What We Need: A shared vision for Ashland’s future with clear goals to work toward over the next 3-5 years.

Ashland faces several complex challenges – challenges serious enough to threaten our physical well-being and the character of our community in the long term if not effectively addressed in the next several years.

Ashland is unique for a city its size in the range of services we manage. Medford, for example, which is several times our size, does not run its own utilities for electricity, water or wastewater, nor its own fiber optic network. Our Parks and Recreation Commission manages 19 parks and almost 800 acres of parkland and open space. These and other services and facilities are a real strength, but they also require ongoing financial investment, and we need to be thoughtful about how we manage them given our relatively modest financial resources.

We have made some progress on this issue since 2018. Early in 2019, City Council and staff hosted a community listening session and online survey to engage the community around this question of our strategic priorities.

From those engagement efforts and a series of facilitated strategy sessions, the Council identified these overarching goals:

Utilize City resources as leverage to develop and/or enhance prioritized Value Services

Develop current and long-term budgetary resiliency.

During the 2019-2021 Biennium analyze various departments/programs with the goal of gaining efficiencies, reducing costs, and improving City services.

Enhance and improve transparency and communication

This process also created the distinction between two different types of services offered by the City: “Essential Services” and “Value Services.”

Essential Services are those services that the City is wholly responsible for - essentially utilities, public safety, planning, and maintenance of parks. The complete list of Essential Services is:

Electric Service, Municipal Court, Planning & Building Inspections/Plan Review, Sewer, Streets, Water, Stormwater, Fire, Police, Parks Maintenance

Value Services are those services the City provides because our community wants these services. They are not mandated. A key distinction is that the City partners with community organizations to provide Value Services and often has a specific discrete role to play in delivering those services. Value Services are:

Tier 1: Emergency Preparedness, Address Climate Change

Tier 2: Reduce Wildfire and Smoke Risk, Economic Development, Housing Needs, Multi-Modal Transportation, Homeless Services, All-Age Friendly Community

Tier 3: Acquisition of New Parks, Downtown Parking, Water Conservation

The commitment was made publicly to keep this strategic planning process moving forward after the budget process was complete, but it lagged for the rest of 2019. Then COVID-19 arrived and City staff and Council needed to focus on the immediate public health crisis and the resulting financial strain.

Earlier in 2022, the City of Ashland worked with Southern Oregon University to conduct a budget priorities survey of Ashland residents to learn more about what Ashlanders care about ahead of the 2023 budget process.

In addition, our new City Manager has worked with the City Council to develop a vision statement to guide our efforts. We are using this as a base for further strategic planning that will identify up to four primary goals for Ashland to work toward over the next few years. We anticipate having that work, and the public engagement effort that will accompany it, done by the end of 2022.