Only The Applicant Can Appeal

Ashland Planning Commission · February 24, 2026 · 56m · special meeting · six of seven commissioners present · no public forum speakers.

A briefing, no action taken, and the most consequential hour the commission has spent this year. Staff walked through the 2025 Oregon housing legislation — Senate Bill 974 and House Bill 2138 — and the commissioners worked out, in public and roughly in real time, what the bills do to their own job.

The Target

Start with the number, because it frames the rest.

Ashland adopted its own housing capacity analysis and eight-year housing production strategy in 2023–24. That work projected 854 units of need over twenty years.

The state then ran its own Oregon Housing Needs Analysis and issued every city a target. Ashland’s is more than 3,500 units — roughly 180 a year.

For comparison, and this is staff’s own figure: Ashland has built 50 to 60 units a year recently, and about 120 a year in the boom. Meeting the state target means roughly quadrupling development and holding it there for two decades.

There is a second half. About half of Ashland’s households earn under 80 percent of median income, and the state’s target accounts for that, which works out to roughly 75 subsidised units a year. Staff’s assessment: “it’s not tenable, in given the subsidy that’s available for a community our size or the development capacity of affordable housing providers in our region.”

Ashland is shielded from that target until about 2031 because it adopted its own strategy first, and will be measured against its own sixteen commitments instead. Asked what happens if the city does everything it promised and the houses still do not get built — because nobody wants to build them, because it does not pencil — staff said he asked exactly that at a state conference and was told there would be no sanction so long as a city makes the efforts it committed to. The enforcement slide says the state focuses on “actions within a city’s control,” and, as staff put it, “we don’t control the number of units built or what subsidies available.”

So the target is enormous, unreachable, and unenforced. That is worth knowing before anyone in Ashland is told the state is making them do something.

What The Bills Actually Do

Senate Bill 974 moves residential review from hearings to administrative decisions, with a hearing only on appeal, and puts a 120-day clock on final engineering review. Staff believes Ashland already meets the timelines.

Then two provisions the commission had to read twice.

The first: 974 disallows residential design standards — materials, roof form, entries, garages, windows, trim, shutters, fences, architectural detailing, balconies — for residential development. And it excludes applications with fewer than 20 units.

Read that again in the direction the commission read it. The design rules stop applying to the large projects and keep applying to the small ones.

The chair: “That’s really weird.”

A commissioner: “So they could build something really horrible and you would — we would have nothing to say about it.”

Staff: “But a smaller developer has to.”

Ashland has perhaps a dozen parcels inside the city limits that could hold more than twenty units, plus a good number in the urban growth boundary; Croman Mill and the Normal Neighborhood were named. One commissioner noted that section carries an automatic repeal in 2033, and took some comfort from it: at least there is a built-in endpoint if it does not work.

The second: 974 states that a zone change to allow denser residential use inside an urban growth boundary must be decided without a hearing, with a hearing available only on appeal. Existing Oregon statute — ORS 227.186 — requires that legislative land use acts be adopted by ordinance, which requires a hearing.

Staff asked the state’s housing production office how a city is supposed to comply with both. The answer was that they must wait for rulemaking and could not give legal advice.

The deadline to adopt local standards precedes that rulemaking by about a year.

Goldman’s summary is the sentence to keep from the whole evening: “essentially Ashland and every community in the state will be in the position of adopting by local ordinance standards that could then be subject to appeal, but beyond that would be subject to revision once rulemaking is completed… I see this will have to be litigated at some point in the near future.”

The chair’s response: “That’s crazy.”

The Part About Notice

House Bill 2138 covers middle housing, and this is where the commission stopped talking about process and started talking about neighbours.

Middle housing land divisions get an expedited review at the applicant’s request: a 63-day turnaround, no public notice, no hearing, no third party permitted to intervene. The applicant is the only person entitled to notice and the only person eligible to appeal.

Staff, plainly: “So nobody gets notice and only the applicant can appeal.”

The chair: “So the guy next door—”

Staff: “Guy next door doesn’t even have to know about it.”

The mitigation offered is real and should be stated: this is a housing type that could already be built outright with a building permit. What the land division changes is the ownership of the units, not their existence. But the commission was also told that a density bonus will require duplexes to allow a third unit where one is affordable or accessible, and that a ten-lot subdivision could therefore carry twenty saleable units — or thirty.

Also in 2138: covenants and CC&Rs prohibiting duplexes or accessory residential units become unenforceable. Asked who an aggrieved homeowners’ association would sue, staff said the state.

And The Building From Two Weeks Ago

A commissioner had done the reading, and asked the question that closes the loop on this series.

House Bill 2138 contains a non-discretionary directive that local governments shall allow single room occupancy development. Did that directive exist, he asked, when the commission decided 431 North Main — two weeks earlier?

Staff’s answer: the application was processed as a single-family residence with six bedrooms sharing one kitchen, “because we don’t have an SRO section in our code.” The legislation directs the city to create one, and it must be adopted by January 1, 2027. The state’s rulemaking on the subject completes January 1, 2028.

So Ashland will write its single room occupancy rules a full year before the state explains what they are supposed to say.

One more detail from that exchange, because it will matter to somebody’s neighbourhood: for density purposes, SRO units count at one third. A six-unit SRO counts as two.

What Is Left For This Body

A commissioner asked the obvious question out loud: “What are we gonna do in our meetings? We just kind of got our job taken away.”

Staff’s prediction is that the work does not disappear so much as move to the back of the process. Applications get decided administratively, neighbours get notice of the decision, and neighbours appeal — so the commission still hears the case, but second rather than first. A commissioner finished the thought: “They’re all gonna get appealed if anybody’s paying attention,” and predicted a return to 1990s-style watchdogs “appealing everything, you know, good or bad.”

The chair put the objection in its widest form: “It strikes me as taking away a local jurisdiction’s ability to form its community.”

Staff offered, with an apology for “a little editorialising,” the argument on the other side, and it is a fair one. Around 2015 Ashland decided on its own that accessory dwelling units no longer needed a conditional use permit and a public hearing — a local community removing a regulatory barrier to a housing type it wanted. The state, he suggested, is now applying that same logic to all housing, and the 2033 sunset is a measure of how urgent it considers the shortage.

Two Housekeeping Items With Teeth

The findings on 431 North Main were adopted, and in adopting them the commission learned that its own amendment two weeks earlier did less than it thought. On February 10 it voted six to nothing to make the entire motion “without prejudice.” Staff explained that under the code the phrase attaches only to denials — it lets an applicant reapply before a year is up. An approval can be modified the following month regardless. So the phrase applies to lot four, and only to lot four, which is where the chair had originally put it.

Notice will be expensive. Because the coming amendments affect how people may use their own property, staff expects to send direct notice to every property in Ashland — a considerable local expense, and the reason code changes will be bundled into packages rather than noticed one at a time. The chair thought that was better for residents too: one trip downtown to argue about four things rather than four trips.

And a caution from staff that anyone planning to attend those hearings should read now: where a change is mandated by state law, “it is likely not within the discretion of the city to just not adopt such a code.”

The chair, who has been doing this a while: “Well, it means we have to sit here and listen to them, yes, with a straight face.”

Odds

Officer elections finally happened, after two postponements for want of a full commission. The chair noted that, unlike the city’s standing advisory committees, the Planning Commission writes its own rules and is not bound by the two-term limit — “I could be chair for life.” A motion simply to roll the existing slate forward was made, described by its own author as “a sloppy one,” and withdrawn. The commission then elected the sitting chair to continue and Russell Phillips as vice chair, unanimously and in about twenty seconds.

The Docket

Code amendments implementing 974 and 2138 come forward “in short order” — staff expects study sessions and regular meetings through the spring to be largely code work, with some provisions due by July and the rest by the end of the year. The SRO ordinance is due by January 1, 2027.

Next regular meeting March 10.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the February 24, 2026 special meeting of the Ashland Planning Commission. 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 a vote or the chair’s own words confirm them. Bill provisions, deadlines and housing targets are as presented by staff in open session, drawing on a Department of Land Conservation and Development briefing; the bills themselves are the controlling documents. A briefing takes no action.