The Toughest Job in the City

Wednesday's joint session of the City Council and Parks Commission opened with the resignation of parks director Rocky Houston — named once, in the first breath of the item, and then never again — and proceeded to two and a half hours of structural knife-fighting conducted entirely in the language of mutual appreciation. When it was over, the city attorney's office had recommended, in public, that the elected Parks Commission leave its director's chair empty, and the commission's chair had answered with six words that will organize this town's parks politics for the next year: "We take that under advisement."

The History Lesson

Give the administration its due: the funding history it presented, assembled from city audits, is the best civic document of the year. In 1908, Ashland's voters created a park commission and taxed themselves for it; the parks ran on their own revenue until Measures 5 and 50 ended independent taxing in the nineties; the youth activities levy — three-and-a-half to four million a year in today's dollars — went to the schools in 2008 and never came back; the fixed millage died in 2013; the auditor collapsed the separate parks fund in 2024; ordinance made parks a city department in 2025. Meanwhile parks' share of general revenues held near thirty percent — the loss was the levy, and the department "controll[ed] expenses by reducing staff." Then the thesis: "potentially the parks director may be the toughest job in the city," because it requires simultaneous alignment of commission, city manager, and council, "and when either of those are out of whack... it can take much longer to get things done."

The legal half was where the knives came out, sheathed in ethics-rule citations: parks runs its own capital projects "soup to nuts" with, in the attorney's telling, receipts to show for it — the East Main rebid, and the ice rink's "lack of permitting, engineering knowledge at the director level." The recommendations: assess structural change, hold joint meetings, and "hold the director position vacant while the city can work through a better plan."

The pushback was immediate and bipartisan. Chair Bachman: "The parks commission retains the authority to hire, evaluate, and terminate as necessary the director... that's our call." Mayor Graham, twice: the vacancy recommendation "has nothing to do with the council... that is not our lane." Councilor Bloom, on joint meetings: "we might as well keep our meetings till three o'clock in the morning if we're gonna have 12 people up here." Commissioner Adams delivered the constitutional speech — two independently elected bodies are "one of the weird and wonderful things about our town... It's in our charter" — and the question staff never quite answered: how are these recommendations consistent with the charter, the ordinance, and the 65 percent of voters who crushed the 2022 measure to restructure exactly this? (Public commenter Corey Frank had invoked that vote before the item even began, which is what institutional memory looks like when it buys a stamp.) The city attorney escalated — "there's just one city, there's not two bodies here" — and the chair landed the evening: "The only thing I'm hearing is that we need to communicate and work together." Then his closing reveal: monthly meetings between the mayor and the parks leadership already exist, and public works taking over parks capital projects is "well on the way." The big structural recommendation, in other words, was already quietly happening while the room debated whether to recommend it.

Councilor DuQuenne, as she has before, found the practical lever everyone else missed: the charter already requires a monthly parks report to council that has never been sent — "We would've known about the ice rink." The chair: "I'm not aware of the charter requirement, but fine... would you get that to us please?" The document everyone invokes, read by no one, again.

Zero for 454

The quarterly financials, presented by the interim finance director, contained the statistic of the night, extracted by Councilor Kaplan. The low-income utility assistance program requires enrollees to obtain an energy or water audit within two years. Number of the 454 enrolled customers who have documented one: "We have not had a single customer provide documentation that they've had an audit of those 454." Zero for 454, on a program that will be "built into the rates" everyone else pays — as staff confirmed plainly when Councilor Hansen asked the question his constituents ask him. Also in the ledger: $2.6 million in past-due utility receivables that the current software cannot age or sort — the city cannot distinguish a customer three days late from ninety — and the city manager's flat summary of the capital position: "we don't have any money for anything for any of our buildings. So roof caves in at city hall, we have no money, right?" Her timeline confidence, self-assessed: "I'm a baseless optimist."

The commission's own business meeting afterward was twenty-seven minutes of genuine competence — the Calle Guanajuato season approved 4-0 four times over, with the artisans' market piloting a year on the front lawn of Lithia Park, restaurants freed from weekend table-shuffling, and Commissioner Adams demanding before-and-after aerial photos of the lawn because you can only "gestalt" the Frisbee players. He closed the night looking at a photo of a little girl in pigtails entering the Calle: "it just makes me happy." After two hours of jurisdictional trench warfare, so does this paper.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the February 11, 2026 joint Ashland City Council / Parks & Recreation Commission session and the Parks Commission business meeting that followed. Quotations appear as transcribed, lightly conformed to natural speech; the caption software merges some speaker labels, so names are attached only where the meeting record confirms the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.