# The Evacuation Piece

*Civic Beat · July 17, 2026 · by Alan Decault*

> The transportation contract everybody has been asking about since March is signed — and it contains something the standard state scope does not: a study of whether Ashland can get out of Ashland. It is there because the public works director insisted, over a year of negotiation, and ODOT agreed.

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**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.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/civic-beat/2026-07-17-the-evacuation-piece