Where Are The Commas

Three hours into a special study session on a Wednesday afternoon in January, Councilor Jeff Dahle stopped the presentation and said what everyone in the room had been circling.

"I don't even know where the commas or the zeros go on this yet."

Councilor Justin Adams, called on next, did not bother to reformulate it. "Honestly, it's kind of asked and answered. I 100% agree with Councilor Dale, where are the commas and the decimal points in this."

They had just been shown 351 pages of consultant reports proposing to rebuild the seat of Ashland's government.

What Was In The 351 Pages

Give the consultants their due first, because the underlying work is not frivolous.

The last facility master plan Ashland did was in 2008. Eighteen years, a pandemic, a restructuring and a good deal of deferred maintenance ago. In February 2024 the council approved a personal services agreement with ORW Architecture of Medford and its subconsultant McKinstry. McKinstry walked every livable, workable city building and itemized the equipment inside it — the resulting condition assessment prices, item by item, everything from a $2,220 unit heater at the Railroad Park restroom to $173,850 of parking lot at the police department, and totals $4,270,170. ORW took that data and asked what the city ought to do with what it owns. Their report, dated August 2025, is called the Facility Planning Optimization and Management Plan.

Their answer is a twenty-step vision called the Ashland Civic Campus, on North Mountain Avenue.

The steps, as reported from the packet: sell Briscoe School, which needs more than $2 million in repairs of its own. Complete the Hardesty master plan so the street division and water storage can move there. Renovate the Community Development building on Winburn Way, move City Hall staff into it, and sell City Hall. Move Parks and Recreation out of the Grove and Lithia Park into Community Development. Renovate the Grove. Move Service Center staff into the Grove. Build a new office front at 90 North Mountain. Move the police to the Grove and build new police headquarters on the current site. Build a new Municipal Court and Council Chambers on the North Mountain campus. Build an Emergency Operations Center where Council Chambers now stands. Build a new community development facility at the B Street yard and sell the old one.

And then steps nineteen and twenty. Convert the Grove into a new Senior Center and sell the current Senior Center on Homes Avenue. Build a new Parks and Recreation building on a site to be determined, and sell the Community Center on Winburn Way.

The plan does not bury this. Under the Briscoe option, ORW writes that consolidation "would allow for the divestment of five existing buildings: B-Street, City Hall, the Community Center, Community Development, and the Senior Center." Under the recommended 90 North Mountain option, the list is the same five with Briscoe swapped for B-Street. Either way, the Community Center and the Senior Center are on it.

Sell the Community Center. The building that sat closed for seven years. The one Ashland spent better than $2 million renovating. The one the city manager moved her office into in February, ahead of the public, and the council voted 5-1 to get her out of. The consultants' plan for it is to sell it.

The consultants' reasoning for North Mountain over the alternatives was straightforward and, on its own terms, sound: space, cost efficiency, expansion potential, surface parking, better infrastructure, room to grow — and it "frees downtown sites (City Hall, Community Development, Community Center) for redevelopment."

Freeing downtown sites for redevelopment is bureaucrat for selling the places where your government currently is.

The Number, And Which Number It Is

There are several figures in circulation and they are not the same figure, so let us sort them.

$43 million over thirty years. This is the real one, and it is the cost of doing nothing new. The May 4 staff report puts it plainly: "With respect to the status quo financial impact, the McKinstry report outlines the baseline lifecycle replacement and building improvement costs. For all buildings over the 30-year analysis the NPV is $43 million." The report adds that this excludes City Hall's life-safety measures and any "unforeseen" issues that turn up when old buildings are opened.

$22 million. The same status-quo figure for just four buildings — the Service Center, City Hall, Briscoe School and Community Development. Half the problem sits in four addresses.

$4,270,170. McKinstry's itemized critical assessment total: what the existing buildings need, component by component, before anyone builds anything new.

About $20 million. Public Works Director Scott Fleury's estimate for the 90 North Mountain option: a new community development building, an addition to the warehouse frontage, an administration building behind the Grove, at roughly $600 a square foot. He was explicit that this excludes renovations to the service center area "and things of that nature."

$15 million. This is the number people repeat, and it is the softest one on the list. Fleury offered it with a hedge — "I believe the 2018 construction number was 15 million" — and the packet shows where it comes from. Attached to the May 4 report is ORW's Project Cost Model, Fall 2018, built on a 2018 construction start. Its Briscoe School line totals $15,254,001 in 2019 dollars. Directly beside it, the same table restates that figure in 2024 dollars: $19,937,000. The new-build Civic Center option runs $18,918,001 in 2019 and $24,727,000 in 2024. Rebuilding on the City Hall site: $12,317,001, restated at $16,099,000.

The model's own escalation assumption is 5.5 percent a year, compounded. Which means the $15 million everyone repeats is a 2019 figure that the same page already marks up to twenty million in 2024 dollars — and 2024 is itself now two years gone. If you hear $15 million quoted as the price of a new civic center, you are hearing a number that was stale before this council was seated.

Fleury, to his credit, was candid about the confidence band on all of it. At this stage of planning, he told the council, estimates run "plus 30, minus 50." A $20 million project is a $10 million to $26 million project. He said so out loud, in open session, which is more honesty than most consultants' slides contain.

That is the answer to Councilor Dahle's question about the commas. There aren't any yet.

The City Manager's Preference

City Manager Sabrina Cotta did not hide the ball, and she should get credit for that.

"What council needs to refine and give direction to staff on is what their priorities are," she told the January session. "If their priority is we will maintain the status quo, fine, but that does not negate the fact that we need significant dollar amounts to do that." And then, plainly: "The staff preference is for the civic center here at 90 North because results and the most number of city staff together to do the operations."

That is a legitimate thing for a city manager to want. Scattered staff is genuinely inefficient; anyone who has watched a permit crawl between two buildings knows it.

Mayor Tonya Graham made the honest structural case alongside it: "We can't carry on the way we are. We have a large number of buildings. We haven't really looked at them strategically for a long time." And she named the funding mechanism without flinching — "the way that communities pay for major infrastructure is with municipal bonds," the way Ashland paid for its fire station — while acknowledging that "at some point, this is going to almost surely be a question in front of our local community."

This is at least honest, which distinguishes it. Nobody at that table pretended a civic campus builds itself out of the operating budget.

There was also a genuinely interesting argument from the economic development side: the city owns "a lot of prime square footage that has great frontage for our pedestrians in our downtown area," and the last economic opportunities analysis found downtown commercial space in highest demand and lowest supply. Get the government out of the storefronts, get businesses in.

Councilor Dahle, who is married to a commercial real estate broker and said so, asked the right follow-up: has anyone actually tested that? "The thesis being that that increased commercial availability downtown, we decide to put a for sale sign on community development and all of a sudden you've got 10 people lined up in 24 hours." He wanted evidence, "not a certainty, but there needs to be some sort of comfort other than yeah, just, you know, look, it's high."

Nobody produced any.

One Hundred And Fifty-Nine People

There is a sentence in the May 4 staff report that deserves more attention than it got.

The city ran a survey, hosted on the City Hall information page, asking respondents to choose among three futures: a consolidated civic campus as outlined in the master plan, rehabilitating and consolidating in City Hall, or carrying on as now across existing buildings.

"The survey received 159 responses with a majority of responders supporting a dedicated civic campus."

One hundred and fifty-nine responses. In a city of roughly twenty-one thousand people. On a question about spending somewhere between twenty and forty-three million dollars of their money.

I do not blame staff for running the survey, and a majority is a majority. But if that is the community engagement backing a generational decision about where Ashland's government lives, then the engagement has not happened yet, and everyone at that table knows it.

Two other lines from the same report are worth pairing with it. The properties the plan proposes to divest have appraisals attached — B Street, North Mountain, the Hardesty house, Briscoe, City Hall. Then this: "Community Development has no current appraisal. Community Center has no current appraisal."

The two downtown buildings the plan most wants to sell, and whose sale proceeds are meant to seed the facilities fund, have not been valued.

The Council Said No

Here is the part that has been garbled in the retelling, so I want it on the record precisely: the Ashland City Council did not approve a civic campus. It declined one, nearly unanimously, in May.

Councilor Dylan Bloom: he sees the benefits, but looks at the economy and the city's finances and worries about a bond that "is gonna help inform the budget" turning into a gap elsewhere in the general fund, "and now we're gonna have to talk about fees or cuts in order to fill that." His preference: divest properties, wait a couple of years.

Councilor Eric Hansen: the timeline might differ, but "I just need to see what the budget is going to do. 'Cause I feel like we're doing this kind of backwards."

Councilor Gina DuQuenne, who did not equivocate at all: "In my opinion the civic center should just be taken off the table. We have to address what's in front of us right now. We need to get out of our structural deficit and when we keep spending more money out than we bring in, it's not sustainable. And right now I don't believe that the residents of Ashland can afford another bond or another cost."

And later, more bluntly: "We already have a civic center, it's called city hall and we have the community development department. Ashland is only 6.6 square miles and we have technology, we can communicate very easily. I do not see the need for this."

Councilor Shire: "In a perfect world, this is awesome and I would love to support it and I would love to see a clear path to how we fund it without raising the cost burden on our rate payers and our citizens in Ashland." His priority instead: "How do we keep staff? How do we stay whole?"

Only Councilor Bob Kaplan leaned in, and even he attached conditions: "I would love to get us into a civic center given a good enough plan and a realistic timeline." He also said the truest sentence of the session — "We've been kicking the can on city hall and now we're in a crisis" — and warned against kicking it again.

Briscoe came off the table. The civic center went into abeyance. Staff were told to look at divesting property and putting the proceeds into a facilities fund.

What This Actually Costs

I have no quarrel with a council that says no to a $43 million vision in the middle of a structural deficit. That is what a council is for. DuQuenne is right that Ashland cannot presently afford a bond, and Shire is right that keeping staff beats housing them handsomely.

But saying no is not free, and nobody at that table said out loud what it costs.

The $4.2 million over ten years on existing buildings does not disappear when you decline the campus. It gets bigger. The condition report is a list of buildings sliding from yellow into red — smoke alarms, egress, ADA doors, electrical, roofs at year 44 of 50. Fleury's example was almost too perfect: a building with fifty doors and no levers, only knobs, and changing them all is "not a $50 operation."

Meanwhile the city is running an experiment in what deferral looks like. City Hall closed in February over a cracked rafter. The Grove, the Service Center, the Senior Center and the rest are all on the same curve, just further back. Kaplan's "we've been kicking the can and now we're in a crisis" was not a prediction. It was a description of the building two blocks away.

There is also the small matter that the consultants' plan and the city's other commitments are in open contradiction. The Civic Campus vision sells the Senior Center and sells the Community Center. In the same eighteen months, this city spent over $2 million reopening the Community Center after seven years dark, and its Parks department has been telling anyone who will listen that senior services are among the first things to go if the parks fee lapses. You cannot simultaneously promise a community its Senior Center and put it on a divestment list, and you certainly cannot do both in the same fiscal year without somebody noticing.

The Verdict

Adopt a plan or admit you don't have one.

The consultants did their job. Fleury has been straight about the ranges. Cotta stated her preference in the open rather than engineering it quietly, which, given the events of this year at the Community Center, is worth something. And the council was right that $43 million is not available and a bond would not pass.

What is missing is the third option, and it is the council's to produce: a written, costed, sequenced plan for the buildings Ashland is keeping. Not a vision with twenty steps and no commas. A list, in order, with money attached and dates — this roof this year, that panel next year, this building divested to pay for that one — so that the next cracked rafter is a scheduled repair instead of a civic emergency.

Councilor Dahle asked where the commas and the decimal points were. Eight months later, the honest answer is that the city still cannot say, about either the plan it declined or the buildings it kept.

The people who pay for that are not in the room. They are the seniors at the center on Homes Avenue, reading in the paper that a consultant's plan proposes selling it. They are the residents who waited seven years for the Community Center and have now learned that the long-term vision is to sell that too. When a city cannot tell its own council where the zeros go, it certainly cannot tell those people what happens to the room they use on Thursdays.

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Sources: City of Ashland Special Study Session packet, January 14, 2026 (351 pp.), containing the McKinstry Facility Condition Assessment and ORW Architecture's Facility Planning Optimization and Management Plan, August 2025; and Council Study Session packet, May 4, 2026 (532 pp.), containing the staff report "Facility Planning Study Next Steps" by Scott Fleury and Sabrina Cotta, ORW's Project Cost Model of Fall 2018, and the property appraisals. Meetings of January 14, January 20 and May 4, 2026 as transcribed from the meeting record. The twenty-step campus sequence is as reported by The Ashland Chronicle, "Special Study Session on City Hall Sale; Consolidation of City Offices," Jan. 12, 2026. Quotations from meetings are as transcribed; quotations from documents are as written. Councilors are named where the chair named them in the room.