With All Due Respect, That Was All Wrong

Three hours and thirty-eight minutes of tape from Wednesday night: a joint session of the City Council and Parks Commission on the fee that funds the parks, or doesn't, depending on which official was speaking, followed by a regular Parks meeting in which a room full of pickleball players in polite fury watched the commission vote to keep an end-time staff had just testified the police cannot enforce. Your correspondent has read all of it so you may live your life. Let us proceed.

The Fee, and the Interpretation Gap

Interim director Rachel Dials laid out the stakes: the parks fee — created by Resolution 2025-13, riding on roughly 12,500 electric utility accounts, yielding about $750,000 a year — dies June 30, 2027 unless renewed, and staff would like a permanent fee adopted by October 6, because that is when the 2027-29 budget machinery starts turning. If it lapses "and no additional revenue sources identified, we will likely need to be cut 400 to 500,000 from our budget due to that loss."

Commission Chair Jim Bachman asked the sensible question — those cuts fall on parks, yes? — and spent the next hour discovering the answer. City Manager Sabrina Cotta explained that "it wouldn't just be the parks department that's affected 'cause it affects the whole general fund... a cut of half a million dollars out of the general fund... from what department." Bachman, verbatim: "So once again, to clarify my original question, this five four, $500,000 figure is the total general fund. It's not about the parks budget. Okay. That's a different interpretation than I had. It's important."

It is important. The fee has been on your bill for sixteen months. The chair of the Parks Commission learned Wednesday what it does. And for the record-keepers: nobody, at any point in three and a half hours, explained why losing $750,000 a year of revenue produces only $400,000 to $500,000 a year of cuts. That gap has a quarter-million dollars in it, and it walked out of the room unexamined.

Councilor Dylan Bloom added the datum this paper considers the evening's most underrated: last budget, "$100,000 out of the total collected from the parks fee" was redirected to early learning grant programs. His conclusion — "this parks fee isn't going directly to parks, it is being used for other general fund purposes" — was not contradicted.

The Execution of Councilor Dahle

Councilor Jeff Dahle then attempted, gamely, to say aloud what the ordinary ratepayer believes: "this is not a parks fee, this is a general fund fee... I pay $5 and 15 cents to parks, but it really, I only get about 80%, 80 cents on the dollar for that... we're sitting here just carving this into death by a thousand paper cuts when it's not even going to the thing that it's supposed to go to." He invited correction. He received it. City Manager Cotta: "With all due respect, that was all wrong."

Dahle, to his lasting credit: "I'm willing to update my model of understanding." The corrected model, per Cotta: the fee revenue is allocated to the parks department — and also, per Cotta ninety minutes earlier, "we get the 750k, it goes to parks, that frees up 750K of general fund revenue to go towards like funding the legal department." Both sentences are true. That both are true is the entire controversy, and the city's habit of deploying whichever one suits the moment is why the chair of the Parks Commission and a sitting councilor both left the room having been "wrong" about a fee they voted on. Dahle put the honest epitaph on it: "I'm just on record for being confused on how we do this." A small note for the auditors: the resolution says $5, Dahle pays $5.15, and no one on tape reconciled the difference.

Positions, briefly: Councilor Bob Kaplan wants the sunset removed now and the fee redesigned later, armed with compounding arithmetic. Councilor Eric Hansen wants the parks fee and the public safety fee raised together because "the optics of that is better" — an argument for which this paper thanks him, optically. Councilor Gina DuQuenne wants a budget drafted without the fee and November's voters consulted. Mayor Tonya Graham noted her own forthcoming public-engagement ordinance "is designed to not be able to move that fast. So October wouldn't be an option" — the engagement the city promised cannot be done by the deadline the city set. Bloom argued the way to beat November's ballot measure "is we do things intentionally... we prove to the community that we have learned our lesson."

Decision reached: none. The mayor declared "a split council this evening" and punted to a date to be determined. Bloom questioned the arithmetic of "split" — three colleagues had converged on a process — and the mayor conceded she was counting herself. Commissioner Weiner supplied the institutional memory nobody requested: the fee was born two years ago from "scramble, scramble, scramble." On the evidence of Wednesday, the scrambling continues on schedule.

Then Everybody Stayed for Pickleball

After a break — hot mic, unidentified voice: "Trying to wear us down anywhere" — the commission took up noise mitigation at the Lithia Park courts, before eleven public speakers, only four commissioners, and zero of the neighbors whose complaints started this. John Frank, 80, who leaf-blows the courts himself and plays four times a week: "anyone who says that we're starting earlier than that is either hearing somebody with a different leaf blower or they have a very slow watch." And: "Is it because you think the Japanese gardens are a place for meditation? Then why are you scheduling concerts there?" Jan Calvin arrived with NOAA sunrise tables and computed that the staff proposal costs players "more than 12,000 lost player hours over the course of the year." A resident sound survey was cited: twenty-six measuring locations, pickleball detectable at seven, maximum 52 decibels on Winburn Way, "less than the sound of a car passing by."

The commission then voted 4-0 to keep hours at 7 a.m. to sunset — sunset being the exact species of end-time staff had testified, that same hour, the police cannot enforce, because trespass citations require posted fixed hours. The chair acknowledged the astronomy: "It changes daily as earth revolves around the sun... And I was a science teacher." A $6,900-to-$7,500 professional sound study passed 3-1 over Commissioner Gardner's objection to the price. Signage encouraging quiet paddles — encouraging, the enforcement mechanism of last resort — passed 3-1.

For the record, the most affecting testimony of the night had nothing to do with either fight: two speakers begged the commission to save the Daniel Meyer Pool, whose liner has "maybe two more years left," on behalf of the 5:30 a.m. Masters swimmers and every four-year-old in a town where, as Lisa Norvell put it, "swimming prevention is death prevention" — a transcription mangle that somehow says it better. The pool gets a study session in September. The tape ends with Commissioner Gardner, post-adjournment, cut off by the void mid-sentence: "Can we, can we create." We may never know. Neither, apparently, may he.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the August 12, 2026 joint Ashland City Council / Parks & Recreation Commission session and the Parks Commission business meeting that followed. Quotations appear as transcribed; the caption software merges some speaker labels, so names are attached only where the chair's own words or self-identification confirm the speaker. Figures are as stated in open session.