The Trouble With Being Right About Sabrina Cotta

George Kramer posted something on Facebook this morning that a good many people in this town have been saying in kitchens and at the co-op for about a year, and that almost nobody with a name attached has been willing to write down.

"COTTA GOTTA GO."

I have watched Kramer work a public forum. Last August he stood at the podium during a council meeting, thanked the city recorder by name for her help, and handed the council a petition he had filed with her office — the manner of a man who does his homework before he raises his voice. So when he writes that the city manager "dictates, directs, stalls, or ignores," it is not a tantrum. It is a conclusion, and he shows some of his work.

He is, on the substance, largely right. Which is the easy part.

The hard part is that the case he makes is not the strongest case available, the remedy he demands has a price nobody has put on the table, and the body he is demanding it from is the same body that built the machine he is complaining about.

So this piece is going to do something Kramer's post cannot, because a Facebook post has a character limit and a temperature: it is going to run the whole performance review. I have spent the week assembling one — council minutes, appointment records, the manager's own accomplishment reports, the monthly financials, the contract, the coverage — the file a hiring committee would build if Ashland were honest about what it is deciding this fall. This city buys documents like this by the pound — the civic campus alone came with 351 pages of consultant — so consider what follows a gift to the ratepayer: the first study in recent memory delivered on time and under budget, the budget being zero. The file supports Kramer. It just does not support him the way he would like, and the difference matters, because this town is about to make a personnel decision with a stopwatch running, and it should know precisely what it is firing.

Let us take it in order.

The Case For Her, Which Is Real

Start where her defenders start, because they are not wrong about it.

Sabrina Cotta did not seize a functioning government. She inherited a vacuum. She arrived as deputy city manager in March 2022, was handed the acting job in November 2023 when the previous manager departed — this being the era when, in one former official's phrase, we changed 'em like underwear around here — was made interim in February 2024, and was appointed permanent that August. Between the handing and the appointing, she kept a city running that had been through managers, finance directors, and attorneys at a pace that would embarrass a minor-league franchise.

And the operation did stabilize. The city's own 2024 accomplishments report — a document produced by her administration, which is worth remembering, but containing numbers nobody has disputed — counts 43 employees onboarded in a single year, turnover down to about eight percent, seven police officers hired into a department that had been running on overtime and apology. Eleven hundred building permits moved. Twenty-five thousand police calls answered, five thousand nine hundred fire calls, $350,000 out the door to the affordable housing trust, $134,000 to social services. Her June 2024 performance review, conducted by this council in public session, was favorable. It was also, as far as the record shows, the last performance review she would ever receive in public, which is its own kind of performance data.

The wildfire file is stronger still, and I will say so plainly because this paper sits in a town that can see Pilot Rock from its porch: the community wildfire planning update that had been overdue for years moved under her administration, the emergency-preparedness drills happened, the coordination with the district got built. If the hills burn next August, the work done on her watch will matter more than everything else in this column combined.

A 32-bed winter shelter got open, eventually, with a nonprofit running it. The severe-weather run-up was contentious and capacity-strapped and the neighbors are still angry, but the beds existed in January, which is more than some winters here can say.

That is the record her defenders mean when they say she gets things done, and the honest version of this argument concedes it in full. She is not an idle manager. She is not an incompetent one. The machine runs.

Hold that thought, because the whole question of the next six months lives inside it: the machine runs. The question is who it runs for, and past whom.

The Ledger, Which Is Also Real

Kramer's central charge is that Cotta's only answer to a problem is more revenue, and that when refused, she reaches for the threat of cuts.

Set the record beside it.

Since March 2025 this city has produced, in roughly this order: a public safety fee raised from $1.50 to $5 on every electric meter, a wildfire fee raised from $3 to $7 on every water meter, an entirely new $5 parks fee, a resolution adopting miscellaneous fees for FY 2027, new electric rates, a water cost-of-service update, wastewater and storm drain rate studies, a solid waste rate resolution, and — as of this month — proposed building fee increases. The recurring take on the 2025 package alone was reported at roughly $2.5 million a year, extracted a few dollars at a time from the same utility bill.

Nobody ever threatens to cut the thing nobody loves.

Some of that is genuinely overdue housekeeping. The water cost-of-service study dated from 2016 and Public Works was right to want it refreshed; enterprise funds are supposed to charge what service costs. I am not going to pretend a rate study is a scandal.

But look at the general fund side, and look at the rhetoric that accompanies it. At the joint meeting last week, when councilors pressed on what happens if the parks fee lapses, the answer was not a list of things the city would stop doing. It was that a half-million-dollar hole would have to come out of the general fund, and that staff would have to come back and show "what programs across the general fund would we look to remove."

That is the move Kramer is describing. Not a proposal. A hostage.

And it works on people, because the hostages are always the sympathetic ones — the senior center, the ice rink, the nature center, the pool. Nobody ever threatens to cut the thing nobody loves.

Two Hundred Twenty-Nine Percent

Now the number that complicates everybody's story, mine included.

As of March 31 of this year, the city's own monthly financial report shows a general fund balance of $16.85 million, against a minimum reserve policy of $6.94 million. That is 229 percent of the floor. Revenues were running at 80.6 percent of budget. Expenditures were at 69 percent.

Read those numbers next to the sentence "we are structurally broke" and you will understand why public trust in this government has the texture it has. Ashland is broke the way a squirrel is starving in October: genuinely anxious, and sitting on a hoard.

You cannot hold a town's senior center hostage for $5.15 a month while your monthly report shows nine million dollars of daylight above the reserve floor.

Both things are, in fact, true, and the explanation is not even complicated: the cushion is the fees. It is timing, vacancy savings, spending restraint, and $2.5 million a year of new charges landing on utility bills. A household that takes a second job and skips dinners out will also show a healthier checking account while its roof still needs replacing; nobody would call that household rich. The structural problem — services that cost more every year than the revenue that funds them grows — is real, and the capital funds are still stressed, and the union contracts are still unfunded.

But here is what the number does to the politics, and this is the part the manager's office has never seemed to grasp: you cannot hold a town's senior center hostage for $5.15 a month while your own monthly report shows nine million dollars of daylight above your reserve floor. You can explain it — one-time money, restricted funds, prudence against the next fire. Nobody from the administration has stood at a microphone and explained it in a sentence a ratepayer could repeat. Into that silence walked George Kramer, and honestly, what did anyone expect.

The Two Numbers Kramer Left Out

Here is where I can help him, because there are two figures in the public record that make his case better than his own post does.

One. In June 2025 — the same budget cycle in which this city told residents it needed a brand-new parks fee on their utility bills or the parks department would lose ten percent of its budget — the council took up a new compensation schedule for roughly seventy top managers and supervisors. Raises in the range of $20,000 to $40,000 apiece. Estimated cost: more than $2 million.

The top step for the city manager's own position moved from $196,964 to $226,803. According to payroll records obtained by a resident through a public records request, Cotta's salary as of last July stood at $216,803, with benefits of $116,075.

So in one twelve-month stretch, Ashland found $2 million for management compensation and told its residents that $5.15 a month stood between them and the senior center.

I want to be precise about blame here, because it matters. Council voted for that schedule. It was a public agenda item, based on an outside compensation study, and the argument for it — that Ashland cannot recruit or hold staff at below-market pay — is a real argument that Councilor Shire was still making this spring when he said the priority ought to be "how do we keep staff, how do we stay whole."

But the city manager did not object to her own raise in public, and the sequence is the sequence. You cannot spend a year telling a town it is broke while the compensation line moves in the other direction and expect the town not to notice. Ashland noticed.

Two. In June of this year — with a structural deficit that councilors and residents alike now put at $2.4 million, with City Hall closed, with union contracts unfunded and healthcare running above forecast — Cotta sent the council a memo proposing to create a new Administrative Service Director position at $141,148 to $173,612.

That would make a three-person executive suite at the top of this government costing, by The Chronicle's arithmetic, better than $530,000 in salary and near $850,000 in total compensation.

The item landed last on a council agenda and time expired before anyone reached it. Cotta was out on leave and unavailable to answer questions about it.

This is Kramer's "vanity projects" charge with a dollar sign on it, and it is more damning than the civic campus, because the civic campus at least came with 351 pages of consultant analysis and an honest staff recommendation. A new deputy-of-deputies in the middle of a $2.4 million hole came with a memo.

The Process File

If the ledger were the whole indictment, this would be a policy disagreement. It is the process file that makes it a personnel matter, and the file has a theme.

The machine moved, and the consent came later or never.

June 2024: compensation for the then-interim manager is discussed in executive session when Oregon public-meetings law says it should not have been. The acting city attorney stood up afterward and took the blame in public, which was honorable of him and convenient for everyone else; the session was still about her pay, and the raise still emerged from a room the public was wrongly kept out of.

August 2024: the permanent appointment, made without reopening a national search. Defensible — continuity is worth something, and she was the incumbent doing the job — but a search you decline to run is the one contest you cannot lose, and she did not lose it. The legitimacy question was never settled by competition, and it never stopped being asked.

Spring 2025: the budget adopted amid the fee package, by a process that drew a state Department of Revenue finding — reported, referenced in council's own materials, and never, so far as I can find, explained to the public in plain language. I flag it at exactly this strength: a governance failure serious enough that the state noticed, on the central fiscal document of the biennium.

Winter 2025: the former fire division chief files suit, alleging a hostile work environment, retaliation, and management inaction. Allegations, not findings — and senior-staff churn in that department predates her — but a lawsuit from your own chief officer corps is not weather either.

March 2026: the one everyone remembers. City Hall closes over structural concerns — a defensible safety call — and then staff move into the Ashland Community Center without a council vote, and the council, in a rare public rebuke covered by name on statewide radio, orders its own administration back out of the building. The administration had relocated itself into the community's living room and was astonished to be asked for the key back. Two councilors called a special Friday meeting to defend the line between operations and policy. The city manager was out of town.

Every item on that list is different in kind. The theme is not. The machine moved, and the consent came later or never. A review of her tenure that I would sign says it this way: she has been more effective as an operating administrator than as a steward of legitimacy — better at running the government than at remembering whose it is. In a strong-manager town, that second skill is not decoration. It is the job.

Where Kramer Overreaches

Three places, and I say this as someone who agrees with his conclusion.

"She has lost the trust of a significant portion of the public and, for that reason alone, is incapable." No. Lost trust is a symptom and a consequence, not a cause of action, and "for that reason alone" is precisely the standard that would let a future council fire a good manager for making an unpopular but correct decision. If you want her gone, want it for the roof that was not called about, the building occupied without a vote, the memo proposing an $850,000 executive suite in a deficit. Those are reasons. Unpopularity is weather.

"She has not, to my knowledge, EVER offered any meaningful or creative approach to reduce spending." The qualifier is doing real work in that sentence, and the record complicates it. When Councilor Dahle brought a councilor-led financial policies package to the July study session — GFOA best practices, reserve policy, a directive for staff to report back within ninety days — the description from the dais was that staff "went through this and agreed with our analysis, added some stuff." That is not obstruction. That is cooperation. And the operating record — the hiring, the wildfire work, the shelter beds — is not the résumé of someone who produces nothing.

What is fair to say, and is damning enough, is that the creative fiscal thinking in this city is coming from the dais and from the public, not from the manager's office. It was Councilor Dahle who went down the rabbit hole. It was resident Nick David who stood up in April and offered the third lever — "modernize the operation before you cut or tax" — with actual specifics about permit intake and minutes production. The ideas exist in this town. They are simply not originating where we pay the most for them.

"Cotta simply doesn't communicate." As a description of how this administration handles bad news, that is unarguable — two months of "we don't comment on personnel matters" followed by a 98-word release, five different explanations for one locked building, a city manager out of town for the special meeting called about her own decision. But as a blanket statement it is too broad, and the file genuinely cuts both ways. This administration built more communications apparatus than any in recent memory: office hours, Coffee & Conversation, newsletters, video explainers, surveys, a records portal, a civics course with the university that won a state award. In June 2025 councilors praised the operation as "night and day" from the era when misinformation had "blossomed into full blown conspiracy."

All of it is real, and none of it worked, and the reason is the one this column keeps arriving at: communication is not the same thing as consent. The apparatus communicates beautifully about things that are going well. When the news is bad, the apparatus goes quiet and the manager goes to Salem, and a town that was surveyed four times about its strategic plan finds out from a locked door that its City Hall is closed.

The Council In The Mirror

Kramer told a councilor that they do not work for Sabrina Cotta, it is the other way around, and all of them work for the residents. Correct, and worth saying out loud in a strong-manager town where the distinction blurs.

But the council does not get to arrive at this moment as an innocent party.

This council approved the compensation schedule. This council's mayor and attorney produced the contract with the 180-day clause. This council created the parks department by ordinance in December 2024 and was informed thirteen months later that the resulting director's job may be "the toughest in the city" — after the director had resigned. This council let the April 7 direction on City Hall repairs sit unanswered for three months and did not, so far as the record shows, put a single item on an agenda demanding to know why.

Councilors Bloom and DuQuenne called a special meeting on a Friday afternoon to defend the line between operations and policy, and they deserve the credit. The question for the other five is what they intend to do with the six months they have left, and whether "being fair" is a principle or a place to stand while the clock runs.

The Clause

Now the part that turns Kramer's post from an opinion into a deadline, and the reason I am writing this today rather than next month.

Cotta's employment agreement contains a provision holding that she cannot be terminated until 180 days after new council members are sworn in, with an exception for malfeasance. Three councilors will not be at the table in January. Run the arithmetic and the protected window extends to roughly April 5, 2027.

Read that again slowly, because it is a remarkable thing for a public body to have signed.

Waiting is not neutral. Doing nothing is a decision with a price, and the people paying it will never see the invoice.

The city manager of Ashland is, by contract, insulated from the judgment of the next Ashland City Council for half a year after the voters seat it. The one mechanism this town has for changing direction — an election — is contractually defused for six months on the far side of it.

Kramer says the council must act before November. He is not being dramatic. He is reading the calendar.

And here is the thing about the "let's be fair, let's give her a chance" position that he says some councilors are hiding behind: waiting is not neutral. Every month of fairness moves the town closer to a window in which severance is more expensive and removal is contractually harder. Doing nothing is a decision with a price, and the people paying it will never see the invoice.

I would add one caution the louder voices in this argument keep skipping. Some of what is circulating about Cotta's contract and conduct — allegations of insubordination, of filing suit without authority, of raising her own salary — is assertion, not established fact, and at least one of those is contradicted by the record, since the council itself voted the pay schedule in open session. If this council removes a city manager, it had better do it on the documented record and not on the loudest version of it. The documented record is more than sufficient.

The Tell

Two more facts, and then I am done.

In June, Sabrina Cotta was named one of three finalists for the city manager job in Tigard. She did not get it.

And 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 the City of Ashland and up the highway to Medford. There is no residency requirement in her contract, and there are perfectly human reasons to live in Medford, starting with the fact that a Medford paycheck goes about forty percent further on a house. I do not begrudge anyone their mortgage. Medford, it should be said, is a fine city. Its city manager lives there too.

But hold the two facts up together and they answer a question the council has been circling for months, which is whether this arrangement is working for anybody. The city manager's utility bill — the one with the public safety fee, the wildfire fee, and the parks fee on it — is mailed to another town. When the senior center is held hostage for $5.15 a month, the ransom note is written by someone who does not pay it. She is interviewing elsewhere. She is sleeping elsewhere. The public is petitioning against her. That is, between the three of them, a fairly complete verdict. The only party still undecided is the seven people who can actually do something about it.

The Verdict

Kramer is right that she should go. He is right that it must happen before the new council is seated. He is wrong that lost trust is the reason, and it matters that he is wrong, because a town that fires city managers for being disliked will spend the next decade hiring people who are pleasant and useless.

The honest performance review reads like this: satisfactory to good as an administrator — the hiring is real, the wildfire work is real, the machine runs. Mixed as a strategist. Failing as a steward of the public's consent. And in a council-manager government, the third grade is the one on the diploma.

So fire her for the record. It is long enough: a public building occupied without a vote; a council directive ignored for three months; a roofer under warranty never called; five explanations for one locked door; an executive position proposed in the teeth of a $2.4 million deficit; a state finding on the budget process; and a management style that answers every gap with a fee and every refusal with a threat to close something people love.

Do it in the open, on the documented facts, at a properly noticed meeting where the public can watch — which, given the executive session this all started in, would itself be a small revolution.

And then sit with an uncomfortable piece of arithmetic, because it is the empirical heart of this whole affair. Every entry in the record above required either a council signature or a council silence. The compensation schedule passed in open session, on councilors' votes. The 180-day clause was produced by this town's own mayor and attorney and signed without, apparently, anyone reading it aloud. The April directive on City Hall sat unanswered for three months because nobody on the dais put it back on an agenda. The executive session that started all this had seven elected officials sitting in it, and one appointed lawyer took the fall. Ashland has burned through a city manager, a finance director, two parks directors, and a city attorney in three years, across administrations that had nothing in common except the body supervising them. When the roster keeps changing and the results keep not changing, the common denominator is not the name on the manager's door. It is the seven names on the dais, and the charter underneath them.

So yes: get rid of her. But hold the applause, because removal is the cheap half of the sentence, and this town has a long habit of buying the cheap half and calling it reform. We fired our way to this point. Firing is the one civic skill Ashland has demonstrably mastered.

The expensive half is measurable, which is why nobody runs on it. Put the manager's evaluation on a public calendar every June and publish it — the last one on the record is two years old, which is how you get a government graded by petition instead. Strike succession-proof clauses from every future contract; an election you can wait out is not an election. Track every council directive on a public list with a date and a status, so that "ignored for three months" becomes a fact on a screen instead of a discovery in a transcript. And reopen the charter question this town has been dodging since 2008: whether a strong-manager government still suits a city whose councils keep declining to manage the manager.

Three of the seven seats are on the ballot in November. The clause, the schedule, the silence — all of it survives or dies there, not in the manager's office. "COTTA GOTTA GO" fits on a sign, and the council can have it done by Thanksgiving. "The body that hired her, paid her, shielded her, and ignored her must now supervise the next one" does not chant as well. It is also the actual work, because removing a city manager will not repair a rafter, will not call the roofer, will not put commas in the facilities plan, and will not tell the seniors on Homes Avenue whether their building is being sold. Only a council does that, and we are about to choose one.

Get rid of her. Then get rid of the habits that produced her. The first part takes a vote of seven people. The second part takes a vote of all of us, and that is the part that costs something.

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Sources: George Kramer, public Facebook post, Aug. 19, 2026. Ashland City Council and Parks & Recreation Commission meetings, March 2025 through August 2026, as transcribed from the public meeting record — in particular the council study session of July 20, 2026 (financial policies), the council meeting of April 21, 2026 (public comment), the joint Parks Commission and City Council meeting of Aug. 12, 2026 (parks fee), and the council meeting of Aug. 5, 2025 (public forum). Tenure chronology, hiring and output figures: City of Ashland appointment alerts, the June 18, 2024 council record, and the city's 2024 accomplishments report. General fund figures: the city's monthly financial report for March 31, 2026 ($16.85 million balance against a $6.94 million minimum; revenues 80.6 and expenditures 69.0 percent of budget). Fee package: KOBI-TV and council records, 2025. Executive-session error: Rogue Valley Times, June 29, 2024. Community-center rebuke: Oregon Public Broadcasting, March 31, 2026, and the council record of that week. Compensation figures: The Ashland Chronicle, "Big Pay Raises for Top Ashland Staff," June 16, 2025, and "City Manager Proposes to Hire a New Senior Level Aide," June 22, 2026, the latter citing city payroll records obtained by public records request. Contract terms including the 180-day provision as described in guest opinions published by The Ashland Chronicle, July 2 and July 12, 2026; the agreement is posted publicly. Tigard finalist status: Ashland.news and Rogue Valley Times, July 2026. 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 contract. The Department of Revenue budget-process finding is referenced in council materials; the full letter has not been reviewed by this paper. The fire division chief's suit is a pending allegation, not a finding. Allegations attributed to other commentators are identified as such and are not adopted here.