Cites Itself

The main event was the walk-back. On April 7 the Council extended the night lawn's hours; on April 13 the chief asked for reversal thirty-nine minutes into the experiment; Tuesday he got it. His argument reached its logical terminus on the record: the night lawn — city-owned property — "is flirting with meeting the definition under city code of being a chronic nuisance property... if it were another property in town, I would probably be generating a letter to the property owner." The city, drafting an enforcement letter to itself, is a thought experiment this paper intends to frame. His enforcement candor was equally complete: the posted 7:30 vacate time has meant 8:30-to-9:00 since 2023 — "you can plus one or one and a half to that" — and when the mayor asked whether ten could simply mean ten: "No, respectfully, mayor... you are gonna have a lot of people that are ticked off at the police officers." The posted time is a fiction with a grace period, defended as such, by its enforcer, against the suggestion of making it true.

The vote restored 4:30 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., kept 24-hour weekends and federal holidays, and vested future adjustments in the city manager — language the chief said he drafted himself so that "we don't have a body of seven... managing the night lawn." It passed 5-0 with two councilors voting for hours they'd just argued against: Sherell, who had canvassed thirteen lawn residents and found eleven appreciated the longer hours — "we didn't give another try a chance" — and Kaplan, who marveled at "the strength of the reaction" to a policy "in place... 38 minutes or something," then joined the consensus anyway. Former councilor Eric Navickas supplied the number that should trouble everyone's sleep: the last police report shows 68 prohibited-camping charges and 12 trespass misdemeanors at the lawn — "This is supposed to be a place that's helping people... not a place where we entrap people." The real conversation was deferred, as all real conversations now are, to May 18. Meanwhile the city manager disclosed the figure that dwarfs the hours question entirely: "right now we have four officers on patrol for the whole city."

Housing Money, Fee Money, Same Money

The Affordable Housing Trust Fund awards — $200,000 of marijuana tax — produced Tuesday's quietest irony. Among the winners: $75,000 to the developer of the Caldera Oaks affordable project, whose representative testified that the city's own permit-fee quote on the project had jumped from $49,525 to $73,000 mid-application. The city's grant and the city's fee increase nearly cancel; the money completes a lap of City Hall and returns home. Nobody on the dais said this aloud, so this paper does. Elsewhere in the item, the new community land trust reported that a state homeownership program funded only those who applied "in the first 24 hours," and that nonprofit insurance now runs $8,000 a year. Councilor Hansen thanked the funding source with characteristic directness: "I'd like to thank those consuming cannabis out there."

The federal block-grant hearing set some manner of record: one applicant — the Maslow Project, serving homeless schoolchildren — asked for $18,000, and the Council, at Councilor Dahle's urging ("the price of eggs, the price of bread, the price of school lunches are not going down next year"), awarded $22,699, the full legal cap. More than they asked for, unanimously. When this Council loves you, it shows.

And the sewers. The Council approved $897,905 for cured-in-place pipe lining — 9,524 feet, fixing roughly 70 percent of known sewer defects, with a fifty-year life — and the chamber watched sewer-camera footage on the big screen. The mayor: "Do we need to issue a parental guidance warning?" The public works director: "There's no crocodiles or alligators within the sewer here, you're safe." Then the disclosure this dispatch was named for: the resin curing process comes in scents, "It was strawberry and banana and they selected strawberry for this go round. So anywhere in your neighborhood where this is occurring, you might smell strawberry." Councilor Bloom, ever alert to the city's brand: "that Ashland place, their wastewater smells like strawberries. It's incredible."

Public forum, for the record, carried Suzanne Haman's warning that the hospital's remaining services "will wither and die," and Paul Mina's budget-law allegations, now bearing what he describes as a Department of Revenue letter agreeing the 2025 hearing was held on the wrong version of the budget. Response from the dais, meeting forty-something in a row: none. The strawberries, at least, are confirmed.

---

Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the April 21, 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.