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My priority is a permitting path that doesn’t add cost or delay to housing we’ve already zoned for.

We’ve done a lot of the zoning work. Ashland’s Housing Production Strategy was the first in Oregon approved by the state. I helped shape the draft as a volunteer on the advisory committee, then voted to adopt it once I joined the Council. We’ve fulfilled some of the commitments already, and I’ll keep pressing for full implementation.

For example: We’ve land-banked for community land trust homes and approved zoning and sale protections for existing manufactured home parks. We’ve eliminated minimum off-street parking requirements citywide. And we’ve designated Climate Friendly Areas on the vacant railroad property and along the Ashland Street corridor, where zoning now sets minimum residential densities, removes density caps, and allows buildings tall enough for four floors of housing above ground-floor commercial. We made similar changes downtown.

But zoning is permission, not production. The next job is shortening the path from permission to a finished home. The Council identified 14 specific proposals in August, and staff and our advisory committees are fleshing them out. One would set measurable design standards in place of case-by-case judgment, so applicants know what’s expected before they draw plans, without giving up the design quality Ashland expects. I look forward to voting on each of the proposals.

When we’re talking about affordable housing, zoning and permitting alone won’t get us there. I want to move forward on the construction excise tax that our Housing Production Strategy calls for. Yes, that’s a cost on construction, and I think it’s a trade-off worth making when the revenue goes to housing people can actually afford.

Climate change is here. We feel it every fire season when we pack our go-bags. We’ve made real progress cutting our reliance on fossil fuels and we need to continue. My priority is making sure the households who’d benefit most from that shift aren’t the last ones able to make it.

One of the biggest ways to reduce our contribution to climate change is to shift our home energy sources from fossil fuels to high-efficiency electric equipment. For most household uses, high-efficiency electric equipment now costs less to run than the fossil fuel version.

Because Ashland owns its own electric utility, we’ve been able to take steps to make the switch even more affordable for Ashland residents. We’ve increased many rebates, added new ones, and doubled the rebate for low-income households. I’ll keep pushing to expand these programs, and for the City to lead by example in its own buildings and operations.

Fossil-fueled transportation is another way we contribute to climate change. We’ll be updating our Transportation System Plan over the next year. I support continued investments in bike lanes so more people can use a bike or e-bike safely for everyday trips. (I get around town on my trusty blue fixed-gear bike, so I know the pitfalls.) Federal funding cuts have reduced our access to bus services. I’ll push to restore discontinued service as funding allows.

We must also respond to our changing climate. Hotter, drier summers mean more fire, more smoke, more extreme heat. I believe our City must find ways to help our most vulnerable residents gain protection from smoke and extreme temperatures. At the same time, the City should invest in reducing our wildfire risk and conserving water.

See my issues note on Wildfire Risk. I’ve written separately about our water resources. Ashland Electric’s current rebates are here.

Ask local employers what holds them back and you get two answers: they can’t find workers who can afford to live here, and it takes too long to get a permit. Those are housing and process problems, not economic development problems, and they’re what I’m already working on.

Ashland pivoted from lumber to tourism, and that base has broadened (including outdoor recreation, restaurants and wineries) alongside world-class companies like Work Sharp, Blackstone Audio, and Blue Marble. My priority is helping smaller local companies expand and attracting new businesses that bring good jobs. I’m excited that, last year, the City provided funding for Storytown Ashland to create a calendar app that gathers music, theater, sports and outdoor events in one place, so the businesses and venues putting them on get seen.

Attracting new employers is a separate job, and we have assets for it: 62 percent of adults here hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, Southern Oregon University has made community connectedness part of its vision, and we have vacant employment and commercial land ready to build on. Ashland is in the running to have census tract 19 (the area between Beach and Walker, running north from SOU to the railroad tracks) designated an Opportunity Zone under the program Congress made a permanent part of the tax code last year. It lets investors put capital gains into designated areas and get a break on tax they’d otherwise owe. Designation would cost the City nothing, and it would put that land in front of the Qualified Opportunity Fund money already hunting for sites like ours.

We also belong to SOREDI, our regional economic development organization, and we should be making more of that partnership. And I think it’s worth standing up an economic development corporation of our own, focused specifically on getting our vacant employment and commercial land built out.

But over two-thirds of the people who work in Ashland live somewhere else, and almost two-thirds of employed Ashlanders work outside the city. We pass each other on the highway every morning. That’s a housing problem before it’s a jobs problem, which is why the permitting reforms and affordable housing financing I’ve described in my Housing note are also good economic development tools.

Economic Opportunities Analysis, June 2025 · SOU Vitality Plan

I volunteered at OHRA’s community resource center before the pandemic and served on its board from 2020 until I stepped down at the end of 2022 after being elected to the Council. So I’ve seen up close both what works and how much our great local organizations and hundreds of volunteers do.

Homelessness is a housing problem first; that’s the title of the best recent book on the subject, and it’s right. It’s also a human problem, fraying nerves on all sides as our unhoused population across the Rogue Valley has climbed.

After providing most of the money to buy 2200 Ashland Street, the state offered Ashland another $1.8 million to renovate the building (adding a new kitchen, ADA-accessible bathrooms, laundry and showers, a sprinkler system, and other structural renovations) plus $800,000 to run a shelter there through June 2025. On March 5, 2024, the Council turned it down 5-1. My colleagues worried that accepting on a short deadline would commit us to a shelter at that site before we’d decided we wanted it there, and preferred to have staff work with ACCESS (the state’s grantee) to steer the money toward a shelter elsewhere in town. I understood the concern, but I felt we effectively had made that decision when we accepted the initial purchase money from the state, so I was the lone dissenting vote.

In a recent Council meeting, I moved to reserve the full $4 million Asante paid the City for health care investments. My motion failed, and so did every alternative on the table. The question is still open, so when it comes back to Council, I’ll push to set aside as much as possible for health care investments.

Like many in our community, I was saddened when Asante ended inpatient and birthing services at Ashland Community Hospital, 13 years after taking it over from the City. And the loss goes beyond that. We’ve lost providers, and it’s getting harder to access primary care. This is part of a larger regional and national health care crisis that we can’t solve alone.

But we can be deliberate with the one resource this transition actually put in our hands: the $4 million Asante paid the City in June, owed under our 2013 affiliation agreement once it stopped operating a general hospital. These funds won’t come again so we should invest them and not spend them on recurring costs. There are serious ideas circulating about how Ashland could invest in health care, with partners of course, because $4 million alone won’t solve the problem but just might make the difference between a viable investment and one that falls short.

If we don’t find an appropriate health care investment within two years, then I’d favor releasing the money for other City investment needs like repairing or upgrading existing City facilities.

I voted for last year’s fee increases, and I stand by that vote. They added $12.50 a month to a typical bill: wildfire from $3 to $7, public safety from $1.50 to $5, and a new $5 parks fee. Each was the best option on the table; here’s my reasoning.

Wildfire. Ashland’s wildfire risk is higher than 97 percent of communities in the country. We’ve had this fee since 2015 and raised it once, in 2019, but it still falls short of what we need to protect our community. Along with the increase, we moved the fee and its staff out of the General Fund into a dedicated wildfire fund, so the money can’t drift, and added an annual inflation adjustment so we don’t spend another six years losing ground.

Public safety. We created this fee in 2017 and left it at $1.50 for eight years while costs rose around it. Meanwhile, in 2023 we added single-role EMTs to our ambulance service, who cost less than dual-role firefighters. The program was meant to pay for itself through fewer dropped calls and better reimbursements, but by spring 2025 it was clear it was doing neither. Rather than cut staff abruptly, we raised the fee to cover part of the gap and brought in specialists to examine the finances of the whole ambulance service (which covers 650 square miles—well beyond our city limits). That report is due this fall.

Parks. Parks didn’t cause the General Fund gap. But when the options are to cut services, spend reserves, or raise revenue outside the property tax cap, parks spending is more discretionary than fire or police. Last year, when approving the 2025-27 biennium budget, we chose to create a parks fee, as most of our neighboring cities did long ago. The compromise was a sunset at the end of the biennium. I supported the package but said at the time I doubted the sunset was fiscally prudent, and on October 6 I plan to vote to remove it. I’ll listen to what I hear between now and then, but that’s my current position.

The downside. These fees are flat: someone in a small apartment pays the same as someone in a large house. That’s regressive, and it’s the strongest argument against them. My answer is to provide relief rather than give up the tool. We’ve replaced two narrow utility assistance programs with a single year-round discount covering electricity, water, and wastewater. In September we doubled the annual household cap, and  I went on record in support of a discount or waiver for lower-income households on the utility fees too.

The measure would require voter approval before the city creates or raises utility fees. I understand the frustration behind it; $12.50 a month is real money, and the fees are flat, so they land hardest on people with the least. I’ve said where I stand on fixing that.

But putting every fee to a vote doesn’t fix it. It would leave the Council without a working tool for a revenue source the property tax cap doesn’t reach, on a timeline that can’t respond to a budget year. The answer to fees that are too blunt is to make them fairer, not to make them impossible.

There’s a real grievance underneath the measure, and it’s about notice. People found out about these fees too late to weigh in. On September 15 the Council gave first reading to an ordinance requiring advance public notice before fees are created or raised. I voted for it, and I’ll vote for it again on second reading.

I co-wrote an opposition argument with a colleague who had voted to refer the measure to the ballot. We agree the measure is bad policy. Where we differed was procedural: whether the Council should have referred it absent the validated signatures the petition needed on its own. We settled that disagreement and went to work on the argument together.

I joined the Citizens’ Budget Committee in 2021 and was troubled to learn the city hadn’t evaluated its compensation structure since 2008. For more than 15 years salary negotiations with our (now) seven unions ran on inflation projections alone. Nobody asked whether the market value of the jobs themselves had changed. Normally, some drift below market over time, and some above. So the City commissioned an external classification and compensation study and rebuilt the salary schedule around the midpoint of each job family. That puts union negotiations on an objective footing, and fairness requires applying the same standard to managers and other staff not represented by a union.

Fixing an outdated system during a tight budget year is uncomfortable—but putting it off would have cost us more.

And it didn’t bust the budget. According to the City’s financials, updated daily on the City’s website, General Fund personnel costs rose from $28.9 million in FY24/25 to $29.3 million in FY25/26, a 1.4 percent increase.

I’m grateful for the caliber of people who work for this city—it’s part of what makes Ashland a great place to live. Paying them fairly is our responsibility as a Council, and it costs less than the churn we get when we don’t.