# One Tree, Counted Twice

*Civic Beat · January 14, 2026 · by Alan Decault*

> The first of this paper's Planning Commission dispatches. A set of findings authorizing eight trees to come down had counted eleven, a hearing had to be re-run because the public notice was defective, and staff told the commission that Ashland's own definition of 'family' violates fair housing law.

---

**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.

---

*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.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-01-14-one-tree-counted-twice