The Curious Case of the Reappearing Intern: A Talent Success Story
Talent Business Alliance (TBA) held what they called a “Listening Session”1 on July 10th in which its Destination & Tourism Strategic Planner (formerly Coordinator) Cecelia Bagnoli presented the preliminary results of her strategic planning project. There were a few interesting takeaways from the presentation, none of them having much to do with a strategic plan.
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.
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)
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.
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:
Bagnoli is being paid for and working two different jobs for two distinct entities (TBA and City of Talent) at the same time.
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).
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:
Was Bagnoli selected for the City Planner position over other candidates who had training and experience in planning?
Why was Bagnoli hired as the City Planner given that she did not meet any of the posted minimum qualifications?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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
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:
The GIS (Geographic Information Systems) specialist actually referring to Bagnoli is unlikely given her education history. It is certainly possible that she took a GIS course to get her degree, depending on the track she was on in Environmental Sciences at Wooster, but probably not to the expert level that Campbell was implying when getting approval from Council.
Well done! It is so very important to keep tracking hiring that looks suspicious. It’s worth asking for the evidence: follow the money, especially the line items that are set up to fund this person. My experience with Curry County government in recent years…well now the County is calling for full transparency, but the coffers are emptied. Good work.
Wow, what's the name of Talent's laundry soap? Sweetdeal Breeze?