Council Q&A with Ashland Mayor Tonya Graham

Mayor Tonya Graham talked about the 2023 accomplishments of every city department at the city’s second annual town hall meeting in January 2024. Ashland.news photo by Bob Palermini
October 25, 2024

Graham is running unopposed for a full term as mayor 

By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news 

For the upcoming Ashland City Council election, all candidates were contacted by Ashland.news for interviews. All who responded were asked the same six questions. Answers from candidates competing for the same position were paired together. This is the first of two articles on uncontested seats. Some answers have been edited for clarity or length.

Ashland Mayor Tonya Graham was appointed mayor for the city of Ashland on Feb. 7, 2023, after the resignation of Julie Akins. Graham, the executive director of the Geos Institute in Ashland and the Director of its ClimateWise Initiative, was first elected to Ashland City Council in November 2018. She has also served on several boards and committees, such as co-chair of the Ashland School District’s Bond Committee, the Church Council for the Ashland First Congregational United Church of Christ, the Options for Housing, Resources, and Assistance (OHRA) Advisory Board, and the the Ashland Chamber of Commerce’s Emergency Preparedness Committee, according to a longer list on the website Tonya for Ashland. 

Question 1: Being Ashland’s mayor is barely paid, it’s verging on volunteer work. Can you talk about why you want to serve?

I have been serving in various capacities on City Council over the last six years and a lot of that time has been spent dealing with crises and emergencies particularly. We had the pandemic during all of that time, we had the Almeda Fire and the response and recovery for our neighbors but also just the reality of fire risk really kind of coming into our community and the need to respond to that. 

Those six years have really had a lot of urgency in the issues put to us. Now where we’re at, there’s still a lot of urgency there but now we’re in a place where we can start to take really decisive, thoughtful action to move us in the direction of the community we want to be over time in spite of these challenges we’re facing. 

We can really focus on those longer-term, kind of anchor elements of the community. And that’s what I’m really interested in doing. … In addition to what all the city does to maintain services, what can the city do to help the community move toward that state that it wants to be in the future? Who do we want to be as a future Ashland and what are the steps we need to take to get there? And I think we’re in a great position to be continuing to take those steps. 

Question 2: How do you see the role of a mayor as that role relates to the rest of city government or the public?

Now of course we have a council/city manager form of government and that really has fundamentally changed the role of the mayor. What I see as the mayor’s primary role is to convene and to bring the pieces together for the action that needs to get taken. 

The mayor has a very important role in helping the council do its work, making sure the council is focused on the most important things that need to be done in the community in terms of local government. But the mayor also has the ability to convene discussions that can lead to some of those bigger projects and the bigger more transformative work the city can do. The mayor’s office is still a very important part of the fabric of the community even though the mayor themselves can’t make unilateral decisions.

In this role I don’t get to tell any staff member any particular thing.  … It’s still a very important role even if it’s different than what it was when we had a strong mayor form of government. 

Question 3: In your conversations with voters, has anyone raised issues that surprised you?

No, not really. I think the big issues are top of mind for folks. I just had a conversation, I know that you were at the engagement forum for 2200 Ashland St., I just ran into some folks at the coffee shop who were there and we had a conversation about that. 

Conversations are really landing around the things we already know are in that next phase of work. It’s economic development, it’s housing, dealing with wildfire risk and climate concerns. It’s building the infrastructure systems we need and the questions people have about that. I haven’t had anyone bring up anything that isn’t already a discussion at council. 

Question 4: The city of Ashland is coming to an interesting position. The desire to preserve its unique character and traditions alongside the necessity of adapting to the demands of various social issues. How do you envision Ashland approaching these competing priorities?

There’s a variety of issues we can think about through this lens that you just offered. The most obvious one I think is housing. We like being a pretty small town, we know we need to build significantly more housing for the people who the current housing market does not serve. That includes people who work in Ashland and simply cannot afford to live here. That economic development pressure, the desire to have a diverse population of people here, we want more families. 

So we have to balance that desire to not grow really big with the understanding that there are very real needs not being met at the moment that can only be satisfied by having some level of growth that’s more than what we’ve had in the past. 

When I think about your question, if I kind of take it through this housing lens, what it means is the city has to think about its role in dealing with its challenges in a different way than municipal government has thought about it in the past. It’s no longer just fire, police, planning, streets. It is also economic development, it is also affordable and accessible housing. It is also, what is our role in dealing with the homeless crisis? 

It lands at our feet, we don’t have the option to ignore these questions if we want a vibrant community. As we go into that space, I think what we have to think about is, what is the appropriate role for the city? 

The city is the only one that can do certain things. We are the only ones that can change zoning. We’re the only ones that can enact ordinances, no other community partner can do those sorts of things. There are other things that are not really our expertise and that’s where we partner. We think about shelter, if we have a homeless shelter, we are likely to partner with people who have that expertise. We are likely to partner with people who build houses, not build houses ourselves. 

I think the most important thing is, what’s the right lane for the city? What’s the right investment for us to make? Is it funding? Is it changing the rules? Is it partnering in some fashion? And then how do we know it’s working? Are we developing these partnerships or plans in a way that we can tell how well this investment is paying off? 

Question 5: The city has these various issues to address and a wishlist of things to achieve. How do you believe the city should best answer to these things with its frankly limited resources? 

That’s a good question. The ever-tightening role there between what we want and what we can afford is always a good place to have a conversation. 

There are certainly things that the city is required to do and we must maintain those service levels. … We need to make sure we are handling the basic services we provide: fire, police, community development, parks, and our streets, those sorts of things. 

One of the most important things a city can do is maintain its infrastructure because that enables business development, quality of life, and things that simply cannot happen if you don’t have a quality of infrastructure and public safety systems. That has to be maintained as a foundational element. 

Alongside of that, we need to think about, what are the things that pose existential threats to this community? What are the things that if we don’t address they could alter this community in a quick way? Our wildfire risk is escalating very quickly so we need to prioritize that and we have been — there have been a variety of things that we’ve done to strengthen our fire service and also to help reduce our risk in the community and up in the watershed. 

What are those elements that if we don’t tend to them are going to create ripple problems in the future? I would say economic development is another one of those elements. It’s one of those things that’s not necessarily the same threat that wildfire, where overnight you could have massive destruction in the community. But if it’s not tended to, you could find yourself in a very different place five, 10, 15 years down the road — and a place that’s very difficult to recover from if you’re not doing things to develop your economy in a conscious and deliberate way. 

It’s always about setting criteria and stacking. When you’re looking at what are the other issues the city will take on, we have to look at them through a lens of what are the criteria that will tell us that this is the most important thing? 

To me, those are existential threats to the community and long-term impacts to the vibrancy of the community. 

Question 6: Is there anything you hoped I would ask about, anything you’re particularly passionate or concerned about that you would want voters to know? 

Whenever I talk with other mayors across the state, other people involved in local government, and when I go to conferences and see what kinds of panels are being offered, there is such a conversation right now around civility in government. 

And it’s really important at the local level. Because we’ve always been shielded from the kinds of goings on that happen at higher levels of government where people are very polarized. But it has pierced that veil into local government. And it’s causing a lot of, you know, negative feelings locally when we lose the ability to disagree and to do so in a way that maintains those community bonds. When we lose that, we lose something very, very important. 

We need to be thinking as a community: How do we remind ourselves that we can disagree about how to do something, or what to do in a way that doesn’t tear at the fabric of our community? 

What does that actually look like in a world where we have AI and we have social media and all sources of information and some of them more reliable than others? How do we navigate in a way that keeps us really interacting in a human to human way? … That’s one of the things that we need to just be thinking about as we face all these challenges. How do we do that in a way that doesn’t fall into this polarization that has gripped so much of our country?

Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected].

Related stories:

Rapid-fire candidate forum held at SOU (Oct. 17, 2024) 

Ashland City Council Position 1: Q&A with candidate Doug Knauer (Oct. 16, 2024)

Council forum: Six candidates, three seats, lots of questions (Oct. 14, 2024)

Q&A with Ashland City Council candidates Dylan Bloom and Eric Navickas  (Oct. 14, 2024)

Q&A with Ashland City Council candidates Jeff Dahle and Kelly Marcotulli  (Oct. 10, 2024)

Picture of Bert Etling

Bert Etling

Bert Etling is the executive editor of Ashland.news. Email him at [email protected].

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