One Tree, Counted Twice

Ashland Planning Commission · January 13, 2026 · 1h 30m · seven of seven commissioners present · one member of the public testified.

This is the first of these, and it works the way the School Board series that started last week works: documentary. The Ashland Free Press is new again this month, and among the things a revived paper ought to do is read what the Planning Commission actually adopts — not the vote, which is usually unanimous and takes nine seconds, but the findings, which are the decision and which almost nobody outside the room has ever opened.

That is the whole method and it will not be explained again. A staff report, a set of findings and a caption transcript, read against each other. What it loses is the atmosphere. What it gains is that a document does not get tired at nine o’clock, and neither does a reader holding two of them side by side.

Which is convenient, because the first three items of this meeting were all, underneath, about documents that did not agree with each other.

Unfinished Business: Findings at 44 Scenic Drive

The commission had approved a four-lot subdivision in December. In January it took up the findings — the written instrument that carries the decision, states the conditions and, if anyone ever appeals, is the thing an appellate body reads. The findings are not a formality. They are the decision.

A commissioner noticed that the tree count in section 2.6 did not match the count in section 2.9.1 and asked whether those were different trees or the same ones. The answer, from staff, unpicked as follows: the original figure was eleven trees; two originally proposed for removal are now being protected; and “there was one tree from the eleven that was accidentally counted twice.”

So the true number is ten, of which eight come down — five significant, three otherwise regulated. The other correction made to the same document was “correcting January of 2025 to January, 2026.”

Nobody did anything wrong here. A revision arrived, a commissioner read it, a staff planner explained it, the number got fixed before adoption. That is the process working exactly as designed, and it is worth writing down for precisely that reason: the system caught it because one person on a volunteer body cross- referenced two paragraphs of an attachment.

The same commissioner then asked the question this desk would have asked, which is the one about everything else: “to make sure I didn’t miss anything, since there wasn’t a lot of time to review the revision, is there anything else significant that changed?”

The answer was the date. The motion carried, seven to nothing.

2262 and 2270 Ashland Street

This hearing was a continuation from December 9. The chair stated the reason on the record: it was continued “due to a fault in the public notice, which has been corrected.”

That is a whole hearing, re-noticed and re-run, because the mailing was wrong. Nobody objected, nobody was harmed, and the cost of getting notice wrong was paid in a month of the applicant’s time. Worth a line in the file the next time somebody argues that mailed notice is a formality.

The substance: two two-story office buildings, a tree permit, phased development. The chair asked whether a property line adjustment approved by staff had ever been recorded. It had not. The line, as presently drawn, runs through the western building.

Staff’s answer deserves preserving whole, because it is what competence sounds like: “we would be remiss to issue a building permit that sits astride a property line.” A condition was added anyway — belt and braces, out of an abundance of caution, and, as one voice on the dais observed, “just more paper.”

Just more paper is how a city stops building a wall through a boundary.

One other exchange. A commissioner, disclosing that she also sits on the public arts advisory committee, asked whether space marked for public art on the plan came with any commitment to install any. It does not; the plaza satisfies the site design standards on its seating and trees alone. The art is a rendering.

The chair then asked for a motion, and had to be stopped — by the person keeping the roll — because the public hearing had not been closed yet. “No,” the chair said, “I need to do that.” The hearing was closed. The motion passed seven to nothing.

431 North Main Street: Skidmore Square

The evening’s substantial item, and the one that will still matter in a year: a four-lot subdivision replacing a deteriorated 5,000-square-foot historic contributing building with three detached houses and, on the corner lot, a single room occupancy building.

Start with the arithmetic, because two documents disagreed in public and nobody stopped.

Staff, presenting, noted a correction to its own report: the density calculation “did incorrectly reference 3.6 dwelling units. That should actually be 13.5 dwelling units,” with the bracketed figure behind it correct. Staff then gave the base density as 4.3 dwelling units. Twenty minutes later the applicant gave it as 4.7. Both numbers were said aloud in the same hearing, neither was challenged, and the answer either way rounds to four, which is what is being built. It does not change the outcome. It goes in the file because a commission that is asked to approve four conditional use permits on the strength of a floor-area table is entitled to a table that agrees with itself.

Those four permits are the request to exceed the maximum permitted floor area in a historic district by up to 25 percent — one for each lot. The proposals land between 19.8 and 24.6 percent over.

The Historic Preservation Advisory Committee had objected to the three houses for “repetitive designs, particularly when it comes to the front facing garages,” which it said “gives a cookie cutter type character not typically seen in historic districts.” The applicant’s answer was to mirror one of them.

And here the hearing produced its best exchange, because a commissioner declined to accept the shape of the argument. Asked why 25 percent more floor area is warranted, the applicant explained that garages count toward the floor area, which “artificially increases” the apparent size of the houses.

The commissioner: “What I heard was an argument for garages… These look like tract homes to me, quite frankly, which don’t look historical.”

The applicant: garages are one component.

The commissioner: “But garages became the argument for making them larger.”

That is the whole conditional use permit, examined in four sentences by somebody who was not going to be walked past it.

The Part About Fair Housing

Lot four is a single room occupancy: six bedrooms, each with a bathroom and a wet bar, arranged around one shared kitchen reached from outside. There is no interior hallway. Residents cross a covered porch to cook.

A commissioner asked how that qualifies as a single-family residence. “I mean,” she said, “it looks like where I went to camp.” Another commissioner, who said he manages eight such buildings and has looked at a dozen, put it differently: “The closest analogy I can think of is like farm worker housing that I’ve seen. But I’ve seen a lot of them. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Staff’s answer is the most important thing said in the room, and it went past without a follow-up question:

“For a single family home, typically we would allow a single kitchen with up to five unrelated people as a definition of a family. That family definition actually violates fair housing law. So if we’re talking about a shared kitchen in six bedrooms — and the number of bedrooms is not really something we can regulate, given fair housing law — it from a code perspective is really looked at as a single family. There is also a state law that says if we’re treating it separately as a single room occupancy, that we have to allow that. But we currently don’t have any of that implemented in our code.”

Read that as three separate findings, because it is three.

One: the definition of “family” in Ashland’s land use code is, in the planning department’s own assessment, unlawful.

Two: state law requires the city to allow single room occupancies.

Three: as of January 13, 2026, the city’s code contains no provisions for them.

So a six-bedroom rooming house is being approved as a detached single-family dwelling, not because anyone thinks it is one, but because the code has no other box and the box it has does not survive contact with federal law. The commission was told this and moved on to porch railings. It is not obvious what else the commission could have done — it applies the code it is handed — but somebody should have written it down, so this is somebody writing it down.

The obvious question is when the code gets fixed, and by whom. Amending it is the Council’s job, on the Planning Commission’s recommendation, and the state legislation that requires SROs has been on the books long enough that “we currently don’t have any of that implemented” is a statement about Ashland rather than about Salem. This desk will be watching for it on an agenda. Until it appears, every application of this kind arrives at a commission holding a ruler that measures the wrong thing.

Public Testimony

One speaker, Nate Wittenberg of Van Ness Avenue, who has lived near North Main since 1996. He came to object to the $105 tree removal permit fee, on the grounds that the tree in question is a mature female tree of heaven — invasive, allelopathic, up to 900,000 seeds a year, of no use to any native bird or insect — and that charging a citizen to remove one is “highly unethical.”

He was thorough, he was specific, and he was factually mistaken about the thing he was angry at. Staff explained that a subdivision application absorbs the cost of notice, so no separate tree fee was charged here; the fee exists on standalone permits because the code requires mailing notice to every property within 200 feet.

Wittenberg heard that, and said this: “Well then that’s what I would’ve objected to. And I’m sorry that I objected to it, not knowing that this person, the new owners, didn’t have to pay a fee for that.”

A man drove to a public meeting on a January night, made an argument, was corrected on the record, and withdrew it in the same breath, out loud, into a microphone. Whatever else is in this transcript, that is the part worth imitating.

The tree comes down either way, once the tree management advisory committee has read the arborist.

The Docket

The public hearing on 431 North Main was continued to February 10, with the record left open so the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee can review the revised renderings and the tree committee can review the arborist’s report. The applicant asked that findings be adopted the same night as the decision rather than a month later, because the owner would like to build before summer. That request was not ruled on.

Next: January 27, a study session jointly with the City Council and the Housing and Human Services Advisory Committee, on the manufactured housing draft ordinance. Before that, the city’s annual town hall, January 21, 5:30 to 7:00, at the Ashland High School theater.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 13, 2026 Ashland Planning Commission regular meeting, and from staff testimony describing the packet and findings. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech, with bracketed interpolations where the repair is interpretive. The caption software recycles and garbles speaker labels, so commissioners are identified by role rather than name except where the chair’s own words or a speaker’s self-identification confirm them; staff, the applicant and the member of the public identified themselves on the record. Planning action numbers, lot areas and floor-area figures are as stated in open session; the adopted findings are the controlling document. Runtime is measured from the first to the last caption timestamp.