Putting Your Best Forward

The ballots Jackson County mailed on October 14 ask Ashland to do something with its City Council race that it has never done before. There are no seat numbers on it this time. There is one list of twelve candidates, and the city’s notice tells voters they may vote for four of them. Whoever finishes in the top four on Tuesday night will make up two thirds of the council in January, and only one of the twelve is on the council now.

Numbered Seats

Until this year a council race in Ashland was six separate little races for Position 1 through Position 6, and a candidate picked a number and ran against whoever else had picked it. In November 2024 the city asked voters to stop doing that. Measure 15-232 removed the numbered seats from the charter, so that candidates now run for whichever seats are open and the highest vote-getters take them, and it passed with 81.12 percent of the vote, according to the city manager’s report that November. The change was set to begin with the next general election, which is this one.

The idea came out of city staff, who had gone looking at how other cities elect councils. Some draw wards, some hold open-seat races, and the city manager at the time, Sabrina Cotta, told Ashland.news that numbered seats with no district behind them were unusual. She also said why staff liked the alternative. “The research has found that an open seat election allows for more civil discourse because you are putting your best forward and your argument for representing the city as a whole versus as up against an opponent,” she said.

Cotta will not see how the first one goes from City Hall. The council signed a separation agreement with her in October, Jefferson Public Radio reported on October 9, and her last day was October 16. Deputy City Manager Jordan Rooklyn is filling in, and the city has begun recruiting a permanent replacement. The reports so far do not say whether the council choosing that person will be the one sitting now or the one sworn in on January 4.

Four seats are open this year rather than the usual three, because one of them belongs to an appointee. Derek Sherrell was appointed to fill a vacancy, and the charter says such a seat goes back to the voters at the next biennial election, so the city’s election page says the three highest vote-getters win four-year terms and the next highest fills the remaining two years of the unexpired seat. In 2028, when the cycle settles down, voters will choose three. The same reform applies to the Parks and Recreation Commission, where six candidates are running for three four-year seats, and where Jim Bachman, Justin Adams and Rick Landt are not running again.

Who Is Leaving

Sherrell did not file, and neither did Jeff Dahle or Eric Hansen, so Bob Kaplan, elected in 2022, is the only incumbent in the race. Dylan Bloom and Gina DuQuenne stay on through 2028, and so does Mayor Tonya Graham, who votes only to break a tie. Ashland.news counted up the job in its October election edition: a council for a city of just under 21,000 people, a biennial budget of a little over $374 million, more than 250 city employees answering to a manager the council hires, and a deficit of about $2 million that the paper expects will mean cuts and restructuring.

The council will also have the hospital money to decide about. Roughly $4 million came to the city through a contract with Asante that the 2013 council decided to negotiate, as Kaplan put it when he thanked that council at a candidate forum this month. The Rogue Valley Times account of the forum says $2 million of it is available for discretionary spending.

The Twelve

What follows is each candidate in the order they filed, as Steve Mitchell of Ashland.news set them out in that paper’s election edition from interviews done before the August filing deadline. All of it is what they said about themselves.

Dan Ruby, 49, is on the Ashland School Board and used to run ScienceWorks. He said Ashland is losing school enrollment because working families are being priced out, among them the healthcare workers and teachers who earn too much for public help and not enough to get by, and that his priorities are affordability, housing and a transparent, responsible budget. He co-founded the Sunstone Housing Collaborative and leads the Firebrand Resiliency Collective, which helps people get ready for wildfire. In 2024 he ran for Congress as a Democrat and took 33 percent against Rep. Cliff Bentz.

Aydin Timmons, 24, moved to Ashland at sixteen and has a business degree from Southern Oregon University. He is running to bring a younger voice to the council, and he is interested in tiny homes as one answer to housing costs. He said he was struck by how much land the city owns, and that he would like it to consider selling surplus parcels for schools, public safety and infrastructure. “I’m a quality-over-quantity guy,” he said. “Let’s have high-quality things and make sure the city isn’t wasteful.”

Bob Kaplan lived in Washington, D.C., for thirty years, advising Latin American governments, and his issues are affordability, climate, wildfire and economic development. He said the city’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan cannot take ten years to carry out, because no house can be resilient while the ones around it are vulnerable, and he wants part of Ashland designated a federal opportunity zone to draw employers with better-paying jobs.

Ronan Kilkelly is a theater electrician and a union steward at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, born in Quebec and here since 2014. “I love this town,” he said. “I love everything about it. I think it could do a little bit better.” He called OSF, SOU and the hospital the “beating hearts” of Ashland, blamed their troubles on bad executive decisions and “greedy corporations,” and said not putting solar panels on the city’s parking structures was a missed chance. He supports income-based help with defensible-space work for owners and renters alike.

Teresa Cisneros is a nonprofit leader and consultant who has spent more than twenty years in social justice work. As interim director of Coalición Fortaleza, she said, she watched Latino and other marginalized families take the hardest blow from the 2020 Almeda Fire and get the least help afterward. Her issues are housing and the number of businesses that have closed, and she wants a youth center. “I’ve lived the consequences of being in those populations that are forgotten,” said Cisneros, who is a single mother herself.

Jack Buckley grew up in Ashland and works as a stagehand at OSF. He decided to run after the hospital closed its birth center, where his daughter was born. He is a union negotiator, and he said workers here cannot afford to raise families, and that an aging town with fewer chances for young families is a threat to its own future. He said he had hesitated to go into politics partly because his father is Peter Buckley, the retired state representative. “Queer rights, trans rights are workers’ rights,” he said.

Victoria Slaboda is also an OSF stagehand. She moved here last year after living in several college and tourist towns, and she said Athens, Georgia, had put tourism and high-end development ahead of the people who lived there, with zoning changes that brought high-rise condos the locals could not afford. She worries about the cuts to the library, the hospital and SOU, and about Ashland losing what she called “third spaces.” “So much of what I love about Ashland seems to be sort of threatened,” she said.

Brandon Polanco is a film director and producer who lived in New York, Texas and Los Angeles before Ashland, and he sits on the city’s Social Equity and Racial Justice Advisory Committee. His first priority is more creative-industry jobs. He said he learned more about homelessness after joining that committee, which meets near the night lawn, and that he would favor combining shelter, jobs and support services, and would listen before proposing anything.

Clarinda Merripen closed the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant in 2024, which is when she started thinking about running. She said the structural deficit sits underneath nearly every problem the city has, and that the city has to deal with staff pay and pension liabilities. “We can talk about all the fun things we want to do, but we’re up against the wall,” she said. “We’re going to have to get into the weeds and balance things to keep Ashland a livable place.” On homelessness she said people often slip into it after a single crisis, and that they “are part of Ashland just as much as the people who come in and have a million-dollar house.”

Kerry KenCairn is a landscape architect and sits on the Planning Commission. She first moved to Ashland in 1983, left in 1992 and came back in 1995. She said she has watched people at council meetings concentrate on objections rather than solutions, and she wants more effort spent on common ground. On the utility fee measure she said, “I’m a believer in people paying for the benefits that they get,” and added that costs should follow what people can pay. She supported having the nonprofit Opportunities for Housing, Resources & Assistance run the night lawn.

Brian Hellwig lives near Garfield Park and was moved to run by trouble from the night lawn nearby, where he said people leaving in the morning brought bad behavior into the park. He moved from Brooklyn in 2020 with his pregnant wife. He called OHRA’s management of the lawn a good start and wants a three-step approach of bridge housing, stable shelter, and services for mental health, addiction and job training, and he wants SOU and other venues to open their underused space to art fairs and music.

Linda Adams sits on the Transportation Advisory Committee and has a background in education, public policy and a gardening business. She said Ashland’s 3.5 percent property tax cap creates the deficit, and that the city should find progressive revenue, set clear priorities and avoid austerity. Flat utility fees are a quick fix and not a lasting one, she said, and she supports a wildfire bond for home hardening and fuel reduction.

Mountain Avenue Theatre, October 11

Eleven of the twelve came to the forum that Ashland.news and the Ashland branch of the American Association of University Women held at the high school on Sunday, October 11. Slaboda was sick. Damian Mann wrote it up for Ashland.news, and the Rogue Valley Times ran it on October 13. The moderator, Regina Ayars, opened by saying, “It’s really exciting that 12 people have put their hat in the ring for City Council.”

On the hospital money Hellwig said, “So I personally would use $2 million to put it into a reserve that had strings attached to it.” KenCairn said, “I think losing a community hospital, our first full-service hospital, is really sad,” and, “I definitely don’t think this fund should go into the (city’s) general fund.” Kaplan said, “I don’t think a new hospital is really in the cards, but I want to hear the other ideas.” Adams called the money “a minuscule amount, a drop in the bucket.” Buckley, whose daughter was by his account somewhere in the back of the room, said, “Our daughter, who we may hear in the back, was born at the birthing center, and its loss affected me deeply.”

On SOU, which is in what the paper called an existential budget crisis, Ruby said, “The city is not in charge of SOU.” Kilkelly said, “We need to be a better partner of SOU by taking more control of what’s going on in SOU.” Merripen said the city cannot keep treating the university as a “red-headed stepchild,” and on housing she told the room the town should go “balls to the walls.”

How to Spend Four Votes

The ballot allows four votes, and it does not require them. Ashland’s new system is plain plurality voting at large, and the arithmetic of it is simple enough to do on the back of the envelope the ballot came in.

Every name you mark gets one vote, and the top four totals win. If you have one candidate you want badly and three you could take or leave, each of those three extra marks is a vote for somebody who is competing with your first choice for the same four places. Leaving a mark blank throws nothing away. It declines to help anyone you do not mean to help. Voting for four people you want uses the whole ballot, and voting for fewer is just as valid.

Fourth place matters more than it sounds. With twelve candidates splitting the vote, the gap between fourth and fifth could be small, and fourth place gets only two years, after which that seat is back on the ballot in 2028 with Bloom’s and DuQuenne’s. The person who wins it will have a short clock and a full in-box.

This paper is not telling you which four. Twelve people put their names on a ballot to help run a city with no permanent manager, a $2 million deficit and a pot of hospital money that was still being argued over at a candidate forum in October, and eleven of them spent a Sunday afternoon in a high school theater answering questions about it. Vote for the ones you would trust to supervise the next city manager, however many that turns out to be. Then get the ballot into a drop box by Tuesday night, or into the mail with a postmark no later than Tuesday, which the county will count if it arrives by November 10.

Sources: The at-large rules are the City of Ashland’s September 29 election notice and its election page, which also gives the appointee rule from Article III, Section 4 of the charter, the candidate list and the January 4 swearing-in. The 2024 result is the city manager’s report of November 19, 2024. Cotta’s account of why staff proposed the change is Morgan Rothborne’s 2024 preview in Ashland.news. Her departure, the severance and the recruitment are Roman Battaglia’s October 9 report for Jefferson Public Radio. The candidate profiles are Steve Mitchell’s, in the Ashland.news October 2026 election edition, condensed here, and they are the candidates’ own accounts of themselves, which this paper has not tested. The forum quotations are Damian Mann’s report as the Rogue Valley Times printed it, and where that report paraphrased a candidate this piece does not turn the paraphrase into a quote. The Parks Commission departures are Buffy Pollock’s October 30 ballot guide for Your Oregon News. The mailing date and the postmark deadline are Jackson County’s election page. The city’s page spells the appointee Dereck Sherrell, and the council minutes spell him Derek, which this paper follows.