It Works, It Leaks, We Fix It

The Parks Commission's January business meeting was gaveled in with admirable precision — "Calling the meeting to order at about six something, 6:16, 16, 17" — and lasted sixty-nine minutes, during which the commission elected its officers, learned its golf course is quietly booming, and confirmed the death of the ice skating season only because one commissioner insisted the sentence be said where the public could hear it.

Commissioner Landt, deliberately, near the end: "It appears that there's no way that ice skating rink is going to open this season. Is that correct?" Kevin Caldwell, for staff: "That is correct. We have began tearing it down. Not the structure but the walls for the rink itself."

There it is, at last, in declarative form. No cause was offered. No cost was stated. Nobody mentioned the Rotary Club whose centennial name is on the building. There was no public comment on it because there was no public comment on anything — zero speakers, at the first business meeting after a season died. The chair's closing spin deserves preservation in amber: "Unfortunately we missed a season and we have a nice new chiller and... it's gonna snow next year for the ski area and it's all gonna get better." The $248,000 chiller, faithful readers will note, cools nothing at present.

The rink update did contain actual news: the tent vendor has produced a cheaper cable-based snow kit — $12,000 plus shipping, designed and installed by the vendor — and staff believes the permanent permit gets submitted once the footing analysis catches up with the design change. Asked whether the rink definitely opens next season, Caldwell answered "It's my understanding," twice, which is the phrase employees use when they decline to spend credibility they don't own. Also disclosed, as a pure aside during an unrelated item: Caldwell was made Parks Division Manager "as of today." A same-day promotion, unannounced, in a department whose director has not been seen since mid-December and whose name — the record will show — was not spoken once all evening.

The Golf Course Doesn't Know There's a Crisis

The annual Oak Knoll report was the night's genuine good news, delivered by manager Brian Weaver with the discipline of a man who keeps records: all golf revenue up 28 percent year over year, rounds and fees both climbing, pacing even with the stimulus-flush pandemic years. Caldwell: "It's not the sleepy golf course everybody thinks it is." The asterisk arrived on schedule: a November 4th storm destroyed the driving range — 35 poles, 52,000 square feet of netting — and the insurance arithmetic runs $277,000 to replace, $163,000 paid after deductible and depreciation, $41,000 more for engineering a design that won't blow down next time. Is the gap in the budget? "No, we do not." The irrigation system, installed in the seventies, got the description that titles this dispatch and could serve as the department's letterhead: "it works, it leaks, we fix it."

The Vote With No Numbers

Winburn Way finally got its decision: option three, the road without a center stripe plus a decomposed-granite path, passed 4-0 — with Commissioner Weiner voting yes while stating for the record that "we don't have any real numbers on it. So I'm a little concerned about approving anything without some real numbers." The ADA path portion continued its career as the commission's finest ongoing seminar: Landt identified a design that would strand a wheelchair user two feet from the curb ("It looks like it was just an oversight"), threatened the magnolia's main trunk — "it's just getting ready to bloom. Not a good time to be thinking about hacking off a large part of it" — and Weiner delivered the standard this paper will hold the whole project to: "we shouldn't be shooting for the lowest bar... We should be thinking about the hundred year cycle for this particular park." The direction that emerged was mushy enough that Caldwell had to ask, on the record, "Is that my direction?" The budget line funding all of it includes $250,000 for a "Lithia Park master plan work plan" that Caldwell described with the candor of the doomed: "I don't have a definition of what the work plan is, but we did locate that in the CIP."

Elsewhere: Jim Bachman and Mike Gardner were re-upped as chair and vice chair, 4-0 each, both men voting for themselves with visible reluctance; the chair converted an action item to information on the fly because "we're kind of a month late on this one. Been busy"; and a new liaison to the Transportation Advisory Committee was proposed "so we don't have the sort of surprise we had last week" — a surprise never described, from a committee whose relations with this commission will bear watching. The senior advisory committee, a commissioner reported, has been cut to quarterly meetings and "I'm not sure who decided." The chair's rejoinder belongs on the wall: "the advisory committees report to us, not staff. Staff are facilitators." Watch that sentence. It is about to have a busy year.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 14, 2026 Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission business meeting. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech; names are attached only where the meeting record confirms the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.