The Evacuation Piece

Ashland Planning Commission · July 14, 2026 · 53m · six of seven commissioners present · no public forum speakers.

Since March a commissioner has ended nearly every meeting by asking whether ODOT has signed the contract for the Transportation System Plan. In April staff had no update. In May there was no update. “I’ll just keep squeaking over that,” he said.

On July 14 the answer arrived, and it was better than the question.

The Contract

The consultant contract is executed and work has begun. Alta Planning and Design leads, with Fehr & Peers as sub-consultant on traffic counts, analysis and modelling. The project runs about two years; the kickoff meeting was June 29; the plan management team — city, ODOT and consultants — meets monthly.

Ashland’s last Transportation System Plan was adopted in 2013 after a two-year effort, which puts it past the roughly seven-year review interval the state encourages. ODOT’s own TSP guidance, staff noted with some satisfaction, cites Ashland’s last plan as a success story: the North Main road diet, which began as a one-year pilot and was made permanent.

The plan is not optional and not advisory. Statewide Planning Goal 12 requires it; it is adopted as a supporting element of the comprehensive plan, which is what brings it to this commission and what gives it legal weight. Once adopted it shapes land use decisions, sets what improvements developers can be required to build, and governs eligibility for state and federal transportation money.

The Part That Is Not Standard

A commissioner asked whether the city had put anything on the consultant’s list beyond ODOT’s template scope.

It had. The community development director answered first: “I know the standard process doesn’t typically include wildfire evacuation studies, and that was an add to the contract.”

The public works director, joining by Zoom, explained how it got there. ODOT is funding the majority of the update and wrote the scope to satisfy the state’s transportation planning rules. He pushed, from the start and across a year of contract refinement, for something the rules do not require:

“Having some component of evaluation of our system against an emergency evacuation process, building on what the evacuation time estimate analysis did a few years ago, and taking that information and developing recommendations towards some level of enhancement — capital improvement, signage, striping, marking, anything that we can do, traffic cameras, things of that nature, that would help improve our response during an evacuation process.”

Fehr & Peers will model it against current conditions and against forecast growth, and the resulting projects go into the twenty-year cost-constrained capital list. The city’s emergency manager will be brought in at specific points so that what he knows about evacuation is reflected in the project list rather than parallel to it.

A commissioner who had read the contract said the thing that ought to be said:

“I just want to tell everybody how grateful I am that staff put the evacuation piece before ODOT and got them to agree to add that to the contract. I think it’s a critical piece for Ashland, it’s really timely, and I’m just grateful that that’s there.”

This desk will add one line of context, from the record of this same body five weeks ago. On June 9 a resident of Wingspread told this commission that his park has over a hundred units and one outlet onto Clay Street, and that an evacuation would be “mayhem.” Whether a modelling exercise reaches a single driveway on Clay Street is not knowable yet. It is at least now inside the scope of something.

The public works director added a second item of his own: the consultants will also look at how Ashland’s trail system connects to the transportation network, and whether those connections can be made safer. The 2013 plan did not consider it; there was no trails plan then.

Parking, Which Is Not In The Scope

A commissioner with a master’s degree in transportation systems asked whether the plan addresses parking, and did not accept the first answer.

Formally, no. There is no parking adequacy analysis in the scope, of the kind the city did in its 2017 downtown parking study. On-street parking appears only through street cross-sections.

Her objection: “If you’re talking about traffic volume and you aren’t talking about parking, it seems to me incomplete.” In Boston, she said, parking is a primary mechanism for managing traffic flow, not an afterthought to highway capacity.

The answers she got back are worth recording, because they describe work already under way that nobody has reported.

The 2017 downtown parking study is going to the consultants as background. The downtown couplet will be examined heavily, including previous attempts at loading zones, a bike lane and configuration changes. Performance measures tied to the climate friendly areas will include parking — not adequacy, but how the city manages parking to reduce vehicle trips.

And this, from the public works director, stated plainly and in passing:

“Looking at the timed parking structure downtown and within the corridor and making recommendations for potential changes to the time structure and the layout of that time structure to facilitate some more turnover in the downtown. Staff is already looking at the potential for paid parking expansion.”

Two months ago this commission refused a private applicant’s attempt to run a fee-based public parking lot and asked the City Council to consider creating a land use category for one. It now emerges that city staff is separately looking at expanding paid parking of its own. Those are different questions with the same subject, and as of this meeting they are being worked on in different rooms.

One more gap the commission found: the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee is not on the TSP’s list of advisory bodies. A commissioner flagged it for the downtown and for the railroad district, now designated a climate friendly area. Staff’s answer is that the committee generally deals with private property rather than public right of way — while acknowledging it has weighed in before, on historic markers and the old wooden-tire rails still visible along the kerb on B Street — and that they would be added if circulation through a historic district were on the table.

How A Commissioner May Do Homework

The commission had asked for guidance on researching the law itself, and a senior planner delivered it. It is the most quietly useful twenty minutes this file has recorded, and the rule at its centre is simple enough to print:

“It’s okay to know that a particular intersection is busy. It’s not okay to go out there on a Wednesday afternoon and make your own traffic counts.”

Researching the law is appropriate. Gathering your own facts outside a hearing is not — in a quasi-judicial matter, introducing evidence from outside the record can get a decision remanded. Reading the statute you are being asked to implement is fine. Turning up with survey equipment to check a slope is not.

The community development director added the corollary every commissioner will eventually need: if you are looking at a site and a neighbour comes out to tell you things, “you should probably say, well, could you bring that to the public hearing so all commissioners can hear it.”

The tour that followed covered where the bills live on the legislature’s site (and that you want the enrolled version, where bold text is what the bill adds), the ORS chapters that carry land use, the administrative rules for LUBA and the statewide planning goals, and LUBA’s own headnotes — searchable across every case, in chronological order, oldest at the bottom. He mentioned you can search them for “Ashland.”

He also, unprompted and apparently for pleasure, showed the commission where to find the recorded oral arguments in Nollan and Dolan, the two land use cases that reached the US Supreme Court, with the audio synchronised to the transcript.

His colleague’s endorsement: on Monday mornings he “is coming to tell us the new things he found on LUBA rulings over the weekend.”

Odds

The manufactured home park ordinances passed first reading at the City Council. Second reading and final adoption are set for July 21. The separate tenant-protection chapter came back modified after legal review and gets its own first reading the same night; commissioners were given copies although no action is required of them.

The city’s strategic plan engagement drew more than 2,000 survey responses, and that material is going to the transportation consultants to help shape their own questions. A draft framework goes to council later this summer.

Remediation in the railroad district should conclude by the end of July, followed by easements recording what level of development DEQ will accept, and post-cleanup testing. The reason for the cleanup, staff confirmed, is to sell the property. At Croman Mill, remediation has not begun; some testing has been done but not enough to size the job.

The Community Center’s ribbon cutting is Wednesday, July 22, 3:30 to 5:00.

The Docket

The July 28 study session is cancelled — the ordinances that were to fill it could not be noticed in time, and the commission voted to take the evening off.

August 11: two ordinances, both previously discussed at study session — the package implementing Senate Bill 974, and the flag drive variance allowing grades above 18 percent where compliance is not feasible.

The commission’s annual retreat is being scheduled, probably for October, with transportation on the agenda and a site visit under discussion — school drop-off, or, as one commissioner proposed, “the intersection of Walker and East Main. We can try to make a left hand turn there.”

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the July 14, 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 chair’s own words confirm them; staff identified themselves on the record. Contract scope, dates and consultant names are as stated by staff in open session. A study session takes no action.