Civic Beat · April 2, 2026 · by J. Korbes
A Room Full of Fit, Beautiful People
The overflow crowd at Wednesday's Parks study session watched from a lobby television, standing was forbidden by fire-marshal order, and applause was restricted to the silent hand-wave — with one speaker instructing the lobby through the glass: "For everybody outside, they wave their hands in here when you say something good. So wave outside." The occasion: whether one tennis court at Hunter Park gets a second set of lines painted on it, at a cost of about a thousand dollars, inside a roughly $1.2 million grant-funded rehab. Commissioner Adams surveyed the chamber and produced the sentence of the season: "look at this room full of fit, beautiful people of all ages. It makes me wanna quit the sports I'm doing right now and put a racket in one hand and a paddle in the other."
The Proposal That Wasn't in the Packet
Before the public got its nineteen minutes — nineteen speakers, one minute each — Commissioner Weiner raised the procedural grievance that shadowed the night. His alternative plan, which commissioners saw, "was not distributed to community... it wasn't included in the packet nor included on the agenda. And it's a disappointment as far as I'm concerned." He then read it into the record anyway, at length, opening with a self-assessment the minutes will sanitize: "this entire [bleeped] storm that I think that I'm the one who started." The plan: three dual-lined courts at Hunter, twelve pickleball courts citywide, and Lithia Park converted "back to its historic tennis" — anchored by his recurring argument that dropping $2 million on a Japanese garden beside eight pickleball courts was a self-inflicted wound. The chair ruled it strategic-planning material, "not on the table." Who kept it out of the packet, and why, was never explained. In a process whose entire legal function is documenting public comment for a state grant amendment, the public spent weeks commenting on a proposal it was never shown. File that where you file such things.
The Minute Parade
The testimony was Ashland in full voice. A third-grader's thank-you note, read aloud: "P-I-K-C-O-L. This is a third grader." A tennis partisan citing "over 200 lawsuits when courts were restriped" nationally. Sharon Bates, 79, a decade into pickleball: "My daughter thinks that's what keeps me alive" — and, crucially, against the compromise: "I have never met a pickleball player who likes double lines." Robin Donaldson of Granite Street, in defense of noise itself: "I saw a guy walking his Siamese cat today. Are we going to negate sound in our life?" A meditator: "I'm a 30 year meditator. That's not what we're doing [at Lithia]. We're there for joy." The AHS boys coach, whose top-two-in-state team practices there: "You can't play true competitive tennis on double lined courts... I'd be humiliated to invite somebody all the way down to Southern Oregon to play on double lined courts." Gail Patton with the long ledger: "We started with 24 tennis courts. We are down to eight." A data volunteer with an actual soundscape survey — twenty-six locations, pickleball detectable at seven, maximum 52 decibels, less than a passing car. One podium flare-up, when a speaker tried to cross-examine Weiner and quoted Spock at the gavel: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." And one man, Philippe Sprague, earned the night's only formal rebuke, to which he replied: "Well, this is appropriate, so I'm sorry."
The pattern a careful listener took home: not one player of either sport defended the double-striped court — the exact configuration staff recommends. Adams noticed the other pattern and said it aloud, gently: the correspondence split between Granite Street residents and everyone else, "and everything we got from anybody who didn't live on Granite Street was that the courts should stay in Lithia Park." Proximity, as ever, is the strongest opinion.
All three options survive to the April 8 vote. The chair pre-gamed the larger truth — future courts are "a budget issue more than anything else" and won't be sited "in the middle of residential areas, I suspect" — and Weiner closed with his fallback, the settlement of 2022 rendered as scripture: "Pickleball in Lithia, tennis in Hunter — never the twain shall meet." The commission votes next Wednesday on a thousand dollars of paint. The room will be full. The paint, whatever happens, was never the subject.
Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the April 1, 2026 Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission study session. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech with bracketed interpolations where the captions garbled a word; names are attached only where the meeting record confirms the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.