Civic Beat · March 3, 2026 · by J. Korbes
The Mayor Walks With Rebar
Monday's study session had two items — the Amigo Club's annual report on the sister-city relationship with Guanajuato, and a state wildlife biologist on Ashland's deer — and the second produced a disclosure that belongs in the civic time capsule. Mayor Graham, on her own neighborhood: "I've had run-ins and I haven't reported them... serious run-ins. Like I walk with a piece of rebar during parts of the year, right? Because my neighborhood is simply overrun. Sometimes there's 10 or 12 of them in a group."
The mayor of Ashland walks armed with rebar. Against deer. Hold that image beside the official statistic, extracted by Councilor Dale from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's district biologist: total human-safety deer reports logged for Ashland in 2025 — four. Dale's response was the correct one: "I would think that we would've experienced four safety reports on the way to council tonight." The gap has an explanation — the state only logs city website reports it can confirm by phone — and the explanation is the story: the data underpinning the city's deer policy is junk, everyone at the table said so, and the policy discussion proceeded on it anyway.
The Threshold Already Crossed
The biologist, Matthew Vargas, was excellent, and his facts deserve their space. Relocation is dead policy — collared deer have traveled forty miles back: "It's uncanny." Contraception works only on islands. The state's urban deer program requires two things of a city seeking lethal-removal permits: a no-feeding ordinance, enforced — Ashland has one, maximum fine $500, presumptive $435 — and a formal declaration that deer are a public nuisance, which Ashland has never made. Then he told the council where it stands relative to Union, Oregon, the small city that qualified and removed fifty deer after a dog was killed: "we've had pets killed here in Ashland before. I believe last year there was an elderly woman that was hospitalized... you guys have exceeded what Union felt was a public nuisance at that point."
The city has crossed the threshold; it simply hasn't said so out loud. The council's chosen response is a spring education campaign — the mayor asked what population lethal removal targets, was told "for population reduction, you're always [targeting] females," and observed, deadpan, "Just thought we should say that out loud." Meanwhile the police chief disclosed, as an aside, the item this paper considers the actual news: in his tenure APD has killed three cougars and a bear — including one cougar an officer shot at and missed, "which wasn't our most shining moment" — and after last year's hospitalization he authorized officers, for one weekend, to lethally remove the specific deer responsible if identified. A standing shoot order on an individual deer, revealed in passing, exercised never. The chief's own framing of the stakes, quoting his conversations with the city manager: "at what point are we as a city entity flirting with being negligent by not doing something?"
Also in the file: Ashland logs more bear complaints than possibly any city in the state — twenty to thirty bears inside city limits at a given time by the 2022 estimate — and the recommended civic arsenal against deer is sprinklers, noisemakers, and inflatable tube men. Harassment is legal and encouraged: "Nobody's gonna get in trouble within the city limits for harassing deer." Residents, the biologist noted, keep deer genealogies — "that deer's name is so and so, and it's the daughter of this one" — which is simultaneously the problem and the most Ashland sentence ever spoken to a council.
Sixty Years of Guanajuato
The Amigo Club hour was the warm half, and earns its paragraph. Twelve hundred exchange students — or a thousand; club president Jay Tapp's own mother came to the microphone uninvited to correct him ("He just made one error, big error"), and the son conceded the point as sons do. Mayors have been trading visits with Guanajuato since 1969; the mayor reported, via the program's historians, "over a hundred children from marriages" born of the exchange, and gave the friendship its thesis: "It is very difficult to have hatred in the heart for someone you know." The shadow in the room was named only as "some serious challenges that they're making their way through at the moment" — the delegation's summer plans hedged against a situation nobody would describe, with the people of Guanajuato held "in our hearts and prayers." The Cervantes plaque coming to both cities reads: "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." On a night that debated deer contraception and closed with inflatable tube men as municipal policy, this paper can confirm the plaque is correctly addressed.
Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the March 2, 2026 Ashland City Council study session. 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. Figures are as stated in open session.