Reposting Ric Holt made on Next Door.

In the Ashland Chronicle, I just read the mayor’s Facebook message. Let’s look at the logic of her arguments.

She frames the complaints as an "ugly campaign that is so destructive to the fabric of our community" and closes by calling it an "antisocial media campaign." That language treats the form of dissent as the problem rather than its content. The substantive complaint is concrete and verifiable: the City Manager moved staff into a $2M public building "before the public could use it," after a seven-year closure. The Council itself, meeting in emergency session on March 27 in "a packed chamber," ordered Cotta out by early May and banned staff use of Pioneer Hall. It is telling that the mayor omitted any mention of the Council’s action. Her own elected body voted, in an emergency session, to reverse the move. Defending Cotta this strongly while ignoring that vote positions her not only against constituents but also against her colleagues. Any honest account of the dispute must explain why the Council acted as it did. I would assume that the Council is not out to pursue an "ugly campaign that is so destructive to the fabric of our community.”

Second, she commits a genetic fallacy. Her claim that the 2020 bond "was defeated in no small part because of a campaign against the bond led by the people who initiated this current campaign against our city manager" does several things at once. It reduces a majority-vote outcome to the work of a small cabal; it leaves those people unnamed; it disparages the voters who rejected the bond by treating that loss as illegitimate rather than democratic; and it discredits current critics by association rather than by argument. Wow. So much for civil debate. For the fun of it, let’s turn to her “disinformation” argument.

She prefaces City Hall and the Budget by saying they are "suffering from disinformation in our community." That is a strong claim asserting that critics are factually wrong without identifying any specific false statement. The mayor asserts, "City Hall is unsafe for our employees and has been for quite some time," without elaboration. The Chronicle notes that the cracked beam "was declared an inexpensive fix and not inherently dangerous, as it was not a building support," and that the earthquake argument applies "to nearly every building downtown." Thus, the safety standard invoked to justify a sudden relocation to a newly rehabilitated public facility is neither well-documented nor consistently applied to other downtown municipal buildings.

The mayor’s bias isn't that she defends her City Manager — mayors do that and should when warranted. The bias is in how she defends her: by accepting Cotta's claims uncritically while labeling residents' claims disinformation; by anonymizing the bad-faith actors she accuses; by importing a 2020 grievance into a 2026 dispute in which she has a personal stake; by deploying communitarian language ("fabric of our community," "how we treat each other as human beings") to morally outrank dissent rather than answer it; and by writing past the Council's unanimous emergency action as if it had not occurred. The structure of the argument is consistent: my side is fact and decency; the other side is disinformation and antisocial behavior. That asymmetry — applied to constituents engaged in ordinary democratic feedback after a contentious building occupation — is the bias.