Joseph Powell lost almost all of his neighbors after the Almeda Fire swept through Talent Mobile Estates in September. Only a few homes, including his own, remain standing on October 13, 2020.
April Ehrlich / JPR
Darby Ayers-Flood, the city of Talent’s current mayor, will remain in office after a close mayoral race. After winning by 20 votes over challenger Mark Anderson, Ayers-Flood will hold her post and continue her focus on the city’s post-fire recovery and economic growth. Ayers-Flood joins us with more on her plans for the city and moving forward after the devastating Almeda Fire in 2020.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OBP. I’m Dave Miller. Every vote counts. It is a truism that’s proven true every election. Take the mayor’s race in Talent. It was decided by just 20 votes in the most recent election. In the end, two term incumbent Darby Ayers-Flood was re-elected so she will once again lead the fire ravaged city. She joins us now to talk about the election and the ongoing recovery. Mayor Ayers-Flood, welcome to the show.
Darby Ayers-Flood: Thank you for having me, Dave.
Miller: This was an incredibly close race. How are you feeling now that you can finally say that you have won?
Ayers-Flood: Well, most of all I feel grateful to be part of an ongoing effort to recover our community, an effort that’s well in play and really just having an opportunity where that kind of momentum that we have in our recovery won’t be disrupted by a new team, trying to learn the position and all of that comes with a transition of a team. So we’ll keep going; we have a really good recovery effort happening here and I don’t think it’ll miss a beat as a result of the elections.
Miller: I want to turn in just a second to the recovery itself. But sticking with politics, four years ago, you won the mayor’s race by a two to one margin of more than 1,000 total votes. As I noted this time, it was just 20 votes. What do you think made the race so close this time?
Ayers-Flood: I think it’s a couple of different things I would just say on the lower end of it, but still very impactful, is the fact that we’ve lost so many voters displaced by the fire and because of the way the fire burned and the populations that it burned out, really a very large portion of what I would consider my constituency has been displaced from the community. That’s certainly a part of it.
I think the other part is that a recovery from a disaster is a really daunting and difficult, complex effort. And under the stress of COVID and under the stress of the disaster itself, there are differing opinions about what directions to take, what to prioritize in some regards, and then how to gather the resources to make recovery happen at a pace that really takes care of everybody. So there certainly have been some differing opinions about how to do that, what tools to use, how to gather resources so there’s been some controversy just before the elections that I think made the elections a more interesting conversation and different points of view. I think it’s fair to say that there’s been some different perspectives on recovery.
Miller: You mentioned in the first part that because of the loss of population that you think disproportionately affected people who are more likely to vote for you. What does the Talent population look like now compared to pre-fire?
Ayers-Flood: For a small community, I think what kind of puts us into context is there were only 2,500 votes casted in this last election, just over 2,500. We’re a really small town. Polling, measuring and data gathering are much more challenging. So I think that’s a difficult question to answer. What I can hone in on is the common ground that everybody did express during the elections and that’s around still pursuing affordable housing, trying to bring back our families who in many cases are still cast asunder. There are still hotel rooms in use for transitional housing. We still have FEMA trailers in the area. We have a project right here in downtown Talent called the Gateway project where we have 53 RV trailers filled with families that are still waiting to get homes. So those are some of our common ground . . . building back our businesses that were common ground. There were a lot of areas where we also very much agreed on how to recover our community.
Miller: What is your overall plan for how to bring housing back, bring businesses back, without pricing out lower income residents who can’t afford expensive homes right now?
Ayers-Flood: That is an incredible challenge that we face. To add context to that question, we had a housing crisis before the fire like the rest of the nation and this fire very uniquely carved out are more vulnerable communities: our senior communities, our Latinx communities, many of our mobile home parks. It just took out most of the naturally occurring affordable housing in large portions. While we were able to see homeowners with insurance recover very quickly and really give this appearance that the rebuild is happening very, very quickly, there is an aspect of our recovery and that’s the more affordable housing that just continues to be the struggle. And two years later, what I can say is, it’s almost the same struggle we had in the first place. Land availability, incentivizing rebuilds, utilizing the resources that are coming to us in the form of support from the state and and from the Feds in a way that actually incentivizes building more affordable housing are just as important . . .
Miller: And if I may interrupt one second, is it fair to say that that naturally occurring affordable housing is not going to happen in the rebuild, that it has to somehow be created or at least incentivized?
Ayers-Flood: Absolutely, especially in the way the fire burned in Talent where it left most of the higher end housing still standing. There was some of that burned, but it leaves us with no naturally occurring affordable housing. So even as we build housing back, it doesn’t compress housing into the affordable sector. We absolutely have to build affordable housing. But I think that’s the national picture that we’re facing. I don’t think we’re going to be able to solve these issues unless we do that everywhere.
Miller: One of the big issues in the race that has now been pushed a little bit down the line, that voters will actually weigh in on themselves, is a new urban renewal district in Talent. The basic idea here is that this extra property tax money won’t go to general coffers, but it will be used instead to help improve the area. That’s a sort of a quick and dirty way to describe how these renewal districts work. What’s your argument for a new renewal district?
Ayers-Flood: I have two main points: one is that because of the incredible increase of housing values that has happened because of the rebuild, all new houses as a result of the rebuild and the associated taxes that come with those higher values, all of the jurisdictions in the area, will see an increased level of revenue streams. So what we are asking for is for us to carve off a little bit of that, taking the increase that’s happening from the rebuild and then help us recover our affordable housing as well.
I think it is important to really see in a recovery that it happens in stages. A lot of the resources and funding that come into the area are around humanitarian efforts and the rescue efforts and the temporary shelters, but when you get to that point where you really have to address resettling folks, the resources start to wane. And local jurisdictions and local communities really face those issues in some ways on their own and they have to figure out how they’re going to resource those rebuilds if bringing folks home back to their communities in their school districts is important. And it certainly is in Talent; it’s always been one of our priorities.
We have to get all the tools out of the tool box is what I say to folks. An urban regional agency–which is typically designed to mitigate blight but also has a provision to recover from disaster fire, earthquakes, floods–will have an opportunity, if the voters choose it, to take that funding and very succinctly impact our recovery with resources that we can fill the gaps where other resources are not able to. So, that is what the proposal is all about and why it’s so important that we look at that as a viable solution for our community to recover.
Miller: Darby Ayers-Flood, thanks very much for joining us.
Ayers-Flood: Sure.
Miller: That’s Darby Ayers-Flood, the newly re-elected mayor of Talent.
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