Five Dollars and Fifteen Cents

Ashland charges you a parks fee. Ashland does not have a parks fund. It has not had one since 2024, when the city's auditor told the finance department that a separate parks fund could no longer be maintained and the money was folded into the general fund like an egg into batter.

Which means that in 2025, this city created a fee, named it after a fund that had been abolished the year before, put it on your utility bill, and has spent the sixteen months since acting faintly puzzled that anyone finds this confusing.

The fee is $5.15 a month. It raises about $750,000 a year. Resolution 2025-13 created it at $5 and gave it a two-year life; it expires June 30th, 2027 unless the Council renews it, and staff would like that renewal made permanent by October 6th. In November you will vote on a charter amendment that would take this class of decision away from the Council entirely.

Three fights, one line item. The city's preferred outcome is that you notice none of them.

Sixteen Months, and Nobody Told the Chair

On August 12th, in joint session, Parks Commission Chair Jim Bachman stopped the proceedings to check something. The $400,000 to $500,000 everyone had spent the evening arguing about — was that a parks number or a general fund number?

General fund, he was told.

"That's a different interpretation than I had," he said.

Sixteen months after the Council created this fee, the chair of the commission whose budget it allegedly rescues learned in a public meeting what the money actually does. He was not being slow. He was being informed, late, of a fact that had been true since before the first bill went out.

Councilor Dylan Bloom said it plainly for the room: the fee does not go directly to the parks, the community should know that, and if it lapses the cuts land across other departments too. City Manager Sabrina Cotta confirmed it from the other end — "It wouldn't just be the parks department affected. This affects the whole general fund. What programs across the general fund would we look to remove."

So we are not discussing a parks fee. We are discussing a general fund fee named after the most photogenic thing it touches, which is how these things are always named, and which is why Lithia Park and not "internal service charges" appears in the sales pitch.

How Ashland Stopped Paying For Its Parks

Now the part nobody put in a press release, assembled by city staff from the audits and presented to the commission on February 11th of this year. It is the most useful thing anyone in this argument has produced, and it explains everything.

1908. Ashland voters create a park commission, tax themselves, and set aside the land we now call Lithia Park. For most of a century the parks have their own revenue, their own elected oversight, and their own dedicated ground. This is the arrangement people still believe they live under. They do not.

The 1990s. Measures 5 and 50 arrive. Parks may no longer levy their own taxes; the money must come through the city. Around the same time voters approve a Youth Activities Levy — a property tax dedicated to parks, running $3.5 to $4 million a year.

2008. The levy moves to the school district, following a legal decision elsewhere in Oregon that such a tax belongs to education. Read that again: the voters of Ashland are still taxing themselves for youth activities, every year, faithfully. The money simply goes somewhere else now. The parks department cut recreation programming and, in staff's own summary, never came back up. So when someone tells you Ashlanders will not tax themselves for their parks — they did, for a century, and are doing it at this moment.

1990s to 2013. Parks receive a fixed millage of $2.09. A millage is simply the rate at which property is taxed, quoted in dollars per $1,000 of a property's assessed value — so $2.09 means a house assessed at $300,000 sends $627 a year to the parks, automatically, without anybody having to be persuaded of anything. The word sounds like accountancy. It is actually a promise: a fixed share, written down, that does not depend on who is in the room. Not generous, but automatic. You knew what it was.

2013. The fixed millage is replaced with a "charge for service" model — an amount negotiated at each budget. Parks funding becomes a conversation instead of a formula, which is another way of saying it becomes a place to look during a shortfall.

2024. The auditor says the parks fund cannot remain separate. Parks fund, meet general fund.

2025. Ordinance 3428 makes Parks an official department of the city. Two elected bodies, one payroll.

And the city charter still promises the parks a $4.50 millage. Ashland's entire millage rate is around $2.82. Parks gets roughly 62 cents. The charter has been describing an imaginary sum of money for thirty years and nobody has bothered to correct it, which tells you exactly how much the founding document is consulted around here.

Then-director Rocky Houston laid the consequence in front of the Council on October 21st, 2025: in fiscal 1999 parks was about 35% of the general fund budget. Today it is 14.37%. Adjusted for inflation, the department's adopted budget was nearly $10 million higher in 2007-09 than it is now. Staffing went from 50.55 full-time positions twelve years ago to 35.

This is the answer to why the money goes where it goes. There is nowhere else for it to go. Nobody is hiding a pot of parks money, because the pot was thrown out in 2024 and the fee was named after it in 2025. That is not fraud. It is worse in a way — it is the city solemnly restoring, by fee, a dedicated funding stream it had spent thirty years dismantling, and declining to mention the demolition.

The Sunset Was Their Own Idea

Here is the detail that reframes the whole argument, and it comes from Councilor Bob Kaplan on June 3rd of this year, describing the original vote:

"We added a parks fee for the first time as a new fee... first fee we added since 2017 or something. And we did it with a lot of consternation... we landed on five and we decided to make it a two year sunset because we really wanted to find" — a better answer.

The sunset was not imposed on Ashland by fate. The Council chose it, deliberately, as a promise: give us two years and we will find something durable. Staff now describe that sunset as an oddity no other southern Oregon city inflicts on itself, and would like it deleted.

The sunset is not the problem. The two years are the problem. They have been spent, and there is no durable answer, and the same people who set the deadline are now explaining that deadlines are unhelpful.

Small Hypocrisies, Collected

What follows is not a conspiracy. It is worse than a conspiracy, because a conspiracy requires competence and agreement. This is just a list of things this city did while telling you it had no money.

They handed back half a million dollars six days before they charged you for it. On April 9th, 2025, the parks director told his commission that the department was underspending its budget by roughly half a million dollars that biennium, and that under the city's budgeting rules the money goes back to the general fund. On April 15th, 2025 — six days later — the Council adopted the parks fee, to raise about $750,000 a year from your utility bill. Both of these things are in the public record. Neither appears to have been mentioned in the presence of the other.

They told Parks to fix its budget, then forbade it. Staff's own account, delivered in February of this year: with budget pressure mounting, Parks was instructed to bring its numbers in line. Parks proposed rental fees for Pioneer Hall set at cost recovery — precisely the fiscally responsible act demanded of them. It went to Council. Council reversed it. Staff's word for this was "awkward." There are other words.

"It would tie your hands." That was staff's recommendation against letting you vote on utility fees. Set beside the simultaneous request that the parks fee be made permanent, with its sunset deleted, a philosophy emerges: permanence is appropriate for the fee, and flexibility is appropriate for the people who set it. Your hands are the only ones anybody proposes to tie, and you are welcome to notice who is holding the rope.

They left money on the table and then came to your table. For years the city outsourced collection of its food and beverage tax and business license fees to a contractor. The contractor did not do a good job. The city ended the contract early, sought legal advice, and discovered it had no recourse. It has now hired an accounting specialist to do in-house what it was already paying to have done badly. How much uncollected revenue this represents has never been stated in a public meeting, which is itself an answer of a kind. The general fund's share of food and beverage revenue, we were told in August, runs about $65,000.

The events budget survived the apocalypse. In the January 2026 State of the City, the mayor reported that the city's new event sponsorship program had distributed $150,000 to local event producers. This is a fine program. It is also $150,000, distributed by a city that has spent two years explaining that the ice rink is unaffordable.

A councilor had to remind the Council that its resolutions are laws. On August 12th, Councilor Jeff Dahle — recognized by the chair moments before, if you are checking the tape — found it necessary to say out loud, to his colleagues, that "resolutions are not a guideline and a good idea. They are legislation that this body decides on and they are to be followed... if we violate them intentionally, that is not good."

You do not say this to a room that has been following its own resolutions.

And then there is Paul Mina. For more than a year, at meeting after meeting, a resident has stood at the microphone and alleged that when the Council amended the budget approved by the Citizens Budget Committee, it did so without the public vote required by Ashland Charter chapter 8, section 6 — "no action by the council shall have legal effect unless the motion for the action and the vote thereon take place at proceedings open to the public." He has cited chapter and verse. He has been answered with an email from the city attorney, read into the record. He has kept coming back.

He may be wrong. It is a technical question and he is not a lawyer. But a city that intended to be believed would have dispatched this in one meeting, in public, with a finding. Instead it has been permitted to smolder for a year while the same body asks residents to trust its judgment about $750,000 a year.

Who Put Us Here

Sabrina Cotta built the mechanism. The city manager assembled a package — parks, public safety, wildfire — that rebuilt Ashland's revenue base entirely through charges on a utility bill, which require no vote, rather than a tax, which does. The public safety fee increase alone supplied $1.5 million toward balancing the 2025-27 budget. When roughly 1,500 residents signed a petition objecting to exactly this, staff's recommendation was that the Council decline to refer it to the ballot, on the grounds that it would tie the Council's hands. Yes. That is the function of a vote.

Mayor Tonya Graham has been right at every stage and has let the calendar win every time. She is correct that the engagement process this city promised cannot be completed by October 6th. Her utility bill process ordinance — transparency for precisely this class of fee — is an excellent piece of work arriving sixteen months after the fees it would have governed. A mayor who believed her own diagnosis in April 2025 insists on the process first. We got the money first.

Councilor Eric Hansen favors raising the parks fee, raising the public safety fee, and eliminating the sunset. It is the most honest position on the dais and also the position of a man who, shown a structural deficit and a public objection, has concluded that the answer is more of the thing being objected to.

Councilor Jeff Dahle asked on August 12th for a comprehensive breakdown so the commission, the Council and the public could be "the most informed possible." He is right, and the question is devastating in the wrong direction, because the honest reply is: why is this the first time you are asking? That packet belonged in March 2025, before the vote, when it could have changed one.

Councilor Kaplan told us the sunset was a promise to find a better answer and then presided over two years of not finding one. Councilor Bloom diagnosed the disease precisely and prescribed nothing. Councilor Gina DuQuenne — "let the people vote in November and let's see what we have and don't have" — holds the only coherent position available, from a seat on the body that could have run this in daylight and chose not to.

And Rachel Dials, the interim director who inherited all of it, is the one person here doing the job properly. She told the truth in plain words: the department is "done with fingernails at this point; we're looking at digits. We're looking at whole programs and people." That is not spin. That is an inventory of what is about to be amputated.

What You Will Lose, Stated Plainly

If the fee dies, Parks does not get lean. Parks gets smaller.

Staff have said what survives: park maintenance, trail maintenance, wildfire work. The legally required floor. Everything above it is what the trade calls "nice to have," which in English means the things you actually use. Senior services. The nature center. Recreation programming. Golf. The ice rink, which costs about $426,000 a season and returns $200,000. The pool, which runs $250,000 to $300,000 a biennium and returns considerably less.

Understand those numbers before you cheer at them. The pool and the rink have never paid for themselves and were never meant to. They are subsidized because a town decided its children should learn to swim. That subsidy has been squeezed out of a department that lost its levy in 2008, its millage in 2013, and its fund in 2024, and made up the difference by employing fifteen fewer people.

Voting this fee down does not punish Sabrina Cotta. It does not punish the Council. It closes the senior center. The people who would pay for that gesture are not the people who earned it.

The Judgment

Renew the fee. Keep the sunset until they earn its removal. And stop calling it a parks fee.

None of the above is an argument for letting it lapse. That is the trap, and it is worth naming before somebody walks into it feeling righteous.

The substance was never in doubt. You cannot maintain 800 acres and 52 miles of trail on a tax base that Measures 5 and 50 put in amber, in a city whose charter still promises parks a millage that has not existed since the Clinton administration.

But renewal is not absolution, and this Council keeps behaving as though the two arrive in the same envelope. Three things are owed in exchange, and none of them are hard. Say in the ordinance, in words a resident can find, that the money goes to the general fund. Publish annually what the $750,000 bought. And fix the charter, which has been lying about a $4.50 millage for three decades — because a city that cannot be bothered to correct its own founding document should expect to be disbelieved when it explains where your money went.

There is one more thing this city could do, and it is the cheapest of all: stop treating the Parks Commission as a subsidiary that has forgotten its place. The charter created two elected bodies. The voters reaffirmed it last year. If the Council is going to reverse the commission's fees, absorb its fund, convert it into a department and then complain about "governmental confusion" when residents call the wrong office about the ice rink, it should at least have the honesty to put the question on a ballot: do we still want an elected Parks Commission, or do we want the appearance of one? Ashland has spent thirty years answering that question by attrition and has never once asked it out loud.

That November ballot measure is a blunt object, and the first time a fee needs to move faster than an election this city will discover precisely how blunt. Staff are right about that. They are also the reason it is on the ballot. Spend sixteen months putting things on people's utility bills without asking, and do not act astonished when they arrive to take the checkbook back.

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Sourced from closed captions of Ashland public meetings, January 2025 through August 2026, and from Ashland.news reporting by Kayla Heffner. The funding history is from a staff presentation to the Parks Commission on February 11, 2026, compiled from city audits and financial reports. Captions are machine-generated: quotations appear as transcribed, and names are attached only where published reporting or the meeting record confirms the speaker.