Valuable Contributions

On Monday, October 5, the Ashland City Council sat down to talk about the mission, vision and values of the city’s new strategic plan, which is the kind of evening the 2x button was made for. The consultants hadn’t touched the values page since the last workshop. Councilor Bob Kaplan remembered making the same comments the first time and wasn’t thrilled about making them again, but they did it anyway, right there in the room, with the city manager feeding them words. About forty-five minutes in, Kaplan asked her to say the part about service one more time, because she’d added something and he wanted to get it down.

“We serve our community with professionalism, transparency, responsiveness, respect, and a commitment to excellence,” Sabrina Cotta said.

Kaplan got it down, for whatever good it did. The next night he and the rest of the council voted to let her go.

Council to Provide Direction as to City Manager

Tuesday’s meeting ran long, the way they do. After a break the mayor called for the city manager’s report and had to shush the audience before Cotta could get going, which tells you something about the mood in the room, or maybe just about the coffee. Cotta reminded everyone that the November ballot would look different this year, with council and parks seats elected at large and no position numbers. She said OHRA was taking over the Dusk to Dawn Lawn on East Main and asked folks to be patient with the new operator. Then she wrapped up. “And if you haven’t nominated your favorite tree, now is the time. Thank you.”

A tree. I don’t know what I’d have said in her shoes, but I doubt I’d have thought of trees.

And if you haven’t nominated your favorite tree, now is the time.

The council punted three items to October 20, the parks fee renewal, City Hall, and money for the Kwanzaa and Martin Luther King celebrations, which left exactly one thing on the agenda. It was listed as “Council to provide direction as to City Manager,” which is bureaucrat for what you think it is. Councilor Dylan Bloom moved “that the city enter into a separation agreement with the city manager.” Councilor Gina DuQuenne seconded. Did anybody want to talk about it? Nobody did. The recorder called the roll, and Sherrell, Hansen, DuQuenne, Kaplan, Bloom and Dahle all said yes. The whole thing took twenty-seven seconds. I’ve spent longer deciding on a bagel.

Then Councilor Jeff Dahle moved to make Deputy City Manager Jordan Rooklyn city manager pro tem starting October 17, with Councilor Derek Sherrell seconding, and Bloom moved to start looking for a permanent replacement and report back by December 15, and those went six to nothing too.

Mayor Tonya Graham had the last word, and then everybody went home.

“So before we head out this evening, I want to acknowledge the good work that Sabrina Cotta has done for us. I was here in the early days when we were struggling with COVID. We were struggling with an organizational chart that had holes shot through it. Our systems were struggling mightily and morale was suffering also mightily. And I know how much of the, the stronger position we are in now is a direct result of your hard work and your dedication to the city. And so I simply say, best of luck in your next adventures. And it has been a pleasure to work with you.”

Cotta’s last day was Friday.

Now, I have to own up to something. This paper asked for this. Back in August, in The Trouble With Being Right, I said the record was bad enough to end her contract, and that the council ought to do it before a new council got seated and the price doubled. Well, they did it. And sitting there watching, I found I mostly wanted to know what the last four and a half years had looked like from her side of the table, which is something we’ve written around for months without ever really asking.

Twelve Months of Base Salary

The agreement wasn’t in the packet, naturally. The Ashland Chronicle pried it loose with a records request and printed the terms on October 9, and it says Graham and Cotta both signed it the night of the vote.

Here’s the deal. Her departure counts as a voluntary resignation, effective October 16. She gets a year’s base salary in one check, $227,961.76, plus the $4,711.49 left on the year’s deferred-comp contribution and whatever leave she’d built up. In return she gives up the year of health premiums her contract would have paid if she’d been fired, waives the notice terms, and promises not to sue the city, which promises not to sue her.

A year’s pay to leave a job they were asking you to leave? That’s ridiculous. It’s also in the contract, so if you want somebody to blame, look at 2024. Section 3.5 of her agreement says that if a majority of the council asks, she can resign instead of being fired, for anything “ranging from no payment to the full Severance Pay.” No payment sounds swell until you ask what happens if she says no thanks. Then the council’s only road is firing her under section 3.3, which pays the whole year plus the health premiums plus ninety days’ notice. So the council shaved a little off a number Mayor Graham signed two years ago, and that’s about all it could do.

And waiting would have been worse. Section 3.4 doubles the severance for any firing in the 180 days after new councilors are sworn in. We said in August that would be January. Turns out the Look Ahead in the October 6 packet has the oaths on December 15, so the council beat the buzzer by ten weeks and kept at least another $228,000 in the bank.

A year’s pay to leave a job they were asking you to leave? That’s ridiculous.

Then there’s the gag. Both sides promise not to “disparage or criticize the other, their officers, employees, or affiliates,” including “any negative comments to the press.” If somebody calls for a reference, the city will give her dates and title and, if pushed, will say “that the Employee made valuable contributions to the City during her tenure, that she resigned voluntarily for reasons unrelated to performance.”

Unrelated to performance, mind you. That’s the same mayor who signed the July 31 evaluation letter with a whole section in it called “Issues to Cure.”

If you were hoping a councilor would tell you what really happened, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Nobody said a word about it on October 6, and the agreement they signed makes it awfully hard to start now. The Chronicle, which didn’t sign anything, reports that her review came out to about a C-minus, that Cotta answered it by calling the council dysfunctional, that she then took four weeks of family and medical leave, and that the council met at least four times behind closed doors about her after that. Its headline said she was fired. As for dysfunctional, she wasn’t the first one to say it. One of the thirty-four staff who filled out the review survey wrote that “there is a limit to what any City Manager can do when Council refuses to acknowledge that they are the primary source of dysfunction.”

Pueblo West to High Street

Back in June she sat down for an hour and a quarter with The HaltingWinter Podcast, a show for local-government people, and told her own story. It’s a better one than I knew.

She was born in Bellevue, Nebraska, and grew up mostly in Colorado. Her dad was a police chief, then a public works director, then a city manager himself, though she says she never paid it much mind as a kid. She did a year at Colorado State and ran out of money for the second. “GI Bill seems great,” is how she put it, so she joined the Army, tested into military intelligence and came out of language school a Persian linguist. After that it was back to Colorado State, then a courthouse in Anchorage, a city internship in Tucson, a county budget office outside Chicago, two master’s degrees, a spell coaching runners while her husband finished his own Army career, an analyst job in Colorado Springs, and about two and a half years running administrative services for the Pueblo West Metropolitan District, which she calls “a city that had never formalized.” There was a rattlesnake in the wall of her new office on the first day. The public works director walked by with a shovel. “Snake got in,” he told her. She says she has since “dumped all of the Farsi,” so maybe Ashland was the harder language after all.

The job was brand new. Ashland had switched to the council-manager form in 2021, hired Joe Lessard as its first manager and made a deputy’s job to go under him. The Chronicle has reported that Graham wanted Cotta for the top job and the council went with Lessard. Her version is that she was a finalist, didn’t get it, and then Lessard called and asked if she’d be his deputy. So she took the number-two chair and bought a house on High Street for $795,000.

Then everybody started leaving. Lessard called while she was still packing. “Hey, the HR director has moved, so we’re going to have you do that when you get here,” is how she remembers it. “And I’m like, ‘Well, okay. Well, moving truck’s here, so we’re still going to go.’” When the finance director’s job came open she took that on too, and for a good stretch of 2022 and 2023 she was deputy manager, HR director and finance director all at once, in a town where she didn’t yet know which neighbors weren’t speaking to each other. “At some point I was like, ‘I’ve amassed too much power, right? This is too much,’” she said.

The council pushed Lessard out in October 2023. Cotta was acting manager by November and interim by February, and in June 2024 she got a good public review, a raise to $183,872 and a $20,000 retirement contribution. It turned out the council had talked about her pay in an executive session where state law said it couldn’t. The acting city attorney took the blame, and guess whose name stuck to it anyway?

In August 2024 Graham skipped the national search the council had already approved and put Cotta’s appointment straight to a vote. It passed five to one. DuQuenne voted no, citing a lack of “due diligence and due process,” and on the process she was right. The mayor’s argument for skipping the search was that Cotta would be the thirteenth person to hold the job since Brian Almquist retired in 1998. Funny, that always struck me as the best argument for running one. Four of the six councilors who voted to let her go this month voted to hire her back then, no contest. And the one who voted no? She seconded the motion that ended it.

Cotta told the podcast she “wasn’t super jazzed” about the top job at first. The deputy gets “to kind of do the fun stuff without being the focus,” she said, while the manager becomes “a public figure and you kind of have this persona that may or may not be related to you or who you actually are.” But she’d been acting and interim so long that slowing everything down didn’t appeal to her. “If council’s kind of willing to learn with me as we go, then like let’s just do it, you know? And so we just did it and here I am.”

Her staff mostly liked her, and they put it in writing. One said she runs a lunchtime book club and somehow turned her regular meetings with the committee staff, “effectively a support group,” into productive ones. Another remembered her saying the city needed a strategic plan two years before anybody hired consultants to write one. A third wrote, “I don’t know if I would still be at this organization if not for her.” She started Coffee and Conversation, office hours, a couple of video series, and a civics class with SOU’s lifelong learning program that won a state award for good government.

The Year of the Fees

Her first full budget, in the spring of 2025, won a national award for how nicely it was put together and also earned the city a finding from the state Department of Revenue that the council hadn’t adopted it properly. It leaned hard on your utility bill. The public safety fee went from $1.50 to $5 a month, the wildfire fee from $3 to $7, and a brand-new $5 parks fee showed up for the party. The council voted for every one of them. She was the one who proposed them, though, and you can guess who the town got mad at. She knew it, too. Here she is in June:

“We’ve had to raise rates and our fees to try to, you know, address the fact that everything is more expensive including our staff. Um, and that’s really unpopular and it’s really hard and the elected have done a good job of kind of staying the course and recognizing the need. Um, but, you know, for the public they’re just like this city manager will not stop, right? She will not stop raising rates. She will not stop raising fees. And even though I’m not the one ultimately making the policy decision because that, you know, clearly is council’s lane to do that, I’m the one starting the conversation or bringing it up.”

On August 5, 2025, with forty or fifty Take Back Ashland folks in the room, the council split three to three on a round of management raises that included hers, and the mayor broke the tie. About two weeks later, according to the Chronicle, Cotta sold the High Street house and moved to east Medford.

We’ve chewed over the Medford move twice already and I’m not going to do it a third time. What gets me now is the timing. That same week the council unanimously adopted the wildfire protection plan her office put together, the city’s first update in twenty years. That fall three hundred people walked through Ashland’s first evacuation drill. In November the EPA okayed a $73 million loan for the water plant, and in December the thirty-two-bed winter shelter at 2200 Ashland Street opened back up. Some of her best work got done after she’d stopped living here. My guess is she left for the same reason anybody leaves a small town, which is that people had started saying her name at the co-op in a certain tone of voice.

Do I know that? No. She didn’t answer the Chronicle when it asked. But I’ve driven that stretch of I-5 enough times to picture it, south past Phoenix and Talent on a dark February morning to a City Hall she’d closed over a split rafter, and then on to the Community Center on Winburn Way, where she moved staff in without asking the council. On March 31 OPB told the whole state that Ashland’s council had voted five to one, at a special Friday meeting called while she was on vacation, to keep city offices out of that building. Did the staff move out? Not really. They were still there in April. On May 5 the council rewrote its own resolution, five to one with DuQuenne against, to let them keep the office rooms as long as the public spaces were cleared by June 1, and nothing in the record since shows them leaving the offices. So after all the fuss, the staff stayed put in the offices, and I honestly couldn’t tell you who won that round.

Still, the Community Center was her own doing, and so was the business of calling the City Hall fix a five-to-seven-thousand-dollar repair and then shutting the building indefinitely over a job of three to five hundred thousand. A former fire division chief has sued for $1.25 million, claiming among other things that she ignored written complaints about the fire chief and then promoted him anyway, which is an allegation and not a finding. And she hired Rocky Houston to run the parks department in 2024, and he turned out to be a bumbler. The ice rink sat closed all winter because nobody got it an occupancy permit, his ten-year plan got rejected, and he was on paid leave by the end of December 2025 and gone in January. Then in June she was one of three finalists for city manager in Tigard and didn’t get it. That must have been a rough month, applying to leave town while the town read about it in the paper.

You wouldn’t know it from the podcast, which went up June 25. She was president-elect of the state’s city and county managers’ association and getting ready to host its summer conference here in July, with tours of the Shakespeare Festival, a board game night, pickleball and a 5K. She paints watercolors and crochets, “like I’m really just 80 years old on the inside,” and tries to be home for dinner. Near the end the host asked how she gets away from it all, and she told every manager listening to use their vacation days. “You have them for a reason. So, get out.” Where does she go? “I like the coast,” she said. “I tell my staff before I leave like, I’m often the least essential person, and I know this, and I’m okay with it.”

Issues to Cure

The July 31 evaluation letter, which we picked apart in August in Meets Expectations, gave her deadlines. She owed the council a plan by August 18 to fix an HR department that staff and council both distrusted, and another one to get some help with communications. Then, over the next 108 days, she was to answer councilors’ questions within three business days, keep up “professional decorum,” and quit canceling so many one-on-ones. The letter also told her that her staff trusted her, and it signed off, “In Ashland, we are better together.”

Some of that was fair, and two of the three cures were repeats from the year before. But two graduate degrees and an Army hitch, and your boss is writing you a three-day deadline for answering email? If there was a moment the job stopped being winnable, my money’s on that one.

Her deputy gave the manager’s report on August 18, the day the plans were due. The Chronicle says she took four weeks of family and medical leave after the review went public. Why is her business, but it’s safe to say that nobody on the beach has an opinion about the parks fee. She was back by the middle of September.

Better Apart

Her last written report is the last four pages of a 787-page council packet, and it reads like the city newsletter it mostly was: the ballot, the lawn, what “closed” means on SeeClickFix, the tree contest. The ice rink will open in November, honest. The Community Center is taking bookings, and the Ashland International Folkdancers are back, “following a 40-year tradition.” There’s a thank-you to everybody who packed a go-bag and checked on a neighbor this summer, “We are proud to be in this with you. Better Prepared. Better Together.” And there’s a paragraph about bears, asking people not to compost meat or leave scented candles outside, that ends, “When it comes to wildlife, We are Better Apart.”

The Fourteenth

I still think the council made the right call, for the reasons I gave in August. I also think a lot of what got said about Cotta around here was just plain cruel, and some of it, as one of her staff put it, was “thinly-veiled misogyny.” She made plenty of her own mistakes, but nobody deserves that.

So here’s my wish list for the council before it hands this job to the fourteenth person since 1998.

Run the search you skipped in 2024. Make it national, do it in public, name the finalists and interview them where the rest of us can watch. If Rooklyn wants the job she should have to compete for it like everybody else, so she doesn’t spend two years hearing the question that followed Cotta around.

Fix the contract. Get rid of the clause that doubles severance after an election, and think hard about whether a year’s pay belongs in there at all. And please, no more gags. A non-disparagement clause makes some sense when a company is paying. Here the ratepayers paid $232,673, and what they got for it was a promise that nobody would tell them why. If the council had good reasons, and I think it did, it ought to be able to say them out loud, and she ought to be able to tell her side.

Would any of that have saved her? Probably not. What might have is a council that ran the search, graded her in public every year, and took its own lumps for the fees it voted for.

On Friday, her last day, the city’s e-newsletter went out like always. A beaver got rescued at the wastewater plant, and the Tree of Hope made the heritage tree list. The city was also looking for somebody to run the shelter at 2200 Ashland Street, the thirty-two beds that opened back up on her watch, and trying to line up a severe-weather shelter before the cold gets here, which in this valley is about a month off no matter who’s in the chair.

So why now, and why like this? I’ll guess, since that’s all anybody outside those closed-door sessions can do. I think it was the election. Four council seats are on the November 3 ballot, and a council that let this slide would have spent October getting asked about it at every candidate forum, and then handed the whole mess to a new council on December 15 at double the price. Doing it the first week of October took it off the table. I’d also bet the gag suited both sides just fine. She walks away with a clean reference for the next job, the council gets through the election without explaining a thing, and I can see why nobody at that table argued.

She’ll land on her feet somewhere. She made the final three in Tigard in June, and cities hiring a manager go looking for exactly what her staff kept praising, somebody who can steady a place that’s been bleeding people. The next city will call Ashland for a reference, get her dates, her title and two sentences the lawyers wrote, and then go read the Chronicle anyway. As for us, I figure Rooklyn keeps that chair a good while longer than anybody’s planning on, because searches take months and a new council will want its say, and whoever finally comes in fourteenth will walk into the same fee fight and a City Hall that’s still sitting on the agenda.

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Sources: the separation agreement with Sabrina Cotta dated October 16, 2026, which The Ashland Chronicle obtained by records request and reported on October 9; her employment agreement of October 1, 2024, sections 3.3 to 3.5; the July 31 evaluation letter and the staff survey that went with it, whose respondents are anonymous and are quoted as they wrote; the recordings of the October 5 and 6 council meetings, and of the April 7 and May 5 meetings with the May 5 minutes; the October 6 packet, including the Look Ahead and her October report; and the city’s October 16 e-newsletter. Movers and seconds were checked against draft October 6 minutes the council has yet to approve. Her background and the events of 2022 through the spring of 2026 come from city announcements and from Ashland.news, the Rogue Valley Times, OPB and the Chronicle. The Medford move, the C-minus, her response to the review and the executive sessions are the Chronicle’s reporting and are credited to it in the text. Her leave is her own business. Her own words come from The HaltingWinter Podcast, episode 350, “Sabrina Cotta: The Best Leaders Don’t Have All the Answers,” posted June 25, 2026. Where the agreement and the coverage of it differ, the agreement wins. Quotations are as transcribed, with the software’s garbles fixed and the speakers’ own left alone.