Who Can Resist a Carousel?

A man named Barney, who lives on Skycrest Drive backing onto Strawberry Park and who will be 96 this year, stood before the Parks Commission on Wednesday and told a story. Fifty years ago, working for Pan American, on a Paris layover, "walking down the street with a beautiful stewardess," he followed music around a corner and found a carousel. "Now who can resist a carousel?" He never forgot it. He has researched the Butchart Gardens installation — thirty wooden horses, two dollars a ride — he has a site in mind, opposite the old Lincoln memorial, and he came with terms: "I would be willing to make a hundred thousand dollars donation to start it off if you could get a campaign going to have a carousel in one of our parks." He asked, in closing, to be put on the committee.

The chair's response, complete and unabridged: "Thank you sir. That and thank you for your kind offer. We heard you."

Hold that thought, because an hour later the Ashland Parks Foundation presented a privately funded $2 million pavilion for the ice rink — shed roof, bronze standing-seam metal, Zamboni bay, the works — and Commissioner Adams reached for superlatives: "the word that keeps coming to my mind is thrilling." The pavilion deserves its welcome; it is good news honestly raised, and its designers have thought about everything from stormwater to skate rentals. But the arithmetic of enthusiasm was on display for anyone counting: renderings get "thrilling," and a 96-year-old with a check gets fifteen seconds and one joke — Commissioner Gardner, during the pavilion item: "in the summertime you put the carousel underneath the roof and I know where to get a hundred thousand dollars." The only official acknowledgment the offer received all night. Barney, if you read this paper: run the classified. We'll set it in display type.

The Interim Becomes Official

The meeting's durable business: Rachel Dials, who has run this department since winter under the title "acting," was voted a contract as interim parks director, 5-0 — one year or until a permanent hire, a ten percent raise, her deputy position held open behind her. Commissioner Weiner praised her for "trying to knit together all of the complexities that she inherited," and Gardner offered the closest thing to an official history of the failed first search anyone has said aloud: "We originally went kind of on fast track, like we thought we needed to get a director in place and I think this is a much better procedure." What made the fast track fast, and the year hard, remains unsaid on every record this paper has read. The job description also passed, 5-0, after Adams caught its minimum qualifications contradicting themselves and the deputy city manager conceded the draft "did not pass through the final, does it make sense review."

The Mandate Question

Pickleball returned, as it always does, and Wednesday sharpened it into an actual policy question: encourage quiet paddles, or mandate them? Commissioner Weiner — who disclosed he works overlooking the courts and "can see it all morning and all into the evening" — reported evening play down to one or two players, "the noisiest, the rowdiest... the boom boxes," and drew his line: "do we really think that saying, could you please use quiet equipment and be respectful is gonna have an impact?... we have to make it a mandate." His larger framing was the season's best: "It really shouldn't be about IF pickleball, it should be about HOW pickleball."

Commissioner Landt pulled the opposite direction — the commission wants more pickleball capacity, so why shrink hours on the courts it has — and lodged a grievance that deserves its own investigation: "we've had lights in the past. A one staff member decided that we weren't gonna have lights there. We, the commission's never weighed in." A staff member unilaterally darkened a public facility, and the elected body learned of it after the fact. Nobody followed up. This paper will.

Staff's contribution: the police cannot enforce "sunset" as a closing time; the Medford-style acoustic panels won't work because the courts sit in a canyon — the panel vendor's own representative advised against buying them, an honesty that deserves note — and a formal sound study runs about $5,000, a number obtained "kind of all happening today at the last minute." Adams added the texture: a volunteer squeegees the courts before 7 a.m. and blows them dry with a leaf blower, a public service and a noise complaint in one body. The direction: posted hours, plain "prohibited" signage, the mandate question unresolved, everything returning in August — into a study session already reserved for the mountain-bike-trail crowds.

The director's report closed the loop on the season: East Main construction starts within two weeks, Hunter Park tennis in early August, the summer concerts have drawn 3,200 people across two shows, and five applicants contend for two Trails Committee seats. And Barney's other question — asked in passing, answered by no one — hangs over the plaza like a horse without a pole: the beheaded Lincoln statue that once stood near his proposed carousel site. "Where is that statue now? Do you guys have it? In any attic anyway." Somewhere in a city building, presumably, a decapitated Lincoln waits for a records request. Consider it filed.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the July 8, 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.