Whatever We Want It To Mean

Ashland Planning Commission · February 10, 2026 · about 1h 45m · six commissioners voting, one absent · one member of the public testified.

The January hearing on 431 North Main was continued so the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee could look at a revised design. It came back on February 10 and produced the most interesting hour of planning this desk has read all year, because the commission spent it arguing about the limits of its own authority and then discovered, from staff, that using that authority might make things worse.

What The Commission Is Allowed To Care About

The proposal, as before: demolish a deteriorated historic contributing building on North Main, divide the lot four ways, put three detached houses on lots one through three and a six-bedroom single room occupancy building on the corner — each of the four needing a conditional use permit to exceed the historic district’s maximum permitted floor area. The overages as finally stated: lots two and three at 24.6 percent, lot four at 22.4.

Two numbers arrived during deliberation that had not been in the January record. The rooms are about 325 square feet. The rent discussed was about $1,000 a month each, which a commissioner totalled aloud: “a dwelling that’s of this size collecting $6,000 in rent a month is, you know, interesting.” He then said he was not factoring it in, which is correct, and said it anyway, which is also correct.

The chair’s objection was the one the code plainly permits: mass, bulk and scale. He did not think the SRO was compatible with the historic district coming south on North Main, and proposed refusing the permit for that lot alone.

Another commissioner asked the honest question underneath it: “I would like very much to be able to say no personally to this project, but we need to do our duty as commissioners.” She could see things wrong with the building. She was not sure they were the commission’s business rather than the historic committee’s.

The answer, from a commissioner who had brought his code, is the sentence this piece is named for. The conditional use permit criteria list six livability factors — and then a seventh, at 18.5.4.050(A)(3)(g): other factors found to be relevant by the approval authority for review of the proposed use.

“So I read that to mean whatever we want it to mean.”

He then used it against his own instinct. He listed what troubled him — a shared kitchen reachable only from outside, no storage, $1,000 for 325 square feet, which he said “does not seem to me like affordable or efficient” — weighed it against the fact that “people need to live indoors in this town,” noted that the developer does not get to call the building affordable but that six rooms still help, and voted yes.

That is what a deliberative body looks like when it works. A member finds an open-ended clause that would let him vote his preference, says so out loud, and declines to use it.

The Votes

The first motion — approve everything, all four permits — failed, two to four.

The second approved the four-lot subdivision, the tree removal, the exception to street standards, and three conditional use permits, for lots one through three only. The permit for lot four, the SRO, was denied.

A commissioner objected on grounds worth keeping: the applicant submitted one project, and approving three-quarters of it is approving something nobody applied for. “We are making conditions, we’re saying delete 25 percent of what you’re planning on and come back to us with something else.”

The fix was procedural and it was the right one. Denial “without prejudice” allows an applicant to return with a revised proposal immediately instead of waiting the statutory year. The chair offered it for lot four; a commissioner moved to extend it to the entire motion; that amendment passed six to nothing, and the full motion then passed four to two.

So the applicant may build the subdivision and the three oversized houses, and may come back with a different corner building whenever he likes.

The Part That Undoes It

Then a commissioner asked staff what the denial actually accomplishes, and the answer should be read by anyone who thinks a planning commission controls what gets built.

Lot four will exist as a legal lot of record. Its owner may build a single-family home on it that stays under the maximum permitted floor area — and that requires a building permit, not a planning action. No hearing. No historic review before this commission. Setbacks, driveway placement and the rest get looked at over a counter.

Staff went further. He could also build a duplex, because where two units are separated by six feet, one of them is not counted toward the maximum permitted floor area at all.

Which means the commission’s refusal of a six-room building on mass and scale grounds leaves open, on the same corner of the same historic district, a building it will never see. That is not a criticism of the vote. It is the architecture of the code, and it is the strongest argument in the record for the sixteen amendments the council will eventually be asked to consider — or against them, depending on which end you pick up.

One commissioner named the wider stake before the vote: allowing floor area to be exceeded because a developer needs the return makes the historic district “subject to profit maximization,” and “what’s gonna stop every developer from arguing that they should take advantage of that. If I were a developer, I would too.”

Odds

Staff spent ten minutes at the top of the meeting answering two written questions from commissioners about where their design authority comes from — the comprehensive plan, four national register districts, 18.2.5.070 on floor area, 18.5.4 on conditional use, and 18.4.2.050(A)(2)(b), which lets the commission require design modifications to meet historic standards.

Asked for examples of what is typically conditioned, staff could not produce a typical, because there have been very few applications in the historic districts since COVID and middle housing, and none for maximum permitted floor area “in quite a long time.” The clearest precedent he could find was commercial: the Lithia Way buildings across from the post office, where recommendations reached the level of strengthening a column for symmetry and using plaster rather than concrete on an elevation.

A commission that has not exercised a power in years was being asked to exercise it on somebody’s house.

Officer elections were postponed until the full commission is present. They cannot be held at a study session; staff was asked and said no.

The Docket

Next meeting February 24. Officer elections carry over to the first meeting with all seven commissioners present.

Outstanding on 431 North Main: nothing before this commission unless the applicant chooses to return. Because the approval is without prejudice, he may do so at any time.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the February 10, 2026 Ashland Planning Commission regular meeting. 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 except where the roll call or the chair’s own words confirm them. Floor-area percentages, rents and code citations are as stated in open session; the adopted findings are the controlling document. Runtime is approximate.