A Rough Draft, Like Most of the Work We Do

The Parks Commission's Wednesday study session opened with the chair defeated by his own microphone — "why are the lights green. Now I have to adjust to something else" — and closed ninety minutes later with his finest self-assessment of the commission's methods, delivered while discussing the capital improvement plan: "it's a rough draft. Like most of the work we do." This paper could retire the column on that sentence. It will not.

The Ramp, Redesigned From the Podium

Item one was the ADA access plan for the Japanese Garden and Winburn Way, and it produced the most genuinely useful ten minutes of local government this paper has witnessed all spring — by accident. A commissioner studied the drawings and noticed the accessible parking design would require a wheelchair user to "get outta your vehicle and get around to the other side out into the street." Staff defended the drawing. Commissioner Gardner contributed his credential — "I did wheel my wife's grandmother around for about five years in a wheelchair" — with the repeated disclaimer "I'm not an expert, I'm just saying," which is more epistemic humility than most experts manage.

The chair, sensing the meeting drifting into freelance engineering, asked the question that should be embroidered on the dais: "are we debating something that is written down somewhere as a resolution already?" Then he summoned Public Works Director Scott Fleury, who had seen the plan "generally for the first time" the previous Thursday, and who proceeded to redesign it from the podium in real time: delete the curb, flatten the whole area into a loading zone, put the ramp between the two accessible spaces, add a small retaining wall, mind the drainage so you "don't initiate any bird baths." The objecting commissioner: "That's, that's basically resolves all my concerns."

Along the way the public learned what a truncated dome is (the bumpy ramp insert; "These ramps are super tricky. There's no tolerances anymore"), that a proper ADA ramp runs about $15,000 a location, that the Butler-Perozzi fountain will need "probably $40,000 worth of railings" nobody has budgeted — "I'll just say that's not a surprise," the chair shrugged, "these projects always seem to have that element" — and that construction on any of it comes no sooner than 2027. The commission's ADA obligations were summarized by staff in the immortal formulation that you needn't do it now, "you just have to make sure that you're progressing towards it." Asked how that works in practice, the room offered the Japanese Garden itself: "After three years after we, yeah, it's the same thing." Progress, as a tense.

The Chair's Document

Item two was a vision document the chair wrote himself and distributed, by his own account, "exactly 24 hours ago," to inform budget talks and to memorialize this commission's views before its seats turn over in January. Commissioner Adams objected to the process with a directness the minutes will launder: "to have the document sort of pop up 24, 27 hours before a meeting, I'm not, I'm not loving this process. I don't, I don't as a commissioner feel a part of it" — and, more pointedly, that it felt like the former director's top-down lists, "though I like your list better than the director's list."

Commissioner Weiner asked the document the fatal question: "is it a strategic plan? Is it a vision statement? Is it all of the above?" The chair: "I can say what it's not... does it need a label yet?" Somewhere between those two sentences lives the whole genre of civic documents.

The chair's defense, though, contained the evening's most honest passage — a veteran's institutional anxiety, worth preserving: he and two others once formed a political action committee to keep the commission alive, "we have post-traumatic stress on that. It's, you cannot take for granted that some firebrand counselor and or mayor want to take this away." He is retiring, not running again, and wants something written down before he goes. One may quibble with a constitution drafted solo on a Tuesday and still respect the instinct.

You Voted for the Break

The look-ahead produced the correction of the night. Commissioner Gardner complained there is no study session until September; the chair mused that the summer breaks had "crept into the council schedule. I don't know when that happened." Acting Director Rachel Dials, with the patience of a woman who keeps the minutes: "if that's something that you want, you all voted in summer break." The commission had adopted its own vacation last December and forgotten. A revision returns as an action item.

Also queued: the fish habitat presentation next week, the joint council session June 3, and — flagged with visible fatigue — the Glenview hillside mountain bike trail, where the Trails Advisory Committee's recommendation has already survived a public-meetings-law complaint from its own lone dissenter, "probably many thousands of dollars spent on that complaint," per Adams, who also offered the only trail-safety guidance this paper will ever reprint in full: "Whole lot of poison oak there... If you're gonna try to follow those flags, you better have Tecnu at home."

No members of the public attended a meeting substantially concerned with how to receive public input. The commission spent part of it deciding, per Adams, that deciding how the public is heard "is our job" and not a committee's. Correct. Now there is merely the matter of the public.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 6, 2026 Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission study session. Quotations appear as transcribed; names are attached only where the meeting record confirms the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.