Sixty Units An Acre

Ashland Planning Commission · August 11, 2026 · about 2h 40m · five commissioners voting, one attending by Zoom · two type three public hearings · one written public comment.

Two ordinances, two and a half hours, and the year’s longest meeting. One of them finished. The other did not, and the commission was right to stop.

What Ashland Just Wrote Down

Ordinance 3307 implements three years of state housing legislation — Senate Bill 974 and House Bill 2138 from 2025, House Bill 4037 from 2026 — and it changes more about how Ashland decides things than anything this commission has handled in a decade.

Single room occupancies now exist in Ashland’s code. In January this commission was told, during the hearing on 431 North Main, that the city had no SRO provisions at all, that state law required it to allow them, and that a six-bedroom building around one shared kitchen was therefore being processed as a detached single-family house because there was no other box. That gap closes here, and the numbers are large:

• Up to six SRO units on any lot that allows a detached single-family home.
• In multifamily zones, three times the maximum density. Staff’s own worked example: an R-3 lot permits 20 units an acre; proposed as SROs, the same lot permits 60.
• A definition, drawn from the statute: an SRO shares a kitchen and may have private bathrooms, or shares bathrooms and may have private kitchens. What it may not have is both private — that, staff said, “is de facto an apartment.”

The city is adopting this ahead of the January 1, 2027 deadline the state set.

Mailed notice shrinks. Ashland currently notifies property owners within 200 feet and notifies neighbourhood organisations. Under the ordinance, that becomes owners within 100 feet, and organisations are not notified at all. The 14-day written comment period survives; staff issues a written decision with findings.

And the appeal narrows to one person. For a housing application that meets clear and objective standards, the decision is staff’s, and under HB 4037 the only party who may appeal it is the applicant — locally, and at LUBA.

The chair confirmed this twice, because it is the sentence that matters. Neighbours within a hundred feet get notice. They may write in. They may not appeal. Nor may anyone else.

Applications that are not clear-and-objective housing — a conditional use permit, a commercial or mixed-use project — keep the old rules, and anyone may appeal those.

The Amendment That Failed

Commissioner Leininger has been building an argument since April: that SB 974 requires the initial decision be made without a hearing, that neither “initial decision” nor “final decision” is defined anywhere in statute or rule, and that the gap belongs to the city to fill.

He moved to fill it. His amendment would have let the Planning Commission make the initial decision on a qualifying application using the limited land use decision procedures already in Oregon law — ORS 197.195 and ORS 227.175(10) — rather than handing it to staff.

His reasoning, in his own words: the legislature “left in place all of that Oregon law,” and its intent is “to allow a city to reserve to itself whatever decision space is not specifically preempted by unambiguous commands of the legislation.”

And then the plain version: “This is a way that we can keep the planning commission in business.”

It failed two to three, with the chair voting for it. A colleague seconded it only “for the sake of discussion,” which is the honourable way to make sure an argument gets heard before it loses. Another said afterwards that she appreciated the deep dive and the intent, and meant it.

The main motion then carried five to nothing, with two additions the commission fought for and won:

• The two-step outline-and-final-plan process stays at a 12-lot threshold, not the 20 staff had drafted — the number the commission asked for in May, chosen to match the twelve-unit cottage housing allowance.
• An additional 200-foot notice requirement is kept for applications not covered by the state changes. Where Ashland still controls who hears about development, it keeps the wider circle.

One more thing survived, and it belongs to a commissioner rather than to staff. The design standards exemption for developments of 20 or more units carries a January 1, 2033 sunset in the ordinance itself, so the temporary state measure does not quietly become permanent Ashland law. He proposed that in May. It is in the draft.

Written comment came from Steve Rouse, president of Rogue Advocates. Nobody appeared in person to speak about any of it.

Thirteen Lots

The other hearing was Ordinance 3309, the flag drive variance — the response to LUBA’s ruling that Ashland’s code does not permit a driveway variance above 18 percent under any circumstances.

The vague number from May is now precise. Thirteen pre-1997 legal lots of record are affected. Staff was clear about the limits: the ordinance authorises no new lots and no new flag drives, and the class is closed and shrinking — “at some point in the future the ordinance amendment presented to you this evening would no longer be relevant, because all of those pre-1997 lots would have been developed.”

Deputy Chief Mark Shay came to answer the fire questions, and his testimony is the most useful thing in the transcript.

Fire apparatus access is governed by the Oregon Fire Code, chapter 5 and Appendix D, and grade is only one factor: surface composition, vertical clearance, overall length, and a place to park an engine within 150 feet of the structure.

The code’s maximum slope for apparatus access is 10 percent. Ashland, he said, has “a lot of roadways and driveways that are well beyond that.” Where Appendix D cannot be met, he is authorised to accept an alternate construction standard — in Ashland, most often a residential sprinkler system. The larger engine is more restricted on grade; in snow or ice the department sends something more nimble.

Asked whether the ordinance should set a maximum grade or length at all, his answer was no, and the reason is worth understanding:

“The fire code gives authority to the fire code official to be more restrictive. So regardless really of what the ordinance says, the fire code supersedes that.”

Which means the land use ordinance is not the binding constraint on a steep driveway. The fire marshal is.

That left the commission with the harder question, asked by a commissioner and put to the assistant city attorney: if a pre-1997 lot cannot get access past either planning or fire, whose problem is that?

The answer was takings — a fact-specific analysis in the Nollan and Dolan line, decided case by case. Which is to say the property owner’s problem, until a court says otherwise. The commission had been shown how to look up those two cases at its July session; it took four weeks to need them.

Rather than vote, the commission did the thing this file has been waiting all year for someone to do. It reopened the public hearing and the record and continued both to August 25 at 7pm, so commissioners and staff can work on the language — with an added request that staff produce the purchase dates for the thirteen lots, so the commission knows, as one member put it, “where these lots fall within their vintage.”

The point of that request is not stated in the transcript and this desk will not guess at it. It will note that a body about to widen a rule for thirteen named properties asked to know when their owners bought them, and that a colleague immediately raised inheritance as a complication.

Unanimous.

The Docket

August 25, 7:00pm, council chambers: the continued hearing on the flag drive ordinance, with the purchase-date list.

The SB 974 package goes to the City Council with a 5–0 recommendation.

And when it is adopted, Ashland’s code will say that a neighbour may be told about a housing development a hundred feet from their door, may write a letter about it, and may not appeal the decision. That is state law and the city has no discretion about most of it. It is still worth writing down the date on which it became Ashland’s law too.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the August 11, 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; staff and the deputy fire chief identified themselves on the record. Bill provisions, densities, notice distances, deadlines and the lot count are as stated by staff in open session; the ordinances themselves are the controlling documents.