Paddling as Hard as We Can

The Parks Commission's first meeting of the year emerged from an executive session about which the record says only that there would be no action, ran forty-seven minutes, and contained one sentence Ashland's children deserved to hear delivered rather better than it was. Acting Director Rachel Dials, midway through a permitting update: "So right now we're in a holding pattern... I don't believe we will be opening this season."

The ice rink. Dead for the winter, in a subordinate clause.

How a Vendor's Layoff Killed a Season

The mechanics, as reported Wednesday: the rink's canopy went up in 2013; the snow-load code has changed since; converting the structure from seasonal to permanent — a plan adopted to save the roughly $100,000 annual cost of putting it up and taking it down — required stamped structural plans from an Oregon engineer. The canopy's manufacturer had one. At the end of October, the manufacturer laid him off before producing the stamp. "It sent us into kind of this tailspin," Dials said, which is the correct word for a department discovering its season depends on the HR decisions of a tent company. On December 29 came "the first good news": the engineer, re-retained, still holds his Oregon license. The structure will need struts. A proposal was due the next day. The season was already gone.

Commissioner Gardner extracted the essential irony gently: had the city simply taken the canopy down and put it back up as always, none of this applies. The cost-saving conversion cost the season — though staff also suggested the structure fails current snow-load rules "regardless," a contradiction the meeting left unresolved, along with the question of what the lost season cost and who was watching the clock.

Ed Finkley, president of the Rotary Noon Club — whose $25,000 in 2005 put the club's name on the rink, alongside a private donation of about $100,000 that got it built — came to say his club still believes. His testimony was the gentlest indictment on record this year: "we can't both say we want to be a kid community and then let the kid stuff kind of go." And, on the roughly twenty thousand skaters a season: "there aren't many kids that know how to tie a lace anymore." The club has money waiting for new skates and is holding it, because "we have to know, you know, what's gonna happen." A benefactor, asking his own beneficiary for a status report.

Asked whether the coming repair proposal would return to the commission before money was spent, Dials answered with the candor of the overworked: "It's something that we as staff would probably just move forward on" — a commissioner completing the thought: "If it's cheap enough. Okay." No threshold was named. Readers keeping a file on parks capital oversight may open one now.

The Commissioners Out-Measure the Engineers

The Winburn Way item produced the evening's genuine spectacle: a factual duel over whether the engineered ADA ramp to the Japanese Garden actually meets the ADA. One commissioner, armed with an outside landscape architect's review: "these plans do not meet ADA requirements... the engineers apparently think they do, but [she] said they didn't. And as a former landscape contractor-designer, they don't look like [it] to me." Grades of 7.5 percent without rest landings or handrails, he said. Commissioner Weiner — who by his own account has personally measured the park's cross-slopes and reviewed two years of minutes "in my obsessive review" — read the specs the other way, while staff held the line: "The ADA specs are not a secret. I'm fully confident that our design engineers have designed a path to meet the specs."

A dispute of checkable fact, about a federal legal standard, was thereby referred to an unrecorded office meeting. Meanwhile the magnolia produced the night's fastest staff self-correction — Dials: "My understanding is there was no tree removal discussion"; a colleague, thirty seconds later: "Yeah, we do encroach upon the magnolia and there is one lower branch that would have to be removed." Weiner's line in the sand stands: "there's absolutely no way that I can support any movement that would require us to carve up that magnolia."

The city's Transportation Advisory Committee, for the record, opposes changing Winburn Way at all, citing the lack of crash evidence — and the commission, conceding the data, proceeded on the honestly-labeled alternative: "the perception is real to the perceiver," said the chair. Both options return next week, plus the hybrid nobody drew.

One name went unspoken all evening: the parks director, on leave since mid-December, mentioned once in passing while a deputy ran the department under the word "acting" and the division manager accepted the title "park superintendent for the time being" — "I'll take it." The chair closed with the sentence that titles this dispatch: "we're paddling as hard as we can right now to keep getting things done." Nobody doubts it. The question this paper will keep asking is who let go of the oars, and when the public gets told.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the January 7, 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.