A Use That Does Not Exist

Ashland Planning Commission · May 12, 2026 · 44m · five of seven commissioners present · the applicant did not attend · no other public testimony.

A quiet meeting about one parking lot that turned into the most useful hour of land use policy the commission has produced this year, largely because it declined a request and then went looking for the reason the request had to be made.

The Question

The owner of 40 North Main Street — the lot serving the Claycomb Mall, downtown, zoned C-1-D — wants to convert it into a privately operated, fee-based parking facility open to the general public. To do that he asked the city for a “similar use” interpretation: a finding that this is the same thing as public parking, which Ashland’s code permits outright in every zone.

The application arrived as a type one, at a type one fee. Staff escalated it to a type three legislative process on the ground that the answer would apply citywide, in every residential, commercial, employment and industrial zone — so the commission’s role is to recommend and the City Council decides.

Staff’s answer, and the assistant city attorney’s, is the same: the test is not who may use the lot but who owns, controls and operates it. Public parking means a facility run by a government — the city, the state, the university — as part of a public parking system. A privately owned lot run for commercial gain stays private even if anybody may pay to park in it.

Which produces the finding that gives this piece its title. Ashland’s code permits public parking anywhere. It permits private parking as an accessory to some other permitted use. It does not, anywhere, permit a standalone private commercial parking facility as a primary use.

The use the applicant is proposing does not exist in Ashland’s land use code.

Staff’s objection to granting the interpretation follows from that: accepting it “would effectively create a new land use category citywide without a legislative adoption process and without including standards or limitations for such a use.” Every zone in Ashland would acquire a permitted commercial parking use, by interpretation, in one evening, with no siting rules attached.

The History, Which Is Longer Than You Would Think

Staff went back through the record, and the policy is old and consistent. Discussion of avoiding a proliferation of downtown surface parking lots dates to 1967. The 1988 downtown plan named large paved parking areas and fee-based lots specifically, as detracting from the historic and pedestrian character of the core and limiting redevelopment.

Ashland’s code encodes that: publicly managed parking anywhere, private parking only as accessory, and a maximum permitted parking allowance keyed to the use it serves.

One detail is worth keeping because it shows the line is not theoretical. The city once leased the Elks lot and ran it as public parking. Under that lease it qualified. When the lease expired it reverted to members only. Ownership was never the point; control was.

A commissioner asked the obvious follow-up: could the Ashland Springs Hotel begin charging for event parking? Staff: businesses have asked over the years, and have been told a commercial parking lot is not permitted in the code.

Another asked the mirror image: could the city build a parking structure where the ice rink is and charge for it? Yes — because the city owns it, that is public parking. (A colleague pointed out it could not be four storeys there. It is zoned residential.)

The recommendation to refuse passed five to nothing.

Then They Went And Asked For It Anyway

Here is the part worth recording.

Having refused the interpretation, the commission immediately voted, unanimously and on its own initiative, to recommend that the City Council investigate creating a new land use category for privately owned paid parking as a primary use — and amended the motion to invite the council to consider it broadly: below ground, at grade, and on the lower floors of mixed-use buildings, not only as surface lots.

The reasoning, from the commissioner who moved it: the question has now come across the desk, the code has no answer for it, and “maybe it goes nowhere. Maybe we just say we like it the way that it is. But I think it’s interesting that it’s come across our desk, and I’d like to know what council thinks about it.”

From the commissioner who amended it, and who develops property for a living: “We talk about downtowns dying and less people are down there, and a lot of it might be because parking’s so difficult.” He wanted the council given something to be creative with — a structure that puts cars inside a building envelope rather than on a surface lot, which is precisely what the 1967 and 1988 policies were trying to avoid, and precisely what surface-lot prohibitions cannot deliver on their own.

And the sentence that justifies the whole manoeuvre: “until this has come up, they might not even know the issue doesn’t exist.”

The chair was careful about the risk, and her caution should travel with the recommendation. What she objects to is “a independent parking lot… that’s not associated with a use that’s next door or across the street,” permitted “in every zone in a city” — which is exactly what an unbounded new category would create. The motion asks the council to look, not to approve.

Both motions go to the City Council on June 16.

So the sequence is: a private applicant asked to be given something by interpretation; the city refused because giving it that way would skip the legislature; and then the commission asked the legislature to consider giving it to everybody, with standards, in the open. Whatever the council decides, that is the process working the way the textbook says it does, and it happened because staff refused to answer a hard question the easy way.

Two Notes On Procedure

The applicant did not appear. The commission spent five minutes deciding whether to proceed. Notice had been posted on the property and staff had written directly to the applicant on April 14. Two commissioners wanted to defer and try again; three noted that attendance is not required, that a party may choose not to speak, and that the council hearing offers another chance. They proceeded. The chair, who had wanted to wait, said what she wanted and then counted the room — “I would like them to speak or make some sort of presentation to us about why they’re pushing this now” — which is the correct order of operations for a chair.

Staff supplied a written draft motion with the staff report for the first time — the practice the chair asked for in April, borrowed from how council packets work. The commission used it, amended it, and then wrote a second motion of its own. It appears to help.

Odds

The assistant city attorney has begun attending Planning Commission meetings as a matter of course; the attorney’s office wants to follow actions that may end up before the council.

And a decision came back from the state. LUBA has remanded the city’s approval of a variance at 231 Granite Street — a driveway grade above 18 percent — holding that Ashland’s code does not authorise a variance above 18 percent, along with findings on terracing on steep slopes. The applicant is reviewing the design and has not told staff whether to expect a remand hearing or a fresh application.

That is worth a note in the file. Ashland’s hillside driveway rule now has an appellate body’s reading attached to it, and the reading is that the city has been granting something it never had the power to grant.

The Docket

Both parking recommendations go to the City Council on June 16.

Next meeting May 26: the public hearing on the manufactured home park ordinance, with notice sent to every park owner and every park resident.

Still outstanding, and still asked about every month: the ODOT contract for the Transportation System Plan.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 12, 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. Code citations, the planning action number and the city attorney’s conclusion are as stated in open session; the staff report and the adopted recommendation are the controlling documents.