the opportunities challenges and successes of women in their daily lives way interview women living in the row ballyhoo are making a difference in our communities today we're talking with two women who have recently been elected to local city councils our st guest is tanya graham who was elected to the ashland city council in two thousand and eighteen we interviewed tanya before she was elected and now she has been on the job for five months carol would you like to introduce our guests i would tarn you would you sort introduce yourself and it tell us how you got here to actually why ashland and then tell us a bit about geo's because that's really important part of your life it's well so if you would just give us that kind of intro to yourself that would be really helpful great so i grew up in nevada in a small town in nevada and then when i went off to college and got my degree i when i was coming back west i had to decide where i wanted to live and my sister was living in ashland at the time with her small children and so i this initially landed in ashland because i had family here and started to do work local conservation organizations that sort of thing and then eventually found opportunities working in that field and here we are twenty two years later and i am still loving living in ashland i work now for the g s institute and we we work to help communities adapt and respond to climate change so when we when we're looking at this we're looking at forests water systems and human communities and the work that i do specifically is to bring climate change projections to communities and help them think through what that means for them and what they should be doing locally to reduce those impacts and hopefully over time to do their greenhouse gas emissions work to help pull down those impacts over time and you're bringing that perspective to the city council i see that you know when i go down and observe the council so you're talking about resiliency and climate change and i really appreciate that because i know our city wants to be on top of that yeah exactly and we've had several really important reports come out global reports come out that tell us that we just don't have time to waste in dealing with both bringing down our emissions and also dealing with resilience issues we have already set changes in motion that we have to deal with so that window for just reducing carbon emissions has closed and now the work that we have to do has to be bringing down emissions and then also dealing with the impacts that are underway that we're dealing with and immunities well i observed that you and perhaps other people are using the word resilience now instead of sustainability that that is kind of the word that is that equivalent to sustainability there's there's a there's a sort of a functional difference in that resilience addresses the understanding that we are now in a time where we are facing disturbances that we wouldn't have faced before and also chronic stressors that weren't in place when the original conversations around sustainability started to happen so initially when we were talking of sustainability over the last several decades it's been about how do we get our system where they are able to protect give us what we need now and also protect that ability for for our children now with climate impacts that are either major disruptions or could these chronic impacts we have to figure out how do we maintain the vibrancy and vitality of our communities while dealing with these shocks and stressors that are coming on and so that's where the resilience piece comes in it's really has that response to change element of it that i think wasn't present in the initial sustainability conversations well show we talk about what we came here for is how you have transitioned into your new role carol if you've got a question i do you say see yourself doing that that's a really good question because ashland has a very wide diversity of viewpoint and so how do you serve a group of people who who have a variety of different perspectives and i think we've seen that in a number of issues that have come up so far what i try to do with that is to look at both the short and the long term pieces of this so any time that the council puts an ordinance forward or a resolution forward it will have consequences that ripple out over time and so i think looking at not only what are we trying to solve in the near term but whether those impacts over time is really important point piece of it it's also important to look at how our different types of people or people in different circumstances affected by something so we have a large number of people here who are struggling to pay for housing costs and the sorts of things and so how do we balance the needs to do things like infrastructure improvements that we we know have a long term impact on the community but also recognizing and trying to get to deal with the fact that that causes short term difficulties for a certain segment of our population and so when we think about how to serve the whole community it's about balancing those needs of short term long term and then what are the needs of people who have different ability to to handle changes in price so what you learn on the council went out with staff i think it was on the th what did you learn when you went knocking on doors that was a really fun experience they were really put us into teams and sent us out into certain neighborhoods and we talked we would do about twenty doors each teen and you know what we heard primarily in my teen that i was with was that people really love living in ashland they are they are they have concerns around us being able to address our homeless issue for for a variety of different  reasons so that was one of the things that came up quite frequently and then people are concerned about wildfire that was a very another strong sort of theme in the conversations that we had with folks and they wanted to they wanted to know about our capacity with our firefighters and and what else the city thought it might need to do in the wake of the tragedy at paradise so that's that's top of mind for a lot of people in town i've took a couple of clips of working at council over the last couple of weeks so can we were on one of those clips i believe it's it's you responding to the chief of police's report you just made a comment on that so can we run that video so we can see tonya in her counsel environment oh there it is i was good you know i go to a lot of city council meetings so i feel pretty comfortable up there but one question i have for you so you were here for five months what's the biggest surprise that's the thing that you dan did not anticipate you weren't prepared for i don't know but something that was an eye opener for you so far yeah i i think probably the thing that has been i don't know if it's a surprise but some something this sort of has gotten more of my attention is just that we have different ways of getting information in town and sometimes the you'll get information is out there that's not actually correct and it's hard to chase it down so suddenly our in boxes will fill up with people who are really upset about something and there's a lot of education in those responses so i think i think that that's one of the things that i spend quite a bit of time on when i respond to people and in helping to try to give them information to help them understand things if they if they  have a sort of a misunderstanding about what's in front of council so sometimes people will think that something is a council decision when it's not and so they're demanding action and there's really no way for us to give them that action and so to that that educational piece of saying this is you really need to contact these folks or this is going to be taken up over here that sort of thing i think has been more than more than i thought it would be and or or i guess i really hadn't aid how much of that education piece would be in those responses to constituents so one of the issues that is listed on our website in terms of one of the issues that we're all facing in ashland is a housing crisis would you describe briefly what you think the crisis is and how the council's dealing with it sure i think that the housing crisis has a number of different elements to it so on one hand we know that if folks who are in the in the purchasing market our house prices are very high land prices are very high so that that moves a lot of folks who in other places would be able to afford a standard home in the community that that middle ground of folks where the living here is often and affordable and then that goes all the way down the line and so it goes into the rental the rental sphere we are houses are partment are renting for hire in ashland across the state they really are in a special long i five corridor but it's very expensive if you're just looking for a studio a one bedroom two bedroom type apartment is very expensive to live here and part of that is because the vacancy levels are so low so it really is a it's a little lourdes market in ashland at the moment and it's and it's that same so we're seeing that trajectory across and so what ends up happening from that is that people double up in houses they stacking into apartments in order to be able to afford them that type of of housing stress then ripples out into all sorts of other parts of the community certainly when when people are under stress financially it affects their relationships it affects their performance at work it affects how they relate to their children all of those things can be seen as coming out from that initial housing stress well one of the ways i see the council and the planning of community development trying to deal with this is called infill and you're hearing from quite a few people especially on garfield where riverside church used to be and on quincy on park area street where they feel it's it's really too many units to put in that small space and so i'm wondering what do you how are you balancing what citizens are saying that would be out of character completely out of character for their neighborhood and yet the developer says you know if this is the way it's going to be the planning commission has approved it in the council also has approved it so you know this is way it's going to be when neighborhoods are just say wait a minute there's some issues here so what what do you think about that because you make decisions on both of those great so a couple of the things that the city has been doing one of them is to update the housing element in our comprehensive plan and to put more of a focus on how do we create a white variety of housing types and that's a really important fundamental step that had to be done and we did that it's the last the last meeting excepted that the st reading yes the st reading of that and it's been right away for a couple of years working with the housing and human services commission and in the planning commission so those foundational elements are really important ashland quite a while ago busy decided that it didn't want to expand it want to sprawl and that's and because we've we've kept our urban growth boundary where it is it tends to push prices up inside of it and so they're when you're looking infill one of the ways or maybe sometimes in certain situations the only way to get to a housing unit that's affordable given the price of land is to have much higher density and so that's where there's a there's a there's a tension between density and land prices and people's what they're expecting in their neighborhoods and so we have heard from folks around issues around parking around just general congestion what m this going to be there like you say there's been a lot of conversation around what does that look like for congestion on streets and and i think one of the things that we are looking at of the city is to make sure that we monitor these early developments and see how that works in terms of those decisions that have been made and what are the impacts because sometimes decisions get made and then we never really go back and see how did that work are we getting the results that we want well there's a state law bill two thousand and one i think it is where they're going to be changing zoning and that hasn't been approved yet but that could impact that'll come down to us at the local level and you know more multi units in our one zone so you know i agreed that we we all agree that we need more housing internationally and that's affordable i think the housing that that two thousand and one bill is for the middle how income housing that then pushes down and in there is less money available then for low income housing so those two dollars are related so they're they're hoping that if that passes that might the last council meeting and i was surprised that there was no response from counselors and that was vanessa how was i was very concerned about the fact that she was told by parks and by the city there's no place for them to continue their meals so for the entire summer we're not going to have any meals but one and that's uncle food at the united methodist church so and she actually handed back her ragland award now i was surprised and maybe you were surprised too but that no one said anything was it was just because it was a surprise for everyone well she came forward during the public the public forum part of that and our our council rules keep us from asking questions in that particular forum but you can make comments yeah you can i mean possibly you know if we haven't had that be the frame i was surprised i was in that moment i didn't expect that and because we did have quite a few people coming up and talking to us about that particular situation and i have been i checked in with the with michael black at the parks department about that a couple days before the meeting and i had understood that they still had one day a pioneer hall reading in the newspaper it looks like they're staging area has been is what has been a major problem of where they keep their food and supplies and sort of thing and so it's a understand this correctly makes them unable to take advantage of pioneer hall for the one day that they still have they still had a way to do that i mean that wasn't the issue i believe they were ready and willing and had a place where they could do those meals so they had things set up for that it was the fact no no meals can occur and i'm not i'm not entirely clear on what is where that particular problem is whether it's in the staging area because of that eviction if that's the problem that needs to be addressed st before finding the other places that might be i know there are conversations happening in churches around town my church is having that conversation as well about how we might be able to help  it's difficult at the city level because we have so many things that the community needs and wants and we've just come through this tough budget process just trying to protect protect our central services as best as we could the quick the housing crisis as you know when you have high high rents it makes it even more difficult to transition people who are homeless into housing when when it's eight hundred dollars a month for a studio that becomes a very very large obstacle to move people into housing and so it's part of that overall piece but the city needs to figure out and i think we'll be doing that in the next several months what is the city's a all these different values services so for senior services for homelessness for for climate change for all of these different issues that we placed on our values or values services part of our priority we need to figure out what is our appropriate rol we've been helping to get the the the shelter in place over on its main street this larger question now of the meals has brought up another another conversation and i think we haven't sorted out yet what is our role in that yet can we i wanted to ask another transition question for you as a new counselor so how do you prepare for a city council meeting carol knows well how much paperwork comes before you and how do you actually prepare for that and feel like you have the knowledge you need in order to make the decisions you might have to make that evening i would say read and read and we're going to be and then read some more yeah and then ask them questions and then read some more of the work was in the read somewhere so we generally we get our packets and wins day before the next tuesday's meeting and so i try to to get up on it pretty quickly so that i have questions of staff i can ask them and give them enough time to get back to me and have me have time to read that before we get to the meeting and so i try to get in there pretty quickly and i think it's just true for anybody who's new on the council that a lot of the issues that are coming in front of us are midstream so the other counselors who've been on longer have to have a background understanding that the new counselors have to catch up with and so i think right now that that's that's one hundred meters well that should ease up over time as well as we clear more of those sort of midstream issues so it was a difficult transitioning into an existing group of people that have been working together for eight years there's three new counselors on there are was that difficult i mean how did you manage that integrate yourself are you still doing it it's been it's been good health good people after i won the election i started to meet with individual councillors just going to coffee tick to get to know them a little bit better and to find out what was important for them in the city and they were asking those same questions to people have been very supportive and offering to help if we if i needed help as i was moving through that transition i think it's been good  the city has done a really good job under kelly matting fleeter ship of orienting the new councillors and so we've got training in public meeting was we got training in ethics and that sort of that sort of peace so that we could make sure that we're doing this work right and then the city did a couple of orientation sessions gave us a big big book to work with and sent us off to the league of cities training if we wanted to go so so they've done a good job of helping to make sure that we know how to do the work correctly and i think that's been a big part of me feeling comfortable saying things right from the beginning because i think if i hadn't known where those boundaries were i would have felt like i had to wait and spend more time figuring that out you know i think we've got another video that i'd like to run of tanya at work in the city council i think this was on the grant this was for the the social services ok that was about like the other one you know responding to the reports that come before it's a lot of information i ran for city council kara was a city councillor so we have a carol more than i of course an appreciation for what happens there so tanya you mentioned the budget process which we got about four minutes or so i have a question it's a big topic yeah well no i'm going to narrow it down  there were lots of issues and the one thing that i noticed at the last meeting when do you voted on i believe it was either the increases in utility or on the budget you said something but i didn't understand it you said i really don't like voting on this but i have to so can you explain that because it's confusing to someone listening to it and i thought wait a minute could you explain give a little explanation so sure yeah that the great for both the budget and the increases in the utility rates i didn't like making any of those so i voted yes across the board for those  the budget process involved laying people off and involved basically cutting back some level of capacity in the city that was important to have and so i didn't like voting for that we also had to take two million dollars out of the general fund which is only fire police community development which is planning and parks and so that's a pretty small budget in which to pull two million dollars out and i don't think i certainly wasn't happy with having to make those cuts  that had to that were necessary i thought in order for us to have a to do the right thing in terms of financial management in terms of the utilities we need to keep investing in our utilities over time or else we end up handing a huge bill to our children and we see that in places where people have failed to invest in their infrastructure and so when we look at these rate increases there they are incorporating what needs to be done at the infrastructure level in order to maintain those systems and so it is difficult to keep paying more but one of the things that i was looking at is the comparisons of utility charges across the valley and other places and we are not actually paying more say for our electricity than talent is on pacific power and so that the fact that we had that really strong analysis beforehand this says that this is actually what we need to pay to maintain the system interrupt is  wanda director john with graphics david teleprompter and audio thank you and gary cameron floor manager j c cameron lighting and cam camera thank you dot s o u dot edu just click on the public access at the top of the page and then search for girl talk and of girl talk and also be heard on live at noon on valley program getaway girl and it's a travel show about why traveling takes you outside of yourself and into other places that can open you to new people new experiences and new inspiration and my most recent show