Two Buckets of Gravel, After Dark

Nine years ago a man watched a female steelhead trying to spawn on bare decomposed granite in Ashland Creek, went home, filled two five-gallon buckets with gravel from the drainage ditch in front of his house, and dumped them in the creek at dark. By morning she had built her nest on it. He added two more buckets. "That's how desperate she was," Scott Howell of the Rogue River Restoration Council told the Parks Commission on Wednesday. "And that year in our surveys, that was probably the only successful redd that we saw."

He then explained, to the elected stewards of the park through which the creek runs, that he and his colleagues have been doing this ever since. "We've done a lot of this, for lack of a better term, under the radar. We just have gone in and done it." Nine years of confessed unpermitted guerrilla stream restoration, delivered from the podium with the cheerful candor of a man holding a straight flush: "everything's above board now."

The commission's response to this confession was to legalize it, 5-0, and thank him.

The Numbers Argue for the Crime

They were right to, and here is why, because the numbers do the arguing. When the bucket campaign began in 2018, surveys counted 5 steelhead redds — spawning nests — in Ashland Creek; the state counted 5 independently. This year: 56. The previous recorded high, in 2013, under fully lawful conditions: 30. The Lithia Park Master Plan itself, page 80, notes roughly 2,000 cubic yards of gravel wash into Reeder Reservoir yearly while the Granite Street Dam starves the creek below of every pebble. The proposal now blessed: 20 cubic yards a year — one percent of what the dam withholds — placed by hand, reviewed in 2027 and 2030, at a cost to the city of nothing. "It's gonna be a $2,000 project for us as all. So, and we're gonna pay for all of it." The city's total obligation: a staffer with a small trailer for a day. "It's been done with wheelbarrows up to this point."

Howell's supporting material was equally unimprovable. On Bear Creek: "I know a lot of us just think of Bear Creek as kind of a cesspool, but it is probably our biggest spawning tributary of the rogue river when it comes to summer steelhead." On Ashland's crown jewel: "The spawning habitat next to the airport on Lone Pine Creek is better than we have going on right there." A ditch by the Medford airport outperforms Lithia Park. Hang that in the plaza.

The scrutiny applied to all this consisted of one question — a commissioner asked what concerns staff had, and staff had none — and a legal shrug: liability is "built into the permitting." The chair had to ask what they were voting on, having forgotten his packet. Commissioner Adams declined to add anything because "anything I said would diminish the wonderful presentation." This paper notes, gently, that charm did a great deal of load-bearing work Wednesday, that the man's donated gravel is nonetheless the best deal this city will be offered all year, and that both things are true at once.

The Department With No Employee

The second half of the evening was less fun and more important. The commission took up hiring a permanent parks director, and in doing so said out loud what has been true since winter: it has no employee of its own. The chair, plainly: "what we have now is an acting director who's a city employee and does not report to us. We do not have review prerogatives... we don't have our agency in place to actualize our policies by directing staff."

The arithmetic of a proper search, per the deputy city manager: thirty days to settle a job description, forty-five to sixty to competitively procure a recruiting firm at around $30,000, four to five months of recruitment, a month of contract, a month of notice — "a minimum of six months, likely potentially to eight months." Commissioner Adams did the other math: three commission seats turn over this year, so "we could at least in theory, have a new majority on the commission" before the process ends, and "I don't think it would be inappropriate for the next commission to choose the director that they will be working with."

Meanwhile the deputy disclosed, "to be quite blunt," that she is structuring the process to preserve Acting Director Rachel Dials as a candidate for the permanent job — the same Rachel Dials who sat through the entire discussion running the commission's agenda, whom nobody asked a single question. And Commissioner Gardner, explaining why legal must vet the job description against the ordinance first, offered the evening's unexploded ordnance: "that's kind of what got us in trouble before." What trouble? With whom? The record does not say, and nobody at the table needed it said, which tells you the room knows a story the public hasn't been given.

The meeting closed with the acting director reporting that the East Main and tennis court bids are out, the splash pad opens Memorial Day weekend, the ice rink cabling arrives in late July, and the golf course will finally sell food by mid-June — the chair's stated priority: "When will I be able to go over there and get something to eat?"

A fish got more due diligence waived than a director got applied. But then, the fish showed results.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 13, 2026 Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission business meeting. Quotations appear as transcribed; names are attached only where the meeting record confirms the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.