Click the above image or here: http://s.alchemer.com/s3/2026-Talent-Speaks

What we’re experiencing in Talent is a distortion of public decision-making, one that can occur in small towns like this when the people responsible for making neutral public decisions are also responsible for advancing the interests of private organizations. Because the Mayor of Talent leads both the City and a nonprofit that depends on City contracts, outcomes can not be treated as neutral, even when every technical requirement is met. That’s what this post is mostly about, and the proposed Gateway Hub is the case I use to make the point.

The Gateway has a long and tangled history in Talent marked by delays, false starts, overflowing RVs, and controversies stretching back years. But this is not a litigation of that history, nor is it a comprehensive accounting of business incubator concept. You don’t need encyclopedic knowledge of the Gateway to see the ongoing pattern of concentrated power shaping our civic processes based on insider priorities instead of the voices of regular people. And you don’t need to understand much about it at all to know there’s something not quite right about City Council directing substantial public resources to its Mayor’s nonprofit. What I find most deserving of watchdog-style scrutiny is not the Gateway Hub itself, but what the process of moving it forward is telling us about our city’s institutions.

This piece does not contain any allegation of criminal wrongdoing. It’s an examination of power and process interacting under an unusually influential and over-affiliated Mayor to produce the kind of forgone outcomes we’ve come to expect in Talent; the kind that feel like they were manifested into being long before anyone is ever invited to an Open House.

The issue we face in Talent is not whether the City follows the rules to the letter of the law, but whether the public can trust that decisions are made for the public’s benefit rather than to favor insiders. At this point, using the Gateway as a case study, I argue that we cannot.

Before we dig in:

I’m using “I” now in my own writing instead of “we” because it’s time to open up authorship of TCW Reports to other Council Watchers and people in the community who have something interesting to say about Talent government. That means I have to pick a pen name for myself, because despite calls by local conspiracy theorists on Facebook for TCW to reveal identities, I’m not actually interested in blowing up my life and will be doing no such thing you absolute nutters. But we do need to differentiate between authors, so for that reason I will now be known here by a name of several lifetimes ago: Buddy. So in the future when you see Buddy in the byline you’ll know it’s me, the original TCW author. And if you would like to contribute to all the watchdogging we’ll be doing here, please send an email to talencouncilwatch@gmail.com

The Gasp-Inducing Vote at the Very Special Meeting

The City of Talent invites community members to attend an Open House to learn more about the Gateway projects, including the proposed business incubator and larger site redevelopment. This is a great opportunity to hear about the vision for the Gateway site, ask questions, and provide input on these important development efforts.

When: January 21, 2026
Time: 4:00PM - 5:30PM
Where: Talent City Hall, 110 E Main St, Talent, OR 97540

Handouts and related documents and reports can be found here

Well good for them. Great idea. Hope they get a huge turnout. Hope it genuinely helps them decide which Developer to go with. Should have happened before almost 1.75 million dollars was sent TBA’s way.

We’ll get back to this Open House at the end of the article. For now let’s go back to the reason this is taking place, which is the November 5th, 2025 Very Special Meeting of Talent Urban Renewal Agency (TURA). This was called for the purpose of voting on whether to spend the last $500,000 of the City’s urban renewal funds to build a “business incubator” on the very visible corner of Valley View and Hwy 99, a piece of land fittingly called the Gateway.

Watch the whole meeting on YouTube here.

If you haven’t read much about the Gateway project yet, you should start with a TCW Report from back in June 2025. It will give you some context that is missing from this article.

The Very Special Meeting was also to vote on exactly who would constitute the Advisory group that would recommend a developer to build the Gateway out with infrastructure and residential and commercial structures. (SPOILER: Three TURA members, including the Mayor/Director of TBA, decided not to allow non-Council members on to the Advisory group and ultimately picked themselves to be responsible for recommending a Gateway property developer… to themselves).

At that meeting a solo brave member of the TURA/Council, first-year councilor Rosario Medina, dissented from the majority opinion, breaking a long-held record of every Talent government body voting to give the Mayor’s nonprofit whatever it asks for.

That’s right, a Talent City Council member attempting to represent the voices of their constituents, and backing it up with an actual dissenting vote! Once in a while we’ll hear one of them give a halfhearted nod to some percolating public sentiment, but rarely does it ever result in a dissenting vote. Usually it’s a token, un-actionable acknowledgment and weak call to keep something in mind as they vote with the majority. Medina’s gasp-inducing “No” was enough to make this meeting a Very Special one indeed.

The issue she brought up was whether the process leading to this major financial decision had sufficiently sought and considered public input, or whether more feedback was warranted. Medina, having actually listened to the concerns of many of her constituents, asked if there was a reason why the decision couldn’t be postponed until more input was collected, via a Listening Session or something similar, so that the Board could find out what the current concerns of the community are before making a big financial decision instead of after. The idea was swiftly shot down by the rest of the group.

17:43 MEDINA: I’m kind of concerned because I’m hearing from the community that they don’t feel like we’re being transparent enough, and having a listening session could, and that I would at minimum like to have some sort of plan to hear from the community. It sounds like there’s been opportunities. But also it sounds like people in our community do not understand that was the opportunity to speak out about it.

Why can’t we wait till we get all the information back? If they’re willing to push it to February 29th, or if we can at least have a listening session, so we can at least make sure people aren’t saying this is like something nefarious or anything like that, right? We’re transparent, we’re clear, this is what it is, period.

22:08 MEDINA: So hearing, hearing a lot of everything going on, I’m still concerned about people saying they have not had input and not just the people we’ve heard from today [referring to 2 letters submitted to this meeting]. I’ve heard of a couple organizations too. I would feel more comfortable if we could even just offer a listening session, just offer it before we make a decision. It’s how I personally feel. I just want to put it out there. It’s not a question, I just want to put it out there. I ran on transparency and that’s very important.

The justifications then offered by members in this meeting for keeping the public out of this $500k decision were mostly about how heavily involved the public has been up until now and will get to be in the future, and that Council already knows how much we all want and need an incubator.

Member Daniel Collay worried about what the public would want to add their input about.

22:53 COLLAY: My question with that listening session would be what are people weighing in on? And are we, you know, re-talking about the multiple public information sessions and studies that we've done about Gateway as a whole? Are we just specifically talking about the TURA part of the allocation for the business incubator? Are we also talking about the PIER part of it? I'm all for hearing both from people and I just fear for leaving it open-ended and, you know, reopening the whole thing when we're basically like going down the road on the Gateway project as a whole.

Member Ponomareff explained that the City has involved the public so much already and what they were told by the public - what the public is “begging for” she said - is an incubator, which she thinks those who had been paying attention would know already.

24:36 PONOMAREFF: I think that anybody new coming in who hasn’t, you know, been, I don’t want to say paying attention, but hasn’t been involved in these events, public facing events, might think that we haven’t been transparent about this. But I think we have been transparent. We have done tons of outreach. I remember a particular one where we played with Legos on table tops, and that was really fun. But I don’t want to, uh, it feels like we’re at a point right now where we’re trying to tell OHCS we are serious about some doing some meaningful commercial things that our community has been begging for for years, and business incubation has been a desire of Talent documented for many years. Now, the Feasibility [study] may speak to what kind of business incubation would be best, and that’s fine. But we’re not there yet. I feel like right now we’re here to say yes, we are serious. This is a good use of our money. And here’s what we’re going to, we’re going to contribute to that. To the point about, uh, I’m getting the public more involved. I think yeah, we should. I think we should let them know here are our plans and get some input along the way, but I don’t think there’s any reason to stop the progress that we would have made a couple of weeks ago if we had had quorum, but we didn’t.

Mayor Ayers-Flood presented a People’s History of the Gateway Incubator, telling us about the tremendous amount of public input that has shaped the vision she hopes will soon be implemented. She cited 4 reports that, all based on extensive public input, she claimed, recommended Talent build this incubator. These reports, she said, are “recognizing that business incubation is a powerful tool” and that an incubator in Talent is “called for often, it’s called for before and after the fire, and it’s called for very specifically.”

Note: Her claims could not be verified as those cited reports were not made available to the public at that time nor for 2+ months after this meeting.

The Mayor explained that there will be plenty of opportunities for public input later, i.e. after this vote that allocates $500,000 of that public’s money to building her incubator is already in the bag thank you very much.

Member Byers managed to squeeze an actual truth nugget in there before the buzzer:

38:07 BYERS: It is such an unfortunate situation that we as the larger Southern Oregon community are in, but there’s limited news coverage of anything. And folks are having to be their own journalists. {TCW waves back. Hey girl!}

And I think we, as a City, especially with something that’s a big decision and has one that has quite a complex back story, I think that the onus is on us to provide our residents with some additional tools to be able to do some information sifting for themselves.

This is of course true, but it's also one of those un-actionable nods I was referring to earlier. Byers is especially adept at the nod.

So the motion passed and $500k will indeed be directed toward building a business incubator on the Gateway property, but a stand has been taken. Medina objected with her vote, and that changed the way the City subsequently dealt with the question of further public input on this project. It’s something.

Is it too little too late? Yes. For sure. Are the City’s efforts a little weak and performative? Perhaps. Will this Open House change the City’s or TBA’s plans in any meaningful way? Highly doubtful. Welcome to what we’ll be discussing today.

The Narrative Misdirection

Prior to scheduling the Gateway Open House, City staff followed the Nov 5, 2025 meeting up with publishing a timeline in Talent News & Review without any context and probably confusing the hell out of people who haven’t been keeping up with the meetings.

Note: Zero of the documents referenced in the timeline are actually available at cityoftalent.org/urban as stated. Nor do most of the links work on this page. But for however long this page stays up you can download several of the reports.

The purpose of publishing this standalone timeline was not to engage with public concerns, but to tell residents we are mistaken and that our concerns don’t need to be addressed. “Look at all the meetings we held where you could have said something. Look at these isolated quotes from old reports that use the word “incubator.” See? We’ve already done more than enough.” That’s the unmistakable message being conveyed.

This comes off as not only dismissive and arrogant but also as a distraction from the far more serious issues at the center of this project. Even if the City could credibly argue that it has met the bare minimum requirements for legal transparency, that completely sidesteps the issues that actually matter to most of us out here, the biggest of which is the inherent conflicts created by Talent Business Alliance’s involvement in City government at every stage of this process.

Were meetings held? Do reports exist? Those are procedural questions with defensible answers. They are not the substance of the public’s concern. This is all misdirection.

Here are some real questions: Who will stand to personally benefit from the City’s plans to develop the Gateway? What decisions about this project have been genuinely shaped by public input and what was decided on behind closed doors? Who exactly is making these decisions? Is TBA’s continuing involvement in decision-making about the Gateway ethical and appropriate, considering all the overlap?

When they narrow “transparency” down to a checklist of meetings and documents, they’re trying to create an appearance of accountability without engaging the significant ethical concerns raised by TBA’s direct participation in City decisions.

And also? Citing six and eight-year-old report language casually referencing incubators does not remotely establish what Talent residents feel like Talent needs in 2026. Things have changed. A lot. They know this.

The January 21st Gateway Open House is being held after the big decisions have already been made. Again, yay for them for setting it up in response to the backlash and inviting people to say their piece, but given the timing and Council meeting discourse around public involvement, it seems very unlikely to change much about the direction this project is headed, which is the Mayor running her own publicly-funded multi-million dollar incubator and revenue-generating food business compound.

Let’s go back to the November 5th meeting for one more nug. Medina ended her contribution with this statement right before the gasp-inducing vote:

36:43 I think anything that can help businesses and our residents of Talent to create a business, especially because it’s really hard to start one up, is great. I just really wish we had time to address some concerns and to clear up doubts about this, like how it’s coming about and TBA involvement or not involvement.

In the meeting in which she dropped that little grenade, no one dared pick it up for discussion. TCW is picking it up right now. Let’s go.

Hey That Deck is Stacked!

A few months ago, a local resident publicly challenged the Mayor on the ethics of the role overlap between TBA and the City.

The Mayor did not treat this as an opportunity to meaningfully address concerns. Instead she denied any criminal wrongdoing and invited critics to contact the Oregon Government Ethics Commission if they thought they could prove a violation.

Her response is instructive. It reflects a mindset that runs through much of Talent City Council and shows up repeatedly in their comments and decisions. Ethical concerns like this are treated as relevant only if a single, discrete act can be proven to be a violation and subject to punishment by OGEC. If not, the complaint is dismissed a personal attack, partisan sabotage, bad faith, or ignorance.

The Mayor’s “fact-based” framing in that comment makes it sound like the facts only matter if they are looked at one at a time. It doesn’t leave room for situations where individual facts may appear mostly benign but collectively describe something deeply concerning to a lot of people. Misused power doesn’t often reveal itself through only a single illegal act. It shows up through patterns, accumulation, consistency.

What do we call it when no one fact is disqualifying on its own, but a hundred of them align in the same direction? When political access and successful outcomes repeatedly converge around the same person, the same organization? Those teamed-up facts start telling a story about how the system actually works that isn’t quite so benign.

From even before day one, TBA has had the inside track on the Gateway. At every stage of the proposed project, TBA has been given everything it needed from the City - including unfettered access to information and a whole lot of money - to turn the incubator hub from a lofty vision into an earth-toned building.

Of course it makes a lot of sense that with the TBA Director sitting at the head of every single table, public or private, the process would favor TBA. Still, it’s remarkable how whenever a decision is placed in the hands of Talent City Council or its TURA doppelganger, it consistently tilts TBA’s way.

I say that’s not a coincidence. Or luck. Or good proposal writing. I think it’s what happens when the person presiding over the City is also running the nonprofit that needs the City’s business.

To understand how our decision-making structure became so distorted, it feels necessary to look at the scope of authority vested in the Mayor and how that authority operates in Talent. We have a model in Talent that makes informal influence and agenda control particularly powerful, and that makes us relatively powerless to stop it.

It’s worth mentioning that the Mayor’s formal powers are relatively limited under the City Charter. Talent operates under a weak mayor–strong council model where the role of Mayor is intended to be largely ceremonial and duties are mostly around facilitating meetings, breaking tie votes, and serving as the City’s spokesperson. In practice, this particular Mayor has expanded the role’s influence well beyond those bounds.

Taken together, the following conditions describe the decision-making environment in Talent and help explain how TBA has acquired persistent and substantial insider advantage that it has today.

How the Deck is Stacked:

1. The Mayor serves as Chair of both City Council and TURA, presiding over meetings, controlling the flow of discussion, and casting tie- breaking votes. Every major decision affecting Talent is made in her presence and under her authority. As presiding officer, she frames how issues are described, which questions are treated as reasonable, and which concerns are dismissed as distractions. The Mayor dominates deliberations by proposing ideas, framing issues, and steering discussion. Her perspective is present in every stage of City decision-making, even when she does not formally vote.
   

2. The Mayor presides over executive sessions, including closed door discussions about staffing, hiring, personnel matters, and legal strategy. Even conversations shielded from public view take place under her direction.
   

3. The Mayor appoints all members of City Commissions and Committees and conducts the initial interviews. As a result, almost every group that delivers recommendations or reports for Council is composed entirely of individuals she has selected. She also presides over meetings in which Advisory Board members are selected if they are not appointed by her directly. Sometimes she appoints herself.
   

4. The Mayor is involved at the earliest stages of idea formation, long before projects are formalized. This allows her nonprofit affiliation to align itself with and even suggest emerging priorities before alternatives even exist.
   

5. The Mayor helps shape the scope and language of RFPs/RFIs to determine how City funds are spent and which organizations are even eligible to compete for City contracts.
   

6. The Mayor has access to all RFP/RFI submissions received by the City as they come in, including letters and applications submitted by her own nonprofit’s competitors.
   

7. The Mayor has immediate access to every report, study, and analysis commissioned by the City. She can obtain information as needed by directing City staff to get it for her.
   

8. The Mayor meets personally with consultants, community leaders, grant administrators, and authors of reports and studies, often in informal settings, positioning herself as the City’s representative while also leading a potential beneficiary organization.
   

9. The Mayor routinely signals in meetings how she would vote in the event of a tie, telegraphing her preferred outcome in advance. This shifts her power from merely breaking ties to openly influencing how others vote.
   

10. The Mayor has the authority to decide whether or not to recuse herself from the discussion, abstain from voting, or remove herself from the dais in matters where there may be conflicts of interest. Recusal/removal is voluntary and operates on more of an honor system than an enforceable standard.

As you can see, that’s more than a few isolated privileges. We’re talking about an entire system of overlapping authority, information access, agenda control, and personal influence that consistently advantages one organization over all others.

Fun thought experiment!

Replace the word “Mayor” in each of the above with “TBA Director” Because that’s exactly the situation Talent is in right now.

Seriously, does that sound like a legitimate structure from which to make major decisions with far-reaching consequences for the City, the TBA, and all the people who live here?

The line between a public entity and a nonprofit matters because it defines who is actually accountable to the public, who controls the money, and whose interests are prioritized. But what we have in Talent is a system that completely depends on the personal integrity of one individual, rather than on a structural separation of powers, in order to maintain that line.

Collectively, we have way too much riding on that one person being able to keep their roles from blurring into one another. It is simply not a trustworthy system.

Take the Gateway, For Example

The Gateway process shows what those 10 deck-stacking conditions look like when real decisions are being made. What follows is far from an exhaustive accounting of every instance where overlapping authority mattered, it’s a focused case study of how the Mayor’s dual role influenced key moments in the Gateway project. These examples are meant to illuminate the broader structural dynamics discussed in the above section, not catalogue them in full.

To bring the timeline current, the Request for Information (RFI) for the Lead Operator of the Gateway Incubator closed on January 20, 2026. Only two letters of interest were submitted: one from the TBA, and one from a Texas based firm proposing a technology incubator. The other firm was not invited to submit a full proposal, apparently ending its participation in the process. As far as I can tell based on publicly available information, TBA is the only organization expected to submit a full proposal to the City by the February 7th 2026 deadline.

TBA’s Letter
Runway’s Letter

To understand how the Gateway Hub became the chosen project, it helps to look at where the idea originated and how it evolved. This is a story about how a rejected proposal was repositioned as a public necessity, and the friends it met along the way.

TBA Somehow Makes Gateway Hub Inevitable

TBA Board Treasurer Awna Zegzdryn first presented the Gateway Hub to a joint Council/TURA on April 16th, 2025. But a very similar project had originally been introduced in an earlier phase of PIER (Planning, Infrastructure and Economic Revitalization) grant funding process when, in 2023, Zegzdryn and Mayor Ayers-Flood applied for $7.27 million to buy land on Hwy 99 and build a food-centric business incubator called Rogue Food Hub. Their request constituted more than half of the total allotment of 13.85 million designated for fire recovery aid in all of Jackson County. This was in addition to the Talent Business Alliance also applying for 3.45 million for business support, 60% of which would have been for overhead/salaries.

At the close of that phase of grant selection in Winter 2023/24, neither the Rogue Food Hub nor TBA was chosen to receive PIER funding. Or rather, not in any straightforward kind of way.

The City of Talent, however, was awarded 4.6 million of that PIER money to develop the Gateway property. This was called the West Valley View Plan Upgrade & Revitalization and here is an outline of that plan.

At this point TBA board members and Rogue Food Hub would-be founders, Zegzdryn and Ayers-Flood, switched up their strategy. Instead of trying to pitch their commercial kitchen hub to another funder, they lightly reheated the concept, renamed it, and absorbed it into the TBA. They then presented it to Council/TURA as the solution to problems most of us in Talent didn’t even know we had!

The goal of their April 16th, 2025 presentation seems to have been to get a cut of that PIER grant money by explaining to Council/TURA members that the City’s commercial development of the Gateway site - if that included the TBA’s Hub - would satisfy the public benefit requirements of the grant it had just received.

(A public benefit is basically the community’s return on investment when public funds such as the PIER grant subsidize what is otherwise a private development. It ensures that public money creates real value for residents, not just opportunities for developer profit).

But the pitch to Council/TURA went beyond simply meeting a requirement. The structure TBA was encouraging them to adopt would let the City, even at that early stage, frame Talent’s need in a way that guaranteed TBA’s incubator would appear to be the perfect and perhaps only solution. The message was: It’s not just any community-serving public benefit feature, it’s a food-centric business incubator! Exactly what the people of Talent have been begging for all these years!

TBA caught a lucky break in June when the Wagner St. extension piece of the project fell through - details on all that here - and the City suddenly had $1.25 million to spend on something else for the Gateway. Naturally TBA, with a big assist from Campbell, jumped on that opportunity, easily convincing TURA to rehome all that liberated money over to building TBA’s hub.

The City wouldn’t even have to bother with manipulating the developer procurement process to ensure an incubator would be built like they had discussed, it could just reroute its own grant money to build the thing directly.

Campbell had to run this past PIER Advisory though, since a business incubator was not what the grant was supposed to fund, and the same group had in fact rejected the Rogue Food Hub proposal when it was presented by the same people the previous year, without the City backing it.

On July 2, 2025 Campbell sent a letter to PIER to start the process of requesting changes, then presented his proposal to the PIER Committee on July 31, 2025. The Proposed Activity he presented in that meeting was word-for-word TBA’s proposal for their Gateway Hub food-centric business incubator. The materials he presented included TBA’s claim that the need for a business incubator in Talent was identified through its own “ongoing community engagement, surveys, and public presentations.”

To summarize: City Manager Campbell convinced Council/TURA that re-routing 1.25 million from the road extension to TBA’s Hub was a solid plan and would help TBA be able to get enough funding for its full construction, then he went to PIER for approval to do that. He used TBA’s presentation content as the concept that would be implemented and he cited unspecified work that TBA claimed was how they know that a food business incubator is what the people want.

They were sold. PIER recommended the funding redirect and once its parent agency OHCS had a chance to review and discuss, it decided that the City of Talent needed to further secure its commitment to the Gateway Hub project. But the City’s allocation of $375k plus more later - when the property sells - was an insufficient commitment. Campbell then proposed to TURA in a subsequent meeting that they push all of their remaining $500,000 into the Gateway Hub construction in order to prove to PIER that the City is serious about this thing. This action is what would make PIER funds fully available for building the entire Gateway Hub.

The resulting meeting and gasp vote on November 5th is what started this article off. TURA voted to fund a portion of Gateway Hub construction with its remaining savings in that meeting. The meeting where no one recused themselves despite 3 of them being paid by the beneficiary of the decision, and then they voted to give the the last of TURA’s money to start building the Hub that TBA wanted to build.

It’s important to remember that the Mayor didn’t have to vote one single time in that entire sequence for all of it to tilt in TBA’s favor. Recusals would likely not have even affected the outcome, not with the dynamics we’ve got going on here!

We can even connect this early stage involvement from TBA right back to the present - the other application for the Lead Operator (TBA’s supposed competition in the selection process). Here is the City Manager’s Agenda Report for the January 7th 2026 City Council meeting.

“Their existing operations do not demonstrate a history of providing the types of services that would match Talent’s needs and the CDBG requirement to generate low and moderate income jobs”

Remember, “match Talent’s needs”as they were defined by TBA when they presented their proposal for an incubator!

And that is how this kind of insider access actually plays out. Not a “fact-based” OGEC fine, but a hundred seemingly inconsequential statements in Staff Reports just like this, which, when all put together, point to one enormous elephant in the room that no one wants to admit to being able to see.

What if all the reports and the surveys about business and entrepreneurship that mentioned “tech” in Talent were highlighted in the City’s reports and timelines instead of “food,” and that was used to argue for the development of a technology hub? What if this other company had the City give them money to conduct a study on if their tech incubator model would work in Talent?

The profoundly influential relationship between the City and TBA matters. A lot. It’s not something that can be dismissively waved away any longer.

The $30,000 Feasibility Study

In July 2025, TBA was given $10k of City money to work with a firm called Marketek to produce a Gateway Hub Market Feasibility Study. This would “flesh out the operations finances of the Gateway Hub.” The other $20k portion of the fee was funded by a grant to TBA from the Ford Foundation.

(The purpose of a feasibility study in this scenario is to provide legitimacy to a plan, show that the project is in fact viable and won’t be a waste of money, and demonstrate that it is supported in the community, among other things)

The project that Marketek determined the feasibility of was a food-centric hub and incubator. Not just any business incubator, but specifically TBA’s vision for the food business incubator hub that it wants to build at the Gateway site.

TBA was Marketek’s client, not the City of Talent. The study was designed entirely around TBA’s model and resources. In fact, one of Marketek’s stated values for the study was a “commitment to build TBA’s capacity to succeed while scaling project work to your capabilities”

So then, TBA got a free-and-clear $30k, 10k of it from us, to spend on a study that will instruct them on how to successfully implement the incubator project they’ve been trying to get going for years now.

Imagine if the other applicant for the Lead Operator role had gotten a grant from the City to conduct a study on how they could make their exact tech incubator vision work for Talent - before they even officially applied for the job. That’s the kind of competitive advantage we’re taking about, times 100.

FYI, this is how the City is describing that study in their hand out packet for the Open House on Wednesday:

TURA and the Ford Family Foundation have funded a study that will be available soon to help answer the feasibility question by looking at the local market for business incubator services and developing a model operational budget for the incubator.

Seems like it’s missing a few relevant facts.

The Wacky World of Predetermined Procurement

With the deck stacked the way it is, contractor procurement often doesn’t function as a tool for selection. It’s more as a tool for protection. The City’s approach to selecting a Gateway Hub Lead Operator shows how processes are used not to discover the best option to perform work, but to manage scrutiny given the outcome is already assumed.

After his presentation to the PIER group asking to re-route the Wagner Cr. extension money to build the incubator Hub, OHCS asked Alex Campbell about the City’s Lead Operator selection process. Since there wasn’t one, because they were always just gonna give it to TBA, Campbell’s response in his 10/1/25 Staff Report was to ask TURA if they shouldn’t maybe do one of those informal type procurements to help divert scrutiny and accountability.

One of the items in the request for information was to “explain the selection process for the non-profit partner.” Depending on the legal structure of the business incubator, it is very possible that the city could simply select a partner organization as this is not technically a procurement. However, using a public process similar to a procurement, to invite interested organizations to apply to take on that role, could be a good step to assuage current and possible future concerns from the public or regulators.

Staff suggests, given the number of details that are not yet finalized, a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for possible operators is probably the most appropriate method. The announcement could be fairly brief and request a brief response. The City could request a response that includes simply a statement of the respondent’s vision for a business incubator and a description of the organization. If multiple, credible organizations respond, staff suggest an interview process to select a single organization to move forward with negotiations.

Classic Alex Campbell move right there!

He did the same thing with City Council Member Ana Byers being given the City’s contract to run the 2025 Harvest Festival.

“Although the size of the contract was small enough (under 25k) to allow a direct award, the City did attempt to generate multiple bids - but through an informal process.”

-Alex Campbell in an email to Talent Council Watch, June 13, 2025

In other words, “We’re not required to allow anyone to apply for this other than exactly who we know we’ll give it to, but we should go through the motions to make it look like it was nominally competitive just so no one can say it wasn’t.” - Not a direct quote.

Let’s refer to this process as Predetermined Procurement. It’s essentially a reputational management exercise and it is 100% guaranteed to come up again in the TCW Report. And again, and again.

I suspect Campbell relies on this tactic because it creates a convenient paper trail for when closed door dealings with the City are questioned down the road. It’s a technical defense masquerading as transparency and open competition. In this particular scenario, the City gets to claim it invited competition even when it didn’t have to! so that concerns around insider contracting and perceived conflicts of interest can be dismissed, and TBA gets the funding and influence it’s been building toward all along with a massive advantage over any possible competition that might submit a Letter of Interest. Win-Win!

The 6-Minute Vote

That same October 1st meeting is also revealing because it shows us what the distorted decision-making environment looks like in practice. When the same person presides over Council, chairs TURA, appoints advisory bodies and committees, helps design the project itself, and leads the organization positioned to benefit, the real deliberations are obviously happening long before any public meeting begins. By the time the vote occurs sometimes there’s nothing left to discuss. Sometimes they give up on even pretending.

At the October 1st, 2025 Council meeting (video here, discussion starts at 1:29) City Council agrees to release the proposed Request for Interest (RFI) that invites brief responses from nonprofit applicants to describe their vision for TBA’s already very well-envisioned Hub. There were a few comments about how great it is that they’re being so transparent with their pseudo procurement process and then they passed a motion to open up the competition to other Lead Operators, instead of just straight up handing the contract to TBA.

Miraculously, the entire discussion and vote on whether to open the Lead Operator role to other nonprofits, a major shift after months of positioning TBA as the presumed, obvious, only operator, takes less than 6 minutes.

If ever there were a flashing neon sign that Pre-Meeting Deliberations happen, this was that sign. Are we really supposed to believe this idea was introduced for the very first time in this meeting, as Open Meetings Law intends? (And is what decision transparency actually means). And that a council which has spent most of the last year implicitly treating TBA as the inevitable Hub Operator would suddenly entertain an open procurement process in a Council meeting without a single question, concern, or hesitation?

Imagine how long this conversation would have gone on if it were an actual deliberation! The Mayor would have meticulously walked us through every possible scenario in which someone other than TBA might be selected to run her program and what the problems with that would be. Councilor Ponomareff, the Mayor’s most loyal wingperson, would have gone on too long with her steady stream of TBA praise and a couple of digs at unnamed enemies not in the room. Imagine the actual probing, the doubts, the clarifications, the ridiculous questions, and the sheer quantity of “uhs” that would have filled up a genuine discussion about this agenda item.

Based on historical data, we estimate a true Talent Council deliberation on this topic would have taken at least 6.5 hours and the vote would have ultimately been postponed until staff could conduct more research about something.

Instead: 6 minutes. No questions. No counter arguments. No repeating themselves. Just a quick and clean unanimous vote.

In fact, it seems like at least a few members of this group had to have talked about this at length before this meeting because they also had obviously already come up with the idea to take advantage of the pretend Lead Operator procurement in order to recruit some groups for TBA to subcontract out to, saving TBA an inevitable step down the road.

Again, something that would have normally been painfully long discussion instead got just a couple of quick affirmations.

1:30:09 PONOMAREFF: I think there’s clearly a candidate that you know of, an organization that has been championing this from the start, but I also think that opening it up a little bit helps spread the idea and it also might identify other organizations that could contribute in some way in the future. Perhaps partnering in kind of a modular supportive role of that as well. So I see no harm in this and I think it’ll show a lot of transparency and I think it’s a good idea.

Remember, this was supposed to have been the first time the group was ever meeting on the question of procuring a Lead Operator of the Gateway Hub. It’s a significant change from the path they had been on - they hadn’t up to this point even agreed that there was going to be an actual “selection process” - yet it only takes 6 minutes for everyone to agree on this new strategy?

Whether or not this can be proven or if it technically constitutes pre-meeting deliberation under Oregon law fully misses the point. The speed and unanimity of what should have been a controversial vote reveal quite clearly that the outcome was already a settled matter. Public process in this case is functioning as confirmation, not consideration, and this is certainly not the first time we’ve seen it. The appearance of open deliberation seems to have replaced the practice of it, at least when it comes to the TBA.

Can TBA really run this thing?

Even setting aside all the structural advantages and process concerns, there is a more basic, more uncomfortable question that has gone largely undiscussed since the incubator was first presented.

Is the Talent Business Alliance actually qualified to run the Gateway Hub?

As described in TBA materials, the Hub sounds like a regulated facility, a retail operation, a workforce development program, and a business incubator all at once.

We did some research and found that what the proposed Incubator Hub requires would include the following:

• Operating a licensed shared commercial kitchen

• Managing food safety and regulatory compliance

• Running a staffed retail marketplace

• Operating a physical campus day-to-day

• Administering multiple revenue streams

• Delivering structured business incubation and mentorship

• Providing workforce certifications and training

• Managing youth programming and the liability associated with that

• Handling complex finances, contracts, and reporting

• Ensuring extensive and strict grant requirements are met*

*Reminder that if certain requirements are not met by the Lead Operator, the City will have to pay back that 1.25 million dollar grant.

Also reminder that TBA still has to raise another 1 million in order to get the appliances and equipment needed for the incubator.

Now let’s look at the activities that TBA is proud to have accomplished in 2025, as per their full page ad in the December 2025 Talent News & Review:

• Organized monthly business mixers

• Partnered with a marketplace planner to put on 4 local vendor markets

• Supported a quarterly Art Walk

• Held workshops about small business

• Provided technical support and marketing assistance to small businesses

• Managed the RARE student who completed the tourism Strategic Plan

• Held talks about art and culture

• Presented the Gateway Hub incubator idea to the community

TBA’s work to date has been event-based, advisory, and promotional. The skills required to put on mixers and markets are not the same skills required to operate a licensed commercial kitchen, retail space, and workforce training program. That is complex operations management.

If the Gateway Hub is going to absorb millions of dollars and is supposed to have a major role in Talent’s economic future, the organization entrusted with it should be evaluated on its capacity, experience, and track record, in addition to its vision for and place in the community.

Why are they not talking about this? Is it because the Director of TBA is facilitating every single public meeting that occurs on the topic and could get uncomfortably combative if anyone were to raise a question about TBA’s qualifications in her presence?

There are power dynamics at play here! Capacity should be something an organization demonstrates before they are entrusted with a public project of this cost and magnitude, not something they promise to build afterward, and that expectation shouldn’t be compromised because of power dynamics.

None of this is to say that TBA is bound to fail. No one is claiming those folks don’t work hard! They could very well acquire at least some of the skills and skilled people needed to operate this Hub by the time it actually opens up in a few years from now. But wow, what an incredibly risky financial move for the City to take at a time when this kind of money is hard to come by for so many other vital municipal projects. Feels like putting a literal ton of eggs into one shaky untested basket.

Perhaps the imminent Feasibility Study results will disagree with that assessment though. I look forward to reading that and will post it in the comments to this post whenever it is made available.

Here’s a question I want to end this with: If a local nonprofit applicant with the same track record and experience level was being led by anyone other than the Mayor of Talent, do you think it would be a strong candidate for the Lead Operator role of a food business incubator? And if not, is that a problem?

Why This Matters

Okay okay let’s wrap this thing up so I can push the publish button before the Gateway Open House actually starts.

What Councilor Medina was pointing out in her final comment at that November 5th TURA meeting was that people are confused about TBA staff’s involvement in Gateway project decision-making given the extensive overlap between TBA and Council/TURA, among other things. There were and continue to be deep concerns in the community about the conflicts of interest inherent in this relationship that are being completely ignored by the Mayor and her Council.

And the City’s response to the calls for more transparency on the Gateway does not answer the questions people actually have about the decisions being made.

The Gateway Open House will allow the public to ask questions about this project and recent progress on it in a format that is not typically made available to us. It’s a great opportunity to make your concerns or support clear and to ask your questions, even if you have to keep it under 3 minutes.

Here are some questions I have for them, if anyone wants to represent:

1. How would you respond to residents who feel like the Mayor also being TBA Director gives TBA an ethically questionable role in determining the outcome of City decisions about your Gateway projects?

2. How will you ensure that businesses aligned with the TBA do not receive preferential treatment from the City of Talent?

3. How does the Mayor justify participating in deliberations and votes about the Gateway that benefit the nonprofit she runs and is employed by, even though they may not technically be considered conflicts of interest violations by OGEC?

4. What do you think it does to a vote when the Mayor is also the employer of Council members and whose organization stands to benefit from that decision?

5. City Council/TURA seem inclined to give TBA what it requests from them regardless of the merit or value of the request. Can you explain why this is and if it could have anything to do with the power dynamic of the Director of TBA being the Chair of both groups?

Maybe you’re thinking ok fine, there’s overlap. So what? As long as it’s all for the good of Talent what does all this even matter?

Because government entities are bound by laws that guarantee transparency, fairness, and public oversight. Private businesses and nonprofits are not. When the boundaries between the two are so deeply blurred we’re left not knowing where the line is and when it’s been crossed and not sure who to hold accountable. This raises serious questions when consequential decisions are being made about Talent’s future - are they being made by our government, or by a private organization with specific interests acting in its place?

Public power and nonprofit interests are supposed to stay on opposite sides of the line. That line exists to protect taxpayers, ensure fairness, and keep decisions about public resources in public hands. But over the past few years, the Talent Business Alliance and the City of Talent have become increasingly hard to tell apart. That isn’t an abstract governance concern, it creates real, practical problems for residents, small businesses, and the City itself.

Here are just a few not-so-great outcomes:

1. Public money becomes harder to track and harder to challenge. When City projects, grants, and priorities are routed through a nonprofit, it’s difficult for residents to tell who made a decision, under what authority, and on which budget. That makes public oversight on spending harder and thwarts accountability when something goes wrong.
   

2. Other businesses and nonprofits stop bothering to participate. When one organization consistently has early access, inside knowledge, and City backing, other potential contributors or competitors reasonably conclude the process is not worth their time. That’s fewer ideas, fewer local voices, less competition, and missed opportunities for Talent businesses that don’t have political access. We’re already seeing this happen quite a bit.
   

3. City staff time gets quietly redirected. When a Mayor-led nonprofit is treated as a de facto City partner, staff effort tends to flow in that direction. That leaves less time and capacity for other City needs residents care about, like infrastructure, housing, and basic services.
   

4. If a project run through a TBA–City partnership fails to meet requirements, under-performs, or stalls, the City is on the hook. That risk is not theoretical. It falls directly on taxpayers.
   

5. Decisions get made earlier and farther from the public. As long as ideas are developed informally and decided on before public meetings, public input will always be reactive instead of impactful and meaningful. We will keep having to respond to plans that already feel decided on, and that makes civic participation feel discouraging and pointless.
   

6. The City is becoming dependent on one organization. When a single nonprofit like TBA is positioned as the solution provider for multiple economic and cultural goals, the City loses flexibility. That kind of dependency is risky for a small city with limited resources. What happens when their funding goes away and the City no longer functions the way it did before it outsourced its services to the nonprofit?

Sorry to end on such a bummer note, but I fear that none of these problems are likely to resolve themselves. The OGEC isn’t touching this stuff. These things are built into how Talent is currently governed and who holds power at the moment. If the people of Talent want a clearer separation between public authority and private interests, the only durable way to achieve that is through the ballot envelope. Structural change will not come from complaints alone. It comes from choosing different leadership. The next real opportunity to do that is the November 2026 election. Will the Mayor run again, or will she lean into her new career as an incubationist and try to put her #2 in the driver's seat?

Until then, please share your thoughts in the comments. You can be a ‘coward’ like me and do it anonymously so that you don’t get cancelled by the Pitchfork Caucus. Or you can write your own rebuttal to this post and if it’s good we might publish it as a guest author, anonymous or otherwise. Or tell me if you hated this or if I got something wrong or if I missed something big or whatever. But just don’t try to dox TCW anymore, please. I’m a regular person in this community who happens to have a lot of thoughts about Talent leadership and an annoying, time-consuming urge to write about them here. This is not the scandal. I am not the thing you should be worried about.

Buddy
talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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TCW takes no stance on these types of development projects in general, and we’re certainly not “aligned with wealthy developers” (an accusation that’s been thrown around at people critical of City Council). We’re trying to help those who would be most affected by this lawsuit better understand what the issues are here, beyond the most obvious facts of the case. Because even the most obvious facts aren’t that obvious in this one. It’s just a hard to follow situation.

Although to be clear, we’re definitely hoping that the City of Talent will not have to pay out over 16 million dollars. That could be catastrophic for our town. But this article is meant only to educate the public on what this trial is about and why the lawsuit happened, and to connect it to patterns we’ve noticed, because an informed citizenry is our best defense against corruption and abuse of power in City government.

The Story

There is a sweet 26 acre piece of land in South Talent that has remained undeveloped all these years, albeit not for lack of trying. We’re talking about the soft rolling vista just west of Talent Ave. a few blocks south of Creel. It’s the low foothills you see from that part of Talent Ave. where the railroad tracks run alongside you and the houses are modest and sparse. It’s a stunning area of town, quintessentially Talent, stewarded by an elite group of blessed/lucky/wise landowners.

The particular land under dispute is owned by the plaintiff, one Talent View Investments LLC. (TVI), members of which (aka Tony Nieto and Eric Artner of Medford) have been trying to develop their 26 acres into a 49-lot single family home subdivision (aka Talent View Estates) since 2007. Their inability to get anywhere, they argue, is the product of Talent government officials doing whatever they could do at each step of the process to stop the subdivision from being built in that location. The alleged hows and whys of that we’ll get into, but the crux of what has resulted in this lawsuit is whether what City officials did was, in fact, within their power to do. Or not do, as this case may be.

And what they did not do was apply for a railroad crossing upgrade, a required step for this land’s development. TVI claims the City was contractually obligated to apply, the City argues it was not, and now they’re going to trial over it with 16.3 million dollars at stake.

Backing up just a bit: The original owners of the land (the Arndt Family) made a deal with the City of Talent way back in 1977 that they would grant the City a little piece of their property to build and maintain a water reservoir in exchange for a commitment from the City to enable development of the rest of the land in the future. The 1977 agreement explicitly included the Belmont railroad crossing upgrade in this provision:

In order to enable the proper development of the area, City shall at the request of Arndt or his successors support, or join in or make application for a grade crossing for an extension of Belmont Street across the Southern Pacific tracks to serve the area; provided that the cost of the construction of the grade crossing and installation of any protective devices as required by law shall be underwritten or provided by someone other than the City.

This is really the key passage being disputed. It’s the language used in this provision that will be thoroughly scrutinized and should factor big into the arguments presented at trial.

So why does the Belmont railroad crossing matter so much? A few reasons.

1. Belmont Rd. would be the only road access to the new subdivision. It would serve as its single entry/exit point, at least for a while.

2. Belmont crosses over the railroad tracks at a private crossing, but that would need to be turned into a public crossing if a residential subdivision were to be built. That mostly means additional safety elements and infrastructure. It’s a big, expensive undertaking and a permit from the Oregon Department of Transportation Railroads (ODOT Rail) is required.

3. But only the City of Talent can submit the application for the permit to ODOT Rail, it’s not something that can be done by a private landowner.

4. ODOT Rail doesn’t just hand out public crossings all willy nilly. For safety reasons it tries to limit the number of them that exist, which means it will often require the closing of at least one other public crossing in order for a new one to be granted. In this case, the crossing just south at Public Road (on Jackson County land) would be closed and an alternate road would need to be built to serve those residents who rely on that other crossing to get to their homes.

Basically, the subdivision cannot be built unless the City applies for and receives a permit from the State to upgrade a railroad crossing. The City has refused to do that.

Although - and this part is important to the City’s defense - it did actually submit a crossing upgrade application in 1994 at the behest of a previous landowners, thereby completing its contractual obligation, according to the City’s attorneys. But the upgrade work wasn’t performed and the permit eventually expired.

The City is essentially now saying ‘this is not our problem, we already did what we were obligated to do and it’s not our fault the previous owner didn’t follow through with their plans.’

The son of the Arndts, however, claims that the 1994 application was “a meaningless gesture because the City’s Planning Commission denied the subdivision of the Property,” and that regardless, the City’s responsibility to apply for the permit was intended by his parents to mean until the land was actually developed, not only until a permit was approved. Of course, if that distinction holds up in court remains to be seen; the jury could come to a different conclusion.

In 2007 the new landowner/developer attempted to start building on that land, but it wasn’t until 14 years later that they finally got past the Talent Planning Commission following a very lengthy series of denials, appeals and a big reversal. By the spring of 2021, the developer just needed that application submitted so the upgrade work could begin. The plaintiff claims they repeatedly made it clear to City staff that TVI would cover all costs associated with the crossing upgrade, and that its proposal for Talent View Estates met the standards requirements and was consistent with both the City’s Railroad District Master Plan and its Transportation System Plan. In other words, the developer did everything they were supposed to do, had checked off all the boxes and was waiting on the City to do its part. At that point, the City Manager had intended to submit the application. City planning staff had done the paperwork, completed the necessary diagnostic processes, and was just about set to send in the upgrade permit application to ODOT.

But then City officials higher up decided to use the Belmont crossing application submission as an opportunity to stop Talent View Estates from being built, according to TVI’s complaint. The Community Development Director at the time testified that she was ready to submit the permit application to ODOT, but she was instructed not to by City Manager Rooklyn (her boss) because, as she remembers being told, “we aren’t obligated to.” She confirmed that Rooklyn had recommended approval of the application the month prior, but changed course after meeting with the Mayor, City Council, and the City Attorney. In June 2022, Rooklyn let Nieto and TVI know that the City would not be moving forward with the application and would not be discussing it or negotiating with him any further.

TVI ultimately brought three claims against the City in its complaint, filed in 2023 and amended in 2025:

• Breach of Contract

• Breach of the Duty of Good Faith and Fair Dealing

• Inverse Condemnation (arguing that by blocking development, the City is effectively taking the property for public use as parkland without compensation)

The judge allowed the first two counts to move forward but dismissed the Inverse Condemnation claim, so that won’t be part of the upcoming trial.

The amount of the lawsuit is the projected profit TVI claims was lost due to the City’s refusal to apply for the crossing upgrade. It’s not clear exactly where that money would come from if the City lost this case, but we do know that individual officials cannot be held financially responsible, and we know that municipal insurance coverage doesn’t typically apply to contract disputes. If that holds true, it’s reasonable to assume Talent taxpayers will be on the hook for that $16.3 million in one way or another.

The Opposition

It’s no secret that development of that area didn’t have a ton of support in Talent in general, but among many of the folks with homes and property nearby, it was (and is) an especially unpopular proposal. Social media and public hearings have at times been loud with residents objecting to the subdivision being built in that location, owing mostly to the perceived taxpayer costs, safety risks, and the disruptions and inconveniences they believed would be created by its construction.

Not only was there an officially recognized neighborhood association founded in response to imminent development of the area, it also happened to be a neighborhood where most of the Talent Planning Commission lived when the subdivision proposal came before it.

Needless to say, Nieto and TVI had quite an uphill battle ahead of them from the get go. TVI says in its complaint that the prevailing attitude among the Planning Commission before the hearings even began was that “development of the Property should not be allowed.” The plaintiff’s complaint states:

City planning commission members owned interests in properties adjacent to the Property and strongly opposed the development of the Property in order to protect the “parklike” surroundings of their own properties. No member of the planning commission recused themselves from votes on the development of the Property.

Talent View Investments LLC v. City of Talent - First Amended Complaint (PDF)

Who knows how this will land with the jury, but the fact that most of the Commission lived right next to the subdivision property and would have been directly affected by its development, but then didn’t recuse themselves from voting on the permit, is pretty compelling. We’re reminded of another recent situation where TURA members voting on a development plan also did not recuse themselves despite personally benefiting from its approval. This is apparently something that happens kind of a lot in Talent?

The Decision Makers

Elite capture of urban development is a term used in city planning and governance studies to describe when those with power, resources, or influence take control of public decision-making processes (i.e. zoning, permit approvals, infrastructure planning) to serve their own interests instead of the broader community.

In other words, instead of planning being about the public good, elite capture is when it gets shaped by the people who already hold power: elected officials, wealthy landowners, well-connected developers, or politically influential groups.

What’s likely to be argued by the plaintiff’s attorneys in court is that in the Belmont case, the elite weren’t the developers but rather the City’s own leaders, who are being accused of bending planning decisions to shield their own neighborhoods and those of their friends. The depositions and exhibits included in trial documents show the plaintiff’s attorney trying to make the case that the close personal relationships between the Mayor, the Chair of the Planning Commission, and the Founder of the South Talent Neighborhood Association played a role in determining the outcome, aka the failure, of Talent View Estates.

It may be hard for the defense to argue that the Planning Commission Chair and Belmont area resident serving as the Matron of Honor at the Mayor’s wedding is totally irrelevant to the case. But we don’t know how effective TVI attorneys will be at convincing the jury it had a significant impact on the City’s refusal to submit the application. It's interesting either way though.

One of the Mayor’s comments on social media is included as an exhibit in the case, presumably in order to argue that she was at least partly responsible for the City Manager’s abrupt shift from recommending the permit to instructing the Community Development Director not to submit the rail upgrade application because they were “not obligated” to do so. Here’s what the Mayor said in July 2021:

“No developer can force the city to build infrastructure. No developer can build a development without the infrastructure. The stand-off is therefore between the builder and the city. No more needs to be done or should be done in my humble opinion.”

Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood comment on Nextdoor, July 2021

The context of the Mayor’s comment was her defending the actions of the Planning Commission and accusing a few vocal members of the community of trying to get others unnecessarily riled up and worried about something that wasn’t going to happen - and the reason it wouldn’t happen was because the City had the power to stop it by simply not doing anything. Which is… exactly what happened.

The question being: Was it the Mayor’s personal relationships with the people leading the opposition to the Belmont development that ultimately resulted in City staff being instructed not to submit the application? Whatever the answer is, it’s a fair question to ask given the circumstances.

The Staff

One unsettling aspect to this whole debacle is the way a few members of the City Council & Planning Commission spoke publicly about the City staff during this process. The Mayor and Planning Commission Chair Joi Riley both went on social media to make serious allegations against City employees - specifically the previous City Development Director and previous City Manager - about lying in an appeal hearing and making “backroom deals” with the landowner, a claim which Nieto’s partner denied.

“I believe the planning commission did all the right things in the face of tricky staff who literally were doing backroom deals, their legacy is well known by many and won’t soon be forgotten. Staff by the way who are no longer with the city.”

Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood comment on Nextdoor, July 2021 - Screenshot

It’s worth pointing out that much of this was happening at the peak of a particularly tense time: the chaotic and tragic second half of 2020 and Talent’s reconstruction period of 2021. Aside from everything else going on locally and across the world, in Talent we saw a dramatic rift play out in public between elected officials and City employees, inflamed by the Mayor’s ‘liking’ of a Councilor’s social media post about the police in June 2020. Remember that? Oof, it was ugly. Staff morale was low, tensions were high, accusations were made, resignations were called for, and a lot of people left or were fired from their positions as civil servants for Talent.

Based on what we can decipher from court documents and the plaintiff’s supporting evidence, a majority of the City Council and the Planning Commission were opposed to allowing the Belmont development to happen. It also looks like City staff were perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place: Trying to avoid violating the developer’s rights while doing what City leaders wanted them to do, all while they or their predecessors were being publicly accused by those same people of secrecy and deception.

Of course there’s always more to the story than what can be found out from public records, but we do know from other incidences during this rough period in Talent history that the way City staff was treated and talked about by Council and Commission members was pretty awful. The fact that they were never held accountable for that is probably deserving of a whole article of its own.

The Cost

This lawsuit may be about just one subdivision, but the story it tells isn’t new or unique. It fits into a pattern of behavior we’ve seen before in Talent government: Decisions being made behind closed doors instead of in public forums. Conflicts of interest normalized, with officials commonly voting on matters that directly affect their own property or business. City staff being undermined and scapegoated, a system of top-down mayoral rule despite our weak-mayor system, and insiders protecting their own interests as the risks of their actions get shifted to taxpayers.

The Belmont crossing case just puts all these dynamics into sharper focus because the stakes are so high. But whether the jury finds the City liable for $16.3 million or not, our community simply can’t afford to have a governing body that puts us all at risk by operating this way.

We’ll have more to share once the trial concludes. Until then, the best safeguard Talent has is you, an informed public paying attention to what’s going on at City Hall. Thank you for reading.

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View the slides from this presentation here.

This part of the Ashland.News write up on the event would be comical if it weren’t so incredibly messed up:

After listening to the presentation, Phoenix resident Roxy Ashworth said, “This is all very pretty,” but she wondered about all the lingering damage from the fire that hasn’t been addressed.

Darby Ayers-Flood, mayor of Talent and executive director of the Talent Business Alliance, formally known as the Talent Chamber of Commerce, said the ongoing study could help provide opportunities for further funding to help take on additional projects that could address those concerns.

-Damian Mann, Ashland.news, July 11, 2025

Is the Mayor really saying that the City’s ability to clean up remaining fire damage 5 years later is dependent on her own nonprofit getting funded for more tourism projects? Because that’s what it sounds like she’s saying.

Also curiously, in the March 2025 PIER grant application, TBA clearly claimed that the Plan was “nearly completed.” A document that was almost done 4 months ago is now in the preliminary phase? Weird. Not usually how that works!

Read TBA’s entire 2025 PIER application

But most curiously of all: TBA’s Destination Tourism planning is still going strong! And that’s confusing. As we reported here, the Americorps program that was supposed to pay for half of Bagnoli’s salary was DOGE’d in late April, many months before the Tourism Coordinator job was scheduled to end.

A local news story on the cuts from May 7th:

“This is not just Ashland. We have folks in the Talent Business Alliance losing an employee, the Greater Applegate is losing their Fire Resiliency Coordinator– which is such a crucial position for a small community. And there’s not going to be a corner of Oregon that doesn’t feel the loss of these people and these services,” said Embleton [an Ashland-based RARE member].

So then how is she still working on this project? Who is paying her?

Remember, the City spent $11,000 of taxpayer money for TBA to hire the RARE member in 2024, a fact that was only ever brought into public awareness because a Budget Committee member asked during a public meeting livestream what that $11k was all about and the Mayor (in the audience) immediately submitted a speaker request form so she could go up to the mic and explain it herself instead of letting the City Manager’s explanation suffice. Yes it was weird.

After the RARE program was reported to have been cut, the public never heard anything more what happened to Bagnoli’s position or the work she had been doing. We asked, nobody answered.

It does seem that the program was partially continued after the initial cut due to an injunction, but only a handful of members were kept on. We contacted RARE to find out if Bagnoli was one of them but have not yet received a response. Based on the timing we suspect she’s one of those who were counted as “hired directly by their host organizations.”

Background: The RARE AmeriCorps Program has been supported each year by a federal AmeriCorps grant. In late April of 2025, RARE staff received notice that its current AmeriCorps grant had suddenly been terminated by AmeriCorps−pausing this major source of funding for the current service year (September 2024 through July 2025). Thankfully, on June 6, 2025 a preliminary injunction was granted as part of a multi-state lawsuit and the grant termination was reversed. Given this sudden and jarring disruption in the service year, only 10 RARE members remain with the program to continue with the current (2024-25) service year (the other 21 members were either hired directly by their host organizations, or have moved on elsewhere). Since it is very uncertain whether the RARE Program will receive an AmeriCorps grant for the next service year, RARE leadership has made the difficult decision to go on pause for the next service year (2025-26)

RARE Communications Toolkit (PDF)

No mention was made by the Mayor or anyone else of the lost federal funding, the $11k in City money, the prematurely terminated intern or the status of winery bike route signs. The whole thing just kind of *poof* disappeared and everyone acted like nothing ever happened.

Until, that is, May 27th, 2025. City Manager Alex Campbell very quietly announced at the City Planning Commission Meeting that Cecelia Bagnoli had just been hired as the new City Planner for the City of Talent!

That’s quite the plot twist.

Brief Announcements from Staff
Alex Campbell introduced Cecelia Bagnoli as the new City Planner. Cecelia is currently working two days a week and will gradually transition to full-time. Cecelia will eventually serve as the secretary for Planning Commission Meetings.

Turns out TBA’s tourism intern didn’t disappear at all, she just somehow landed a way more lucrative and long term, career-defining position with the City of Talent that she does not appear to be remotely qualified for! How… interesting.

A Curious Hiring Choice

Six weeks prior to that announcement, Alex Campbell had received authorization from City Council to hire for the City Planner role, with one particularly strong mapping data candidate in mind. Importantly, Council did not authorize him to hire specifically that candidate nor Bagnoli,2 only to hire someone for the Planner position.

Bagnoli must have absolutely nailed the interview, because here is the relevant portion of her bio on the TBA website, which does not mention any sort of a city planning history:

She earned a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies and Environmental Studies from the College of Wooster. Her commitment to advocacy led her to work on various community engagement initiatives, including her role as Community Engagement and Enhancement Coordinator, where she organized local events and strengthened community connections. She also served as a Health Coach, where she facilitated public health programs to support community wellness for low-income groups.​​

In the fall of 2024, Cecelia joined the RARE (Resource Assistance for Rural Environments) AmeriCorps program and currently serves as the Tourism and Destination Coordinator with Talent Business Alliance. In this role, she collaborates directly with local businesses and community stakeholders to promote sustainable tourism and foster economic growth in Bear Creek Valley.​

Cecelia is dedicated to advocating for affordable housing, food security, and public transportation to create more equitable communities.

And here is her LinkedIn profile, which doesn’t exactly scream City Planner either.

Okay now let’s look at the City of Talent’s actual posted Job Announcement for City Planner from earlier this year, viewable in full here.

These are the minimum qualifications for the job:

• Four (4) year college degree in planning or related field.

• Three (3) years of increasingly responsible planning experience, preferably in a municipal setting.

• OR- Any satisfactory equivalent combination of education and experience which demonstrates the knowledge, skills and ability to perform the above-described duties will be considered.

This is a summary of the job from the City’s official job description:

Manages operations of the Planning Department associated with the implementation and administration of the Development Code and Zoning Ordinance and related planning rules, regulations and procedures; provides assistance to citizens by processing permit requests, assigning addresses, processing and issuing special event permits, processing sign permits and responding to questions from the general public; provides limited technical and graphic/mapping support. Supervises Code Enforcement.

The City Planner is expected to apply considerable knowledge of land use and related rules, regulations, and procedures. Thorough knowledge of office procedures in performing research and making decisions necessary to review and approve routine land development permit applications typically classified as Type I and Type II land use decisions, and gathering data for use in the review of complex land use applications is also required. Forward information concerning Type III and Type IV applications to planning and land use consultant for processing. Assist with logistics and data gathering on long range planning and code amendment projects. Provides staff support to the Planning Commission. Attends Planning Commission meetings and keeps an accurate record of all proceedings of the Planning Commission.

As you can probably gather, there’s a good reason the minimum qualifications for City Planner are a degree in planning and 3+ years of planning experience. It’s a complex, high-skill job. This isn’t a role people usually stumble into or pick up on the fly, it’s a serious profession that typically requires formal training, technical knowledge, and years of on-the-ground municipal experience.

Ms. Bagnoli seems like a thoughtful and committed person with a bright future, but based just on her background, no reasonable hiring manager would have considered her a natural fit for a City Planner position. Under normal circumstances, it’s unlikely her resumé would have made it past the initial screening, let alone landed her the job.

So then what happened in April-May 2025 to cause such a major pivot in Alex Campbell’s hiring intention? Why did he become convinced that someone with her academic background and limited professional experience, neither of which are in planning, would be an appropriate hire for this position? What did he believe she would bring to the role that would be more valuable to the City of Talent than literally any education, training or work experience in the field of planning?

We’re not done, this gets weirder still.

Judging from TBA’s July 10th presentation, there is still quite a bit more work for Bagnoli to do on the that Tourism Strategic Plan.

With more outreach in the coming months, Bagnoli said she expects to finalize the plan by the fall. The strategies going forward rest on developing three pillars: wine country biking routes, arts and cultural districts, and creating an identity and branding.

-Damian Mann, Ashland.news, July 11, 2025

In other words, she hasn’t already moved on to her new career in the planning department and was just presenting the final results of her previous internship work as a wrap-up. She was delivering preliminary results and discussing what more she will be doing on this still-very-active TBA project over the next several months.

Keep in mind:

• She is now employed by the City of Talent as a City Planner, which started in May as part-time but turned into full time.

• The funding that was paying for half of her Strategic Plan work at TBA was taken away 4 months ago.

What in the world is going on here?

If the facts we’ve laid out here are right, then there are a few possibilities. We don’t know which one is the most true, but we do know that none of them can be definitively confirmed one way or another. Under Manager Campbell, questions from the public and even official records requests to the City go unanswered. Transparency is a lower priority now than it was before he was hired, which is saying something!

In fact we probably won’t know the whole truth about this situation until someone who works in the Darby Administration writes a salty tell-all memoir. Until then, here are the most likely possibilities:

1. Bagnoli is being paid for and working two different jobs for two distinct entities (TBA and City of Talent) at the same time.

2. She has one job that she actually works for (TBA Tourism Planner) while being on-paper employed and paid by the other entity under a different title (Talent City Planner).

3. Some other convoluted and ethically questionable scenario that keeps the dual employment situation technically legal and under the radar, while minimizing the cost to TBA and maximizing the benefit.

Yikes on all of the above. Here are just a few of the ethical considerations with those three possibilities:

• If the City is funding TBA strategic development work that should be paid for by TBA, that’s a misuse of public resources to subsidize a private nonprofit. Even if no actual laws have been broken, it still looks like the Mayor is using public funds to benefit her own nonprofit, specifically for the purpose of creating a foundational fundraising document (aka a Tourism Strategic Plan), which could be perceived as a misuse of power.

• Bagnoli wrote the Plan under the Mayor’s direct supervision as a TBA employee over the last year. Now if she, as the Talent City Planner, is positioned to implement pieces of her own Plan on behalf of her former/current boss, using City authority and public money, it would be a deep blurring of the line between public interest and private agenda. It also gives the TBA a strategic advantage that no other organization gets.

• If Bagnoli is simultaneously serving both TBA and the City, that creates divided loyalties in that she may face situations where TBA’s goals conflict with what is in the public’s interest. Can she really be objective in her City Planner role if she is expected to also advance the strategies of the nonprofit that employs her?

• There has been no clear public documentation explaining Bagnoli’s roles, how or why she was hired as a City Planner, or whether she is being paid by one entity or both. The lack of transparency raises the likelihood of public deception. The City Manager, who is supposed to serve the public interest, appears to be complicit if he did indeed enable this arrangement behind closed doors.

• If Bagnoli was selected for the job primarily due to her relationship with the Mayor and TBA, that denies equal opportunity to other qualified applicants. This undermines fair hiring practices and suggests the City is prioritizing private relationships over public process.

Even if this arrangement between the Mayor and the City Manager, whatever it is, skirts around legal prohibitions, it certainly violates the spirit of Government Ethics Laws and strongly indicates that the TBA and the City are becoming functionally intertwined.

But that said, based only on publicly available information, it looks to us like several individuals in Talent government would stand to benefit professionally, politically, and financially from the employment of Ms. Bagnoli as City Planner because of the nature of her connection with TBA, and that’s why her lack of experience was overlooked.

City Council members need to recognize how bad this all looks from out here and do something to clear up misconceptions, if that’s what the issue is. Correct us please! Explain to us what’s going on. This hiring is worthy of a serious and coherent explanation from government officials, and if it can’t be easily explained then it should be added as an agenda item to the next Council meeting and subjected to open discussion for the sake of accountability and public clarity.

Here’s what we think are the most important questions to ask:

1. Was Bagnoli selected for the City Planner position over other candidates who had training and experience in planning?

2. Why was Bagnoli hired as the City Planner given that she did not meet any of the posted minimum qualifications?

3. Is Bagnoli currently being paid by the City to complete work for Talent Business Alliance, and how much of City funds have gone towards paying Bagnoli to work on TBA’s projects to date?

4. How is the City going to deal with the inherent conflicts posed by Bagnoli being employed by both the City and TBA, whether simultaneously or sequentially?

5. Can the City assure the public that neither TBA nor its Director are likely to benefit financially or professionally from the employment of Bagnoli as the City Planner?

6. Again, would Council be open to allowing the establishment of an independent citizen oversight group that could address the public’s ethical concerns in matters like this?

7. How do members of City Council respond to the growing concern that the Talent Business Alliance appears to enjoy unfettered access, influence, and opportunities that are entirely out of reach for any group or nonprofit not run by the Mayor and with which they cannot possibly compete?

Okay that last one isn’t entirely necessary for this situation, we just really want to ask them that. They have to see what's happening in front of them, right? And nobody has a problem with this?

-Talent Council Watch
talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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According to the computer, a Community Listening Session is an open public forum designed to gather genuine input from members of the community prior to widely impactful decisions being made. They are facilitated by a neutral party to ensure that all voices are welcomed, especially those that might challenge the direction of a project or policy. The goal is to create a space where residents can share their ideas, concerns, hopes, and lived experiences in a way that shapes the development of a plan or initiative. Listening sessions are held early in a process so that community input can meaningfully influence the outcome, and are meant to include people from outside the standard decision-making circle. A true Listening Session should feel welcoming to even critics and marginalized voices, not just supporters, which is why a facilitator is used to lead the discussion. Organizers also provide information about how feedback will be used and they follow up with the public to show what was heard and what actions will be taken in response.

A Community Listening Session is an act of participatory democracy rooted in transparency and a genuine desire to share power with the people affected by the decisions being made. It would be great if Talent leaders ever held anything like an actual Listening Session, but they do not. It’s definitely not whatever this is:

Ok first of all, to get this out of the way up front: the Talent Urban Renewal Agency (TURA) is just City Council. It’s literally all the same people, except the City Manager is called the “Executive Director” and the Mayor is called the “Chair.” Do we here at Talent Council Watch know why this group exists in this form? No we do not. We didn’t have time to do all the research and information sorting necessary to lay out the whole TURA backstory for this post, but there is indeed a story there that you could spend an evening or two on.

Whatever it was that brought TURA to its current formation, there is a separate monthly meeting for our City Councilors, called Members in this meeting, for when they’re discussing downtown infrastructure and development.

The issue at hand is that the PIER grant awarded to the City for 4.8 million to develop the Gateway (the lot at Valley View & Hwy 99 and the Roundabout to Nowhere) includes $1.7 million to extend Wagner Street through the Talent Irrigation District’s property to connect with the roundabout. The TID is predictably not at all interested in moving their headquarters unless the City builds them a super sweet, very expensive new facility somewhere else, and pays for the U-Haul. The City is predictably not interested in doing any of that. Stalemate. This is where revising the already awarded PIER grant comes in.

What if, City Manager Campbell asked TURA, we take the funds intended to build the Wagner Street connector (estimated at between $500k - 1 million after cost increases) and use it to start building the actual physical structure(s) of the Gateway Hub envisioned by the Talent Business Alliance (TBA) in their April presentation to TURA. This will, Campbell tried to explain, give TBA a leg up on being able to get enough funding to implement their bold vision for a front door gathering heartbeat to the future.

The main problems with this plan are that 1) it would mean the PIER grant’s advisory group would have to approve the new plan because it’s way different and more complicated than what they awarded the money for and 2) businesses operating in the Hub, including the Hub’s management entity itself (i.e. TBA), would be required to either *be* a qualified microenterprise or to create majority Low and Moderate Income (LMI) jobs. If these requirements are not met, the City would end up on the hook for re-paying that portion of the grant, even though it’s something that would be mostly out of the City’s control.

What the City could do instead of taking that risk is use the Wagner money to build more infrastructure on the property - think pathways, a central plaza, improvements to the promenade connecting Talent Ave., parking, utilities, benches. Possibly even solar panels over the parking area! (Actually a neat idea, thanks Member Collay). Installations that would benefit the community and relieve some of the cost burden of developing the property for whomever ends up building on it. Making the property more ready and usable all around and make building on it less costly could lower the barrier to development and attract a more diverse selection of potential developers. This option would not require additional reporting, restrictions, or approval. It’s the path of least resistance; no change required. The safe option.

The exciting new risky option is to build the TBA’s proposed Talent Gateway Hub structure instead because it would make it easier for TBA to secure enough additional funding to complete the whole incubator project, since these re-routed PIER funds wouldn’t cover the full cost. This is the much less safe option due to the potential repayment stipulation, but would apparently be more beneficial than infrastructure to certain stakeholders. Any other benefits to the Hub construction option, beyond it helping TBA accomplish their vision, were not fleshed-out in this discussion.

Read the TURA Staff Report from June 18th for more context.

Whether a micro-incubating heartbeat is the best use of the Gateway, or whether a majority of residents even want that, is not the point of this article, although we’re certainly curious about that. Nor is this about the question of whether the City should play it safe and sound with infrastructure or take a gamble on a TBA-friendly development project, although we do wonder if anyone other than TBA people really think trusting TBA to ensure rigorous grant requirements are met at the risk of taxpayer repayment is wise, warranted or financially prudent.

And that brings us to what troubles us the most: This is obviously a serious conflict of interest. Council is about to make a million-dollar decision that will directly and significantly benefit the personal and professional interests of several of the people making it.

The Chair of the TURA Board - aka the Mayor of Talent Darby Ayers-Flood - is also the Executive Director of the nonprofit that would operate the Gateway Hub and presumably stands to gain the most from redirecting this money. Remember from our last article, running a food-centric business incubator is her professional goal. This is about more than even a consistent paycheck for the Mayor, it’s about making her dream come true. So perhaps she’s not exactly a neutral party in this decision?

Two other TURA Board/City Council members are paid by the TBA nonprofit as well. All three of their careers seem likely to benefit more from a pro-Gateway Hub outcome than a pro-infrastructure one, and endorsing the project at this stage and rerouting funds to boost its development sure seems like it would help them secure their own roles with TBA in the years ahead.

One could argue that they aren’t deciding on who will manage the Gateway Hub right now, but simply whether the City should redirect funding to help build it for whomever does end up running it. But that hypothetical doesn’t really hold up to the reality of the situation.

City Manager Campbell stated in the TURA meeting that the Gateway Hub management model is going to be a nonprofit, one selected by this very same group of people.

“I think the working assumption of all of us is that such a building would likely be operated by a nonprofit entity that the City and the Board would select. And then that nonprofit entity would also be working with incubator customers. So we would have limited direct control.

-City Manager Alex Campbell, June 18 TURA Meeting

Given the structure of power in Talent and the unsettlingly close alignment between City Council and the Talent Business Alliance, it’s hard to imagine any other nonprofit being even considered. Anyone familiar with the political dynamics in Talent will recognize that this deck is already very much stacked. No way is anyone other than the Mayor & TBA getting this gig. It was her idea and she has an outsized role in shaping what does or does not happen in Talent.

An Abundance of Conflicts

The three individuals paid by TBA should not be anywhere near the deliberations on this issue. They are not neutral or unbiased public officials weighing a community investment, but personal stakeholders in the outcome, and their being part of the decision-making process undermines the integrity of the entire Gateway project.

And yet, none of them recused themselves from this important discussion. Why not?

It seems like every Council meeting these days starts with a declaration of a potential conflict of interest by multiple people, but then the meetings go on and the system continues to operate like it’s all business as usual. As if this is just how things work. They tell us that there’s a conflict and then do it anyway, again and again. That’s because it’s a baseline rule of OGEC to do so. They have to or they would be in violation.

Talent’s current crop of Councilors, or at least the ones with a few years in office with this Mayor, operate under a very specific understanding of what “conflict of interest” means. It's not an ethical term for them, it's a legal designation.

The definitional difference between Actual and Potential Conflict of Interest is about how certain it is that there is that a member will be affected financially in a positive or negative way by the outcome of a decision, and the real world impact of the difference is significant.

The email response the Mayor received from the Oregon Government Ethics Commission (OGEC) to her questions the day before the April meeting explains why the difference matters:

Given the definition of the term, a conflict of interest doesn’t actually arise until you are in a position to take an action or make a decision or make a recommendation in your position as Mayor that could or would have a financial impact on you or your relatives or a business with which you are associated.

If it’s a potential conflict of interest, publicly announcing the nature of the conflict of interest is all that is required. Once the conflict of interest declaration is made, the public official can proceed with taking actions, discussing or making recommendations on the issue/agenda item out of which the conflict arises. [ORS 244.120(2)(a)].

If it’s an actual conflict of interest, once the public announcement regarding the nature of the conflict is made, the public official is prohibited from participating as a public official in any discussion or debate on the issue out of which the conflict arises, or from voting on the issue. [ORS 244.120(2)(b)(A)]…

-Casey Fenstermaker, Compliance & Enforcement Coordinator at OGEC in an email to Mayor Ayers-Flood, April 15, 2025.

Read the rest of the email from OGEC

These OGEC guidelines are being treated by some of our Council like a map of loopholes rather than a baseline for ethical governance. As long as they don’t technically violate the law, they believe they're fully in the clear and seem proud of themselves for even checking first.

But OGEC rules aren’t meant to be the gold standard of behavior in office. They’re supposed to serve as the minimum threshold for avoiding formal charges.

We’ve lost count of how many times a Council member has justified their declaration by citing recent communication with OGEC. On the surface that might look like diligence, but what does it really say about them? In a government culture built on transparency and public trust, officials shouldn’t need to call the state ethics board every time they face a decision that could benefit them personally. They should already be guided by a strong internal standard where integrity and public perception matter as much as legal compliance.

Do they consult OGEC so frequently because of the oft-cited “abundance of caution?” Or is it because they operate in such a tightly controlled circle of overlapping interests that they’re constantly coming up against the line and need to make sure they won’t technically step over it? Maybe in a healthier system they wouldn’t need to ask so often, because the people in charge wouldn’t be so personally invested in the outcomes of so many of Council’s decisions.

About These Conflict Declarations

The instances in which our Councilors do decide to declare conflicts are incoherent and inconsistent. There is no predictability to it, no way for the public to know ahead of time whether they will be voting or not, even when we have all the available information. It may simply depend on factors we’re just not privy to. Perhaps which conflict to declare is more of a politically strategic decision than any kind of real ethical consideration?

For example, take the April 16, 2025 TURA/Council Study Session (YouTubeVideo here) where a civilian business owner and member of TBA first presented the TBA’s vision for the Gateway Hub. Here’s how that meeting started:

COUNCILOR PARE MILLER: So I am needing to declare an actual conflict of interest for this agenda item. I'll be recusing myself from this item which will be pretty much the entire presentation And this is because I work for the Talent Business Alliance as a paid employee. So with an actual conflict it means that I will recuse myself and not participate in discussion and not vote and I know that I may stay at the dais, but I'm going to be sitting in the audience or possibly in the next room because it's such a full house.

COUNCILOR BYERS: Yes I also have a conflict of interest because I currently have a contract with the Talent Business Alliance as an independent contractor, so this means that I cannot participate in discussion, ask questions or participate in a vote. I checked with the Oregon Ethics Commission and I am not required to step off the dais and I may or may not depending on if we have the room.

MAYOR AYERS-FLOOD: I do want to just remind everybody that this is a study session and there won't be any decisions tonight…

..So that just is also another layer to add to this I also will be declaring recusing myself. If I were to act tonight it would be an actual conflict of interest because I am an employee with Talent Business Alliance.

…It's interesting I just want to add that the Ethics Commission is a little bit of a moving target in that they add to their rules and regulations on this on a regular basis. So I too reached out just for the most recent rules and regulation and I got a very thorough explanation of conflicts and when to declare them and when the actual conflicts happen and that would be if I stayed up here and I acted on this item I would, that's at the point that the conflict would be caused. So for that reason I will be stepping down from the dais even though I don't need to. I just am not, according to the rules, to act on this item.

BYERS:… I also followed up with the Ethics Commission on this point and asking if it was any sort of conflict for me to Chair just the order of business through this study session and I was told it was not as long as I did not comment on any information that was shared today or ask any questions or contribute to the discussion.

-The TBA Crew fully recusing themselves from a presentation Study Session, April 16, 2025.

Some interesting things about these statements that jump out at us-

First, this frequency of contact with OGEC by multiple Board members supports our argument that these folks are using the agency to determine which loopholes they can cite to justify their own conflicts on a case-by-case, meeting-by-meeting basis. As opposed to, for example, just not participating when they know it’s ethically questionable out of respect for their constituents.

Second, nowhere in all those many words does anyone explain how this is an Actual conflict of interest. (It’s not). They're supposed to explain the nature of the conflict, not list off what they are supposed to do about it.

Third, the Mayor is misleading us when she says the rules are “a moving target.” They’re not. They’re relatively stable and are only changed when the Oregon Legislature amends them, which is infrequent and usually happens during regular sessions every few years (2024 was the last revision). Changes to the rules are not made as casually as she is implying. Frequent contact with OGEC is not necessary for her to be able to keep up, it’s far more likely that she’s just constantly brushing up against ethically problematic areas because she's involved in the leadership of so many overlapping local organizations.

And finally, given the fact that this was a Study Session and no vote would be held or decision made, it’s especially peculiar that all 3 of the TBA-paid Councilors fully recused themselves with Actual Conflicts of Interest.

From Talent’s own Council Rules of Procedure:

Remember OGEC’s rule that a Conflict of Interest applies only when an “Official Action” is to be taken. Isn’t that impossible in a Study Session? What are we missing?

Aside from that detail, it was an early discussion in the TBA Gateway Hub sequence of council events, still sitting in the theoretical phase, that was guaranteed to not end in a decisive vote and no money was directly at stake. This was before staff had even informed Council that the Wagner St. extension was off the table and that extra ~million dollars was in need of a new way to get spent.

Read the TURA Staff Report for the April Study Session for more information.

So then why did they consider their TBA connection an Actual Conflict of Interest for the April Study Session, but the June meeting - one in which a highly consequential vote was possible concerning directing a lot of money to the development of TBA’s project - got a quick and dismissive Potential Conflict without any recusals?

This was the Mayor’s conflict statement at the June 18th TURA meeting:

At this time, I'd like to declare a potential conflict of interest. I'm employed by the Talent Business Alliance and Talent Business Alliance may in the near future present a proposal to the Urban Renewal Agency regarding the Gateway Hub.

-Talent Mayor & TURA Board Chair Ayers-Flood at the TURA meeting June 18, 2025, before advocating in favor of redirecting the City’s funds to the project her organization may at some point present a proposal on, maybe.

And then there’s Councilor Paré-Miller’s distant shrug of a conflict:

Yes, I am also an employee of the Talent Business Alliance, so I am declaring a potential conflict. And like the Chair said, that is just because Talent Business Alliance is the organization who originally presented this Gateway Hub concept to this board.

-TURA Board and City Council Member Paré-Miller, TURA meeting June 18, 2025, before agreeing with everything the Chair/Mayor - her boss at TBA - had already said on the topic.

These both look to us like strategic understatements that frame direct, serious, consequential conflicts of interest as some hypothetical future possibility based on a loose connection. We think that disclosing these conflicts in this way minimized a valid public concern and was a disingenuous attempt to downplay the financial ties already well established.

But beyond the cringey performative element, it also makes no sense why for this meeting their positions at TBA were considered only a Potential Conflict while the previous meeting they were all Actual. Could it be that they get together and decide beforehand what kind of conflict they will declare for the meeting in order to maximize their impact on the important decisions, avoid violations and appear ethically diligent, all at the same time?

In other words, are they declaring Actual conflicts when it’s convenient to do so because nothing meaningful is on the line and it makes them look good to sit it out? But then when the stakes are high and their personal interests are actually impacted, the Actual gets inexplicably downgraded to Potential so that they get to stay in the room to debate and vote? If so, they’re doing it all backwards; the exact opposite way as what political leaders with a strong moral compass would do. But hey at least no laws are being broken, right?

But that’s all speculation on our part about what may be happening behind closed doors. It’s also possible that they’re just really, really confused.

Beyond Compliance

Earlier this month we at TCW were informed that Ana Byers Consulting was awarded the City contract to manage the 2025 Harvest Festival. Yeah. Same Ana Byers from City Council and TURA. Same Ana Byers who TBA hired to manage last year's Harvest Festival with the City’s money. Given the obvious ethical concerns with this, we decided to reach out to Councilor Byers to see what she had to say about it. Here is the exchange:

Hello Councilor Byers,

In the interest of transparency and accountability, we believe it is important for our community to understand the justification for awarding this contract to a sitting member of the City Council. As you are no doubt aware, such arrangements deviate from standard municipal contracting practices.

1. What was the process by which your company was selected by the City to coordinate the event? Were you aware of any competitive bidding process or opportunity for any other qualified vendors to apply? If not, why was the public not informed and invited to apply? Especially given that there was enough planning time this year to bring more interested vendors to the table, unlike in 2024.

2. Was there any public notice, agenda item, or meeting discussion where this contract was presented or discussed?

3. Are you concerned about the appearance of an actual conflict of interest, or misuse of public office in this case, even if the arrangement is technically legal?

4. How do you respond to concerns that the lack of both public awareness and competition for this contract indicates normalized insider access to City funds?

5. What steps, if any, do you believe the City should take in the future to prevent preferential treatment toward elected officials or their affiliated businesses?

We appreciate your time in addressing these questions. As a nonpartisan civic integrity group, our goal is to ensure that all city decisions (especially those involving public funds going to elected officials!) are made in a manner that upholds transparency and accountability standards.

-Talent Council Watch, email to Councilor Byers June 12, 2025

Her response:

Hello,

I encourage you to approach the City Manager with your questions about the procurement process for independent contractor services, including those of the Talent Harvest Festival coordinator.

As for myself, prior to responding to the RFP for this project on 6/2/25, I contacted the Oregon Government Ethics Commission on 5/27/25 to make sure I have and will continue to follow the necessary requirements.

Ana Byers

-Response to TCW email inquiry, June 13, 2025

Screenshot of the email here

It’s unfortunate she didn’t take the opportunity to answer any of the questions asked, we’re genuinely interested in her perspective on this stuff. But the reason to include her tepid response here is that it is very much on brand with today’s theme of doing the bare minimum to avoid legal trouble. They do that with more than just conflict declarations at meetings! This ‘as long as it’s not illegal’ attitude permeates many facets of our City government. Minutes, meeting access, public notices, subcommittees, public input, City contracts. You name it, Talent does only what it has to for it.

Which underscores the need to build better systems of oversight for Council, with far more robust checks and balances. Because without those, this compliance-only culture will keep dominating our democratic processes and Talent will continue to be governed by people regularly attempting to game the state’s rules in their favor with zero consequences other than a way-too-long post in an Anonymous Blog.

Talent Council Watch would like to encourage members of Talent City Council to propose the establishment of an independent ethics committee to help address these types of common issues. A group composed of regular citizens with the authority to review conflicts of interest, evaluate concerns raised by the public, and issue formal recommendations, and that isn’t appointed by the Mayor like every other committee is. Right now there’s simply no meaningful, accessible mechanism for accountability when our elected officials are in the position to benefit personally from the decisions they make, albeit within the boundaries of the law. Something has to change. We deserve better than this.

The same tiny circle of people controls pretty much everything in Talent - the access to information, the narrative, the committees, the funding, and all of the decision-making - making transparency nearly impossible without a more local and immediate level of ethical oversight. If Talent leadership cares about restoring public trust after years of discouraging missteps, a committee like this would be a good place to start. We can assure you this proposal would have significant public support. We can all see that self-policing isn’t working, and Council essentially relying on the honor system for conflicts of interest has gotten us to the ethically questionable place we are now with the TBA Gateway Hub.

-Talent Council Watch

Corrections, questions, tips and comments are welcome! Send us an email at talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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DISCLAIMER: Talent Council Watch is an independent and non-partisan watchdog publication offering investigative commentary, criticism, and occasional jokes about Talent, Oregon’s government. All content is based on public records, public meetings, email communication, and firsthand observation. Opinions herein are protected speech under the First Amendment. Public officials who are concerned about being written about by TCW should consider behaving more ethically.

Author’s Note: The Talent Business Alliance (TBA) has become an oddly sensitive topic of discussion in town, has it not? For one thing it’s kind of everywhere recently, having become involved in a bunch of prominent community projects: the Evening Markets, the Harvest Festival, Gateway development, the Art Walk. But there’s also a ton of confusion about its relationship to the City of Talent government, which makes sense given that it’s run by the Mayor and there are several murky connections between the two entities. People have a lot of questions about the relationship of TBA to elected officials, City staff, local businesses, and us normie taxpayers. But asking the questions feels very much frowned upon these days, as if wanting to discuss possible TBA conflicts is an attempt to divide and harm the community. That kind of rhetoric silences honest discussion and leaves us all out here guessing, trying to fill in the information gaps on our own - which is exactly the kind of vacuum where misinformation thrives.

Even the Mayor’s strongest supporters can’t deny that the public needs to better understand where TBA ends and City business begins. Since it seems unlikely they’ll be giving us a clear and complete breakdown of the many connections between the Talent Business Alliance and the City, or any official assurance that its relationship is entirely unproblematic and raises no ethics questions, we want to use this forum to examine TBA’s role within Talent’s political and business ecosystem ourselves. So if you have direct experience or insight into how TBA operates, whether financial, organizational, or political, that you think could help us lay out the issues for our readers, we encourage you to reach out to us. Your identity will be kept confidential.

Now, on to the first TCW Report dedicated entirely to everyone’s favorite AltChamber of Commerce.

Ethical Drift:

A gradual shift away from accepted ethical standards, often inadvertently, when informal practices and personal relationships start to replace the rules for public accountability and the boundaries between personal and public interest. This is commonly justified with ideas like “There’s no one else to do the work” and “This is how we can best help the community,” but over time, transparency, trust and accountability all suffer and public resources can end up serving personal agendas, all without anyone technically breaking the law.

Signs of ethical drift in a small town:

• Public officials are also running nonprofits, businesses, or development projects that receive City support, but don’t withdraw from deliberations to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

• Public money is allocated through informal conversations or administrative decisions without council votes, accessible documentation, or public awareness.

• Updates are delayed, questions go unanswered, and public records and meeting minutes are missing, incomplete, or difficult to access.

• Projects or funding priorities align closely with leaders’ personal ambitions, but there is no distinction made between the personal and the official.

• The City Council serves as its own ethics and oversight committee.

• When community members ask questions, they are labeled as divisive, or are accused of “making things political,” rather than their voices being heard. Ethical concerns from citizens are brushed aside as personal attacks and misinformation rather than legitimate calls for transparency.

And on that note, let’s talk about the TBA’s tourism intern.

Remember last July when the Mayor TBA Director was excited to tell us about how Talent was given the amazing opportunity to have a AmeriCorps RARE member come to town and do a bunch of cool stuff that would “enhance the town’s appeal and support local economic growth? She even paid for a full page ad on the back of the Talent News & Review to tell us about it.

Well, we have heard exactly nothing about this project since then, up until we were informed by KOBI on May 7th that the federal cuts to the AmeriCorps program would result in the loss of a TBA employee.

…RARE has four members in Southern Oregon working in roles from disaster preparedness to rural energy support that are being cut.

“This is not just Ashland. We have folks in the Talent Business Alliance losing an employee, the Greater Applegate is losing their Fire Resiliency Coordinator– which is such a crucial position for a small community. And there’s not going to be a corner of Oregon that doesn’t feel the loss of these people and these services,” said Embleton [an Ashland-based RARE member].

Most people reading that probably went “Wait, which TBA Employee? Oh yeah, there was a grad student doing something on tourism. Whatever happened with that whole thing?”

Good question. Hard to say. We do know now though, and only because one particularly sharp-penciled member of the TURA Budget Committee brought it up in a public meeting last week, that the City of Talent paid $11,000 to support TBA’s grad student. That means 41% of the Host Organization fee of $26,500 paid to AmeriCorps was publicly funded from the City’s coffers.

As far as what the student was able to accomplish in her time and what the funding cut meant for the project she was working on, that all remains unclear. We think it should be made very clear, given the City’s ample contribution to the project, but the convoluted web of relationships between City Hall and the TBA makes it difficult for the public to understand who is accountable for what, which tends to end up letting all of them off the hook.

So let’s do a mid-depth dive into the Mysterious Case of TBA’s Tourism & Destination Coordinator and ask some questions that maybe one of the people we elected to keep us informed can answer for us.

This RARE Opportunity

In July of 2024 the Talent Business Alliance applied as a Host Organization for the RARE (Resource Assistance for Rural Environments) program. From the UO website:

RARE AmeriCorps is an AmeriCorps program administered through the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research and Engagement. The RARE AmeriCorps Program has been supported over the years by grants from AmeriCorps, The Ford Family Foundation, the University of Oregon, the Oregon Food Bank, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and other agencies. In addition, each participating host organization provides $26,500 of the approximately $52,000 needed to place, train, and support a full-time RARE AmeriCorps member.

The TBA is the only entity listed as a Participating Host Organization in their application for the program. The City of Talent and Travel Southern Oregon are included as organizations that the student would work with over the course of the assignment. If the TBA position lasted for its intended duration it would have been from September 2024 to August 2025. Executive Director Darby Ayers-Flood was designated on record as the student’s Supervisor.

What would that RARE student intern be doing? According to the application submitted by TBA:

60% of their time would be on developing a Destination Strategic Plan for Talent. They would identify & reach out to local wine, biking, art & culture, and culinary industry leaders and create a structure for relationships between groups. The teams would then serve as resources to develop the Strategic Plan, which would include an inventory of community destination assets that would lay out a path for future investments, development, and partnerships.

The remainder of their time would be allocated to:

- Develop a Project Outline for Wine Country Bike Trails that would work towards designating Wine Country Cycle Routes, and explore funding options.

-Serve as Talent’s Art District Vision Facilitator, connecting with partners to create an outline for the creation of a new cultural district.

Well, the closest we ever got to an update on this Amazing Opportunity to Revitalize our Economy was this post on TBA’s Facebook page in March, which was a photo of an Instagram reel on the RARE account. The TBA post didn’t include a link to the content. Just this photo and caption:

The RARE intern may have put significant effort into the Talent Art Walk that started in January 2025 and now happens quarterly, but we don’t know that for sure because any contribution she may have made to the event was never mentioned publicly.

The next thing we hear about the program is that it was DOGE’d. And we don’t even hear about it from TBA or City officials, but from a Medford news station quoting an Ashland RARE participant.

What does this funding cut mean for Talent? Did TBA’s Destination Coordinator position end immediately? Is she still working on her projects, and if so will she be here until the planned end of the assignment? If her job in Talent was already terminated and no more work will be completed, what will become of the Destination Strategic Plan? And what about all that wine country bike trail coordination? WHAT ABOUT WINE BIKING YOU GUYS?!?

Seriously, regardless of what anyone might think about the value of the work, it would be nice to know if anything was produced in her months working for TBA that can be picked up and followed through on by someone else, or is it all a loss? How much of a loss was it?

Given that the City of Talent paid for close to half of the cost of TBA’s intern it seems appropriate to let the public know the status of their projects and what will become of that work, if anything.

Following the Money

Ok we may not be talking about a ton of it here - $11k is a small fraction of the City’s budget to be sure - but hey it’s not nothing! It’s certainly an amount that could have been used in a thousand other ways to benefit people who live and work in Talent. Plus the mechanics of this arrangement, and the broader implications of it, are certainly worthy of public scrutiny.

According to the City Council meeting minutes from May - August 2024, the City paying a portion of the $26,500 RARE fee was neither voted on nor discussed publicly. This is unsurprising given that the City Manager now has the authority to spend up to $50,000 on something without approval from City Council, and expenditures like this wouldn’t necessarily even make it into the minutes of a meeting until budget season (as it just did in this case, actually).

Are you wondering how it could possibly be appropriate for the Mayor to enter into a financial agreement with her own City Manager, someone whose job security she significantly influences, that results in public funds being directed to a nonprofit she leads and draws a salary from? We’re wondering that too.

In Oregon, public officials are supposed to avoid actual and potential conflicts under ORS Chapter 244 of the Oregon Government Ethics Law. Even if Mayor doesn’t vote on a contract, signing one as a nonprofit representative while having power or influence over the City Manager also signing it may still create a conflict under:

ORS 244.120: Requires public officials to announce conflicts of interest and recuse themselves.

ORS 244.040: Prohibits the use of a public position for personal gain or to benefit a business with which the official is associated.

It is not standard practice, not even in a very small town, for a City to execute a contract with a nonprofit where the signatory is both the nonprofit Director and the Mayor of the City. It gives the impression that one person is signing for both sides even if that’s not the case. Better governance practices would be full disclosure to Council, an independent review by the City Attorney, and explicit documentation in the public record (and in a lot of cities would be outright prohibited). While Talent operates under a "strong council, weak mayor" system, the influence of the Mayor over the City Manager (especially when the Manager is interim or pro tem and hoping to make the position permanent) is still significant, particularly in small towns where social, political, and business networks overlap so much.

And this isn’t the first time this questionable arrangement has come up. It’s not even the first time in the last year.

In August 2024, City Manager Milliman signed a contract with Mayor TBA Director Ayers-Flood to pay her nonprofit up to $25,000 to take over coordinating the 2024 Talent Harvest Festival, which was previously managed by City staff. Because the amount of the contract was not over $25k, the City did not have to open the process to bidding and was able to just pay TBA to do it without Council approval or a request for proposals from other community event planners.

Fortunately, Mayor Darby knew an event planner she could hire to do the actual work, one who also happens to serve on the Talent City Council! $15,000 of the payment to TBA went to pay City Councilor Ana Byers to coordinate the Harvest Festival.

Just a few months ago Byers started her own event consulting business and highlights her management of the Talent Harvest Festival on her website. Congratulations to Councilor Byers on her new business venture.

If you’re keeping track, that’s two paid TBA employees, one paid TBA contractor, and one (now former) TBA Board Member (Ponomareff) currently serving on the Talent City Council.

Moving along, nothing to see here.

An agreement between the City and TBA for the City to contribute a portion of the RARE AmeriCorps fee is technically legal, but what is definitely not clear is how a financial agreement signed by a Mayor and her City Manager that would financially benefit the Mayor would not be considered at least an ethics violation. Plain common sense tells us it is wildly inappropriate at best.

How would this financially benefit the Mayor? More grant funding for TBA, for starters.

The PIER Proposal (Planning, Infrastructure, and Economic Revitalization Program)
In March 2025, TBA applied for a PIER grant for $500,000 to develop a program that would support economic revitalization for the hospitality/tourism and microenterprise industries in Talent and Phoenix. The majority of the funding - $305k - would be used to pay the salaries of its employees, which are of course Director Ayers-Flood and Administrative Coordinator (and City Council member) Colette Pare-Miller.

The work that will cost half a million dollars consists of:

1. A “Tourism Website”

2. Training for hospitality entrepreneurs

3. Support for microenterprise and a plan to launch a business incubator

Click to read TBA’s 2025 PIER application.

Ah yes, The Incubator. Surely you’ve heard of The Incubator. It was all over the Talent news wires last month because TBA held a forum to get more people involved in helping make the Mayor’s dream come true. Literally!

”My dream is to build and operate an incubator commercial kitchen in Talent, perhaps a non-profit kind of like this one. While I work for a property ownership group, in the hotel portfolio, my background was in Food and Beverage. As a young woman, I wanted to be chef but I was never in a position for a formal education. I am educated and have been certified in food safety, award winning OLCC license holder for manager of the year in Oregon. I’m qualified and passionate! I suspect with food trucks, side hustles and small food production there might even be a need. Should we talk about this y’all?”

-Mayor Darby, January 2, 2022

What does any of that have to do with the RARE intern?

The student’s project with TBA was mentioned in the grant application as a near-complete Strategic Plan that can be implemented if the $500,000 is awarded. It was explicitly called out in the main Project Summary of the application as a foundational document to guide the work of the proposed PIER-funded TBA economic revitalization team.

The Winery Biking Trails project included exploring funding sources as part of the job description, basically making the RARE deliverable for that project a grant application-ready document, complete with list of all the sources TBA could use it to get funding from.

This is more speculative, but the RARE-produced Destination Strategic Plan was also very likely intended to be used in grant applications to other agencies for the matching funds to help launch The Incubator in Year 3 of the PIER grant.

Given just what we can see for ourselves in these applications, it sure seems like the main pupose of the RARE intern position was to help get more grant funding for the Talent Business Alliance over the next several years.

Put another way, it looks like the City Manager used $11,000 of public funds to help produce reports that the Mayor’s own nonprofit could use to secure more grant money for itself. And a portion of the grant money her nonprofit would receive would go towards paying the Mayor a salary to literally create her own dream job.

It’s not too hard to see why the City-TBA relationship has raised more than a few red flags. And no this is not just “how these things work.” Or at least it shouldn’t be.

It also makes us wonder just how much public money is quietly being spent advancing personal and professional interests under the guise of disaster recovery and economic revitalization.

What Civic Integrity Looks Like

It’s long past time for the few non-TBA-affiliated members of City Council and the City Manager to step up and request an audit of the TBA’s interconnected relationships to ensure that public resources are not being used to establish or prioritize officials’ careers over programs that would benefit the people of Talent. Something needs to be done by City Council to stop the ethical drift happening in City Hall and get us back on the right track.

If I were an actual journalist and not an Anonymous Blogger with zero clout I’d ask the Mayor, City Council members, and City Manager these questions:

1. Please clarify the process by which City funds were allocated to support the RARE program employee of the Talent Business Alliance with an $11,000 contribution. Was a proposal submitted to the City from TBA that outlined the benefits to the public and the City? Who reviewed and approved the specific deliverables and outcomes tied to the $11,000? How was that figure landed on? At what point in the process of applying for the RARE program was this decision made? Was any third-party oversight involved?

2. What would you say to Talent residents who feel uncomfortable with the level of financial and leadership overlap between the City and TBA?

3. What steps are taken to ensure transparency and public accountability when City funds are used for projects tied to organizations that the Mayor or Council members lead or are compensated by?

4. Would you support an independent review of City-TBA financial interactions to help reassure the public that no ethical lines have been crossed, as well as a public-facing transparency report outlining all current financial and operational connections between the City and TBA?

5. Would you be open to establishing an independent ethics or oversight committee to review future partnerships involving City officials and nonprofits?

A transparent Talent government would not have necessitated this article or speculation because it would have already anticipated, and held itself accountable to, these types of questions and concerns from the public. That might have included an update on the RARE student’s work at any point, or an announcement that the position was unexpectedly cut short, or even assurances that there were no conflicts of interest in the financial contribution from the City.

In a transparently-governed community, the public wouldn’t have found out how much the City paid for the RARE student only because someone asked about a specific line item during a Budget Committee livestream. Instead we would have all known from the beginning exactly what level of support the City was providing and why that amount was needed in order to take advantage of the RARE student opportunity.

If transparency was genuinely a priority for Talent City Council, public input might have even been solicited before committing to the decision to participate. There are City leaders out there who make real efforts to consistently inform and involve their constituents in decision-making under the guiding principle that a cohesive, collaborative community is built through voluntarily transparent governing*. Imagine a Talent government that doesn't just comply with transparency laws (usually, barely) but truly embraces transparency practices as a foundation for public trust and a tool for citizen empowerment.

*This concept is one we’ve been thinking a lot about over here at the TCW Commentary Bureau offices. If you're a subscriber you can expect to hear more about civic integrity and voluntary transparency in Talent in the months to come. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on that topic or any information to share with us, please leave a comment or send an email to talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com.

And watch out for the drift.

-Talent Council Watch

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Ok ok wait. Back up. Context. Recap. Important points.

• The City of Talent applied for, and was then awarded, a federal CDBG grant through Business Oregon that would fund the purchase and remodel of the old Asante office building at 49 Talent Ave. for $1.5 million. The original reason for applying for the grant was to provide a home for the Talent Food Pantry, operated by the Jackson County nonprofit organization ACCESS. It was also intended to host other community service-oriented nonprofit organizations in what they are calling the Talent Community Resource Center. Here is the December press release in which the ACCESS Pantry is mentioned.

• The ACCESS Pantry had been housed in the old Town Hall for many years, but in April of 2024 there was a fire in the building that left ACCESS without a space to either distribute or store food. The ACCESS Pantry has been operating on a smaller scale outdoors in a City-owned parking lot since September 2024. The Town Hall fire also displaced the City Council as well as several other groups.

• Very little has happened with the building since the grant was awarded due to various delays, but in January 2025 then City Manager Gary Milliman reported to Council that he had met with some potential tenants and would be doing further outreach and taking meetings with interested parties. We had some issues with them meeting with groups before knowing for sure what the criteria would be.

• Last month the City Manager (now Alex Campbell) presented his first draft of a set of steps and criteria to the Council that outlined what would qualify a nonprofit group to be considered as a tenant in the building. At that meeting on March 19th, Council pushed the discussion to a Study Session so they could go over it in more detail. The result of that session is where we are now.

Back to the April 2nd Study Session, in which the agenda was to discuss Campbell’s proposed criteria and process for tenant selection for the building. They really did not get to any criteria in depth other than the Mayor’s new rule of “must pay their own rent” being added to the other 3 minimum requirements on the list:

She was clear from the jump that she wants to find a different food nonprofit that pays rent instead of allocating ACCESS’s share of costs to other tenants. Her proposed rule would effectively push ACCESS out of building, given the organization’s policy restriction on not paying rent for food distribution.

05:15 MAYOR: But I want to clarify that, while it does say in the application that food distribution… I think we all recognize that that is the intention, to head it in that direction…. But if it were at the expense of other organizations in the space, I think I'd want to have further discussion on that. I mean, this is certainly the most viable spot for food distribution, as long as I think that we can come to a place where the organization doing the food distribution is able to meet the other requirements, such as - well, I think what we what we wrote in that was record of financial stability. I would hope that we would add to that the ability to share the cost for the building.

13:49 MAYOR: I would propose then… that another possible minimum and a fourth bullet point would be to share in the cost of the maintaining and paying the utilities, and just for the record, I think the newspaper printed something like $1.10 a square foot, which I think was an erroneous, it was a mistake, I think, because I, we, nobody's even done an assessment on that, and I think it's too early to be talking about numbers. But I do, based on a lot of discussion about this, and not bringing on another expense for the city, in terms of public spaces, I do think that that would be prudent to add that.

Councilor Medina pointed out that the standard model for sustainable food pantries is to only utilize spaces that do not charge rent, so it may be difficult to find an organization that would agree to this. At that the Mayor claimed that she knows that there are some food distribution models out there that do pay rent instead of passing it on to others.

10:45 MAYOR: When that model is deployed, somebody's paying for it. And in the case previously, the taxpayers paid for the Town Hall that they were in previously… And there are other nonprofits that are doing food distribution that do own and maintain their own space at their nonprofit costs.

When the City Manager and other Council members brought up potential solutions around the ACCESS Pantry sharing its operating space with other groups that could afford to pay for it, given that their rent would still be well under the market rate, the Mayor had this to say:

26:05 MAYOR: But there's still the question of the portion of the food pantry that would be used 24/7 for storage. And so I think it is a viable idea, although I do have a little heartburn distributing the cost of open space to every tenant, especially if not every tenant is using it… It can be challenging to try and have equitable use of open space when everybody's sharing the cost burden of that, but there's still the question of the 24/7 space that is needed and how to offset that. And I think I would have a more difficult time offsetting those costs to the other tenants when they have no access to that space. So again, I feel like a minimum standard should be based on it… but that space shares the cost burden, and if we're not able to find somebody that can share that cost burden, I think we need to have a different conversation. Maybe it’s going to the community and seeing the community wants to offset that cost. Maybe it's adding to the fees. I do think that there's still room for a lot more exploration with organizations that are orbiting this work, this food access work, I think there's a solution out there, and I'm just less inclined to set up a design of criteria that designs that cost burden on the rest of the tenants.”

Eventually the Mayor conceded that if, and only if, no other food organizations with rent money can be found would she support looking at the logistics of distributing the monthly costs to other tenants.

She does not make her strong preferences on the matter quite as obvious in her followup Facebook update as she did in the previous night’s Council meeting. In her post she’s neutral and passive, again bringing up the not actually discussed option of adding a fee to Talent residents’ already really painful water bill, knowing full well that it will be immediately rejected.

Here were the alternatives discussed as opposed to asking the other spaces rents to go up in order to cover the food pantry share of rent.

A small city fee (on the water bill) to create a dedicated fund for this imperative service for residents. My best guess is that would likely be less than a dollar.

Finding a well established nonprofit partner for Access who also works in nonprofit food service (to accept the Access food donations and distribute them), who are willing/able to contribute toward the costs for the space.

One direction provided was to priortize food nonprofit orgs who can share the costs. If no other solution is found, spreading the cost for the food distribution out to the other tenants would be a solution.

A food distribution is an expected part of that space from the beginning. To keep it real, the question discussed last night was how to equitably cover the cost of the maintenance/upkeep/overhead and prioritize those food distribution nonprofits who are able to cover their share of the reduced costs, given that the city can no longer bear the cost of providing space for nonprofit.

In Talent with Mayor Darby Facebook page, April 3rd 2025. Shared to multiple groups.

She posted that the day after the meeting and in response, as expected, even Pantry supporters say they wouldn’t be cool with a fee added to their water bill. So now the Mayor gets to shrug and be all ‘Welp, I tried. The people have spoken. They don’t want another fee. I guess we’ll have to do exactly what I wanted to do then!” Aaaand now she’s a hero for saving us from a fee.

What she made clear in her 40% meeting time allotment, if not in her Facebook post, was that she would not support passing ACCESS’s share of rent on to other tenants without at the very least eliminating all the options she prefers first, and that her most preferred option of all the options is to give the space to a “food service nonprofit” who will pay their rent. Which is interesting.

Does anyone else agree that this is the most preferable option? We do not know. Why exactly is this option preferable to sticking with the long-running and popular ACCESS Food Pantry? We do not know. The only answer we can point to is that it gives Mayor Darby heartburn.

Talent Council Watch has been following along with this Community Resource Center project since the very beginning and there have been some eyebrow-raising statements made, generally around tenancy. But this one is different. Something is definitely *off* about what the Mayor is pushing for here. Let’s talk about why it’s not sitting right.

First of all, the fact that ACCESS doesn’t pay rent is no surprise to anyone involved. It’s not like the City just found this out 4 days ago and is suddenly scrambling to figure out how to adapt to this shocking twist. ACCESS has literally never paid rent (beyond the token $1 per year) in its many years of being a tenant of the City of Talent, and it does not pay rent for any of its 30+ food bank distribution sites. In fact, this is true for most food pantries in the United States, which typically receive donated, in-kind, or highly subsidized space agreements due to their limited resources and the nature of the free, volunteer-run public service they offer being an exception to standard property cost-recovery arrangements.

This has always been the case with ACCESS, and the City has always known that. They certainly knew about it when they submitted the grant proposal, which included a breakdown of what they expected to collect in rental revenue ($1.10 sqft) for building utilities and maintenance.

Secondly, the Mayor mentioned repeatedly that the City Manager (Milliman at the time) and she discussed the expense coverage options at great length prior to submitting the grant. Multiple times she recalls the huge amount of discussion they had before submitting the grant around whether or not the City could or should absorb some of the costs.

09:07 MAYOR: …I appreciate the fact that there's language in the grant that addresses that concern, but I don't think there's enough language in this grant that suggests that shared costs would be a minimum standard as well. I know we had healthy discussion about that prior to even putting in the grant; That we could not or should not be bringing on another cost burden… I don't see it anywhere in here that it addresses that directly, and I think that we should address it directly.

15:47 MAYOR: ..but in the discussion before we submitted this grant, we talked about wanting to make sure that we would get this resource, bring it into our community, not have the community bear any of the burden of the ongoing costs, and then just pass on just that cost

You think that during all that ample discussion about maintenance costs, it never once came up that the group that would be using the largest portion of the building, the one with the displaced service that the entire grant is being built around, would not be able to contribute to revenue? Of course it did!

The real question is: How was the fact that ACCESS could not pay rent for a large portion of space incorporated into the City’s plans for generating enough revenue to cover the costs? And were they transparent about it?

When the City was in the process of applying for the CDBG funding back in September 2024, they solicited a letter of support from the Executive Director of ACCESS, which was included in the grant proposal documents submitted.

If you can’t read that image, here’s the important part:

I am writing on behalf of ACCESS to express our strong support for the City of Talent's application for CDBG funding to purchase a building that will be transformed into a vital Community Resource Center. This project is especially significant to us as it would provide a new, expanded location for the ACCESS Talent Food Pantry, which was displaced earlier this year due to a fire in its previous building.

The Talent Food Pantry has long served as a critical resource for individuals and families experiencing food insecurity in our community. The fire not only disrupted these services but also highlighted the need for a larger, more equipped space to meet the growing demand for food assistance in Talent. The proposed Community Resource Center will provide the pantry with the much-needed additional space to store and distribute food efficiently, allowing us to serve more people and improve the quality of services we offer.

When Carrie Borgen wrote that letter in September of 2024, ACCESS management was obviously under the impression that their Food Pantry would be the one with a space in the new building. She says it bluntly. Why did she think that?

In fact, it seems like a whole bunch of other people thought that too, and it was mentioned as one of the reasons why several organizations said they were supporting the City’s CBDG application. Here are a few snippets from letters the City of Talent submitted with their proposal:

We understand this project will expand ACCESS 's Talent Food Pantry, which was displaced earlier this year due to a fire in its previous building.

CASA of Oregon has been actively involved in affordable housing development in the Talent area as part of the Almeda Wildfire recovery process, and have witnessed the traumatic impact the wildfire had on lower income families, and how ACCESS has effectively responded to their many needs. We value our partnership with ACCESS and want to continue to support their efforts to assist lower income households achieve long term housing stability and overall well being.

Peter Hainley, Executive Director of CASA of Oregon

The center will provide a new location for an ACCCESS food pantry as well as space for community services provided by other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) for residents of Talent and surrounding areas.

Ann Marie Alfrey, Executive Director, RVCOG Southern Oregon

The relocation of the Talent Food Pantry to a larger, more functional space is a key element in this project, ensuring that individuals and families in Talent have access to critical food resources.

Tucker Teutsch, Executive Director, Firebrand Resiliency Collective

The Talent Food Pantry will find a permanent home and the building will serve as a hub of connection for social services and community services that are vital to residents feeling safe and welcome. Having a safe space to go for help is the first and most important step in community connecting.

Dee Anne Everson, CEO/ED, United Way of Jackson County

As an organization based in Talent, Revista Caminos has consistently supported initiatives serving the local Spanish-speaking community, including the ACCESS Food Bank

Alfredo Flores, Camino Magazine

So where did they all get that idea?

Did the Mayor and City Manager tell everyone whom they asked for application support that funding would mean the ACCESS Talent Food Pantry would have a permanent home, while knowing full well that 1) they would need rent from every tenant to make it work and 2) ACCESS can not pay rent? Why would they do that?

We have to ask, how in the world did we get here, with community members and partners alike being blindsided with a major change to what we were told was a primary purpose of the building purchase? Was this the result of a budgeting mistake made by the City? Was it a misunderstanding that got away from them? Or was this always the plan?

We see only a few possibilities to the question of how we got here:

1. The City told ACCESS that they would need to start paying rent in the new building and ACCESS agreed to it at the time, but then backed out once the grant was funded. No way. If this had happened we would definitely know all about it. The Mayor would have told us this was the case because it would take the heat off herself for replacing them.
   

2. The Mayor and Manager Milliman inexplicably believed that, despite all existing knowledge and evidence to the contrary, ACCESS would scrap their own long-held universally applied no-rent policy and would suddenly start paying rent for the new Talent building no questions asked, and the City went ahead with budgeting and writing an entire proposal around the ACCESS Food Pantry as a primary tenant under that assumption, without ever confirming it with ACCESS. Could be considered negligence if that’s what happened, but it seems unlikely. Gary Milliman was supposed to be very good at writing grants.
   

3. The City did not raise the topic of rent with ACCESS at all, despite all that robust conversation about how they were going to cover all expenses with ACCESS utilizing the largest share of tenant space. Given their diligence in ensuring the cost of building upkeep would not be passed to the City, this would have had to be an intentional omission from their conversations with ACCESS. Why would the City deliberately avoid talking about their rent expectations with ACCESS while writing the grant proposal?
   

4. The City purposefully misled ACCESS about their rent expectations, leading ACCESS to believe they would be able to continue with their long-established no-rent relationship, and the Mayor is trying to backtrack on it now that the grant has been awarded. Why would the City intentionally mislead ACCESS about the rent they would be asking for from them?
   

What it looks like from our dark and suspicious little corner of town is that the City submitted an effective 1.5 million dollar grant proposal centered largely around the displacement and imminent needs of the ACCESS Talent Food Pantry, fully aware that ACCESS would not be able to the pay rent that would be required, and now that the grant has been funded the Mayor is attempting to insert a rule that would in effect disqualify ACCESS from the food distribution space so that another nonprofit, one that she prefers, can get it instead. That’s what we think it looks like anyway.1

We’ll be on the lookout for a more niche “food service” nonprofit (i.e. not quite a pantry?) to start getting casually name-dropped by the Mayor on social media as a possible ACCESS replacement, and then for that name to start popping up in minutes and agenda packets. We’re thinking a small but growing org with plenty of operations funding that perhaps wouldn’t have been quite as established, or widely supported, or as compelling of a grant narrative centerpiece as the displaced ACCESS Talent Food Pantry was in September 2024. A nonprofit that, when you Google the names of its leadership team along with our Mayor and Council members, you get some solid hits. A Board of Directors, an Advisory Board. That’s kinda just how it works here. Small town and everything, you know.

What’s next?

Manager Campbell is now rewriting the tenant criteria to present at the next Council meeting to reflect the changes given to him by the Mayor. Eventually, whether at that meeting or a later one, Council will vote on a motion to proceed with judging rental applications using a specific set of criteria.

Regardless of any one person’s opinion on who should or should not be given a space in the building, we can probably all at least agree that the Mayor’s personal preference on the matter should not be what drives Council’s decisions on it, right? Whatever her motivations are and however much meeting time she takes at the expense of everyone else’s opportunity to contribute their thoughts and ideas, it is simply not about what the Mayor would prefer. She doesn't even get to vote on it unless it's a tie (and it's never a tie). It’s about what City Council believes will best serve the people of Talent, and we really need them to represent us right now. It’s why we elected them.

What should be happening next is that Council members should be finding out from Talent residents what we think about how to deal with this problem. Remember back in August when City Council ensured us that the public would be part of the tenant selection process? Well here’s their chance to make good on that, because it certainly hasn’t been true so far. This question of how to approach ACCESS’s rent issue is a great one to put in front of the community for feedback. But not via comments on a post written by Mayor Darby in a closed, ideologically homogeneous Facebook group, but rather using legitimate civic engagement tools like a public hearing, a town hall forum, a focus group, an online survey. There are so many ways to gather useful feedback from constituents that are accessible, fair, and commonly used in municipalities that put more than lip service toward incorporating public input into council decision-making.

Dear City Council Members: We know you have thoughts about all this. We’d like to hear them. And we would encourage you to take advantage of one of the many public feedback tools to find out what Talentonians think you should do about the rent problem. You have no idea all the types of genius lurking out here, maybe one of us has an even better idea than what has been proposed so far. And even if not, wouldn’t it feel good to know that you’re making an important decision about a major community asset with input from the community and the actual people it is intended to serve?

Thanks for reading!
Talent Council Watch
talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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That would be because something is (not) happening at City Hall that’s preventing the public from being even minimally informed about meetings and the decisions and discussions occurring in them.

Here is an incomplete list of the Open Meetings Law near-violations that we have observed since we started paying attention to this in January:

1. The Council, Study Sessions, and Subcommittee meetings held the week of March 3rd were not adequately noticed, meaning there were no announcements made via email or Facebook about the upcoming meetings. It appears that the only way to have known about the meetings from an official source was to pay close attention to the Calendar on their website, because they were posted there with very little advance notice. The City’s Facebook page as a source of meeting information appears to have been abandoned since early February.

2. There have been no meeting minutes available to view for any Regular Council Meeting since August 7, 2024. Seven month’s worth of minutes! A few drafts were included as part of an agenda packet in January, but despite those presumably being approved with the Consent Calendar, they still have not been uploaded to the City’s meeting documentation web page. The Mayor and other City representatives have stated that because they post the video recordings of meetings on their YouTube channel, they are not required to post the minutes. So they just don’t.

3. Without meeting minutes, we have no choice but to watch the video recording of the meetings on YouTube to find the result of a vote or content of a discussion. A lot of these meetings are several hours long and there are no timestamps or chapters embedded in the video or in the description text to make it possible to find something specific without watching the entire thing.

4. To make it worse, many of the video recordings have long sections without legible audio. So even if you are industrious and patient enough to locate the specific topic you’re looking for, you may not be able to hear what they’re saying anyway. And when that happens, without any minutes available to cross reference, there’s literally no way to find out what was said or decided during that inaudible time.

5. If we’re gonna have to rely on videos to take the place of minutes, then they need to actually upload the videos! As of today March 8th, there are no video or audio recordings of any meeting since January accessible to the public. The recordings had been getting uploaded to YouTube within a few days after the meeting in lieu of minutes, but that hasn’t been happening. That’s 23 consecutive public meetings (and counting) held in which the public has zero access to the decisions that have been made by our City officials.

Here is the relevant (ORS 192.650) section regarding meeting recordings and minutes:

The governing body of a public body shall provide for the sound, video or digital recording or the taking of written minutes of all its meetings. Neither a full transcript nor a full recording of the meeting is required, except as otherwise provided by law, but the written minutes or recording must give a true reflection of the matters discussed at the meeting and the views of the participants. All minutes or recordings shall be available to the public within a reasonable time after the meeting.

“Reasonable time after the meeting” is obviously open to some interpretation, but standard practice is to make draft minutes available within a few days to 2 or 3 weeks after a meeting, with final approval typically occurring at the next regular meeting. “The recording of the meeting should be available within a few days of the meeting, if not sooner.”1

For a Council that prides itself on how open and transparent it is, it’s weird that they aren’t more diligent about ensuring their meeting documentation is actually accessible to the public, right?

Of course Council relies on City staff to do the actual posting of meeting minutes, recordings, and notices, but we don’t think the situation we have here is a matter of someone on staff not doing their job. Without having spoken to any current City employees, based on our own professional experiences with poorly led, high-stress workplaces and our knowledge of how City staff has been treated in the past, it’s hard to imagine that the City Recorder is over there taking 3-hour lunches every day and playing video games on his computer instead of posting minutes. Staff in positions subordinate to the City Manager - who answers only to Council - are typically instructed on how to prioritize competing responsibilities and heavy workloads. Administrative duties in an office like this can be overwhelming on a normal day, much more so when emergencies and resignations and urgent deadlines come up, and even more so when you have situations like when the City Recorder is also serving as the Community Outreach department and the IT staff. For example!

From our perspective, significant neglect of transparency obligations like what we are seeing in Talent right now is a management and leadership problem, not an admin personnel issue. It’s a predictable product of severe under-staffing and over-burdening, and it also signals deeper issues within leadership around public accountability. (The only people who can hold Council accountable are the public, but we can’t really do that when we don’t even know what they’re saying in their meetings, can we?) It also raises a lot of questions about what exactly is being consistently prioritized above informing the public, and why these important obligations to us are routinely getting pushed off for such a prolonged period of time.

It makes sense when someone’s sick or on vacation for some of the less urgent stuff to get pushed to the side for a bit. And given the recent transition to a new City Manager, we should certainly expect (and forgive) administrative delay. We get all that. But this isn’t about stalled documents over a couple of weeks, we’re talking about 65% of all public meetings held over the last 4 months and 100% of Regular Council meetings over the last 2 months having produced NO records that are available to the public. Residents not in attendance at every meeting have no idea what their City Council has accomplished or decided on for almost 2 months now. That’s not ok!

It is the Council’s responsibility to ensure that the public is informed about their decision-making, and they need to do this by consistently prioritizing transparency and enforcing its compliance, even when it’s a challenge to do so. This level of disregard for information accessibility is a failure of responsibility on the part of our Council and should be corrected now, before it is seen as intentionally obstructive behavior and/or becomes a punishable violation of law.

Transparency in local government is not defined as doing the bare minimum to avoid breaking the law. True transparency is City Council being accountable, honest and open about what is happening in government and making genuine efforts to build a culture of trust and respectful engagement with its constituents. That’s the transparency that we’re always looking for more of from Talent City Council, and it’s what we’re getting much less of than we deserve right now.

-Talent Council Watch

Fellow Talentonians, if you’re as concerned about this problem as we are, please consider letting the Council and your neighbors know about it. You can email any of the Councilors directly or all at once.

Talent City Council: talentcc@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Ana Byers: Councilor2@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Colette Paré-Miller: Councilor1@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Daniel Collay: Councilor6@cityoftalent.org
Councilor David Pastizzo: Councilor3@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Eleanor Ponomareff: Councilor5@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Rosario Medina: Councilor4@cityoftalent.org

You can also post a link to this TCW Report in a Talent Facebook group or on NextDoor to spread the word and get people discussing this issue.

If you believe there has been a violation of Open Meetings law you can also reach out to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission (OGEC) to ask questions or file an official complaint.

Or just send us an email with your stories, feedback, advice, or support: talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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Maybe someday Talentonians will enjoy the kind of City leadership that assumes good intentions on the part of its constituents and responds to their questions with respect and curiosity instead of contempt and paranoid dismissal. For now though, it appears we have Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood serving as the City of Talent self-appointed spokesperson, which means we will continue to be treated like sinister plebeians a while longer.

Before digging in we should make something clear: Talent Council Watch is not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. We are asking questions about and alerting Council to what, based on publicly available evidence, looks to us like a lack of transparency around processes, decision-making and potential conflicts of interest. If we’re wrong, great. We will quite happily accept being wrong and we will correct the record and revise our analysis accordingly, but for us to do that it would at minimum need to be extremely clear exactly what we have said that is incorrect. Until then, we will keep asking questions. Anonymously.

Ok, now on to the TCW Report making its dramatic Facebook debut.

Councilor Collay was the first to reply to this post, predictably discrediting Talent Council Watch instead of engaging with the content. He accused us of “trying to draw conclusions and make assumptions” which…uh, yes? Guilty as charged Councilor.

But far more interesting than what he said is the fact that he deleted his comments shortly after posting them. When questioned about that by the original poster, we get Councilor Ana Byers telling us about how elected officials have been trained to adhere to extensive rules about discussing City business on social media. (More on that later).

It seemed at that point like maybe they had gotten a call from their lawyer and had to shut it all down, but no not quite, because Mayor Darby had not yet taken the opportunity to misuse the word misinformation and caution her subjects against ever reading anything about Talent that apparently doesn’t come from her own Facebook page, an official City press release, or a Talent News & Review article literally written by her staff. So of course she did that first, adding & deleting comments and ultimately revising one of them 19 different times over the course of a day but somehow still neglecting to edit into it any clarifying information on the topic, and then she skedaddled on outta there and changed the subject.

Once again, we are left with questions. In fact, we have more questions now than we did before, because she just made everything So. Much. Weirder.

It doesn’t seem like Council is super into us asking questions so there’s no real expectation that these will ever be sufficiently answered, but we’re gonna keep asking them anyway. I mean it’s not like the Talent News & Review is gonna do it!

First Question
Is the Mayor immune from the rules that limit what everyone else on Council is permitted to say about City business on social media? Because she doesn’t seem to have a problem with ‘inadvertently creating public records at a level that does not comply with all requirements’ on a pretty regular basis. Do these extensive rules that Councilor Byers refers to not apply to the Mayor and if not, why not? Did she not receive the same training everyone else did?

Second Question
What exactly does all this mean?

“Identifying local organizations who are already tenants in Talent buildings for input, is very far from signing a rental agreement at the resource center. And for the record, TBA might be happy to give input about rentals in Talent, because we pay rent (not make money) for our space, and we have already notified the City Manager a while back that TBA wants the old office back when Town Hall is repaired… TBA (still called Talent Chamber with the irs because they are slow) has been there in business since 2005 (not 2022) and it’s the best location for TBA.”

“TBA just recently remodeled the cute office at Town Hall, they will have to throw TBA out!”

“For the record, Access has been consulted as well. They are great community partners and previously occupied city space like all the rest. Still…no agreements have been signed with anyone. “

-Comments written by Mayor Darby in response to a Facebook post linking to this TCW Report on February 13, 2025.

This is how we understand these statements: TBA and other organizations are only being invited to “provide input” about the new building at this stage and they are being chosen to provide input only because they are tenants of the City. TBA is not seeking a space in the new building, as it already has an office in Town Hall and the City Manager was already informed that they will be keeping it that way. TBA is simply giving input about the new building because they are City tenants.

We welcome correction if we’ve misunderstood, but that is our genuine, honest-intentioned interpretation of what she was saying, which she would not expand on when asked.

We have never suggested that any agreements had been signed. That’s not the issue. The argument we actually made was that Manager Milliman’s department update at a Council meeting, along with a Facebook comment from the Mayor the same week in January, sure made it sound like the City had both identified and spoke with the initial groups (City tenants) as presumed candidates for building space before the public could give any input. Since we still don't know what the criteria for being able to rent a space will even be, if this is true then it would be in opposition to the very rules for tenant selection they told us they would be adhering to back in August. That was our entire thesis right there.

City Manager Gary Milliman’s Jan 15th Council meeting update:

“So we are starting to reach out to some of the community based organizations to determine their initial interest and possibly relocating there and we'll be talking to more next week and in the coming weeks.”

Mayor Darby’s January 12th comment on Facebook in response to a question about who would be invited to join the new building:

“Gary Milliman mentioned that he has approached current tenants but no agreements are made. RAC tenant since 2021, Jackson County Long Term Recovery Group tenant since 2002, Talent Business Alliance tenant since 2005, and Access/Food Project tenant since 2015?”

Note: According to their website the Jackson County Long Term Recovery Group has only existed since 2020, not 2002. We assume that was a simple typo on her part and was not misinformation intended to damage our community and tear us apart.

Third Question
Setting aside the fact the Milliman stated on the record that several groups had been identified and were met with as possible future tenants, not as consultants, it is unclear what kind of pertinent input the same groups could even provide as consultants if those groups are not assuming they will be offered a space in the building. (i.e. “Welcome to a tour of our sweet new building that we are not inviting you to move into. We asked you here because you have been a City tenant therefore you have insight into whether we should take down this wall in the building we will be renting out to tenants that are not you.”)

But here is what makes this whole situation weirder now than it was as week ago: the Mayor insisting that TBA doesn’t even want a new space. Okay, then why in the world would TBA be one of the groups asked to meet with the City, tour the building and provide input on…things? I mean at least if TBA were in the running as a tenant that would make sense, even if it’s premature at this early stage for anyone to be in the running. But if they don’t even want to move out of Town Hall, then we have to wonder about TBA providing input on any of this at all. Why would Talent Business Alliance - with our Mayor employed as its Executive Director and with several other Councilors financially connected to it, and which as a non-profit is not accountable to voters or subject to transparency laws - be providing input on important City decisions that on the surface have very little if anything to do with its mission of supporting small businesses, if not in its capacity as a future tenant?

Again, we are not making accusations of wrongdoing at this point. We are only trying to figure out why City tenants are already being invited to group tours of the vacant Resource Center building and how the TBA is intertwined with Council and City decision-making. And we are also letting our elected officials know that some things are looking kinda shady at the moment. If they are at all concerned about not adding to that perception any further, they might want to address it in an honest, public-facing way instead of trying to scare people away from even reading about it with stuff like this:

And on that note! A few words about this publication, or “anonymous blog” as Powerful Council Leaders are referring to it. We fully anticipated the anonymity pushback. To publish on Substack anonymously was a decision arrived at after a great deal of reflection on our priorities in relation to the risks involved. We knew our work would be dismissed by some because of the lacking byline, but we chose anonymity to protect ourselves against retaliation and personal attacks from people with direct and institutionally-backed power over our careers and day-to-day lives. Nothing for us to apologize for there. Holding power accountable does not require disclosing one’s identity, and what we lose in institutional validation by being anonymous we make up for in the freedom we have to expose the truth about what’s happening in those very institutions.

In response to the criticism that being anonymous while asking for transparency from City Council is hypocritical, there is a huge and fundamental difference between government accountability and personal privacy. Transparency requirements exist because the City government wields public power, controls taxpayer money, enforces laws, and makes decisions that affect entire communities. Private citizens - including journalists and local watchdog groups like this one - do not have remotely the same power nor the same obligations and cannot reasonably be held to the same standard as elected officials. This is something our Council seems to forget sometimes.

As far as what to call this thing you’re reading, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Grassroots/Citizen/Watchdog journalism or anonymous blogging. Personally I think it most comfortably lives in the “Investigative Commentary” space, a subtype of accountability journalism where private citizens working from outside of entrenched civic institutions examine evidence, connect the dots, and explore the broader implications of facts. There’s actually a well-established, corruption-exposing history of this kind of writing in the United States, we’re in good company. But whatever anyone chooses to call it, if this newsletter provides evidence that supports the assertion that the City Council is failing in its transparency obligations, officials dismissing the concerns only because they are raised anonymously is nothing but a distraction from the real questions in front of us.

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There is a bit of context that needs to be laid out here before we can dig into those questions, so let’s go on a short mudball-throwing detour.

Russell Hodgdon, life-long Talentonian, was running for Council Seat #4 against Rosario Medina, also a Talent lifer. Hodgdon posted a Meet the Candidate event announcement to his campaign page on Facebook with a little bit of cutting commentary, which ended up triggering some heated accusations from a few of the folks on the slate he wanted us to break.

It appears that Mayor Darby really did not like his post. Her responses to it in multiple groups and in the comments of several posts over the next few days read to us as overly defensive and critical of his decision to even run for office against Medina in the first place (despite the fact that he had been running for Seat #4 unopposed before she entered the race).

Rosario Medina enters the fray here, arguing that Russell is perpetuating a racist and sexist narrative by saying that the Mayor-endorsed slate candidates would be more likely to maintain the status quo than to instigate change on the Council.

Hodgdon responds to her accusations with some interesting claims of his own, thereby unleashing Consensus Discourse onto the Talent political scene and ultimately leading to the creation of this very newsletter you’re reading right now.

Ok now we can get into the meat of this weird sandwich. First of all, could we write a 12-part investigative series about the Mayor’s social media behavior, especially during election season? Yes, yes we could. But for now we’re just gonna zoom in on a piece of this one incident because it’s fascinating and unsettling and may even be telling us that our City Council regularly operates in violation of the law.

When Hodgdon brings up the fact that there have been zero (0) dissenting votes through August over 81 different Council motions, all heck breaks loose. Mayor Darby and Councilor Daniel Collay both defend themselves against their own voting history with the argument that they are simply “building consensus,” which someone at some point must have decided is the right way to govern Talent?

(For what it’s worth, for August through December the Council again didn’t have a single NAY vote on any motion. That’s an additional 6 meetings and 33 votes of nothing but AYEs. 114 Votes in 2024. Not a single NAY).

Consensus as a small town Council’s decision-making process has some strengths, but also many weaknesses, and is certainly worthy of its own debate. Some experts argue that consensus-building in groups of this nature often does not result in representative governance, not that anyone asked them. But what’s especially interesting in this situation is that the Council members who spoke on this said that the consensus form of decision-making requires “extra” deliberation to achieve. In their own words:

What we are being told by our Mayor and Councilor here is that just because they vote yes on every single motion literally 100% of the time, that doesn’t mean they don’t disagree with each other. They totally disagree! It just means that they meet to work through these disagreements BEFORE they come to the Council meeting to vote on them.

There’s a rather glaring problem with that.

ORS 192.630(2):

“A quorum of a governing body may not meet in private for the purpose of deciding or deliberating toward a decision on any matter.”

This is what Oregon law says:

• Decisions must be discussed and made publicly. Any discussion, deliberation, or decision by a governing body must take place in an open meeting unless a specific exemption applies.

• If a quorum (the minimum number of members needed to make decisions) is present, the body cannot meet privately to deliberate or decide on official matters.

• No “serial” or “rolling” meetings. That means public officials cannot avoid the law by holding a series of smaller, private discussions (such as through emails, phone calls, or one-on-one conversations) that collectively involve a quorum and lead to a decision.

• Certain topics (e.g., personnel matters, legal consultations, real estate negotiations) may be discussed in exempt Executive Sessions, but final decisions must still be made in a public meeting.

Here is a longer summary of what the law says >.

These meeting rules are intended to reflect that government belongs to the people and should operate in a way that is transparent and inclusive. The purpose of the laws is to ensure that Council conducts City business openly so citizens can see how decisions are made and can hold officials accountable. They allow ALL community members to observe and provide input on decisions that affect them, not just those with special access, and they help prevent corruption, undue influence, and backroom deals.

So if the Mayor and Councilor Collay are admitting that the Council members disagree with each other about City business all the time but the public just doesn’t see that because they argue privately, well that’s a pretty serious problem.

Once again, from the Mayor herself:

“It discounts the countless extra meetings that the members put into consensus building.”

“It would be far easier to come to meetings with views based on limited info, and vote either up or down on policy and get back to their families.”

“Hours of sharing differing views, compromise and revision. Putting in extra time at study sessions, community engagement, public hearings, making revisions, building consensus before taking a vote.”

Needless to say, there should not be “countless extra meetings” that the public doesn’t know about. “Extra meetings” should in fact be extremely countable!

The Mayor mentioned Study Sessions. Let’s take a look at those to see if all this consensus-building is happening in there, because as far as we know there are not any other types of public meetings where the Council as a body discusses the items that it ends up voting on.

What we find when we look at all the Regular Meeting Minutes alongside this list of Study Sessions is that in Jan-Feb 2024 there were 2 votes - Water Rate Options and the Bear Creek Project - that did indeed have Study Sessions about them take place prior to the vote. We can’t say if there was disagreement on these topics because we did not want to listen to two whole Council Study Sessions to find out. For good measure let’s just assume there was some dissent present. Regardless, as we can see in the list above, the vast majority of the Study Sessions that took place in 2024 were about Council goal-setting, which ended with a vote in May, and extensive procedure education.

So if not Study Sessions, then what countless extra meetings are they referring to where all this consensus-building is taking place? Or are Council members regularly deliberating behind closed doors to come to agreements before they vote? Or could it be that everyone on the Council is afraid to disagree with the Mayor?

114 Council votes in 2024, every single one of them unanimous AYE’s.

What could the complete lack of dissenting voices mean? According to our research1, this level of affirmative unanimity is uncommon and suspicious in a City Council, and is likely due to one or both of the following:

1. Council members are privately discussing and deciding on matters with one another before public meetings, which is considered a rolling quorum and is against the law.

2. Council members feel pressured socially or politically to vote in lockstep, avoiding dissent with the group leader(s) in order to maintain unity and avoid scrutiny.

The Mayor vehemently denies that “Powerful Council Leaders” are in political lockstep, and she lets us know that it is ridiculous to have concerns about this. In fact she thinks it’s “lowbrow” to even bring it up.

Lowbrow refers to something that is not intellectual or sophisticated, often associated with crude, uncultivated, lower class culture. It’s the opposite of highbrow, which means of superior intellectual interests and refined tastes. That’s what our town’s Mayor is calling a lifelong resident with deep connections to the community who has expressed concern about a what could be a major problem with Talent’s government and wants to do something about it. Lowbrow.

Ok let’s zoom back out and look at what we have. First, a regular guy running for a seat on the City Council says these things:

• Many people in Talent don’t feel heard or represented by the current City Council.

• Running a slate campaign can lend itself to groupthink in office and doesn’t signal change to the status quo.

• The Council’s ongoing pattern of completely unanimous voting is concerning.

• City Council should encourage different viewpoints among its members that better represent the interests and priorities of Talent citizens instead of their own.

In response, based entirely on his two comments screenshotted above, the Mayor and Council members collectively accuse that candidate of all of the below:

• Engaging in dirty politics, throwing empty mud balls, tearing people down.

• Spreading misinformation.

• Perpetuating racist and sexist assumptions about women of color.

• Not being smart or sophisticated enough to understand how consensus-building works.

• Deliberately trashing decent peoples’ reputations to further his own political ambitions.

• Aligning with wealthy developers.

• Working against diversity by running in this election.

Does that feel a little… unbalanced to you? Doesn’t it seem like quite a lot of personal insults and serious accusations in response to what were pretty mild assertions on his part?

What the hell is going on in this town?

If you’ve ever wondered what people mean when they say they’re afraid to say anything negative about Mayor Darby or her Council, this is probably what they’re worried about, among other things (although this particular example is hella mild compared to some of what we’ve seen happen to people who say the wrong thing). People are scared to be honest because it feels like we’re all one critical opinion away from becoming the target of unfounded, bad-faith accusations from our very own Mayor. Why do you think Talent Council Watch is an anonymous watchdog group?

Here’s what is important to remember when we see such hostile reactions by elected officials to citizen feedback: It is not disrespectful or dirty politics or sexism or misinformation or nonsense to observe a troubling pattern and challenge the City Council on it. It is actually our duty as responsible citizens and voters to be engaged enough to notice irregularities and ask these kinds of questions, and to hold the Council to account for any potentially unethical behavior, even when we might have some of the facts wrong. We believe it is the Council’s duty as elected community leaders to correct inaccurate facts where they exist but to respectfully answer their constituents’ questions, instead of making ugly insinuations and running smear campaigns against the people who ask them.

To that end, we have 2 questions for Council members that we invite them to answer:

1. If, as the Mayor claims, the Talent City Council was NOT in complete political lockstep for the entirety of 2024, then did members of Council hold consensus-building conversations about City business in private meetings, against Oregon Public Meetings Law?

2. If that is not the case, then please explain in what types of ‘extra’ public meetings did the Council come to consensus on their decisions before voting unanimously on them 114 times in row. If they were indeed publicly-held meetings as required by law then there will be documentation of the deliberations that we can access to confirm.


   Thank you,
   Talent Council Watch
   

Is something happening with the Talent City Council or the Mayor that you have concerns about but are afraid to say anything ? Maybe it’s something we can investigate. Email us at talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com

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Talent Awarded $1.5 Million for Community Resource Center

News Release Date: 12-20-2024

A $1.5 million grant to fund a Community Resource Center in Talent was approved this week by the State of Oregon.

The funding will be used to purchase and remodel a former medical clinic at 49 Talent Avenue, currently owned by Asante, according to Talent City Manager Gary Milliman. Funding will come from the federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program administered by Business Oregon.

“We are delighted to receive this news,” Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood said. “The vision is for this 4,000 square foot building to serve the needs of a variety of non-profit organizations serving the people of our community.” Read entire >

We’ve all known about this possibility since July 2024, when Milliman announced that the City of Talent had become qualified to submit a proposal for the purchase of the old Asante building downtown as a Community Resource Center for lower-income Talent residents. Awesome idea. The TCW is 100% on board with offering a consolidated location for Talentonians who are struggling financially to access resources and assistance - which is why we’re paying close attention to how this goes down.

We may dive into the triggering event for this proposal at some point, but for now we will just focus in on the question of who will be given a space in the Center. Available space is rare and in high demand in that area of Talent, so of course people are wondering about which non-profits the City is going to give these spots to. There’s certainly no shortage of Talent-focused community organizations since 2020; they definitely won’t have any trouble finding tenants. So then, how are they going to decide who gets in? Will it be a fair selection process or are they going to just pick their friends’ and their own non-profits to move in? Will we the public have any say at all?

Well if you watched the Public Hearing portion of the August 7th City Council Regular Meeting, you would presumably not be too concerned about it. The Mayor and City Manager went to lengths to ensure everyone that it would be a public process and the no organizations have been selected to occupy Center space yet. In fact, they were months away from even establishing the criteria for selecting the tenants, much less the specific groups to be invited.

Here are the portions of the transcript from the Public Hearing that discuss this: (With ums and uhs mostly removed for clarity and some important parts in bold)

26:24 / MAYOR: I just have a clarifying question. So I want to make sure I understand the steps of this process Gary. Did I hear you correctly that we're authorizing tonight, we're hearing from the public about how to use this space, yeah? And authorizing you to submit an application for a grant, that's the first step? Can you describe, can you tell me what the steps are moving forward?

CITY MANAGER: All right so you have the public hearing which is both on the topic of the proposed application and to hear from the public about any other projects that the city may wish to develop for future applications. Then after the hearing is completed you would authorize the Manager to if you choose to to submit an application with the current project as described in the current round of funding. Those applications are due in mid-September. That is called a pre-application. That pre-application is then evaluated by Business Oregon staff, they are the administering Agency for CDBG, and if it appears to meet the criteria for funding they advise us accordingly and then we prepare a full application for submission by the deadline. Then it goes into a process of further evaluation review by the state, some back and forth always occurs on documentation requests and such and then there's a determination made by the state about which projects they're going to fund… that would be probably in late October/November. So you wouldn't see it come back until after that process is concluded and a grant offer is made and we'd need to respond at that time as to whether {indecipherable].

MAYOR: Great, and then after that it comes back to the Council to develop criteria based on the grant, is that correct, that's what I thought I understood, and then the staff uses that criteria for application and selection of who is actually the tenants of the building, is that correct? So we're not selecting tenants, we haven't selected any tenants…

CITY MANAGER: We're not close to doing that, we're not close to doing that. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to get to the point of soliciting tenants. A) We don't know we have the building and B) we don't have a commitment from the state or even a preliminary in that regard and C) we have some architectural work to do to define the spaces within the building better, it's a lot of technical stuff to do before we get to the point of actually talking to the prospective tenants.

MAYOR: Great and I think it's important for the public to know this next question, the question of the council developing criteria for the use of this building - once a grant is awarded, if a grant is awarded, based on the application - that is a public process, right?

CITY MANAGER: So that would be, the caveat to that is that depending upon the feedback we get from the business's Oregon staff they may want that sooner.

Later…

36:14 / MAYOR: I have an additional question for you Gary if I may. Again we're not selecting applicants we're not even creating criteria for the staff to select applicants which which is presumably how that will go. So do you want to hear…we're hearing from our community that they want to see a food bank, I think that is clear on the record and then based on some of the testimony online I'm seeing that concerns about making sure that nonprofits are those who directly serve lower income residents. Is there any part of this - because I know you're going to write a grant - is there any part of this where you want us to list potential - like a food bank you know these are the service - is that what you're looking for in this testimony? Or are you just looking for a for a… I'm not sure what.

CITY MANAGER: Yeah we will be discussing with the state in the grant process the types of uses that would be located in the building. We won't be discussing with them specific entities. I was happy to hear tonight that there's another party in town providing services that would be interested in partnering up on the building and we'll follow up with them and any others that come forward.

MAYOR: So you don't need to hear from the council types of uses, that'll be sorted out when you work with the state about allowed uses correct? Okay that that helps me a lot exactly in this discussion.

COUNCILOR GREIDER: Is there a plan or time to get more word out for organizations to come forward in…

CITY MANAGER: Well I think it's a good time now to let organizations know that this is a potential project. It's a little premature because we don't have any assurance or even an early indication as to whether the project would actually…but if there are organizations who are interested, sure I'd be happy to hear from. But we can't can't make any commitments to them.

COUNCILOR GREIDER: I fear that unless you follow Council business you may not be aware that this is out there.

CITY MANAGER: Yeah I'd be…being new to the community I'd love to hear about any organizations who would get engaged and you would be willing to reach out willing to do that to them yeah.

MAYOR: I would imagine - just to follow up to her question - I would imagine that at the point that we've written criteria and you're starting the selection process you would open that up for application is that right? Yeah right, so everybody would have a fair chance to meet the criteria that's been established by the state and adopted as policy, is that correct?

COUNCILOR BYERS: To Councilor Greider’s point…I am wondering if at this point it might be even more supportive to hear from organizations that serve the community just about the types of services that are needed and desired by the community as opposed to whether that organization themselves would be interested in participating…

CITY MANAGER: Yeah both would help.

MAYOR: Great. So with hearing that conversation I will be looking forward to seeing you know what kind of outreach the City is going to do.

One last little important bit, part of discussion of a letter from a local resident submitted as testimony for the hearing:

43:37 / MAYOR: On that note I would also like to state that in this testimony it says that “however the already arranged selection of Rogue Action Center, and perhaps other nonprofits not directly involved in services, to occupy the spaces does not fit with the qualifying factors of the grant…” We don't know what the qualifying factors of the grant, nobody's been selected. Just to be fair I do want to say that this is early in the process and it can be very confusing and people can be misinformed by some of that confusion so there's some certainly some latitude. I'm not prepared to think that there was anything maligned about that, it's just that we need to make sure that when we have information flowing through the community about an opportunity as great as this that it isn't encumbered by misinformation and discourse, unnecessary and really angry discourse at times. I think it's important to set the record straight on that as well. There have been no selections, we haven't even developed criteria yet.

Okay, looking pretty fair so far. As of August 2024 the Council and the public are assured that the tenant selection process will not be a closed-door, private invitation event but rather a series of public input hearings and openly-made Council decisions.

Not much happened (that we know about) until December, when the City was finally awarded the grant. No agreements have been signed or anything finalized yet, but the City had been approved by the State to receive the 1.5 million for the building. WooHoo! (Great job Gary, for real).

On January 15, 2025, City Manager Milliman gives a brief Staff Report update at the City Council meeting on the CDBG proposal approval and purchase of 49 Talent Ave.

5:49 / CITY MANAGER: The City has received a grant award letter from business Oregon on the Community Development Block Grant for the Community Resource Center. People have been asking about oh when's this going to be happening… I want to let everyone know that we're still waiting for the grant agreement that will come from Business Oregon. It's been several weeks now. I really don't have a date for that, but I'm advised that it should be soon. And we really can't be doing anything there including entering into an agreement to purchase the property or really doing any on-site planning for remodeling until the grant agreement is signed. Otherwise all of the subsequent expenses would be not eligible.

So we are starting to reach out to some of the community based organizations to determine their initial interest and possibly relocating there and we'll be talking to more next week and in the coming weeks. So I hope to gather a group of the Community-Based Organization representatives together once we have better access to the property so we can kind of couple a meeting with those groups and a tour of the building.

Wait what? Hold on there a sec, that doesn’t make sense. It’s too early for the City to plan anything about the remodel or even give the public an estimated timeline of when the various hearings and milestones will take place, but next week you’re inviting a unnamed group of prospective tenants to meet with the City and tour the building?

If it were too early to start planning the remodel, what would be the purpose of these groups touring the building? You certainly have some kind of timeline in mind if this is happening next week. And why is anyone who is not a City staff member being given access to the building at this stage, when we’ve been told repeatedly that you don’t even know what the criteria for tenant selection will be, much less the specific entities to be invited? How do you know which groups to reach out to if you have not yet established tenant criteria?

We find out a little more when we mine Facebook for the Mayor’s comments to public questions regarding the grant. Here’s what Mayor Darby said on January 12th:

Ah ok, so there are obviously groups that have already been pre-qualified then. Assuming the Mayor’s comment here is accurate, we can deduce that those who have been invited to meet with staff and tour the building are all current or displaced tenants of property owned by the City of Talent.

Talent Business Alliance - Non-profit since 2022 20051 that promotes Talent businesses on their Facebook page and organizes business-owner mixers and consumer events that aim to bring customers to small businesses. Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood is the paid Executive Director, Councilor Pare-Miller is paid employee, Councilor Ponomareff is a (volunteer) TBA Board member, and Councilor Byers was paid by the TBA, with money provided by the City of Talent, to organize the Harvest Festival in 2024. Formerly headquartered in old Town Hall, we understand that the group is currently using a room in the Talent Community Center.

Rogue Action Center - Social justice advocacy group. Was renting at low cost the City’s owned building on Home Street. Councilor Greider (2020-2024) is a paid employee.

Jackson County Long-Term Recovery Group - Fire recovery non-profit that surveyed residents and wrote a Recovery Plan called Rogue Reimagined, published in 2023. It’s not clear what they’re working on now or where they rent City space.

ACCESS Talent Food Pantry - Serves Talent’s lower income population with free food and groceries on a weekly basis. Currently operates in the parking lot outside the Talent Community Center after having been displaced by the fire in Town Hall in April 2024.

Other than the Food Pantry, none of these groups explicitly serve low-income Talent residents (the original intent of the new building, according to early discussion and Press Releases). The only thing they have in common is that they have served Talent in some way in the past and have been tenants of City property before.

So what’s the issue with that? Well, first of all, it has not been decided that a purpose of the Resource Center is to relocate City tenants. Certainly it would be nice for the City to have most of its renters in one central location and to free up valuable rental and/or meeting space in other City buildings, but that is not the aim of the CDBG program or the grant, nor is it part of the criteria for space rental. Because there have not been any criteria established yet, remember? This ‘previous tenant’ criteria may be something that the Mayor/Council/City Manager have always been planning on, but that doesn’t make it a given. As per the City Council, the qualifications for tenancy are yet to be decided and the process of making decisions about the qualifications will be a public one.

Second, the potential for actual and perceived conflicts of interest here are…bountiful. Several City Council members appear to have non-Council interests in which groups will be allowed to rent space at the Resource Center. Given the assurances of the Mayor and Councilors back in August that tenant selection would be fair and public, one might find it surprising that none of them questioned the City Manager’s announcement that groups are already being invited to a City meeting.

On the other hand, given the direct connection that 4 Council members have to the Talent Business Alliance and secure in the knowledge that it has been (unofficially) offered a spot already, it’s reasonable to wonder if perhaps they wouldn’t want to question the process too much at this point.

What this could mean for the community is that when the tenant selection process is officially started in view of the public, the Council would seem to be inclined to establish criteria that will include the already-invited groups. “Previous City tenant” would need to be a tenant criteria in order for these groups that have been low-key offered a space to get one, and then that criteria could disqualify otherwise qualified non-profits hoping for a space.

Then the City will find itself in this unfortunate situation where it looks like, behind the scenes, they’ve handpicked a bunch of nonprofits that they already had relationships with or are being paid by (or even running), thereby preventing smaller, newer, lesser-networked groups from being given this opportunity to grow and reach people from downtown Talent. The optics are not great you guys!

They told us that this process would be transparent. They said everyone would have an equal chance to meet the criteria, and that the criteria itself would be open to public discussion. So far that has not been the case. There is still time to course correct on this one and we encourage Council to do so. Council and City staff should cease conducting meetings with prospective tenants until the public has been allowed to participate in the discussion about which types of organizations should occupy the building and until tenant criteria has been approved by Council.

Read the Part 2 followup to this story:

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CORRECTION 2.14.25: According to Mayor Darby in a Facebook comment dated 2.13.25, “When TBA changed from a 501c6 to a 501c3, it was to stop collecting a membership fee from businesses and instead raise money to help businesses by increasing foot traffic through events, etc” …. “TBA has been around since 2005. The old board changed the name in 2019 but the current organization still has all of the same tax id number since 2005 etc…easy to verify which news sources do when they are dedicated to objective news.”

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We used 2022 in the Report because that is what it says on the TBA website and it seemed most accurate to use the year from which the current organization name and registration as a 501(c(3) had been active, which we assumed from the Our Story paragraph below was 2022. That was an incorrect assumption.

Talent Council Watch is a citizen watchdog group established in 2025 to critically monitor Talent, Oregon’s City Council and hold its members accountable when they do not meet the standards of integrity we expect of City officeholders.

TCW is a non-partisan project and is entirely unconcerned with the political affiliation of Talent’s elected officials or their constituents. We do not advocate for any ideology or platform, but rather for the integrity of our City’s leadership.

As such, we ask that our Mayor and City Councilors:

• Serve Talent honestly, ethically and transparently.

• Willingly avoid potential conflicts of interest and do not use their position for the improper benefit or monetary gain of themselves, family members, or favored associates.

• Ensure that their governing decisions consistently prioritize the needs and concerns of everyday citizens in Talent, rather than being disproportionately influenced by elite and special interests.

• Demonstrate a commitment to vital principles of American democracy, specifically the freedoms of speech, expression and association, equality of voice and consideration, fair processes, and a pluralistic system of political parties and organizations.

• Accept responsibility and hold themselves accountable for their mistakes and failures and those of their administration, without throwing their subordinates under the bus.

• Refuse to engage in political bullying, meaning using one’s influence and reach as a public leader to shame, undermine, or discredit an individual or group in the community, and often a willingness to distort the truth to achieve that goal. Political bullying includes the use of social media for reputation-bashing, rumor-spreading, blame-shifting, threatening, and making bad-faith accusations and insinuations.

• Maintain a productive, supportive, non-hostile workplace culture for the City staff who are integral to municipal operations and who we all as residents rely on to be able to successfully do their jobs. We believe that no City of Talent employee should ever feel the need to resign their position because of mistreatment by Council or a toxic work environment.
  

When our elected officials engage in what appears to be behavior that does not meet these standards, and there is documentation of it, we will bring it to this forum for public scrutiny and discussion. We invite the Mayor and Councilors to defend themselves against any claims they believe to be false, misleading, or lacking important context, although we are aware of limitations to what they can say and where. We ask that they in turn respect our right as citizens to question and criticize them as fundamental to democratic functioning.

This newsletter, the TCW Report, is authored by a private citizen of Talent with input and research support from the small group of smart, civically engaged people who make up the Talent Council Watch, none of whom represent any single entity, individual, political party or campaign. We intend to present hard evidence and analyze its significance with journalistic integrity. However we are not journalists, reporters, politicians, or pundits, just regular people with ordinary lives who want to help bring impactful, positive changes to the way Talent government operates. The content shared and arguments made in this publication will be based on publicly available information and aims to foster transparency, accountability, and informed civic engagement. We will not intentionally spread cruel, personal, or unfounded rumors, and we will not dox, threaten, encourage violence, or violate the boundary between public and private life. Our intent is to expose and discuss questionable decisions made by our elected officials, not cause personal harm or fear for safety. Factual information provided in the TCW Report will be sourced, verified, and documented as much as is feasible and appropriate. Opinion will be presented as such. We will not make unwarranted accusations without evidence of potentially unethical behavior. We will always engage in good faith and avoid ad-hominen attacks based on ideology or identity. We may be proven wrong about something at some point, in which case we will be adults about it and make it clear that we stand corrected. We will ask questions that may be hard to answer, but will not be wrong to ask.

If you’re interested in helping us hold Talent City Council more accountable to its constituents, please subscribe to this Substack publication to receive the latest TCW Reports in your email inbox. If you have an issue in mind you’d like us to investigate, or you’d just like to convey your support of this project and/or give us some advice, you are invited to send us an email us at talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com.

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