 I'm Cathy Shaw. I live here in Ashland and have since 1984. I've also been known as Cathy Golden. So I came to the valley in 1976 and I arrived with my then-boyfriend Jeff Golden who had bought some land up in Beatt Falls and I joined him on the land. We were later married there on the land and began, you know, a short career of river running. I discovered as I worked on river trips when we were for ARDA, the American River Touring Association. So, and we had met actually working for ARDA in Valoceto, California. And so any rate, he had bought this place in Beatt Falls. I went and joined him. No running water, no septic system, no, I mean it was just very, even though it was a relatively new cabin, it was fairly rough. You always wanted to be the second one to use the outhouse in the winter. So, any rate, we lived up there for a while. We did continued run river trips and I did work as an assistant boatman for ARDA and just sort of discovered that I was not particularly cheerful in the morning and that I didn't like carrying people's, you know, huge bags and any rate. I liked being assistant boatman because when you're not licensed, you can't take any passengers. So, I was always on the boat alone which was great on the road. Jeff, however, was licensed and he was a river guide. We also worked in Utah. Again, me as an assistant boatman. So, we also worked in Utah for a short while, just a few trips and this was subsequent to the two of us traveling in Central America and Mexico for, I don't know, maybe four or five months and going to intensive language school and things like that. So, we had in 76 when we met at the river company, we then sort of started our life together. At the time, I needed to get a job and I got one at the Ashland Women's, it was called the Ashland Community Health Center, the Ashland Women's Health Center right here on Main Street and sort of worked my way up to being co-director of that. I did think that we should bring a clinic for Hispanics to the area. At the time, I was volunteering at the, what do you call it, the health department as a translator when Hispanics would come through, migrant workers would come through and need to be seen and Senator Bates, Alan Bates and I later discovered that we were both working there at the same time, just decades before we met each other. So, at any rate, I felt like we needed a migrant health clinic and I said about looking into that, being a satellite of one in Woodburn. At any rate, so eventually I just sort of got tired working a $5 an hour job and commuting an hour each way and so when my husband was accepted, then my husband, Jeff Golden, was accepted at Stanford Graduate Programming Communications. We both went to Palo Alto. I had grown up in the Bay Area so it was great to be close to my parents and friends and things like that. It was a good time and it was there that I gave birth to our first child, Daniel, who now works with me in my business and then Jeff applied for, he was just working at some television stations down there. He wasn't happy with it, didn't like it and so he put an application for a production manager at KSYS and we moved back to Southern Oregon and that would have been 1984. I was tasked with finding a place for us to live. I did not want to go back to Butte Falls, not with a small child and we decided to sell the place in Butte Falls and don't get me wrong, I really loved living there. I played on softball teams and it was a great place to spend a few years but I didn't want to go back and I also didn't want to bang up and down the coast while Jeff was kind of figuring out what he was going to do and I said, we're moving, we want to stay in one place. I was charged with finding us a place to live and looked all over the Ashland area. We had already bought a place on Third Street. If you're ready for this, we bought it for $25,000. A little house on Third Street and any rate, so I decided, I looked at the place where we were on an oak, walked in the door, knew I was at home, asked to use the phone, called them up at work and said, I found it and we bought it in January of 1984. So the three of us moved in there and then our daughter was born there and on Thanksgiving Day, actually it was between dinner and pie and I had both. She was born right there in our bedroom with a midwife. So any rate, we continued there. I became somewhat involved in politics. Jeff wanted to run for county commissioner and it just, I don't know, I just seemed to have an ability to organize campaigns. At first, I was just, we had a fellow who was organizing the Ashland part of the campaign and then he had a hired campaign manager for the rest of the county and the fellow in Ashland just said, this is too much work for me to do. He had a full-time job. He said, this is too much work for me to do. I'm going to step back. And so I took over Ashland for the general. He was working in the primary. I took over, maybe I took over Ashland for the primary and then basically the whole campaign for the general. And it was, I learned through Bill Mulliams, who was a polycyte professor at SOU, how to do precinct analysis. I still talk about it in my book and it's a very effective tool for targeting voters and specific precincts. And in some ways it's gotten more effective because of how we have moved to live next door to people who think vote just like we do. They have the same, you know, they want their children to be taught similarly in schools. They go to the same church. They have the same politics. So at that point when I studied precinct analysis, it became more interesting to me that I had chosen the house that I live in on Oak Street. It is two acres. It was an original 1865 donation land claim of Bennett and R. Mildemillion and had never been broken up. Hadn't, still isn't. And shotgun lot, 100 feet wide, 800 feet deep with a pond, creek frontage on the Bear Creek. So it had all the advantages of the country, which Jeff wanted to live in the country, and none of the disadvantages and all the advantages of living in a city with none of the disadvantage. So it really met what we needed as a couple and the children too. They had, you know, a wonderful childhood there. So at any rate, what I discovered in precinct analysis was that Oak Street, which was part of a, the precincts were very small back then. It was part of a precinct that had the highest registration of Democrats of any precinct in all Jackson County. Saved the VA up in White City. So that, that was a very small precinct. So at any rate, I became curious about how Democrats versus Republicans choose where they live. And you are able to kind of drive down any street. And I can pretty well tell you if it's a, if, if an individual is registered Democrat or Republican. There are lots of clues. People leave lots of clues out. For example, I mean, there's obvious clues. If it's Hooten, I'm shooting bumper sticker on the back of a pickup truck with a gun rack. I'm going to tell you that's a, that's a Republican. If it's got by high flags and a, you know, a statue of, what are they called? A Buddha. Anywhere in the yard. That's a Democrat. So we look for clues like that. But the other thing is the Democrats want their homes to look a very specific way. First of all, they really value older homes. And they value porches that greet the street. There's very specific things that Democrats gravitate to versus Republicans. And, and as a result, cities will evolve and develop in a way that is in line with the people who live there. So in Ashland, you'll see porches and an equal point. You probably won't. Not that there won't be old houses there that have them or people that have requested them. But when you look at, you know, large developments, you'll see that pattern. Mountain meadows, all the houses have porches. And so there are certain things, clues that we give that explain why we live where we live. And ultimately, as we move to our corner of the world to be near people who live, who embrace the exact same ideology as us, we become more of that color. So if you're in an area that's overwhelmingly registered Republican, you can't get red enough. If you're in an area like Ashland, you can't get blue enough. So all of these kinds of observations started to define what I would do in terms of targeting. So early on, I was asked after Jeff won the county commission raise. I was asked if I would run for Ashland Budget Committee. And on the Budget Committee, I felt that things were, in a way, were kind of just checked off, that things weren't exactly looked at closely. And I saw some things that I thought were troubling. And I want to say also, I was really young and probably a little too forward and not respectful enough. And I think that remained true in my first years of being mayor as well. But at any rate, after two years in the Budget Committee, it became clear to me that I would never get reappointed. There were three-year appointments. And the only way to remain in a position where I could influence change would be to run for office. In the meantime, our area, our bottom-acre where we had a pond, started smelling like sewage. And I had been harvesting watercress out of there. It was just a beautiful place. I mean, you walked a few hundred feet and you were in the wilderness. It was just that whole flood plain down there. It was just gorgeous. And the kids would play there and, you know, go in the pond and come up covered in mud and just all the things that children should be able to do. At any rate, I noticed it started smelling like sewage. And then everything started dying. And so I called the city and they sent me to me, both the head of public works as well as the second hand man. And we were standing at the top of the hill. Mind you, it's a steep hill down to the pond. So we're standing at the top of the hill and I said, you know, this used to just be pristine water with, you know, watercress which will only grow in very pure water. And now it's all dead. And he said, well, I can tell you exactly what's going on. You have decaying plant matter. And as it decays, it will tend to smell. I said, no, this smells like sewage. He said, we have no sewer pipes down there. So we decided to have the water tested and sure enough, it was full of sewage. So we took that back to the administrator and, and by the way, I just want to point out that when these two fellows were at the top of the hill and I suggested that there was sewage that was contaminating our pond, I suggested that he and I walk down there. And he said, if I were to walk down every hill that a housewife in Nashville wanted me to walk down, I'd get nothing done. His assistant, who later was elevated to his spot, you could see him noticeably cringe. And I was like, okay, that's really all I need to know. So then we went and had the water tested and sure enough, and there was a sewer pipe down there. And it was broken and it was leaking. And the city did fix it. And we continued to test the water until, you know, it was clean and all that. So my feeling was that no city worker who's paid for through taxes should ever talk to a resident in that manner. And when I ran for mayor, part of the reason was that it was how can we make city government more beholding and responsive to the citizens that pay their salaries. So I decided to run for mayor from the budget committee. Don Laws was also running for mayor. He was a professor at SOU. He had also already served many, many years on city council. And I think there was a sense that it was his turn. And for me to jump in and leapfrog from the budget committee over him on city council to the mayor post, I think engendered some hard feelings with the council. And Don was a very nice man and everybody liked him. And I think they felt like I didn't have any right to do that. And I was advised by people who worked at the city that, gee, why don't you start at city council then go to mayor. And I said, no, I think mayor is where I want to be. So I ran and I organized the campaign having already won one countywide campaign, but organized it had, I bet, well, I mostly walked the city, but I had a lot of volunteers that were helping. We, for example, we had close to, what, 75 people that dropped a last-minute door hanger, endorsement door hanger that I also talk about in my book, and we canvassed the city in two hours. I knew how many people took to canvass the city in two hours. I knew how much time, but now it takes almost 100 to canvass the city in two hours. So had a lot of volunteers and they were people that, like me and Jeff, had moved here in the 70s or had, we moved here in the 80s, but we were, Jeff had moved here in the 70s. So they were all these boomers and they were really anxious to have kind of a change in the face of government here. Prior to my election, Gordon Madaris had been the mayor for eight years and he was, like, right out of central casting. I mean, he was really handsome. He was very tall. He had silver hair. They called him the Silver Fox and he had those kind of, you know, eyelids that hang over your eyes, which I think make people look very distinguished. So he, he was stepping down, obviously, and it was hard to follow him. I was a 37-year-old, basically, housewife with two small children at home, six and four, running for the city's highest post, where no woman had ever been elected. Two had run prior to me, as I like to say they were my older sisters that, you know, paved the way for the younger sister to be able to date younger or stay out later. But anyway, so I worked really hard in that campaign. I read 10 years of minutes because I felt I needed to be more informed than a, than a guy running. And I also read every single report that the city had, whether it was water, sewer, electric, everything that the council had done in the last 10 years and a lot of reports. What I discovered in the many debates with Don Laws was that because I had read all of this information recently, and he had lived through it, I knew it better than he did. Even though he was part of the votes, even though he was part of, you know, the council making decisions, it was so fresh in my mind. So that was a real advantage I had. Also, because there were so many young people here, boomers that were anxious for a change in government. Ashland at the time was liberal, but it was a very thin veneer. All mayors prior to me weren't fairly conservative. The council tended to be liberal, but the mayors tend to be conservative. We did have some very conservative people on the council that time. I remember one of the fellows on the council, it was before I was elected, one of the fellows on the council had, he had voted yes on making Ashland Nuclear Free Zone. And knowing how conservative he was, I, when I was walking out with him, I said, GF, I'm so surprised that you would vote yes on that. And he said, yeah, why use nuclear weapons when chemicals are so much more effective? That was the kind of conservative that we had on the council. He won by one vote running over Phil Arnold. Phil Arnold later than went on. At any rate, it was a thin veneer. And businesses, the chamber was very conservative. Obviously now the chamber has really moved to the left. As I like to say in Salem, when I was up there working with Senator Bates, or at that time representative Bates, there is the Ashland Chamber of Commerce and then there's all the rest. It's very different with our Chamber of Commerce. But at any rate, there were certainly roads to be paved and opened and changed. So when I was first elected, over 200 people signed up to be part of the boards and commissions of the city of Ashland. Now we were making a very sharp left turn. And in fact, during my tenure, we had the most sweeping environmental legislation of any city in the entire state of Oregon. It was all the way through. And you could say, oh, good job, mayor or whatever, but it wasn't. It was all of these new faces that saw an opportunity to be part of their government and change the course and direction of Ashland that really were the genesis of this monumental change that happened in Ashland in the preceding or the following 12 years during my tenure. During that time, we, I put together a list, which I, but during that time, just as an example, we protected the floodplains and riparian areas from development. One of the reasons I wanted to do that, obviously, I had a lot of land in the floodplain. And if I could have developed it, it would have been worth millions. And I also, Jeff and I had also bought land on the other side of Oak Street. So we had seven acres over there and two acres over here. And it was like, oh, that would be great. Well, somebody had come to the elderly woman who lived across the street, she had a big barn that faced Oak Street, and said that they would develop all of that. Thirty-five, it was in the floodplain, and thirty-five condos were to be built directly across the street from us. And we protested at the Planning Commission and the Council, it was rejected at the Planning Commission and appealed to the Council. And during the Council, they basically said, we'll allow density to be transferred out of the floodplain and onto the shelf of Oak Street, which, and the road was going to come right out with light shining into our, into our living room. So I clearly didn't want that. And I told Jeff, I said, we can't continue to fight this. They're allowed to develop. Let's buy it. So we basically refinanced our home. We bought that property. And the elderly woman who lived there, she said, actually I'd like to sell my house too. I asked her how much she wanted for it, she told us. And she rented from us, which was great for her because now she had people to take care of anything that was broken down. She was the tenant. So we paid her and she paid us and it was a net gain for her. So she not only had money coming in every month, but she also had two people, a former contractor, Jeff was, to take care of any problems that she had in her house. So it was a win-win for everybody. I created shotgun lots across the street four. So they were just under an acre and they went all the way back to Ashland Creek. So at any rate, when I was first, and that was during my first term in office, when I was first elected, I pushed through protections for floodplains. And so you can see that, well, I had all this land on both sides, I could have said, gee, let's make some money. But to me, it's irresponsible to put land, homes on houses that are periodically inundated with water. And I knew that because I went to school at UC Davis and I saw what happened in Sacramento Delta over and over. So by putting in curtailments into the floodplain, not only did we protect the floodplain, we created open space. And more importantly, it felt to me at the time that there might come a day when we needed to produce food closer to home. And floodplain land is some of the the richest soil that you can use for producing crops. So I thought that would be a better thing than homes. And we did get through both repairing protection and floodplain ordinance prohibiting any any building in floodplains. We also banned polystyrene and and phosphates. We banned phosphates in large part because of the contributing factor of the nonpoint sources as well as the point sources in Ashland that would put too much phosphate into Bear Creek, thereby making the too much algae for the fish to survive. They would die of starvation or lack of oxygen. Polystyrene, obviously, it has a half life. We don't need it and it should be gone. We also protected historic homes from demolition. That was a fairly large battle. But the Genesis was somebody who wanted to move the Applegate home from Granite Street across town. They said it was in too poor of a condition to be renovated but somehow it was in good enough condition to be moved. But at any rate, we decided to stop any more of that from happening. We also established the recycling program. There was no recycling program in Ashland before I was mayor. And again, had a lot of help. I mean a lot of help. People wanted it, but there were also a lot that were reticent. So we needed to increase awareness. And so Ken Hagen, who later became a city counselor and subsequently died in office. He was an ardent recycling supporter and we basically ran a campaign. We had lawn signs to increase people's awareness of it. We canvassed all of that. I had a small group that met my office frequently, at least once a month, maybe more often. And it was ten people in the small office and people were standing and you know in chairs and they were all crammed in. And it included Republicans who were running the garbage service and then they were screaming liberals and there were people in between. But they all had one thing in common. They wanted to start recycling. The landfill was getting full. It was going to become a transfer station. And National Sanitary saw an opportunity to extend its life. And here we were, you know, meeting of the minds kind of thing. So from that group I finally said, okay I just need you out of my office and created the recycling commission, our committee, recycling committee. And we put in place all of the recycling programs that Ashle now has and created the recycling depot. In fact when lately, not too long ago when they wanted to remove, get rid of the recycling depot because it costs money to actually recycle. And the then administrator said, you know, garbage has changed a lot since the since the olden days when wagons rolled through the street and collected garbage. And I was like no, actually that's exactly how we still do it. So it, I think people recycling at the depot puts them in touch with their waste flow. And if you have, you know, people just picking up your garbage and not thinking about it, you aren't recycling, you're not helping. And so the other thing we did, it used to be that one can cost X number of dollars, I think it was 12. And the second can was six. It was half as much as the first. And we were like no, the second can should be twice as much, not half as much. So we changed a lot of things that had to do with, in connection with that. So we established a water conservation commission because at the time we were during one of my, and a lot of this happened during my first administration, we were running out of water. We were not hooked up to the talent Phoenix project, the talent, it was supposed to be talent Ashland Phoenix, but our water system, our water was completely governed by how full Reader Reservoir was. So there was talk about, oh, do we build another dam? This one's built on a, you know, earthquake fault, which most dams are by the way. It's just how the world works. At any rate, so we could create a new dam, we could tie in to the Lost Creek, or we could conserve water. And so we set up a water conservation commission. The city imposed water conservation, there's, I'm sure you've noticed on your bill, that the more you use, the higher the rate. So we imposed all those kinds of things to encourage people to use water wisely. And when I left office we were using less water per capita than we were in 1975. It just worked. And we extended the life of our dam to, we assumed to 2021, which is coming up, but meanwhile we've tied in to TAP. So water conservation came about. We also created the open space program. That was also my first term in office. Hard fought time. Realtors didn't want it. Which ironically, they came before us. I mean, people poured out of the woodwork scene. They did not want a walking trail anywhere near their home. People, you know, up in the hillsides said, oh, if we have a trail on the backside of our property that would go along the irrigation ditch, then people would come and steal our televisions and whatnot. And I said, well, why wouldn't they just drive up in front and use their car to do that if they intended to do it? Just the image of somebody lugging another television down a trail was so ludicrous. I mean, it was hard not to laugh sometimes. And then Realtors, who were in opposition of it, because it does take land out of the inventory, we found classifieds. Yeah, classifieds used to be a thing. We found classifieds where Realtors would say about a house across the street from a proposed open space or across the street from a proposed park. And when they came to us, I said, you can't have a both ways. You just can't. And in fact, many times I wanted to say to Realtors, who supported me in my first run and then opposed me from then on out, I wanted to say, let me count the ways I've made you money. Ashland is a very desirable place because of all these boomers that came through and did all the amazing things that they did during that particular period. Anyway, so once we created the open space plan, which passed by a little over 300 votes, really hard-fought campaign, the funny mechanism for it went down. I wanted a meal's tax. I wanted prepared food and beverage tax. And the reason I wanted that was because tourists use our parks. They should help contribute to buying parkland. We had the ability within our charter to take care of parkland once we had it. We had no ability in our charter to buy it. And the prepared food and beverage tax gave us the revenue stream to buy land. Tourists like city, like residents, use our parkland. And so why wouldn't they want to contribute to that? I proposed a 1% food and beverage tax and it became very clear, given the kind of rancor that it was generating within the community, that we needed to put some meat on the meat and potatoes on the plate along with the dessert. And open space was the dessert. So I proposed that we get authorization on the first vote. That it be 1% tax for parkland acquisition with authorization to raise it to 5% to be used to repair the wastewater treatment plant. Retire that debt. And again, tourists have their sheets laundered. More often than I launder mine, towels laundered. They use our wastewater facility. Why wouldn't they want to pay for it? Help pay for it. Some, I'm sure, would not. It would be like, but in almost any city where tourists are coming from other than in Oregon, they were already paying a prepared food and beverage tax, a meals tax already. 8%, 10%, 12% in some areas in California. So when they came before the council, there were three counselors that were voting in favor of 1%, including Don Laws, political science professor. Phil Arnold was an opposition of it and why I later discovered, but he was in opposition of it and as were all the restaurants in Ashland, all the restaurants, with the exception of Gepettos, the only one who supported it. So and ultimately, ironically, it was the meals tax that buried him, but because he didn't pay it and we kept coming after him to pay it. So and that was a tragedy, but at any rate. So Phil Arnold voted against the 1% Don Laws, voted for it and two other counselors joined him. One Susan Reed was missing that day. When it came to authorization to raise it to 5%, Don Laws argued that it would kill the 1%. I vociferously argued that it would help us. Phil Arnold, thinking it would kill it also, he flipped over and voted for the 5% and Don Laws rolled off. So still it was 3 to 2. At the time, a restaurant owner, Michael Donovan, who was at Chateau Lynn at the time, he stood up and chatted thank you because people mistakenly think that we're voting on 23 cents per thousand. We're not. You're never voting for money. If you're selling money, you're losing. I don't even put how much a bond is going to be what the millage is on any of my brochures. I haven't done that since, I want to say, 2000. People, if they want to know how much it'll cost per thousand, it'll be the voters pamphlet. There is no reason to say oh it's only a cup of coffee. If you are arguing money, you are on their message. I'm not selling 23 cents a thousand. I'm selling hope and opportunity. I'm selling land where all people can access it. It's free for all. It's open to all. I'm selling better school systems, you know, or co-curricular. I'm selling a library that's accessible to all. I'm never selling money. So they thought they were selling money and they put together a brochure. Again, it's in my book. They put together a brochure just at five percent. And it just didn't matter. I mean it was like okay, sure. On the back, and they had a great slogan by the way, which was don't swallow the mill's tax. Excellent slogan. Ours was Parks Now and Forever, which they then co-opted. And I've done this before to other people on the on other campaigns. They took that and changed it to Parks Pay Now and Forever. Anyway, so it passed, the open space plan passed, but the funny mechanism, not mill's tax, went down. The Parks Commission, which we're working hand and glove at the time, went to the council. The two groups were together, two elected groups together, and the park said, we want a food and beverage tax. The council did not unanimously. So all of the parks voted for it, including me. The council didn't. So the council theoretically lost in that particular study session. And they did a pair-pair comparison of, you know, which system do you want. And after they lost, one of the city councilors said, yeah, I know how the vote went, but I still want something else than that. And they put out basically the exact same thing they had before. Well this time, Parks and I didn't help. The first time, we did work to get the funding passed. This time, we didn't. We said, I just had let it go. So now we're we're at a position where we could lose all of open space. Again, I said to the council, please do a food and beverage tax. And that was put, as I just relayed, that was the big conversation of the 1%, 5% and all of that, and the campaign was underway. All the restaurants, as I said before, except Gepetto's opposed it. And Curtis Hayden of the sneak previews also opposed it. And it was a very ugly campaign. People were unkind to each other. And after it passed, Curtis Hayden referred it back out to the voters through the initiative process. And this time, and usually what happens in the initiative process is if you lose narrowly and you put it back out, you lose by bigger numbers. If you won narrowly and you put it back out, you win by bigger numbers. This time we, the meals tax was on the same ballot with the last time that the state asked Oregon if they wanted a sales tax. That was our competing measure. Jeff, who was county commissioner still at the time, he said you are allowed to put a competing measure on there. And we did. I brought it to Paul Nolte, our attorney at the time. And the competing measure basically said if the state's sales tax passes, ours will go away. And if it doesn't, whichever gets the most votes between the two, the NAE and the pro, we would prevail. And Ashland voted again, voted for a statewide sales tax two to one. They also voted for retention of the meals tax if it didn't pass statewide. And we continued. So I was really great advice from Jeff at that time. So at any rate, once the meals tax was in place, the council immediately put it to a nickel. When it was put back out, people said, oh, it was a sleight of hand. And they said they were going to do 1% and immediately raised it just like government. They immediately raised it to 5%. That I was able to use when it was re-up to say, no, you ran a 5% campaign when it was 1%. We still won. And then you referred it back out when it actually was 5%. And we won again. And here's the voters pamphlet. Here's your original pamphlet. And we won that campaign with a single five minute video, which I took around and showed to groups that asked for a presentation of why we should retain it or not. By then, restaurants got it. They realized that it was keeping their wastewater bill down. And restaurants do generate a lot of wastewater. More importantly, all the servers, the waitresses and waiters, figured out that people did not add 5% before the tip. Excuse me. They didn't add the tip before the 5%. They added the 5% and then tipped on that. So all of the wait people were getting more money on their tip. Suddenly it was like, this is going to be fairly easy. I completely missed the voters pamphlet. That's why we created the video. And the video you can find online, it's called an Elegant Solution. We had a small committee. It's also listed on it. It's a really good encapsulation of the history of how open space came about and why. And also the funding mechanism for it. We also prevented a clear cut of the superior land above the boulevard. Superior land bought it from the college. They intended to clear cut it. We did an extemburg exchange. That created the Forest Commission. It created the Forest Plan out of that. And we also regulated open burning and wood stoves for air quality maintenance. We joined the Air Quality Maintenance Survey, put that to a vote. We saved Mount Ashland. We put very stringent curtailments on large development. Large skill development in Ashland. The LSD, what do you call it? Ordinance that we put together. That was designed specifically to keep Walmarts, Costco's, big box stores out of Ashland. We also banned any fast food chains from the downtown. We didn't want to see McDonald's, Taco Bell, or any of those in the downtown. Keep it in looking historic. So we also had hearings on hillside development standards. We wanted to move people from developing in the hillside, move them down to the flatlands where they could walk, use public transportation, bike, and dissuade people from building on the hillside. What happened then was equity rich people came up and would buy two lots side by side and docked the QE2 there on two lots. So people found ways around it. We then created obviously AFN. We were putting in a dark fiber ring in the city and as long as we were there, why not provide high-speed data services. We did that so that all the graphic designers in town and others could be more efficient and effective. Businesses doubled after we created that super highway. People came here. They created businesses. It really helped. It's not unlike the government alighting the rural parts of America in the 20s and 30s. You create highways and those are paved and those are also electric and those are also water and in our case it was data services through high speed data services. We altered our relationship with Ashton Community Hospital so that they could join venture in an era when small hospitals were being eliminated through legislation both state and federal. And then one of the best things we did was campaign for the Carnegie. That was to preserve the Carnegie. Again it was crazy campaign but Amy Blossom, Barbara Ryber who were Amy worked here and Barbara was Ashton Friends the library president came to us because we owned this building. The city was able to renovate it apart from the county and we made a deal with the county that we would hold off on floating those bonds until they had an opportunity to put all the buildings to a vote and that moved us to the top of the line. All the libraries then were on the next election. Ashton voters got to lower their taxes by voting for that because economy is scale and all of the libraries were renovated which was just fantastic thing to have happen. We were losing a lot. It was a depressing situation here with our old building and leaky walls. There's a lot of water that comes down from the hill. It's basically filtered through the hill all the way down through the flood plain and into Bear Creek. So there's just a ton of water here that seeps in and that had to be dealt with. And then of course after measure five we had our school district which was had a millage of 16 dollars per thousand in Ashton at the time. Measure five required that they reduce that to five dollars per thousand. So everything was being cut at the schools. So I decided that the city could actually impose a levy that we could then hand over to the schools and that levy was the youth activities levy and it was designed to fund co-curricular extracurricular sports programs brainball all those things that enrich a student's time foreign language that enriches a student in school. We had a campaign where you had two pictures in the in the newspaper one with a student with straight A report card another with straight A but then all this co-curricular at the bottom simple headline who's more likely to get into a good college who's more likely to get a job and people went you know they they believed in it and have re-upted ever since in fact it's coming back up and then in 2014 ran the library district campaign which was a culmination of all of the things that I had observed where we start first started our conversation all the things that I observed about who would vote for and who would vote against and the idea I broke the county into five, one, two, seven zones and ran seven different campaigns depending on the zone Ashland surrounds Ashland Phoenix Tallinn Jacksonville and the surrounding area West Medford East Medford the upper broke in the northwest corner each of those areas had their own campaign committees I was the campaign manager we ID'd people for for three months with the exception of Ashland we knew that Ashland would vote for it by 81 percent so that meant that in a midterm primary with a typical turnout of 34 percent we had to increase Ashland's turnout to 65 percent or greater to win it's all math it's just math how do you swamp the boat we knew that in the upper road in the northwest corner that consistently voted against library services and buildings 70 percent no to 30 percent yes that we had to drive down voter participation and the way you do that is you're simply invisible you just don't do anything there however people had been IDing voters so we made sure that those ID voters got out and vote and that in Medford which typically voted 45 55 in opposition to libraries we had to break even in Jacksonville Applegate Rouge had to break even in Phoenix in town we had to win by 70 percent with with this high voter turnout all of it was just done based on registration who would vote who wouldn't vote and we applied pressure where we could that created the neighborhood captain program the neighborhood captain program was basically designed to have every single neighborhood national broken down based on a hundred voters and an individual who lived in that neighborhood who would actually talk to their neighbors and encourage them to vote mind you because we have done IDs you in the outline areas we know how they're going to vote because we've ID them we know a national they will we don't ask our neighborhood captains to do any persuasion which people love in Ashley broke it down to 125 neighborhoods and instead of a 34 percent typical voter turnout in midterm primary 70 percent voted 81 percent voted in favor of it in the upper rogue in the northwest corner less than 50 percent voted and they voted in opposition 60 40 we had to get that 10 percent in Medford it moved by five points broke exactly even as we had hoped again we had had people IDing voters there so broke 50 50 on the district in Applegate Jacksonville 50 50 so we had we knew that's all we had to do and indeed the exact same number of people turned out to vote in the library district campaign as it turned out to vote when it lost by 19 and 20 points the yes vote remained the same absolutely the same the yes vote altered in all these people that turned out the yes vote only altered by three I think it was 3000 voters it would get this out of what 30 40 thousand people that voted so the yes vote remained the same but the no vote collapsed it went down 17 points because people didn't vote so we had in the areas we didn't want them to vote so it was magic people were thrilled and more than that people were thrilled to work on a campaign where they were given exact things to do no more no job creep this is your neighborhood you're responsible for it we had a web page designed by Micah Cadella that had you know there be Kathy Shaw I'd click on it there up came my map of my neighborhood and here's a list of people that I had to to notice to knock on the door of I I felt at the time that campaign should be about building community not tearing them apart and this built community and the reason you want to build community is that you want to invest in social infrastructure a community that invests in social infrastructure can withstand both economic and natural disasters far better than one that doesn't and in big cities it can go neighborhood by neighborhood a neighborhood that invests in it right next to one that doesn't does better in an economic or natural disaster than the one it doesn't so and that sort of was born out in the in the in the flood response and remember the ash and food project was birthed out of the great recession of 2006 so you create a community you create social and invest in social infrastructure in three ways you invest in public education you invest in open space and parkland and you invest in your libraries all things that allow people to come to community held assets free freely and unencumbered and that was our best test of it because we really did create a community in ashland and a structure in ashland that has we used in alan betz's campaign we used in jeff golden's campaign it was how he won the primary when he had no endorsements it was taking no money from you know any lobbyists or anything that is how we are able to win the campaign you're not going to change anybody's mind so you have to change the demographic of who actually votes so looking back on it all what i do thinks differently i think in the beginning i was a bit of a bull on a china shop i think i didn't give people an opportunity to get used to somebody that was so young and brash and all of that and often regret i have in the past regretted how those first years went but this much i'll tell you obama tried to begin his presidency in a consolatory tone and people fought him and looking back now we realize how crazy it was when we had the senate and the house and obama that we didn't fill judge seats we didn't we were busy he didn't want to be obviously the black angry man but he could have certainly asserted his authority in a better way even if he did appear to be too brash i i know that's not his his approach and i know mine tends to lean farther the other way which is i'm tired of people keeping me from getting what i want or getting you know people that believe in the things i believe in from us getting what i we want by voting no and i found ways to get around that even in the youth activities levy initially it was just the city now it includes everything surrounding the city but back in the day those that surrounded the city kept us from getting what we wanted in education here i think overall that young brash young woman who started out would i want to do everything that i've done again absolutely i think i can drive around ashland and i see my fingerprints on everything i love that my name isn't on a single road i would be horrified if i was on a highway or something oh but everywhere i look i can see land that was protected i know air quality is better i know businesses are stronger i know we are vibrant in many of the ways because of all the work and effort that we had done in those 12 years and frankly the torch that was handed off that the current council has continued to carry they we are a very dynamic robust community that wants to be involved in civic activities and they are there is no shortage of opportunities for people to jump in and lead by example and i felt as the first woman mayor i didn't haul my children around i didn't say oh vote for me because i'm a woman i felt that by being a woman elected that was enough and that is where i focused my elections my eye was always on the prize of opportunity to shift our community from one sensibility to another and and by being the first woman mayor i could be a role model for other girls who are coming up that you can do this too and indeed i was on all the talk shows of of girl scout meetings for years it was um and i was the right person in the right city at the right time and you don't mess with those odds i loved that job and by the time i left i was ready to be done with it too and then it was all about getting really great people elected to do the work as i like to say eh i got lazy so i wanted other people to do it alan bates wow 95 percent of all the children in orgin are covered in health care because of him you have you have an opportunity to let great people i have a system that seemingly works and it's just a great marriage there are a lot of good people out there that want to serve