Question Mark, Annually

Here is a line from a slide the City of Ashland presented to its own homelessness planning subcommittee on February 28, 2024. It sits at the bottom of a list of what the city spends on homeless services, and the three lines above it are exact.

Social Service Grants: Approx. $134,000 Annually. Affordable Housing Trust funds, approximately $100,000. Inclement Weather Shelter, $100,000 Annually.

Then: Night Lawn. $? Annually.

That is a question mark, typed by the city into its own presentation, in the space where the number goes. The presentation is called “Understanding the Players,” which is a strange name for a document about money, and it was prepared for a subcommittee of a masterplan.

By that February the lawn behind the police station had been open nine months. It has now been open three years and four months, through two city managers, hours that have been set, changed, reconsidered and changed back, one police sweep that ended in a shouting match, a Supreme Court decision, and something over twelve hundred consecutive nights of people sleeping on it. Ashland can tell you to the dollar what it spends on inclement weather shelter, and it cannot tell you, or has not told you, what it spends on the lawn.

A reader wrote to this paper about something else, and he was right, and what he was right about turned out to be smaller than what the record contained once somebody went and read it.

The Letter

Last month this paper published two long pieces about City Manager Sabrina Cotta, one weighing the case for removing her and one reading her July performance evaluation in full, with the council’s 3.03 average, the staff survey and the three issues ordered cured by December. Between them they ran to about eleven thousand words, and neither one contains the word “homeless” or the word “unhoused.”

A volunteer with Southern Oregon Housing For All wrote to say so. He has spent two and a half years on that lawn, and he pointed out that both pieces argue the manager’s failure is the outward-facing half of her job — the council scored her 2.30 on responsiveness to residents and 2.00 on communicating in a way that supports public accountability — and then illustrate that failure with street medians, herbicides, a locked City Hall and a community center.

That last one has a hole in it, because the council’s July evaluation letter lists “the trespassing situation at the community center” among its examples of the manager’s communication failures, alongside the herbicides and the medians, and never explains it, and I could not find a record anywhere that does. It may involve unhoused people and it may not, and until the incident file is in hand it would be as improper to call it homelessness enforcement as to assume it wasn’t.

He is correct and the omission is mine. The population with the least power in this town and the most direct exposure to how the city actually administers itself was not in either piece, and the argument those pieces were making is exactly the argument that population is standing in the middle of.

He also made a specific accusation: that the coordination failure around homelessness in Ashland belongs to the city manager. This paper has written back to ask him for the dates and documents behind that, and he has not answered, so I went to the record first. The record does not support the accusation as he framed it.

Part of what he alleges is that the manager stopped answering the group. Council minutes cannot prove the absence of email, and what the meeting record does show is a group that was not confined to the public-forum microphone the way the letter suggests: a SOHFA member addressed council in public forum in August 2024, the group appears in the Housing and Human Services advisory process, and the city’s own assessment says it was “in conversations with the Southern Oregon Housing for All (SOFA) group to operate a storage program near the Dusk to Dawn site.” Local coverage at the time reported that a six-month storage pilot managed by the group went to council in November 2024 with the city manager presenting it. Whether the manager herself stopped corresponding is a narrower question and it will take a records request to answer.

The Calendar Problem

The night lawn opened on May 12, 2023. Sabrina Cotta became interim city manager in January 2024, and permanent city manager in August of that year. The manager who was in the chair when Ashland designated a lawn behind its police station and started letting people sleep on it was Joe Lessard.

That is eight months, and every rule the lawn opened with was written and put in place before Cotta had the job: the 7 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. hours, the ban on visitors, weapons, cooking, campfires, drugs and alcohol, the allowance for pets, the assigned amount of ground per person, the evening drive-by patrols, and the appeal to city management if you were thrown off.

A letter that says the manager cut off communication “the very first months” of the lawn is describing months in which the deputy city manager, not the city manager, was the person in that room. That may be a distinction without a difference to somebody trying to get a storage locker approved. It is not a distinction without a difference when the same letter concludes that the institutional failure is hers.

What The Lawn Was Built To Do

The founding purpose of the night lawn is not in dispute, and it is in the mouth of the police chief on the day it opened.

Chief Tighe O’Meara, May 12, 2023: “Basically what we’re doing is we’re getting back to where we were a couple of years ago. Where if you’re a chronic camping offender, you’re going to start getting citations.”

Ashland opened a designated place to sleep so that it could resume citing people for sleeping everywhere else. The city allowed a two-week grace period and then the citations resumed. That is roughly what the law required of it, because a city that wants to enforce a camping ban has to leave somewhere to go, and Oregon was seven weeks away from House Bill 3115 taking effect, which requires any local rule about sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors to be “objectively reasonable” as to time, place and manner. Ashland was building the place that made the enforcement lawful.

It means the lawn has always been two things at once, a service and an enforcement instrument, and every argument this town has had about it since has been an argument between people who think it is the first thing and people who are administering the second.

One legal note, because the national coverage got it wrong and this town absorbed the error. When the Supreme Court decided City of Grants Pass v. Johnson in June 2024, it removed a federal constraint, the Eighth Amendment rule that had blocked enforcement when shelter was unavailable, and it did not touch Oregon’s statute. HB 3115 remained in force the day after that decision exactly as it was the day before, and the League of Oregon Cities told Oregon municipalities so. Anyone who tells you Grants Pass freed Ashland to clear the lawn is wrong.

Who Actually Decided

In August I wrote that nearly every item in the case against the city manager required “either a council signature or a council silence.” I did not have the night lawn in mind, and it applies anyway.

December 2023, the camping ordinance. Council took the first reading 4–2, as Ashland.news reported at the time, on a framework staff had walked them through in November explicitly built around HB 3115’s time, place and manner language, which makes it a legislative act of the elected body.

June 2024, the property removal. Volunteers said officers collected belongings from people on the lawn and dumped them. One volunteer called it destruction, a witness disputed the city’s characterization, and the city called it a mix of unclaimed property and abandoned garbage. When Mayor Tonya Graham called the police chief to find out what had happened, O’Meara told her the operation had been carried out under his direction, not the manager’s. He said so on the record, and no source I have found says otherwise.

April 7, 2026, the hours. After the city publicly connected a surge of complaints at Garfield Park to conditions around the lawn, the City Council voted to expand its hours from 7 p.m.–7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.–10 a.m., with all-day use on weekends and federal holidays, effective April 13. Two weeks later the council put the same question back on its own agenda under the heading “Request for Council to reconsider direction on lawn hours,” and changed them again.

The city manager supplied information and recommendations at each of those points, which is the job. The decisions were made by seven elected people and, in the June case, by a police chief who said so. That is not where the letter put them, and I am not going to put them there because a letter did.

“No Formal Mechanism Or Structure”

This is the part where the letter-writer is right. In July of this year, the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee received the city’s Homeless Services Assessment. Under a heading about strengthening partnerships between law enforcement, social service agencies and volunteers, the assessment says this:

“With the opening of the Night Lawn, the police are having regular interactions with unhoused individuals who are staying at the night lawn and the volunteer community members who are engaging with them. There is no formal mechanism or structure for these entities to communicate regularly, or coordinate. This is seen as a barrier to moving people out of homelessness.”

That is the city, in its own commissioned document, describing precisely the failure the letter alleged: three years of nightly contact between armed municipal employees, the people sleeping on municipal grass, and the volunteers standing between them, with no structure for any of them to talk to each other on purpose.

The assessment does not blame the city manager for it, or anybody. It notes that housing program staff and a council liaison already do regional coordination through the Jackson County Continuum of Care, suggests the police department could host or attend regular partner meetings, and observes that this “could be accomplished quickly.”

Could be accomplished quickly. The document is dated July 2026 and the lawn opened in May 2023.

What the record shows is three years in which the coordination everybody agrees is necessary was nobody’s assigned job, and therefore did not happen, and therefore is still being described in the present tense in a report written this summer.

The Homeless Coordinator

There is a small, precise hole in the record and it is worth naming.

On April 15, 2024, at a City Council study session, the idea of a homeless coordinator was raised. Shelter Coordinator Avraham Sacks said it was a good idea, noted that OHRA already had training infrastructure a new coordinator would otherwise have to build, and cautioned that the workload would be substantial. Mayor Graham said she wanted such a position to work across multiple groups so services were maintained.

And then nothing.

I want to be careful here, because the letter I received described this as a proposed staff position that was lost, and the minutes do not support that description. There is no job description in the record, no budgeted full-time equivalent, no requisition, no motion, no vote to create it and no vote to kill it. What exists is a discussion, a favorable-but-qualified comment from the one person in the room who would have had to work with the hire, and a mayor’s stated interest, and the position has not been on an agenda since.

Nobody killed the coordinator. In a city with no formal mechanism for coordination, the job of coordinating was raised once, agreed to be a good idea, and never appeared on an agenda again. It was never given a vote to lose.

What The Lawn Costs

On the same slide Ashland puts approximately $180,000 a year in Community Development Block Grant money, approximately $100,000 in Affordable Housing Trust funds, approximately $134,000 in social service grants, and $100,000 a year on inclement weather shelter. It budgeted $200,000 across the 2023–25 biennium for severe weather shelter operations at 2200 Ashland Street. These are known numbers, published by the city, in a public presentation, with the decimal places filed off but the magnitudes honest.

And the night lawn: $?

I have not found the answer and I am not going to invent one. The portable toilet costs something, and so do the handwashing station, the water for the grass, the waste removal, the signage, the police hours, the insurance and the appeals to city management when somebody is thrown off, and every dollar of it is in a budget somewhere under a line item that says something other than “night lawn.”

This is a town that added $5.15 a month to your utility bill for parks and could tell you, to the cent, what it was for. It budgets its city manager at $332,878 in total compensation, a figure printed in the evaluation this paper read in August. It ran a $2.4 million deficit and argued about it in public for a year.

It has run a homeless encampment behind its police station for three years and four months and has never published what it costs.

The Verdict

The letter was right about the disease and wrong about the patient.

The coordination failure is real and the city has documented it itself, in the present tense, this summer, three years in. The ownership is diffuse in exactly the way that lets everybody off: the lawn was created under a different manager, its founding purpose was enforcement and was announced as such by a police chief, its hours are set by council vote, its most contested enforcement action was ordered by the chief on his own authority, and the coordinating job that would have knitted those together was discussed once in April 2024 by people who agreed it was a good idea.

Assigning that to Sabrina Cotta would be the same error this town keeps making. Ashland has burned through a city manager, a finance director, two parks directors and a city attorney in three years, and the common denominator has stopped being the name on the manager’s door. You cannot fire your way to a coordination structure.

So: publish what the lawn costs. Give the coordination function an owner with a title and a line in the budget, which the city’s own assessment says could be done quickly. And when the council next argues about the hours — it will — someone on that dais should say out loud that the lawn was built to make citations lawful, because everything the town has fought about since follows from that sentence and nobody has said it since the day it opened.

The Water

One more thing from the assessment, and then I am done.

Across every group the city engaged, housed and unhoused, front-line workers, businesses and residents, the need named more often than any other was public restrooms open 24 hours a day, and access to drinking water.

Here is what the city says it currently provides: a portable toilet behind the plaza, a portable toilet at the Dusk to Dawn site behind City Hall, and a handwashing station at the lawn which, in the assessment’s own words, “does not provide potable water.”

Garfield Park, the park at the center of this year’s entire argument, the one whose complaints prompted the April hours change and the enforcement surge, has potable water and a bottle filling station.

The most frequently named need in the whole community engagement was drinking water, and there still isn’t any on the lawn.

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Sources: the July 2026 evaluation of the city manager, which this paper read in full on August 24 and which supplies the compensation figure and the phrase about the community center; the city’s Homeless Services Assessment “Suggested Actions,” attached to the July 23, 2026 Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee packet; the February 28, 2024 “Understanding the Players” presentation to the Homeless Services Masterplan subcommittee, where the “$? Annually” line is; the city’s current Homeless Services page; enrolled House Bill 3115 (2021); the Supreme Court’s opinion in_ City of Grants Pass v. Johnson _(2024) and the League of Oregon Cities’ guidance on it; OPB and Jefferson Public Radio’s report of May 12, 2023 on the lawn’s opening, which supplies Chief O’Meara’s quotation; Ashland.news reporting of December 2023, June 2024 and August 2024; OPB’s report of April 10, 2026 on the council’s hours vote; the April 15, 2024 council study session minutes; the December 2023 camping ordinance; the November 2024 storage-pilot roll call; and the July 2026 OHRA management agreement. Where a claim rests on another outlet’s report rather than on the document itself, the sentence that makes it says so.

The thinnest part of this is the money, and it is thin because the figure is not anywhere a resident can reach it. If somebody in the finance department knows which line the lawn is buried under, that is the correction this paper wants most. The letter that prompted the piece came unsolicited from a volunteer with Southern Oregon Housing For All, who is not named because nobody has asked him whether he wants to be. The paper wrote to him with questions and had no answer when this went to press. Where his account and the documentary record disagree, the record is what is printed above.