A Winter Without Ice

The Ashland Rotary Centennial Ice Rink sat empty on December 19, 2025, inside a canopy nobody was permitted to stand under. The structure was up. The chiller was paid for. The barrier around it came down in early January, which is how the season officially ended — not with a decision, but with maintenance staff removing the fence from around a thing that was never going to open.

Here is how a town loses a winter.

The Reasonable Thing They Were Trying To Do

Start with the part that reflects well on everybody, because it does exist.

For years the rink cover went up every fall and came down every spring. This cost roughly $100,000 a year. Worse, the market for the work had collapsed to a single vendor: Ashland was, in the director's own account, "down to only one contractor in the state of Oregon who reluctantly was coming down to still do it." Reluctantly is the word he used. Anyone who has tried to get a contractor in Southern Oregon will recognize the situation immediately.

So Parks proposed to stop taking it down. Convert the temporary canopy to a permanent structure, save the hundred thousand, stop depending on one unwilling vendor. This is a good idea. I want that on the record before the rest of it.

The Permitting Cascade, In Order

February 2025: Parks files a preliminary review for the change of use of the canopy. March: planning approval. So far, so ordinary.

Then the requirement that undid everything. To make a temporary structure permanent you need updated structural plans, and in Oregon those plans need the stamp of an engineer licensed in Oregon. The canopy's manufacturer had an engineer. Then the manufacturer had staffing problems and laid the engineer off.

Parks was told 60 days to obtain the stamp. They hired an architect to complete the application. They paid a local structural engineer for a special inspection to confirm the bolts and fasteners were still sound. They did, as far as the record shows, each sensible thing available to them.

Meanwhile a clock nobody was watching ran out. Because the canopy had stayed up through the non-use parking cycle, the fire marshal had issued a six-month temporary approval. It expired October 15. On October 15, staff believed the stamp was imminent and the schedule would hold.

One week before Thanksgiving, on a Thursday, with the director out of the office, Deputy Director Rachel Dials received notice from the manufacturer.

Fire Chief Marshall Rasor described what followed with the clarity of a man who has no stake in anyone's feelings. Absent the engineering stamp, Parks had two options: take the canopy down or not use it. "They chose to leave it up," he said. "Nobody can be under it. It's blocked off." The parking area could not be used for parking either.

And then the line that ought to be carved above the building division door: "It's unfortunate, but we can't have a double standard with our permitting."

He is entirely correct. That is the thing about this story. Nobody in it is wrong.

The Arithmetic Of An Empty Building

Now the numbers, which are where this stops being a procedural curiosity.

In March 2025, explaining to the City Council why parks cuts were going to hurt, staff offered the rink as the example: it costs $426,000 to operate, in seasonal employees and utility bills, against $200,000 in revenue. That gap is the argument for closing it and also the argument for keeping it, depending on whether you think a town is a balance sheet.

In April and May of 2025 — before the permit failed, while everyone still expected a season — the parks capital fund paid for a new ice rink chiller. About $200,000 of it hit in April; the balance came in May. Staff put the total at roughly $248,000.

Two hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars of refrigeration equipment, bought for a rink that then did not open.

By the March 2026 financial update, the revenue chart told the story without commentary: July good, August good, September good, October still good, November flattens, December "significantly lower than 24 and 25." Staff attributed it to the ice rink, because there was nothing else to attribute it to.

Who Actually Paid

The Ashland Rotary Club put $25,000 into that rink in 2005 and took the naming rights. Club president Ed Finkley came to a January study session mostly to listen, and said so, and then said the thing that makes this more than an accounting problem. The rink cost far more than $25,000; there was, as he understood it, a private donation of about $100,000 that got it off the ground in the first place. He put it alongside the Daniel Meyer pool as an example of the public-private partnerships "that have existed in our community to have the kind of resources that we have."

He was hopeful, he said, that despite this year's setback the rink is still part of the parks department and is something that is going to continue.

That is a man whose club's money is in the ground under a fenced-off canopy, asking politely whether the thing they built is still ours.

At the March commission meeting a commissioner said out loud what the department had not: that he wanted to name, "not for the purpose of pointing fingers," a couple of failures that year, and that "the failure to open the ice rink was really significant to our community." He mentioned the towers at the pool and the splash pad in the same breath. It is the closest thing to an accounting the record contains, and it came from a volunteer commissioner rather than from anyone paid to run the place.

The Verdict

Permitting did not kill the ice rink. Permitting is what permitting does; Chief Rasor gave the only answer his office could give, on the record, while others were giving none. What killed the season was that a project with one external dependency — a stamp from an engineer at a company nobody in Ashland controls — was run without a fallback, against a fire-marshal deadline of October 15, in a department that had already bought the chiller.

Taking the canopy down and putting it back up would have taken about 30 days and cost the money the whole project existed to save. That was the fallback. It was available in October. It was not taken.

So: get the stamp, open next season, and when the next capital project depends on one signature from one firm in another state, write down on the first page what happens if that signature doesn't come. It is not a complicated document. It is shorter than a season.

The people who lost something here are not the officials. They are the kids who skate once a year because their families can afford once a year, the Rotarians whose $25,000 bought a name on a building that spent the winter behind a fence, and the volunteer who has to say into a microphone that his own department failed.

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Sources: Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission meetings of December 3, 2025, January 7, January 14, February 11 and March 11, 2026; City Council study session of March 31, 2025. Reporting by Ashland.news, "Silence from city fuels uncertainty over Ashland Parks & Rec director's future," December 19, 2025, and subsequent coverage, for the fire marshal's and community development director's accounts. Figures as stated by staff in open session; quotations as transcribed.