Navickas is running against appointed incumbent Bloom for council Position 3
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 have been paired together. This is the second of three articles on the contested council seats. Some answers have been edited for clarity or length.
Dylan Bloom and Eric Navickas are on the ballot for Ashland City Council Position 3.
Bloom was appointed on March 15, 2023, and has professional experience selling go-karts online. He also worked as Councilor Eric Hansen’s campaign manager, as previously reported by Ashland.news.
On a Facebook page titled “Elect Eric Navickas,” Navickas is described as an organic farmer, residential designer and artist. He will also serve as vice-chair of the city’s citizen budget committee for the 2023-2025 biennium budget, according to a city of Ashland page.
Question 1: Being a city councilor is barely paid, it’s verging on volunteer work. Can you talk about why you want to serve?
Navickas: I just have a really deep love for the community. Two and a half years ago, my apartment burned down that my wife and I live in. The community rallied around me and I really want to give back to the community and help to address the issues of housing, especially because when you find yourself without a home, suddenly you realize how difficult it can be to find a place in this community.
Bloom: I grew up in Ashland and I’ve seen the town change quite a bit in the last 20 years. You know now, with a 3-year-old — and I’ve got another coming in February — I think I realized I want to get involved. … When I was growing up it was very vibrant, lots of young families, lots of kids, the schools were packed, there was always music downtown, there was just an energy about it. … I grew up on the south side of Ashland. It’s always been the case that side of town has been really ignored.
I thought, how can I bring a voice for young working families and those on this side of town that have always felt ignored, and be able to bring that perspective and, you know, advocate for those two things?
Question 2: How do you see the role of a councilor as that role relates to the rest of city government or the public?
Navickas: The role of the city council is to be a facilitator to bring community members together and to allow the community to really decide the future. I think I have visions, I have ideas about the future, but I think it’s really about the community. I think it’s really about bringing the community together.
Bloom: First and foremost, our job is to advocate for the public and the things that they need. So for me, something I’m really proud of, I’m really responsive. Sometimes to the point where it kind of irritates staff, I think. … And that doesn’t mean calling and giving direction to staff, it’s more like, “Hey look, people need to know, people have questions, they can’t find anything online. I’m lucky enough to have a direct line, can you give me some information to get back to them.”
Also, its ultimately about setting policy and goals and a budget for providing a general direction for the city. Those are the two major things, but it’s also just showing up and setting a standard for how do we behave in public, how do we behave as Ashlanders toward each other, that’s super important.
Question 3: In your conversations with voters, has anyone raised issues that surprised you?
Navickas: I want to be really honest. … I have been canvassing much of the town and talking to a lot of the community members. One of the things that did surprise me, someone brought up the issue of drugs among our youth. I think it’s a really serious problem that we need to face directly. And one of the ways we can address that is continuing to invest in our parks and recreation programs, because it’s so important to get youth engaged in activities to keep them away from drugs and want to invest in a healthy future for themselves. I think recreation programs are so important for that.
Bloom: No, actually no. It’s the same issues that I think people have been bringing up for the last decade and that’s that there’s not a lot of good paying jobs in Ashland, there’s not a lot of affordable housing, or what I would call “attainable housing” — that can apply to all income brackets. You know I think that sometimes some people — my opponent is one — who gets focused on just having low-income housing and it’s like “yeah, we need that, but there’s also people that are lower middle class, upper middle class, and young families like myself that are trying to break in and get that first home.”
Question 4: The city of Ashland is coming to an interesting position: There’s 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?
Navickas: One of the things I’d really like to focus on is a downtown plan … that means bringing more housing into the downtown so we can keep a winter economy vital and increase the entire vitality of the downtown through people living there, working there, shopping there, going out to bars there.
There’s a younger generation of people that are interested in a more urban lifestyle, and I think that’s what Ashland really needs to look for in the future — bringing a younger generation of people into the community who are now being excluded through the high cost of housing. … (And) also to provide employees for our restaurants and other businesses downtown. … That’s how I see the future of Ashland really staying strong, staying vital, staying diverse.
What a downtown plan means is bringing a variety of stakeholders together to envision what a strong downtown would look like and all the elements that incorporate that, including parking, zoning, trees, transportation — even simple things like signage, street furniture, those things.
Bloom: We should be able to respond to some of these social issues like homelessness or opportunities around climate when they present themselves. … But I think first and foremost we need to be patient and we need to have a really good strategic plan.
Homelessness is a really good example. We saw what happened with 2200 (Ashland St.), how that went down and that was us being responsive and it served its purpose. Those folks were able to get some permanent shelter for a period of time but it came with a lot of backlash and that backlash came because we didn’t have any real strategic plan.
What we’ve been doing now with the homelessness master plan, and then with the ad hoc committee, those are just good frameworks to have. So now we start to have that public debate. … now we need to have an actual study session, a conversation amongst council for how do those fit into our broader priorities for the city long term.
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?
Navickas: The impacts of measure 5 and 50 have been really difficult for cities across Oregon so we are looking at less and less revenue to address our needs. One of the ways we can do this — I’m talking about the downtown plan — is looking to the state. The state does have money available to cover the costs of downtown planning efforts. Another way is really looking at ways to make our tax structure less regressive so we can take the tax burden off of young people and people with lower incomes. Those are ways that we can really benefit the city of Ashland.
Bloom: I think doing a needs assessment is a good starting point. What is it that is within our capacity, what is within the capacity of the city budget to be able to deal with — and also kind of benchmarking that up against what kind of funding is available from the state or the feds from either direct funding or grant programs. A couple months ago we went out and contracted with a firm that can go out and find us grant money. …. then we backfill what we can with the budget.
Funding staffing, taking care of roads, deferred maintenance costs — you know, those fixed costs, how I think about it in a budget. And then you have this kind of pool of discretionary money leftover.
Then we need to have that really hard conversation about what are our goals? Is it our goal to solve climate change for the world? OK, if that’s the case and that’s what everybody wants to do, then that gets a priority in the budget. Is it housing? Is it wildfire? Is it economic development?
What we’re investing in now … we don’t really see the full results of those for the next several years. … When we talk about economic development, bringing businesses in, developing the Croman Mills site, that’s several years out, but we need to start funding those things now. … Being very vocal and standing your ground in some cases as I would, especially around economic development and housing, is very important.
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?
Navickas: I really want to talk about diversifying the economic structure of Ashland so that we can bring more younger people, more people who are working, into our community. Doing that through really investing in both housing and jobs. Diversifying the economy to try to bring small-scale industry, things like especially food production, light manufacturing, the kind of jobs that younger people can make a good living at. Design jobs as well.
One of the important things to keep jobs like that in our community is to keep zoning available for that type of development. I’m seeing right now, the city is pushing to allow housing, say in some of our light industry areas and into our employment zones. I think it’s really important we protect our employment and light industry zones.
The Croman Mill site … Right now they’re talking about working on the economic opportunities analysis and really that’s a land-use based analysis where it’s creating justification for shifting those zoning. …. I have severe reservations about that because it also creates another commercial zone which can affect our downtown.
When we try to create other commercial zones, it’s going to draw people away from our downtown, and at this point, we really need to focus on our downtown.
Bloom: What this election is about for me, especially when I got the opponent that I did, it’s about professionalism and it’s about our record. It’s not just our voting record, it’s how we behave in council, it’s about how we behave in the community. That’s something that really differentiates him and I.
I like to think of myself as very level-headed, someone that’s willing to work with and compromise with people that maybe don’t agree with me. My opponent has demonstrated that he’s done the opposite. I’m really proud that I’ve built a really broad coalition. I’ve got people that are very against the water treatment plant that support me even though they know I do support it.
I’ve got folks like the Houks who are strong advocates for the homeless community and really want to do everything we can in the city to help them. And I, of course, really kind of led the way on the camping ordinance, which they very much disagreed on. But they support me.
They know that I’m going to be honest with them, we’re going to have conversations, we’ll find ways to compromise, and I’m going to respect their position.
Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at morganr@ashland.news.
Related stories:
Council forum: Six candidates, three seats, lots of questions (Oct. 14, 2024)
Q&A with Ashland City Council candidates Jeff Dahle and Kelly Marcotulli (Oct. 10, 2024)