Meets Expectations

An institution reveals itself most completely in the documents it writes about its own employees. A budget can be argued with. A press release is written to be disbelieved. But a performance review is a private genre made public by law, and in it an organization says, without meaning to, exactly what it values, what it is frightened of, and what it has decided to stop noticing.

It also attempts something no institution is very good at: converting a person into a number, and then holding the number responsible.

Ashland has just produced one. On July 31, Mayor Tonya Graham signed a letter evaluating City Manager Sabrina Cotta’s performance for the year running July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. It arrived with two addenda: a survey of seven elected officials scored against a rubric of fifty criteria in nine categories, and a survey of thirty-four staff. The council reviewed the results in executive session on July 14. The City Attorney, Johan Pietila, administered the instrument.

Add the council’s category totals and you get 151.6 points out of 250. By this paper’s arithmetic that is an average of 3.03 out of a possible 5, and the form supplies its own translation of that number.

Three means Meets Expectations. Consistently meets expectations.

That is the whole affair in one figure. A town has spent a year at war over a woman her own employer scores, on an instrument of its own design, at almost exactly the mark it labels “meets expectations.”

The Scorecard

Averages flatten things, and this one flattens something worth seeing. The scores are not uniformly mediocre. They are sharply, almost diagnostically uneven, and the pattern they make is the most useful thing in the file.

Where Cotta scores well, she scores genuinely well — and where she scores badly, the subject changes.

Highest and lowest of the fifty

Council average per criterion · 1 to 5 · dotted line = 3.0, “meets expectations”

1. Cooperates effectively with neighboring jurisdictions4.14
2. Represents the City effectively in regional and intergovernmental settings4.14
3. Manages labor relations and collective bargaining effectively3.85
4. Maintains organizational stability, accountability and momentum3.83
5. Is well-prepared for Council meetings and work sessions3.71
6. Recruits and retains competent personnel for leadership2.60
7. Implements Council direction consistent with Council intent2.57
8. Represents the City with a positive, consistent, credible public presence2.57
9. Maintains professional and trust-based relationships with Mayor and Council2.42
10. Is responsive to residents, businesses, and community2.30
11. Responds well to requests or advice from Council2.16
12. Responds constructively to feedback and shows growth over the review period2.14
13. Communicates in a manner that supports transparency and public accountability2.00

Black = at or above expectationsRed = belowOverall average 3.03

The five highest describe work done with other institutions, with the unions, or in preparation. The eight lowest describe the job at the point where it meets a person.

Let’s read those two groups again, because the shape of them is the whole diagnosis. This is a manager who performs above expectations mostly away from direct public dealing — at the county, across a bargaining table, inside the machinery, in the preparation that happens before a meeting starts — and below expectations at nearly every point where the job turns outward to a resident, a councilor, or a microphone.

Let’s be careful with the word mixed. A mixed review is one that cannot make up its mind. This council scores her 4.14 with other governments and 2.00 on public accountability — it has made up its mind twice, in opposite directions, about two different halves of the same job.

It should also be said that seven people produced these numbers and did not agree with one another. On criterion after criterion, Councilor Bloom records a 1 while Councilor Sherrell records a 4 or a 5, with the mayor and the rest strung between them. On one measure — whether she responds well to requests or advice from Council — the scores run 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, with one councilor declining to answer. A body that cannot agree within three points on its only employee is telling you something about itself as well as about her.

The same manager, graded by seven people

2026 review · each councilor’s own average across the fifty criteria · all seven returned a form

1. Sherrell
   49 of 50 scored4.37
2. Graham (mayor)
   44 scored, 6 blank3.61
3. Kaplan
   50 of 50 scored3.18
4. Hansen
   50 of 50 scored3.16
5. Dahle
   41 scored, 9 blank2.76
6. DuQuenne
   42 scored, 8 blank2.14
7. Bloom
   50 of 50 scored1.92

Spread: 2.45 pointsBlanks excludedThis paper’s arithmetic on the scoring form

All seven returned a form this year, which is worth saying because a year ago they did not. The 2025 review used a different and looser instrument — agree or disagree rather than one to five — and four of the seven answered it at all. On whether the manager provides timely, accurate and complete information for council decision-making, two agreed, one disagreed, and one strongly disagreed. Four of the seven graded their only employee; two of those four failed her; nobody outside the room knew.

That is the more encouraging fact in this file. Whatever else the 2026 process did, it got every councilor to sit down with fifty criteria and put a number beside each one, and it produced a document specific enough to be argued with — including by her.

The Staff

The employee survey is the part of this file that will surprise the people who have spent the summer shouting about her, and it deserves to be reported before anything else in it is used.

Thirty-four staff responded. On fourteen of sixteen questions, more than 78 percent rated her performance between adequate and very well. The evaluation letter records that the numbers “remain high across all 16 questions,” and Council writes plainly: Your staff trusts you and that matters to the Council.

The free responses go further than the numbers do. One writes that Cotta “has and continues to be the stability that staff and the City has needed for years.” Another, that she is “the strongest leader the City has had in at least a decade.” A third: “I don’t know if I would still be at this organization if not for her.” A fourth describes a manager who “listens, supports process improvement where appropriate, has provided resources for new technology implementation, and invests in professional development.” These are not the notes of a workforce being tyrannized.

Two questions break the pattern, and Council flagged both.

Seeks input from affected departments before making decisions that materially affect their work — 27 percent disagree. Creates an environment where staff can raise concerns, identify problems, or offer dissenting views without fear of retaliation or negative consequences — 25 percent disagree.

Council’s letter calls these “indications of internal culture and as such, are very important,” and orders both to reach 80 percent agreement by the 2027 evaluation. One in four people saying they cannot safely disagree with the person who signs off on their pay is the sort of number a careful reader stops at. Let’s stop at it.

And beneath it sits the specific institutional failure this file returns to repeatedly: Human Resources. Staff comments describe an HR department perceived as “unresponsive, directive rather than collaborative, and unprofessional,” one the same respondent says the City Manager’s oversight “allowed” to “foster an atmosphere of hostility, inconsistency, unprofessionalism,” and a broader “lack of trust in HR and the City Manager, with some employees hesitant to raise issues due to fears of retaliation.” One respondent notes that “concerns about the anonymity of this survey have also discouraged participation,” which is a sentence a serious organization should read twice.

Council’s own language is unusually blunt for a document signed by a mayor:

“That so many management staff are sharing significant concerns about the HR Department is particularly problematic given the heightened legal risk poorly handled HR issues pose to the City of Ashland.”

The letter then does something more damning than any criticism from a podium. It notes that Council had already planned, at the 2025 evaluation, to coach the HR Director toward independence from the City Manager’s office; that some progress has been made; and that “concerns regarding competence, professionalism, and favoritism remain.” Then this: the fact that HR leadership “did not independently identify the need for a standard employee review process illuminates the concerns of competence.”

An HR department that had to be told it needed a standard employee-review process. This is the operation for which the City of Ashland budgets a director at $160,349 in wages and $95,540 in benefits.

The Cures

The word the letter uses is cure, and it uses it as a heading: Issues to Cure. Three of them, each with a mechanism, a threshold and a date. Whatever else this document is, it is not a pat on the head.

One: reform of HR. A plan due August 18, carrying its own 90-day timeline, and ninety days from that presentation to put its steps in motion — the same ninety days, ending in mid-November. Then a follow-up survey to the same staff, and — the test — 75 percent must agree that the operation and trust of the HR department is adequate or improving significantly.

Two: strategic communications. A plan due August 18 naming the person responsible for strategic communications and for tracking community conversation. Thirty days to implement, so the actions must be in place by roughly September 17; an outcome assessment at ninety days, at which a majority of the seven councilors must find significant improvement. The letter lists its exhibits without euphemism: the move from City Hall to the community center, the trespassing situation at the community center, and — as examples of an “unwillingness to consider changing course” when the community objects — increased use of herbicides and the redesign of street medians.

Three: council engagement. Over 108 days from August 18 — so through about December 4 — Council requires visible improvement in four specific behaviors, every one of them startling to see written down about a chief executive: a respectful approach to the role of Council; responses within three business days to council requests for information; “maintaining professional decorum in interactions with council members”; and reducing the number of cancellations of one-on-one meetings with councilors.

To its credit, Council commits to four obligations of its own in the same passage, including reviewing packet materials, asking questions before meetings, and “maintaining professional decorum in interactions with you.” It also installs a tripwire: an unprofessional interaction reported in either direction “will trigger a neutral, third-party investigation.”

A city manager who must be instructed, in writing, to return a councilor’s question within three business days is either being harassed or is not managing. The file argues both, on the same page.

Two of these three issues were raised in the 2025 evaluation. The letter says so itself. This is the second year of the same instruction.

What Happens to a Measurement When You Aim at It

Now let’s watch what the letter does at the moment it turns serious. It stops describing and starts specifying: 80 percent agreement by the 2027 evaluation on the two staff-culture questions; 75 percent agreement that HR is adequate or improving; a majority of seven finding significant improvement in communications.

Every one of those numbers began life as a measurement and has now been made a target. Until July 31, the staff survey was an instrument for finding out what was true inside the organization. As of August 1 it is the thing the organization is required to move. This is the oldest problem in management and one of the more reliable findings about human institutions: a measure adopted as a goal stops measuring what it measured. The ward hits its wait-time target by counting differently. The classroom raises the test score without raising the education.

There are only so many ways to move a number like this one, and only one of them is to fix what the number was about. The others are to change who is surveyed, to shape the conditions under which people answer, or to make the cost of a dissenting answer quietly clear — in an organization where a quarter of staff have just reported they do not feel safe dissenting, and where one respondent volunteered that “concerns about the anonymity of this survey have also discouraged participation.”

None of which argues for abandoning the thresholds. The alternative — improve communications, unnumbered and unfalsifiable — is how the 2025 evaluation failed to resolve the problem and had to be written again in 2026. Council chose a real instrument over a comfortable one, and that was the right call.

But it bought a known risk, and it should say so out loud when the results come back in November: that a survey used as a test measures partly the thing, and partly the pressure applied to the thing. The honest reading in November will require asking not only whether the number moved, but who was asked, and what it cost them to answer.

The Raise That Arrives By Itself

Now the sentence nobody in this town has argued about, which is the one that deserves it.

Cotta’s employment agreement, section 4.3.6, reads: Upon the successful passing of the Employee’s annual performance review in July, the Employee will automatically be moved to the next step on the salary schedule.

Automatically. And the contract, having made a payment depend on the word, never says what the word means.

Contracts are written in a language that pretends every term has an owner. Malfeasance is defined in this one, at length, in its own subsection. Core employment policy gets a definition. Successful gets none. It is left to do its work as though everybody knows a successful review when they see one — which is precisely what a document should never assume about the sentence that moves money.

So let’s go looking for it in the letter. There is praise. There is a list of accomplishments that runs to fourteen items. There are three issues to cure, with deadlines, thresholds and a tripwire for third-party investigation. One can read the thing twice and not find the sentence that says whether she passed.

So the public record leaves an unanswered question with a dollar figure attached, and this paper will state it plainly rather than guess: did the July 2026 evaluation trigger the automatic step increase in section 4.3.6, and if so, on what finding of success? The city has not said. It should, unprompted, and in public.

For scale: the 2026 budget carries the City Manager at $216,803 in wages and $116,075 in benefits — $332,878 in total budgeted compensation. That is roughly a third of a million dollars a year for a position the council’s own rubric scores at 3.03, in a city that spent the spring adding a $5.15 parks fee to utility bills and telling residents the senior center was at stake.

None of which makes her overpaid by the standards of the market she was hired from. It makes the sequencing indefensible, and the sequencing is a council decision, not hers.

The Clause

Every document in this file eventually runs into the same clause, and it is worth reading slowly, because the half of it everybody quotes is not the half that governs.

Section 3.4 of the agreement: The City shall not terminate the Employee within 180 days after the swearing-in of newly elected Council members, except for violation of any criminal law, core employment policy, or for malfeasance. And then the part that changes the analysis: In the event the Council chooses to terminate during this period the Employee will be granted double the Severance Pay.

So the clause does not lock the door. It puts a number on the handle.

The severance itself, under section 3.3, is twelve months of base salary, plus accruals, plus twelve months of deferred compensation at the maximum IRS contribution, plus a healthcare stipend equal to twelve months of employer, employee and family premiums — paid as a lump sum within thirty days, with ninety days’ notice. Doubled inside the protected window, the base-salary component alone runs past $433,000 before anything else is counted.

Three council seats are on the November ballot. New members are sworn in at the council’s first meeting in January. One hundred and eighty days from a swearing-in in early January runs to roughly the first week of July 2027.

Now let’s lay the two calendars beside each other.

The cure deadlines fall in mid-November and early December 2026. The protected window opens in January 2027. The council that wrote the cures is the council that will read the results — and it will read them in the last weeks of its own existence, with the answer in hand and four or five weeks to act on it before acting gets twice as expensive for six months.

The sitting council set itself a test with a due date, then handed its successor a contract that doubles the cost of acting on the result for six months. Nobody laid that trap on purpose. It is what happens when a body writes deadlines into one document, signs another, and never lays the two side by side.

The Person

It is possible to hold all of that in one hand and still be fair, and the file insists on it.

Sabrina Cotta did not arrive at a functioning organization. She was deputy city manager, then acting, then interim, then permanent, across an era in which this city cycled through managers, finance directors and attorneys fast enough to embarrass a minor-league franchise. She has been, at various points and sometimes at once, interim HR director and interim finance director. A staff member puts it better than a columnist could: the public does not “understand the breadth of her positive impact and foresight as Interim HR director, Interim Finance director, Deputy CM and Interim CM before her appointment.”

The record also contains something the town should sit with. One staff comment observes that “much of the vitriol directed at Sabrina by some members of the community is thinly-veiled misogyny that goes way out of bounds,” and that Council has a responsibility to name it rather than let it pass. Another notes she has absorbed “an unusually high level of public criticism over the past year, much of it personal in nature,” and shielded staff from it. A third, on the survey Council itself commissioned: “nothing Sabrina has done warrants the level of critical scrutiny that is being performed on her right now (even with this survey).”

That is a real finding in a public document and it is not cancelled by anything else in this piece. A person can be miscast in a role and still be owed decency in it, and this town has not consistently managed the second half of that sentence.

One more, from a staff member who is plainly not a partisan: that running a small city like Ashland “is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.” Read the rest of the file and the claim looks less like flattery than like a job description. Ten departments’ worth of expectation, a council that cannot agree on a 1-to-5 scale, a structural deficit, a closed City Hall, and a public that has learned to conduct municipal argument at the volume of a divorce.

The Assessment

So, let’s give this an honest reading, which is what this section is for.

On operations, the evidence supports her. Phase one of the water treatment plant complete; the community wildfire protection plan adopted and over three hundred residents through the city’s first evacuation drill; fifty-plus fire-resistant poles in the ground; the facilities study finished; six lots land-banked for affordable housing; a manufactured home park zone drafted; the comp and class study completed. Staff report stability where there was churn. Labour relations score 3.85 from a council that scores her 2.00 on transparency. The machine runs.

On the parts of the job that are not operations, the file is unsparing, and this desk agrees with it. The council-manager form does not hire a chief operating officer. It hires the one professional whose task is to convert a legislature’s intent into administration and to explain the result to the people paying for it. Measured there, the record shows a manager who implements council direction inconsistently with council intent (2.57), does not respond well to council advice (2.16), does not communicate in a way that supports public accountability (2.00), and — the number that should worry her advocates most — does not respond constructively to feedback or show growth over the review period (2.14).

That last figure is the one that decides the question, because everything else in the letter is a request to change, and 2.14 is the council’s assessment of how much changing it has actually seen so far. Two of the three cures were already ordered in 2025.

Let’s try it the other way round, as a test of our own fairness. Strike the name from the file, strike the town, and hand the pages to someone who has never heard of any of this. They would find an executive rated above expectations at operations, labor relations and intergovernmental work, and below expectations at transparency, public responsiveness, council relations and growth. They would not conclude that this person is a scoundrel. They would ask why an organization had assembled those two halves into a single job, and then hired for one of them.

The fair conclusion is not that Sabrina Cotta is a bad public servant. It is narrower and harder: she appears to be an able administrator who has not, in two evaluation cycles, demonstrated the political and communicative half of a job that is at least half political and communicative — in a town where that half is the whole controversy. That is a question of fit and of demonstrated growth, not of character, and the difference matters, because a town that fires people for being disliked will get managers who are pleasant and useless.

If the November surveys come back showing the cures took, the council will have been right to try. If they come back showing what the last two years have shown, then the council will know, in the first week of December, that it has an executive whose own employer rates her below expectations on the central public-facing functions it measured — and four or five weeks to act before acting costs double.

What Should Happen

Publish the answer to section 4.3.6. Whether the review was “successful,” and whether a step increase followed, is a matter of public money and takes one sentence.

Put the November results in front of the public. The cures were ordered on the strength of surveys the public has now read; the results of those surveys belong in the same place, in open session, with the thresholds — 75 percent on HR, a majority of seven on communications — reported against as written.

And decide in December rather than in January. Not because a departing council should punish anyone on its way out, but because the alternative is to hand the decision to a body that will face double severance for making it until roughly July — about a manager whose cure order expires before that body is sworn in. The constraint is contractual, not constitutional, and it is a price rather than a prohibition. It is still a price the incoming council did not set and cannot avoid. Whatever this council concludes — that she cured it, or that she cannot — December is when it will know, and December is when it should say so, in public, on the documented record.

The Middle Box

Let’s finish where the instrument does.

The form gives five boxes. One is Unsatisfactory. Five is Outstanding. Fifty times over, seven people sat with those boxes and put a mark in one of them, and when somebody added the marks up and divided, the answer came to rest in the middle box — 3.03 — the one the form calls Meets Expectations.

Consider what had to be squeezed to fit in there.

Into the middle box went the woman who took the acting job in November 2023, in a city that had recently mislaid a manager, a finance director and an attorney, and who did not put it down. Into it went thirty-four people, a clear majority of whom say she steadied a place that had not been steady in years, and the nine of them who did not answer the question at all. Into it went the staff member who wrote that she would have left the organization by now if not for her, and the one who called the whole operation elitist and secretive. Into it went a councilor who marked her 1.92 across fifty criteria and a councilor who marked her 4.37 — two people describing the same twelve months in the same small town, two and a half points apart. Into it went a wildfire plan, an evacuation drill, fifty fire-resistant poles, a treatment plant halfway built, a closed City Hall, an occupied community center, a herbicide map, a quarter of a workforce that does not feel safe disagreeing with the boss, and eighteen months of a woman being shouted about, by name, in the town that employs her.

All of it went in, and the box came back marked adequate.

That is not the instrument failing. Compression is what instruments are for, and this one is a considerable improvement on the four-person shrug it replaced. But a number is a decision about what to stop looking at, and a council that has agreed to stop looking is a council that has to be very sure it looked properly first. Twice now, on the same three problems, it has written down that it was not sure.

And one thing the form has no box for at all.

At some point during this tenure — the record does not fix the month, and the city has never volunteered it — the manager of the City of Ashland moved her household out of Ashland and up the highway to Medford. There is no residency requirement in her agreement. There are entirely human reasons to live in Medford, beginning with what the same paycheck does to a mortgage twenty minutes north, and Medford is a decent city whose own manager lives in it. This paper reported the move in August and does not begrudge anyone their house.

But set that fact beside the fifty criteria and it explains their shape better than any one of them explains itself. Look again at where the numbers are high: the county, the bargaining table, the regional room, the intergovernmental call — the parts of the job conducted at a distance, with other professionals, at arm’s length from anybody’s kitchen. Look at where they collapse: transparency, public accountability, responsiveness to residents, credible public presence. Distance is where she is strongest. Proximity is the part of the office she has been graded on and found short.

So the last line of the file is one the file never wrote down. The public safety fee, the wildfire fee, the parks fee — the charges this administration defended through a year of open warfare, the ones a town was told stood between it and its senior center — arrive on Ashland utility bills. Hers is not one of them. She argues the case in the evening and is not billed for the verdict in the morning. That is lawful, it is ordinary, and it is not a character flaw. It is also the single most eloquent thing in this entire record about why a woman who is good at this job keeps scoring two out of five at the part of it that faces us.

So the file stays open, which is the condition this town is actually in. The letter of July 31 will still be in a drawer in twenty years, and it will read then exactly as it reads now: a governing body that took fifty tries to decide whether the person it hired was doing the job, could not agree within two and a half points, and gave itself until November to find out. In the first week of December it will finally know something. Everything up to that point is already written down, initialed and filed. What happens after it is the only part of this that is not.

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Sources: the City of Ashland’s July 31, 2026 city manager evaluation letter, signed by Mayor Tonya Graham; the 2026 council performance scoring form with individual councilor ratings and category totals; the 2026 staff survey for the city manager review (34 respondents, 16 scored questions and three free-response questions); the 2025 city manager annual review survey; the City of Ashland employment agreement with Sabrina Cotta dated October 1, 2024, in particular sections 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and 4.3.6; and the city’s 2026 total budgeted FTE schedule. All are records of the City of Ashland released under Oregon public records law and circulating publicly. Category totals, the 3.03 average, the severance arithmetic and the 180-day date are this paper’s arithmetic on those records and are shown so a reader can check them. Staff comments are quoted as written and are anonymous in the survey as released; no attempt has been made to identify respondents. The Medford residence is as reported to this paper and referenced in public comment; the city has neither confirmed nor disputed it, and no residency requirement appears in the posted agreement. The question of whether the evaluation triggered the step increase under section 4.3.6 was unanswered in the public record at the time of writing.