All Jackson County residents have even more reason to speak out to all our city councils right now as a result of last night’s Ashland city council meeting about the county’s proposed new jail tax. (Talent’s council is meeting tonight, and Medford’s on Thursday – details below.)

Every resident who spoke at the Ashland council meeting strongly opposed the county’s new tax to fund a tripling of jail capacity at a cost of more than $1 billion over the next 23 years.

They said that the county needs to come up with a comprehensive alternative plan that commits real resources to programs like other counties have that keep people out of jail in the first place through prevention, crisis intervention, diversion, and treatment.

Only then would county residents be able to judge whether a new jail is needed and, if so, how big.

Only one Ashland council member spoke against the county’s super-sized jail proposal. But faced with overwhelming public opposition, the council voted 5-1 to postpone endorsing the new tax and sending a bad proposal to the May ballot that would waste time and resources, and potentially locking in Ashland residents to paying it if it is approved by voters county-wide.

So that’s the good news!

The more troubling news involves what the Ashland council decided to do next.

They plan to set up a closed-door meeting with County Administrator Danny Jordan to seek some assurance that the county will consider programs that deal with mental illness, addiction, homelessness, and poverty in a more cost-effective way than just tripling the size of the jail.

Then they plan to vote to endorse the new jail tax at one of their meetings in the next few weeks. With such an unrealistic timeline and no public participation or transparency, and no involvement of anyone from other cities, the danger is that their closed-door meeting with Jordan will be used as political cover when nothing real has actually changed.