Jazz Hands for Democracy

The fire marshal's capacity limit was invoked twice before the Parks and Recreation Commission's August 5th study session even started. People standing in the aisles were ordered out to the foyer, to be called back in five at a time. The chair, confronting a room that would not stop talking, attempted his gavel and reviewed the results in real time: "I don't usually have to do this... Well that was effective. So we do, I hope this stops. That's the first time that's ever happened."

Then he banned clapping. Approval would be expressed by "the universal sign language for applause" — jazz hands — and as for the opposite: "we don't have an accepted body language for disapproval of what you've heard. So we please just a stoic silence. We'll know that you didn't like it."

The occasion for all this crowd control is a proposal to build just over a mile of mountain bike trail — a machine-built downhill called Dormouse and a handbuilt uphill, about half a mile each — on the East Hillside of Lithia Park, at an estimated cost of $30,000, per its proposers at the Rogue Valley Mountain Bike Association. Interim director Rachel Dials reported more than 390 public comments received, and offered the institutional measurement that matters: "I've been here for I think about 23 years and I don't recall ever getting that many comments on a parks issue."

What Does the Hundred-Year Plan Say? Nobody Knows

Before the public got its turn, the commission had a fight about its own homework. The staff slide stated that the Lithia Park Master Plan — adopted October 2024, described as a "comprehensive hundred year management framework" — "recommends against bicycle trails in Lithia Park," steering mountain biking toward a potential land acquisition next door instead.

Commissioner Adams called the slide "factually inaccurate," arguing the anti-trail recommendation had been superseded by an addendum. A fellow commissioner contradicted him directly: "The third bullet point was in the addendum, the second bullet point was in the main body. It was never removed... I believe that what's there is accurate." Dials, twice, diplomatically: "I'll check that out."

Sit with this. The commission adopted a hundred-year plan twenty-two months ago, and on the precise question now before it — bikes in the park, yes or no — the commissioners cannot agree on what the document says, and staff left the meeting promising to go look. A hundred years is going to be a long time at this rate.

The People, In Their Variety

Roughly twenty-eight residents then spoke, two minutes each, timed by a gong and three clocks that one speaker complained "are all out of sync." A representative sample, faithfully rendered:

John Enders, whose great-grandfather was the first park board president in 1908 — "I think he might've been conceived in Lithia Park" — read the charter language holding that city lands bordering Ashland Creek "shall never be sold, leased, encumbered, or used for any purpose inconsistent therewith," and ruled: "This should be 86th right away." Alan Hirsch opened with the evening's finest credential: "I'm here representing my dog." Sylvia Iglesias, 78, said the trails would end her walks in the park and asked, on behalf of "the rest of the million visitors a year": "what are we thinking?" Michael Murray, past treasurer of the Ashland Parks Foundation, noted that "over 70% of the population in Ashland is over 55" and told the commission to its face: "your special interest, you want your bike stuff."

On the other side: Gilad Golan, who owns the downtown bike shop, testified that he fields the question "where do you take kids?" constantly and has no answer — "we don't have anything in Ashland to serve that at all" — and proposed the one genuinely falsifiable idea of the night, a one-to-two-year test: "a trail that's not being used goes back to nature." Andy Evans, who coaches youth riders, framed the gap exactly: "If you're an experienced rider, Ashland is world class. But if you're a child, a parent, someone trying mountain biking for the first time, or an adaptive rider there isn't... an entry point." Ian Cropper, born here in 1988 and by his own attestation not a mountain biker — "You can check my Strava to verify that" — delivered the sharpest structural point: bikes already ride these hiking trails illegally, so "this trail won't stop the bikes. It just keeps them riding where they're most dangerous." And Amber Richards, age 12, filed the shortest brief: "I am fully 100% in like I would totally ride this trail and I would love it."

The evening also produced dueling satirists — one deadpanning opposition ("Girls on bikes in our park," which drew an audible "Oh my God"), one in character as a wealthy bro with five mountain bikes, cut off by the chair mid-shred: "Excuse me, you're done." Democracy contains multitudes, and on August 5th most of them had two minutes.

The substantive opposition was not all vibes. A retired ecologist's letter, read into the record, noted the pine-oak woodland in question is the only one inside city limits and that the parks department's own sign at the trail base warns visitors not to trample the rare plants — "disturbance and trampling would be the inevitable result of this proposal. In fact, they are the essence of the plan." The lone dissenting vote on the Trails Advisory Committee showed up to say the committee "was basically mountain bikers." And several speakers flagged what the enforcement record supports: nobody polices e-bikes now, and nobody explained who would police them on Dormouse.

The Commissioner With the Bike

Commissioner Adams then delivered a prepared speech of roughly nine minutes — the longest turn of the night — carrying the pro side's hardest number: "43 motor vehicle versus bicycle accidents in the last 10 years on Winburn Way between Nutley and the plaza versus no bicycle involved accidents on Pioneer in front of OSF." It is a real statistic and it deserved a real answer, though two speakers had already supplied the awkward rejoinder that Pioneer Street is calm precisely because nothing funnels onto it yet.

What nobody said aloud, though Mr. Murray circled it: the commission's most sustained advocate for the trail is himself a mountain biker whose origin story for the project, by his own telling, involves his own son nearly being struck on Winburn Way. Adams acknowledged the optics sideways — "more than 90% of my time is spent working on topics... that do not involve mountain biking" — which is the kind of statistic one only volunteers when the other 10% is standing at the podium.

Where it landed: comments close September 3; staff will return September 9 with a summary — "hopefully unique individuals and not carbon copies," the chair requested — and a vote is being teed up. The chair, endorsing decisiveness with a Freudian flourish: "at least be ready to vote next week, next month, next month. Yeah."

As the room emptied, the transcript records a single unattributed voice: "Democracy." Hard to improve on that.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the August 5, 2026 Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission study session. Quotations appear as transcribed; names are attached only where the chair's own words or self-identification confirm the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.