With Four Votes

Jordan Rooklyn had been city manager pro tem for “30 some odd” hours, by Councilor Jeff Dahle’s count, when she got to the parks fee on Tuesday night, October 20, and she started by apologizing for not being used to the chair. “Sorry I’m not used to sitting on this dais yet,” she said, and then she walked the council through Resolution 2026-24, which renews the parks fee, the $5.15 a month on every Ashland electric bill (it was $5 until this July’s inflation adjustment). It raises about $763,000 a year, roughly a tenth of what the parks department spends. Councilor Eric Hansen got his question in first. Did the resolution have an end date? “It’s currently written,” Rooklyn said. “There is no sunset date.” It still didn’t an hour later, after the council split three to three on putting an end date back in, and three to three on passing the fee without one, and Mayor Tonya Graham voted against the first and for the second. The fee that was supposed to expire on June 30, 2027 is now permanent — two weeks before the town votes on a charter amendment that would make the council ask first.

On October 5, in Let It Go To The People, we said the council should renew the fee with a discount for low-income households and amend the resolution to give it a new end date of June 30, 2029. Councilor Dylan Bloom made exactly that motion and lost. At the council’s September 14 study session on renewing the fee, George Kramer told the council it would be “rude and disrespectful” to take a temporary fee “and with four votes” make it permanent while the people of Ashland were waiting to weigh in. Kramer led the petition campaign behind that charter amendment, Jefferson Public Radio has reported.

Ride Off Into The Sunset

The council’s public comment on the fee came from two people, and both wanted it renewed. Mike Gardiner, who is vice chair of the Parks and Recreation Commission and president of the Ashland Parks Foundation, asked for it “without a sunset date,” and said that “the entire current sitting park commission, as well as all the candidates for the park commission have endorsed the park fee.” Linda Adams, who lives on Oak Street, told them “Ashland Parks are not a luxury.” As written, the resolution had a low-income discount of at least half the fee and no end date, and Hansen moved to adopt it that way. Then the councilors talked for the better part of forty minutes.

Hansen spoke for his motion, and then Councilor Derek Sherrell said he expected “to catch a little bit of hate on this one,” because the emails he’d had all came from people who signed with a property address.

“So if you send me a nasty gram, I’m gonna hopefully be able to send you a link to sign up for low income assistance if you need it. And if you don’t, please be more thankful. I did not see one email that was signed with an apartment number.”

Bloom moved to amend, so that the fee “shall terminate on June 30th, 2029, unless renewed by the city council.” Then he said he was going to read something, because he didn’t want his comments “to be misconstrued by populace out there.” He said that at a study session on May 19, 2025 the council had “directed $100,000 of parks fee revenue to the early childhood affordability grants and another 100,000 from homeless services, inclement weather funding,” and that the budget adopted June 3 made it formal. “The fee was projected to raise 1.5 million over two years against a $1.4 million parks gap. And the difference went elsewhere. I led the effort to fund that grant program and I stand by it, but that isn’t what we told residents this fee was for.” He called the fee “a bridge, not a solution,” and said the sunset was supposed to buy time for a real conversation about paying for parks, which “never happened.” The survey, he said, “told us people love their parks. It also told us they don’t trust where this money goes.” Both of his numbers cover two years: the fee was expected to bring in $1.5 million over the two-year budget, and Parks had asked for $1.4 million over the same two years, which left $100,000 over. The second $100,000 he mentioned came out of the city’s homeless services budget, not the fee. He also read out Recital D, one of the paragraphs at the top of the new resolution, which says the fee will “exclusively fund parks and recreation in the General Fund,” and then said, “A sunset is how we prove we mean it.”

Dahle, who had reminded everyone earlier in the evening that he’d be “a citizen in 70 some odd days,” backed the amendment on the grounds that the council keeps asking for money before it knows what it will cut. He had written down something Gardiner said, that “we don’t know where the cuts will come until we know what the budget is,” and he said it was the whole problem. “We are doing this backwards and we continue to do it backwards,” Dahle said. “You have to show the work.” And a little later, “When you are in charge of putting a fee on a utility bill that you have to pay or your heat doesn’t come on, we have to do the work.”

Hansen didn’t buy any of it. He said he didn’t understand how “a $760,000 revenue hole,” which is about a year of the fee, “is, is going to do Ashlanders any favors,” and then said, “I guarantee you that every dollar that you put in for your parks fee went to parks because that’s 10% of our parks budget.” Councilor Bob Kaplan said Ashland was “the last city in the valley” to get a parks fee, that Talent, Medford, Phoenix and Central Point all have one, that Medford’s is more than twice Ashland’s, and that “none of them have sunsets.” Councilor Gina DuQuenne, who voted against the fee in 2025 and against it again this time, listed what the parks lost in the year the fee was supposed to be saving them, from splash pad hours to restroom hours to what the soccer clubs now pay for a field, and said, “$5 is $5.”

Bloom went back at Hansen, and Hansen said he “didn’t know this was gonna be high school debate.” A permanent fee, he said, was something the council could ride off into the sunset with, by which he seemed to mean settle it and stop arguing. Bloom said he had only done middle school debate, “so maybe it’s a little lower for you,” and the mayor stopped the whole thing and said the council was “not going to let this conversation degenerate.” Later in the meeting Bloom apologized to Hansen and said he had meant the line as a joke on himself.

The mayor spoke last on the amendment. She’d called around to other mayors in the state, she said, and what Ashland was doing was “right in the middle of what people do.”

“We know that we are dealing with a, a structural issue with budgets just like everyone is all across this state. And this is a very common way of dealing with that. When we look at our projections out over the next several biennium, we see that there is, that that gap continues to grow. And it is not entirely because of, well it’s not, it’s not because of anything that we’re doing necessarily to change things, but it’s because things are getting more expensive, faster than 3%. It’s a basic mathematical issue. And if we are going to protect the services that we want, we have to pay for them in a different way.”

The 3 percent is the cap Oregon puts on yearly growth in property taxes, which is the first thing the city’s own slides on the fee explain.

The recorder called the roll on the amendment: Dahle, Bloom and DuQuenne for; Sherrell, Kaplan and Hansen against. Three to three. In Ashland the mayor votes only to break a tie, and Graham voted no, and the 2029 sunset was gone.

Then the main motion: Hansen, Kaplan and Sherrell yes; DuQuenne, Bloom and Dahle no. The mayor voted yes. “Motion pass,” the recorder said, and Graham called a seven-minute break and asked everybody to be back in their seats by 7:40. The minutes for that meeting aren’t out yet, so both of those roll calls are from the recording.

After the break and a water plant contract, Rooklyn gave her first report as city manager pro tem, and the best news in it was about the dam. The city is running an emergency exercise at Hosler Dam around October 29 and testing its alert system, so you’ll get texts, and you may hear the sirens. “I say this with some disappointment,” Rooklyn told the council. “Turns out our sirens are not like old school sound sirens. It’ll actually be a voice that says out loud, this is a test.” Bloom said he had been about to ask what time it would go off, “but now that there’s no sound, I’m disappointed.”

Made Available by the Parks Fee

On May 14, 2025 the Citizen Budget Committee voted to add $1.4 million to the Parks operating budget, with a $5 parks fee then on its way to the council. Kaplan, who sits on the committee like every councilor, had talked the figure down from $1.5 million because, he said, “the parks department asked for 1.4 million. They didn’t ask for 1.5 million.” The committee had also recommended $235,000 in childcare grants, to come out of the reserve fund.

Drawing on the reserve would have meant rewriting the city’s financial policies, so on May 19 the council sat down at a study session to find the $235,000 somewhere else. The approved minutes of that meeting record the answer in one sentence: “Direction given to staff to reallocate $35K from social service grants, $100K from homeless services, and $100K from the general fund (made available by the Parks fee) to the Childcare Grants for a total of $235K.” The homeless services money was the part of that budget line set aside for the severe weather shelter, whose cost nobody could predict, and staff said they would cover it out of contingency if winter ran long.

I led the effort to fund that grant program and I stand by it, but that isn’t what we told residents this fee was for.

The next night, May 20, the council created the fee by Resolution 2025-13, at $5 a month from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2027, “after which it will automatically expire unless renewed by the City Council.” Dahle moved it and Bloom seconded. Before the vote the mayor polled the table, and the minutes say what she got: “Hansen and Kaplan will support the fee regardless of time limit or not. Bloom and Dahle will only support the fee with a time limit.” It passed four to one, with DuQuenne against. The sixth seat was vacant that spring. On June 3 the finance director explained the $235,000 to the council again, in nearly the same words, as “funds that would be freed from the parks fee back into the general fund,” plus the homeless and social services money, and the council adopted a $374,021,893 budget, again four to one. On August 5 the city manager’s report said the first childcare grants were going out, $50,000 to the YMCA, $30,000 to Avery Street and $20,000 to Mountain Star.

In the Case of Tie, the Mayor Votes

Counting Tuesday’s two, the mayor has broken at least six ties in fifteen months, not counting a straw poll. Ashland’s council has six seats, and for a good part of the last year and a half they have tended to sort themselves into the same two groups of three, with Kaplan, Hansen and Sherrell on one side and Dahle, Bloom and DuQuenne on the other.

Before Tuesday, the minutes have her voting yes to break ties on the management raises in August 2025, which included the city manager’s, on the $1.19 million the city paid a railroad in January for a crossing, and on this year’s schedule of miscellaneous city fees in May.

Right after the vote on the raises in August 2025, Bloom moved to adjourn and DuQuenne seconded him, and the motion to go home split three to three like everything else that night. That one the mayor voted no on, and the meeting went on to the city manager’s report.

Measure 15-243

The ballot sitting on your kitchen counter has a charter amendment on it, Measure 15-243. Kramer’s petition started collecting signatures in 2025 and turned in 1,537 by its own count. The city recorder threw out most of those, largely for missing cover sheets and other paperwork problems, and counted roughly 194 valid against the 1,308 it needed. In November 2025 the council took a straw poll on putting it on the ballot anyway and decided not to, four to three with the mayor voting. Then on August 4, after a motion by Hansen to reject the resolution putting it on the ballot died for lack of a second, the council put a revised version on the ballot itself, four to two, with Dahle, DuQuenne, Bloom and Sherrell voting yes and Hansen and Kaplan voting no.

The measure says the council may propose “new fees, taxes, or increase existing fees or taxes on a utility bill unrelated to the operation of the utilities,” but that “no such fee, tax, or increase will be assessed, imposed, or collected on a utility bill until at least thirty (30) days following a positive vote to affirm by Ashland voters at the next regularly scheduled election.” Increases for inflation up to the western consumer price index are exempt, and so are franchise fees.

The fee the council passed on Tuesday doesn’t start until June 30, 2027. Section 1 of the resolution says it “shall take effect on June 30, 2027, and shall replace the temporary Parks Fee that terminates on June 30, 2027.” If the measure passes on November 3, is that a new fee, which would need your vote before it could be collected, or is it the old fee carrying on, which wouldn’t? City Attorney Johan Pietila was at the meeting, two weeks before an election with the ballots already in the mail, and nobody asked him. DuQuenne was the only one who even said the measure’s number out loud, and what she said, during the debate on the 2029 amendment, was that if the fee was going to run to 2029 she hoped people would vote for the measure.

Sherrell was one of the four votes in August that put the measure on the ballot. When he explained his vote for a permanent fee on Tuesday he talked about tenants and young families, and the measure didn’t come up.

I did not see one email that was signed with an apartment number.

It’s Not Like a Levy

The mayor herself pointed out on Tuesday that the council can undo all of this whenever it likes. “Any council at this dais will be able to pull back any of those fees, restructure any of those fees,” she said. “It’s not like a levy.” Four of the six seats are on the ballot November 3 and the new council is sworn in December 15, and it will start its first budget the same winter.

Before November 3 somebody should ask Pietila in public whether the measure reaches the new parks fee, since people are filling out the ballot now.

After that it’s up to whoever is sitting there in December. Put a review date back in. Bloom’s amendment said 2029, and 2029 is still fine, and I’d point out that the one night this council spent asking what the parks fee buys, that September 14 study session, only happened because the old fee was about to expire. Then put a page in every budget showing what the fee raised and what the general fund put into Parks beside it. Bloom promised on Tuesday that in two years the council would “show them every dollar went to parks.”

As for the households the fee was always going to land on hardest, the resolution promises them at least half off, but the actual discount still has to be set. Rooklyn said she’ll bring a resolution adding it to the city’s utility assistance program, probably along with discounts on the public safety and wildfire fees. There were 495 households in that program a couple of months ago, and the city says it has been budgeting more help than people are claiming. Anybody on SNAP or the Oregon Health Plan is automatically eligible for that program, Rooklyn said.

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Sources: the recording of the October 20, 2026 council meeting and its packet, which has the staff report and Resolution 2026-24 as voted. The 2025 story is from approved minutes for May 19, May 20, June 3 and August 5, 2025, and from the recordings of the May 14 budget committee and the May 19 and June 3 council meetings. The 2025 figures are the minutes’. The mayor’s earlier tie votes are from approved minutes for August 5, 2025, January 20 and May 19, 2026. Measure 15-243 is from the August 4, 2026 packet, the draft minutes of that meeting in the August 18 packet, and Jefferson Public Radio’s September report for the number. The quotations come from the city’s caption track, with the software’s mistakes corrected.