A Patterned Mess

Take a walk downtown this week and count the buildings you cannot go into.

City Hall has been dark since February 17, closed by the fire marshal over a split two-by-six. The Community Center finally had its ribbon cut on July 22, seven years after it closed and five months after the city government moved in without one; you still cannot book it, because the city is waiting on door locks for the government offices staying inside. Walk up Winburn Way and the ice rink slab sits bare, as it sat all last winter, under a canopy nobody was permitted to stand beneath.

Three public buildings. Three different stories about why. One town.

It is tempting to file this under bad luck, and each individual item almost supports that reading. A manufacturer went under. A rafter split. A door was left open. Any city has a year like this.

But look at them together and the accidents start rhyming. What Ashland has is not a run of misfortune. It is a method — an unwritten set of operating rules that this government follows with real consistency, and that produces, with real consistency, exactly what we are looking at.

Here are the rules.

Rule One: When In Doubt, Study It Again

Ashland's last facility master plan was completed in 2008.

Since then, on the question of what to do with City Hall alone, the city has commissioned: a Miller seismic estimate in 2015, an ORW feasibility study in 2016, an ORW project cost model in 2018, a bond measure in 2020 which the voters rejected, a McKinstry facility condition assessment in 2024, and an ORW Facility Planning Optimization and Management Plan in 2025, which arrived at 351 pages.

Six studies. Eighteen years. One decision, and the voters made it.

This is not confined to buildings. The city's previous strategic plan ended in 2016; staff acknowledged in 2024 that everything since had been "shorter term goals, but not a comprehensive look across the community." The new one kicked off in 2026 — a ten-year gap. The water cost-of-service study dated from 2016; Public Works recommended updating it in 2025 and it is being updated now. The Lithia Park master plan started in 2017 and was presented in draft in 2019; its recommendations are still being worked through the commission this year.

And then there is the Butler-Perozzi fountain, which the Ashland Parks Foundation brought forward around 2022 offering to raise the money if the department would deliver the project. By my count of the record, that fountain has been discussed at twenty-one separate public meetings between August 2023 and June of this year.

Twenty-one meetings. About a fountain.

The studies are not the problem. Several are good work, and Public Works Director Scott Fleury has been notably straight about what they can and cannot tell you — he told the council in January that estimates at this stage run "plus 30, minus 50," which is more candor than most consultants put on a slide. The problem is that a study here is not a step toward a decision. It is a substitute for one, and when it goes stale you commission another.

Rule Two: Depend On One Person, Somewhere Else

The ice rink is the purest specimen.

Parks wanted to stop putting the canopy up and taking it down each year — a sound idea, saving about $100,000 annually, and necessary besides, since Ashland was "down to only one contractor in the state of Oregon who reluctantly was coming down to still do it." To make the structure permanent required updated plans stamped by an Oregon-licensed engineer.

In June, staff learned the manufacturer's engineer had no Oregon stamp. The manufacturer said sixty days. Sixty days from June is August. October 15 came — the date the fire marshal's temporary approval expired — with no stamp. The week before Thanksgiving, the manufacturer laid its engineer off.

Director Rocky Houston told his commission what happened next: "We panicked, started to throw up all of the things that we could to say we've got a contract, we've got an agreement."

Nobody sought a second Oregon engineer, although Parks already had a local structural engineer working on that very building, hired to inspect its bolts and fasteners. Nobody costed the take-down fallback until December, by which point it no longer bought a season. And the chiller — roughly $248,000, paid across April and May — had already been purchased on the assumption it would all work out.

The same rule runs everywhere once you see it. City Hall's roof carries a live warranty from a Medford firm; three months after the council directed staff to get quotes, The Chronicle asked the roofer whether the city had called. His answer was one word: "No." The Community Center sat finished but closed for more than six months waiting on specially ordered doors, then waited again on locks. East Main Park went out to bid in November and came back with thirty questions, because, in the acting director's words, "there were certain components that were missing from the construction documents that was leading to confusion with bidders."

In each case the plan had exactly one path and no branch. When the single external party failed — a vendor, a supplier, a document — there was no second move, because nobody had written one down.

Rule Three: Write It Down Afterward, If At All

In October 2025 the Parks Commission was told, of a trail system that is one of Ashland's defining assets, that the department "currently doesn't have a written protocol or procedure in regards to how we manage our trails. We have a lot of oral history and processes that people have been here for a while, know what to do."

Oral history. In a department that had, by then, lost a nine-year director, an interim, and was months from losing his successor.

The same summer the commission adopted a "policy on policies," which is precisely what it sounds like — a policy about how to have policies, adopted in 2025 by a department founded in the nineteenth century.

The habit reaches the top of the organization. The facility master plan proposes selling five buildings, and the proceeds are meant to seed the facilities fund that pays for everything else. The May 4 staff report lists the appraisals attached: B Street, North Mountain, the Hardesty house, Briscoe, City Hall. Then: "Community Development has no current appraisal. Community Center has no current appraisal."

The two downtown buildings the plan most wants to sell, on which the financing of the entire scheme depends, have not been valued.

Rule Four: Treat Every Deadline As Somebody Else's Problem

October 15 was a real date, set in writing by the fire marshal. It passed.

February 17 produced a real instruction, also in writing. Fire Marshal Mark Shay asked for one thing before the building could be reoccupied: "A report by a qualified engineer assessing the safety of the roof system should be forwarded to Fire Marshal Shay prior to resuming normal occupancy." Five and a half months later, City Hall remains closed and the public conversation has been about roofs, budgets and litigation — not about the engineer's report.

On April 7 the council directed staff to obtain bids for the roof and the HVAC. By the end of June the councilors had received nothing, and the communications director explained that the work was unbudgeted and required council approval — from the council that had asked for the numbers in order to approve it.

Look at what is coming and ask yourself how it will go. The parks fee sunsets June 30, 2027. The food and beverage tax runs out in 2030, and a councilor noted this spring that 2030 "is not that far out in terms of these sorts of things." The state's housing targets require Ashland to plan for more than 3,500 units against its own 20-year projection of 854.

Every one of those is a date on a calendar with a decision attached. The record of the past eighteen months suggests each will arrive as a surprise.

Rule Five: When It Breaks, Offer Five Explanations

I have written elsewhere about City Hall's shifting rationale and will not relitigate it, except to note the count.

February: a split rafter and a fire marshal wanting an engineer's report. The rafter is repaired — the city's own table carries it at $6,000. March onward: roof leaks, over two offices, one of them the city manager's. Late June: the public works director says there has been no significant water damage to those offices since the city manager moved out. Also late June: it is really about unbudgeted roof and HVAC work. Also late June: it is really about the lawsuit.

Five reasons, one locked door. Meanwhile a proposal from Hoag Roofing sat in the May 4 council packet offering to coat that roof for $23,778.18 with a five-year material warranty, and nobody has publicly explained why it was not taken, or taken up, or discussed.

There is a number in that same packet that ought to end the conversation about what all this is worth. City Hall was appraised in February at $280,000 — because the 1884 deed restricts its use to "public square of the plaza, town hall or jail," so the appraiser valued the land and effectively wrote off the building, which is "at the end of its economic life" without renovation.

The city is in Circuit Court, against thirty Helman descendants and their four lawyers, fighting for the right to sell a $280,000 asset with a $3.4 million repair list — a fight it opened by commissioning the very inspection that closed the building.

Rule Six: Blame Travels Downward

Rocky Houston was appointed parks director in July 2024 and gone by January 2026. He was placed on paid leave in mid-December; the city announced his resignation in a release of 98 words. Three officials — the communications director, the commission chair, the city manager — each declined to comment on personnel matters, three times, for two months.

Then in February, at a joint session called because of that resignation, city administration put on a slide the phrase "improper management of the parks director" and recommended the commission delay hiring a replacement. Which is to say: the institution's own diagnosis, delivered after the man was gone, was that the job had been badly supervised.

Compare that reticence with the speed in May, when a citizen named Jim Falkenstein found the Community Center doors standing wide open on a Sunday evening, went in for two minutes, filmed what he saw, and locked the building. An Ashland police officer was at his house by Wednesday. The mayor and council president issued a statement taking responsibility — "the responsibility rests squarely with the City… No excuses" — and a week later the mayor published a second statement explaining that Falkenstein had violated the privacy of the city manager and the HR director, and asking the community to move on.

Nobody has said who sent the officer. The mayor, the police chief and the city manager have each said it was not them.

Two months of silence about a director's departure. Four days to reach a resident's driveway. That is not a coincidence of scheduling. That is a disposition.

Who Put Us Here

City Manager Sabrina Cotta carries the most, because the most decisions were hers. She handed the fire marshal the inspection that closed her building, then moved thirteen staff into a public hall without bringing the policy question to the council, then was out of town for the special meeting called to discuss it, then let a council directive sit for three months, then offered the town five different reasons for one locked door. None of these individually is a scandal. Together they are a pattern of choosing the path that requires no public conversation.

The council approved six studies and commissioned a seventh. It created the parks department by ordinance in December 2024 and was told thirteen months later that the resulting job may be "the toughest in the city." It has been, in fairness, better lately than it was: Councilors Dylan Bloom and Gina DuQuenne convened a special meeting on a Friday afternoon to defend the distinction between operations and policy, and DuQuenne's line about the civic campus — "we already have a civic center, it's called city hall" — is the sort of plain speech this town has been short of.

The commissions watched the ice rink appear as a status update rather than a risk from June to November and nobody asked the question a bank would have asked first: what happens if the stamp does not come?

The consultants did their work. ORW recommended, McKinstry itemized, and both were honest about ranges. Handing a government a plan is not the same as handing it the nerve to choose one.

And a short list of people who came out of this year with their record intact, because the guide I write by insists the blameless be named:

Fire Marshal Mark Shay, who put his reasoning in writing, specified exactly what would satisfy him, and included a protocol for staff to keep using the building safely in the meantime — a document that has been repeatedly characterized as something it does not say.

Fire Chief Marshall Rasor, who in December answered a reporter's question plainly while everyone above him said nothing: they could take the canopy down or not use it, they chose to leave it up, "we can't have a double standard with our permitting."

Rachel Dials, who ran a department through a leaderless winter under the word "acting," explaining decisions she did not make, and was not put under contract as interim director until July.

Jim Falkenstein and Marcus Scott, who locked a public building the city left open, and got a police car for it.

What It Costs

None of this is theft and little of it is malice. That is what makes it hard to prosecute and easy to repeat.

The costs are ordinary and they land on ordinary people. A winter with no ice for kids who skate once a year. A wedding reception that could not be booked for seven years, then could not be booked because the government was inside, then could not be booked because the locks had not arrived. Seniors at the center on Homes Avenue reading that a consultant's plan proposes selling it. Pickleball players and tennis players fighting each other over eight courts because nobody put more courts in the capital plan. A citizen with a police car in his driveway.

The remedy is not a new study. It is the thing this government keeps declining to do: pick something, write down what happens if it fails, and tell the public which reason is the real one.

Until then we will get more Augusts like this one — walking past our own buildings, unable to go in, being told it is complicated.

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Sources: Meetings of the Ashland City Council and the Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission, January 2024 through July 2026, as transcribed from the public meeting record — in particular the Parks Commission of Oct. 1 and Dec. 3, 2025 and Feb. 4, 2026; the City Council special study session of Jan. 14, 2026; the special council meeting of March 27, 2026; and the council study session of May 4, 2026. Documents: Fire Marshal Mark Shay, General Fire Inspection Report, City Hall, Feb. 17, 2026; City Hall Repair Recommendations and Costing Estimates, March 25, 2026; Hoag Roofing proposal, April 24, 2026; appraisal of Ashland City Hall by Colette Meyer, MAI, Feb. 3, 2026; ORW Facility Planning Optimization and Management Plan, August 2025, and McKinstry Facility Condition Assessment — the latter four as attached to the Jan. 14 and May 4, 2026 council packets. Reporting: Ashland.news, OPB / Jefferson Public Radio, and The Ashland Chronicle, December 2025 through July 2026. Figures as stated by staff in open session or as written in the documents; quotations as transcribed.