The Vibe Theory of Law Enforcement

Monday's Council study session ran two hours and seventeen minutes, required two separate motions just to keep extending itself, and contained, by this paper's count, one genuinely important accounting question, one civilian who out-prepared the police department on its own statistics, and one paradox so clean it should be bronzed. We take them in order of appearance.

The Chief's Annual Report, Now With Vibes

Police Chief Tighe O'Mara delivered the department's annual report — formerly the use-of-force report, presented "albeit a little bit tardy," which is to say months late. The numbers themselves are mostly good news and deserve stating plainly: use-of-force incidents down from 43 to 31 in 2025; pepper spray used zero times; batons zero; 27,054 calls for service; fewer than 1.5 percent of cases involving force; Part One crimes down from 387 to 227. Violent crime, the asterisk, rose from 40 to 50, with a 66 percent clearance rate the chief called "way above the national average." Councilor Eric Hansen compressed the whole slide deck into one sentence: "Trend lines look good, but the violent trend line looks terrible."

Asked why downtown crime fell, the chief offered a theory of causation this paper intends to cite for years: the new enforcement framework and council attention "just put the vibe out there that we are tired of seeing this part of the city track up." The vibe. Sixteen months of contested public policy, and the official mechanism of action is atmospheric.

Councilor Bob Kaplan, performing his customary role of man-who-read-the-packet, punctured the victory lap twice: the downtrend "started trending down regardless since 2023," and had crime merely relocated outside the enhanced enforcement area? Chief: "I have not tracked that." Kaplan also asked whether police numbers reconcile with the municipal judge's monthly report. Chief: "I've never looked at it." He had, he explained, first pondered the question that morning, because Kaplan emailed it. On his own promised quarterly enforcement reports: "I'm happy to say that I was negligent not keeping up on those" — a confession delivered with a cheerfulness normally reserved for people who have not just used the word "negligent."

Then came public comment, and the star turn. A former 911 dispatcher named Debbie — introducing her platform with "Debbie does data, okay," and preceded by a word the captioning software rendered as four asterisks — demanded year-to-date expulsion numbers instead of point-in-time counts, parks and night-lawn figures broken out separately, the judge's report posted online, and the restoration of a municipal court clerk lost to layoffs: "we've got a full police department. We got what, 31 officers, we need a new municipal court clerk." The chief walked back to the podium and committed, on the spot, to fixing the crime-log coding and breaking out the data she asked for. One citizen, three minutes, direct pipeline to policy. She also noticed what no councilor did: the department is expanding an expulsion system whose appeals run through a court that just lost its clerk.

A Dedicated Fund for Thee

Item two: pull the building division out of the general fund into a dedicated enterprise fund, raise permit fees to full cost recovery, and start work on a construction excise tax for affordable housing. The division currently recovers 60 to 74 percent of its costs; the general fund covers the difference — $262,000 this fiscal year. Under the proposal, big commercial and large multifamily projects absorb real increases while single-family projects stay roughly flat, and — the sleeper statistic of the night — the fire department's plan-check fee gets restructured from a percentage to hourly billing, dropping one 30,000-square-foot example from $13,656 to $375. A 97 percent cut on that line, costing the fire side up to $73,000 a year, mentioned precisely once.

Councilor Dylan Bloom, continuing this Council's most useful habit, caught the staff report overstating its own legal mandate — the packet claimed state law forbids the program subsidizing or being subsidized by other city services; Bloom read the statute and found only the first half true. Staff: "that sentence could probably be better structured." It could. Councilor Sherell supplied the incidence analysis usually left unspoken: "This fee goes directly to the end user... this rolls downhill to the customer, which in our case is the Ashlanders." The dais said yes anyway, three informal polls, unanimous, effective January 2027. Hold that thought about dedicated funds. It matures in one item.

The $4 Million in the Drawer

Item three, brought by Bloom and Councilor Gina DuQuenne at 7:15 p.m. with the room already thinning: what to do with the $4 million Asante paid this city in settlement over the dismantling of Ashland Community Hospital. The money currently sits $3.2 million in general reserve and $800,000 in capital — parked there by the city's unbudgeted-revenue policy, which Bloom framed as the whole question: "do we follow our financial policies or not... or do we believe that financial policies are flexible and that we can kind of pick and choose."

Six residents came to answer. Suzanne Haman: "We are at the edge of an abyss" — park the money in interest for two years and build toward a health district. A retired physician of twenty-five years at the hospital called a full hospital "a pipe dream," wanted the money spent on grant writers to chase the roughly $1 billion in federal rural-health money coming to Oregon, and delivered the quote of the evening directly to the dais: "You can be creative, the city attorney can be creative. You're gonna look bad to the citizens... if this money goes to the general fund." John Mauer, fifty years in town: "It was exactly two years ago today I brought to your attention that Asante was not acting the way it ought... I'm looking for some credibility, I suppose."

And here is the paradox, spotted from the podium by Mauer himself: this Council had just spent an hour enthusiastically building a dedicated fund so that building-permit money can never leak into the general fund — on the grounds that money collected for a purpose should serve that purpose — and then spent the final half hour explaining why hospital settlement money cannot have a dedicated fund, because policy is policy. Kaplan proposed the obvious synthesis: a special healthcare investment fund with a two-year sunset, unspent balance reverting in July 2028. "It's not locking it up not to be used... it's locking it up so that it's there." Bloom favors following the policy and standing up a $2 million healthcare grant program — though how $4 million becomes $2 million of flexibility was asserted several times and derived never, a number this paper will be pursuing.

Decision: none. "We are not going to solve this tonight," the chair of the evening said, accurately. The money stays in the drawer, earning interest — one speaker priced the passivity at $150,000 to $160,000 a year, which is, to be fair, more than the fee-collection contractor ever made this city. A town that lost its hospital two years ago now has four million dollars, no plan, three competing frameworks for making one, and an October presentation to wait for. The abyss, meanwhile, keeps office hours.

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