24-year Recorder Barbara Christensen says office went unsupported after her departure

By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news

Barbara Christensen served as elected recorder for the city of Ashland for 24 years. 

Reached by phone Friday, Christensen remembered decades of love for her work, pride in her service, and frustration with city administration. In general, seeking equipment, upgrades to storage, or otherwise support for her work required “begging or force,” she said. 

“It was like a battle, every day with the city administration,” she said. 

During her service, she insisted on keeping a large windowed office on the ground floor, near utilities in city hall. City administrators had previously tried to take the office for other uses, she said, but she believed it needed to belong to the recorder to keep that office visible and accessible. 

“Administration hated hearing this, but sometimes people didn’t feel comfortable or trusting asking questions of administration. I could answer questions and fill record requests,” she said.

After she retired in 2017, the large office was repurposed and her appointed successor, Melissa Huhtala, was moved down the hall. Huhtala was elected recorder in 2018 and reelected in 2022. She resigned in the summer of 2023.

Looking at Huhtala and her own tenure, Christensen said she felt the office was not respected or supported because the recorder’s work is not well understood and the office was elected, allowing it independence.  

“That office is about control. It has no support, it’s kind of an island all to itself. … We weren’t staff, we weren’t part of their team and they didn’t let us play,” she said. 

When she first ran for office, she was competing against eight other candidates — three of whom were current city employees. She was “flabbergasted” to win and artfully put a bowl of candy on her desk to break the ice with her new co-workers. 

Christensen lasted through seven or eight city administrators, she estimated, before finally being forced to retire after having a stroke. 

“I was in the hospital for about a month. I was like, ‘I’ve got to get back to the office,’ and when I finally got back in, I wasn’t getting around too good, I had a cane. I felt like it was just, no sympathy, no empathy from administration just, ‘You need to do your job,’” she said. 

She wanted to hold out until the election to prevent the position from being filled by appointment because she felt with the mayor and council at the time, “it would not be a good outcome.” But due to her health, she resigned in 2017 and Melissa Huhtala was appointed. Christensen looked at her successor with sympathy. 

“You know the phrase, ‘Set up to fail?’ … She had no help, no support, then COVID happened. Nobody could have kept up with all the work by themselves,” she said. 

Efforts to contact Huhtala for comment have been unsuccessful. Prior to her work in Ashland, Huhtala served as recorder for the city of Talent from 2011 to 2017, according to a resume submitted to the city in 2017. 

Two letters of recommendation were included with the resume — one from former Talent chief of police Mike Moran and former Talent City Councilor Edwin McManus. Both praised her ability to adapt and perform in the midst of challenging or surprising administrative demands. 

“Melissa came into the job in a bit of upheaval. … Melissa not only excelled at her work during this hectic first six months, she brought the level of professionalism and achievement of this position to a new height,” Moran wrote. 

“In my experience as an executive in management and finance, I know Melissa is a very valuable individual to have on a management team,” McManus wrote. 

Ahead of ballot measure 15-227 to change the recorder’s office from an elected to a hired position, Christensen was passionately in support of keeping the office an elected official. In her time in the role she said she was aware of recorders in other municipalities struggling with pressure from elected officials in performing their duties as election officers.

“If citizens decide to do anything with that elected position, they’ll never get it back. … By being elected, I was a stronger person. It’s the accountability, that office is the accountability for city government,” she said. 

She described the work of a recorder as akin to a supportive municipal pillar quietly and often unseen managing the records and paperwork that keep municipal government moving. 

“Everybody thinks the city recorder goes and takes the minutes at council meetings, but there’s so much more depth,” she said. 

The recorder is responsible for records retention and records management, including not only council meetings but, under Oregon law, various kinds of licenses, meeting minutes and paperwork, down to the deeds for cemetery plots which were one of the few things kept by hand when Christensen left office in 2017. When she started in 1996, the office was rough.

“When I first started, they had records in a shed at the cemetery with the tractor. … There were permanent records in there, there were spiders in there, it was a mess,” she said. 

When she retired years later, cemetery staff were still helping with moving boxes to the storage units Christensen eventually rented after years of failed attempts to obtain alternative records storage. The photo in an Ashland.news story showing boxes of records lining a hallway has previously happened as a consequence to lackluster storage options, she said. 

The recorder is also the elections officer and responsible for the paperwork for anyone who runs for an elected office in Ashland. As elections officer, the recorder also manages the city’s ballot measures and any citizen’s initiatives. Oregon law has since changed, she said, but the city recorder also used to handle paperwork related to campaign finances. Election season was a busy time, she remembered. 

At the time of her service she was also the city treasurer. It often took up as much as half a day to manage the city’s bank accounts and investments. Richardson said she was at one time responsible for as much as $27 million in investments for the city. These duties have since shifted to the city’s accounting department. 

Even some of the smaller aspects of the job could become time consuming. Her responsibility for taxi licensing was a persistent time sink due to competing companies using a call to her office to complain about competitor’s minor rules infractions to stay abreast of the competition, she said. 

She had an assistant, as often as city administration would allow her to have one to keep the office humming. Time without one was “hell,” she said. 

Christensen worked her way up to president of the Oregon Association of Municipal Recorders and, through that organization, earned a master’s degree and taught courses to other recorders. She won a few awards, but she was proudest of the Sunshine Award for her work making hundreds of city records publicly accessible.

She convinced the then-administrator, Brian Almquist, to allow the purchase of a new and not well understood piece of technology to electronically scan records. The city had been using manual filing, an unorganized wall safe and had recently obtained computers with Windows operating systems. She believed Ashland was the first city in Oregon to begin electronically scanning records. 

Every city department had its own method of records processing, she said. It took some time to convince all the departments to submit their records in a uniform way to be digitally scanned and available to the public. In the beginning, only the police department was “gung ho,” she said. 

When department heads expressed worry about exposing their paper trails to the public, Christensen was adamant the public had a right to see into the workings of city government as much as possible and as easily as possible. 

“My motto was we could never forget who we worked for. We worked for the people who lived in the community and paid their taxes,”  she said. 

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

Related story: Documents: Work left undone at Ashland City Recorder’s office will take ‘at least’ two years to process (April 28, 2024)