Terrible Resolve

Three hours and five minutes of your Ashland City Council, August 4th edition, and the evening can be summarized in one arithmetic fact: seventeen residents signed up for public forum, the total was capped at fifteen minutes, and so each citizen of this democracy received one minute, with a green light, a yellow light, a red light, and two chimes. Several of them used their minute to report that they were living outdoors in triple-digit heat. We will come back to them, because the Council did not.

The Committee That Was Un-Cut Live On Camera

The fight of the night ran fifty-six minutes and was nominally about video recording. Resolution 2026-21 arrived carrying a staff pronouncement that advisory committees "will no longer be allowed to form working groups or subcommittees," and, separately, the Social Equity and Racial Justice Committee had discovered its meetings cut to quarterly. Its chair, Allison Mendel, put the situation plainly during forum: "We can't do our work under these conditions. It's just impossible."

Councilor Gina DuQuenne asked the question the room was waiting for: "I thought it was the council had the authority to say what can and what cannot happen. Not necessarily staff." Councilor Dylan Bloom sharpened it: "I'm trying to understand where one believes that their power is derived to direct committees that are established by council resolution and ordinance."

The city manager's defense was logistics — one room with recording equipment, shrinking staff, and a request that committees "pause," to which she appended the most honest sentence of the night: "Obviously they are not willing to pause." And then, mid-meeting, without a vote of any kind, the reversal: a memo will go out, "so it's very clear that council is not interested in freeing up staff capacity for other things. So we'll go back to the monthly meetings."

Note the construction. Not "we got this one wrong." Rather: the Council has made clear it does not want the savings. The committee was restored the way a concession is made at gunpoint, on the record, in the passive-aggressive voice. DuQuenne's response — "I look at being singled out" — stands unanswered in the transcript.

The resolution itself passed 6-0 after Councilor Jeff Dahle, who prefaced a lecture on public meetings law by granting the city attorney "explicit permission to interrupt me if I say anything factually incorrect," drew the operative distinction: three committee members at Pony Espresso are citizens having coffee, right up until they produce a recommendation, at which point they are a governing body. Bloom offered the budget-conscious alternative to all the hand-wringing about equipment: "It's a picnic table, some chairs, internet connection and a laptop in Pioneer Hall and Community Center. We just spent 1.5 million on, but that's just my idea."

The Measure Nobody Loves, Approved 4-2

Then the Council took up Resolution 2026-19: whether to put on the November ballot a charter amendment requiring voter approval of new or increased utility fees. Longtime readers will recognize this as the check finally arriving for the 2025 fee package.

Staff recommended against referral. The city manager warned a special election could cost "$65,000 potentially" and cited, via the League of Oregon Cities, the cautionary tales of Bandon, Reedsport and North Bend. Resident George Kramer was having none of it: "I'm not surprised the city manager has tried to put her thumb on the scale," he said, and then located the actual question with a precision the dais spent an hour avoiding: "You are not being asked whether or not you support this. You are being asked to put it on the ballot... The question is whether you get to decide or whether those of us that pay the fees get to decide."

What followed was a genuinely novel parliamentary object: Councilor Eric Hansen moved not to accept the resolution, and the motion died for lack of a second — possibly the only motion in this city's recent history to fail in the negative. Bloom then moved to refer the measure while announcing he would campaign against it: "I very much will be opposing this... we absolutely kind of deserve a little bit of the kick that we're getting." Councilor Bob Kaplan voted no, calling it "bad policy, bad process." Hansen voted no: "This is not sport to me." DuQuenne voted yes: "This is democracy."

And Dahle — voting to refer a measure he opposes, minutes after the Council had solemnly read its annual Hiroshima Day proclamation, and acknowledging the awkwardness himself — reached for Admiral Yamamoto: "I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve... make no mistake, there will be 1500 signatures that aren't discarded on a technicality the next time."

It passed 4-2. The people will vote in November on whether the people get to vote. At least three councilors intend to write voters'-pamphlet statements against the thing they just sent to the voters, which is either sophisticated constitutional humility or a hostage video, depending on your reading.

Whoops of Daisies

The city manager's report disclosed that City Hall has window tint that violates the city's own code, has had it for "20 plus years," and found out via a citizen complaint. Facilities installed it because the sun was beating in and the HVAC could not cope; nobody checked the code the city enforces against everyone else. Her summary: "It's one of those whoops of daisies." The Council also learned the county jail has closed 62 beds — a fifth of its capacity — and that a year into the ten-year Community Wildfire Protection Plan, the city's implementation so far amounts to a code review, which Kaplan declined to accept gracefully: "It's a 10 year plan, one tenth is gone."

For completeness: the Council sold 188 square feet of the Briscoe School property to ODOT for about $2,600 so a corner can have an ADA-compliant curb ramp — "I don't think I'll ever in my life make a motion for such small amount of square footage," Bloom observed, "and ADA is good" — and adopted Ordinance 3306, giving manufactured-home-park tenants notice and a chance to buy when their park is sold. Both 6-0. Both, it should be said, good.

The Minute They Were Given

Which returns us to public forum, where the ADA was invoked a second time that evening with less success. Kate Hartzel told the Council that night lawn residents — the city's sanctioned outdoor sleeping site — had requested ADA accommodations during the heat wave and "the city denied that." Avrum Sachs, 77, seven years volunteering at cooling centers, called the daily tent-teardown requirement "cruel and unusual punishment." Alexander Hamley, a night lawn resident since "the budget cuts at SOU," described the 4 p.m. setup rule as a daily fight for shade. A woman the chair addressed as "Brenda, Brandi — hopefully you'll know who you are" said police took her belongings, including "my daughter's necklace that I've had since my very first Mother's Day."

Each got their minute. Each got their thank-you. The transcript records no councilor returning to any of it. The same meeting that spent $2,600 and a public hearing making one street corner accessible had nothing to say about the accessibility requests of people sleeping on the city's own lawn in hundred- degree heat. The curb got a hearing. The people got a chime.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the August 4, 2026 Ashland City Council business meeting. 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.