# The Smallest War in Oregon
*The Sunday Edition · August 30, 2026 · by Nixie Worthington*
> Somewhere in America this month, a parks board approved a mile of mountain bike trail in eleven minutes and the local paper gave it a paragraph. In Ashland it is a war — and the war is an inventory of everything this town could do if it aimed half this effort at the problems actually eating it. Names named, jazz hands included.
Art by CONTRA — Collage on aged paper: the trail application and the opposition rebuttal flank a spiraling siege of binder clips, push pins, redacted comment slips, and pencil stubs, all ringing a small torn window of the actual dirt path, with City Hall in the background.
---
Somewhere in America this month, a parks board approved a mile of mountain
bike trail in about eleven minutes, between the pickleball resurfacing item
and the restroom winterization item, and the local paper gave it a paragraph.
We conjecture, but confidently: it happens all the time, in Bend and Bentonville
and a hundred towns nobody writes about, because in most of America a mile of
singletrack costing $30,000 is what a parks agenda calls Tuesday.
In Ashland it is a war.
It has a two-year history, a procedural complaint before a state ethics body,
a fifty-page legal memo, dueling advisory committees, a campaign website, a
counter-campaign website, a 23-point rebuttal document, guest opinions in
three publications, at least one letter citing John McLaren from beyond the
grave, 390 public comments — the most the parks department's institutional
memory can produce for any issue in about 23 years — and, on the fifth of
August, a room so far past fire-code capacity that the chair had to ban
applause and teach a standing crowd the jazz-hands sign for approval, having
first gaveled them into what he optimistically called order.
All of this over two dirt paths, each roughly half a mile long, on a
brush-covered slope most residents could not point to on a map of their own
park.
How does a town do this to itself? Not by accident, and not over bicycles. The
war is now arriving at its constitutional moment — the vote is set for
September 9 — and somewhere along the way the question on the table changed
from *should the trail exist* to _who gets to decide, and when, and whether
waiting is wisdom or surrender._ Follow the half mile and it will take you the
whole way around this town.
## What Thirty Thousand Dollars Buys, Allegedly
The facts first, briefly — there are not many of them.
The Rogue Valley Mountain Bike Association proposes two one-way, bicycle-only
trails on Lithia Park's East Hillside, between Glenview Drive at the top and
the car-free gravel stretch of South Pioneer Street at the bottom: a
machine-built descent — working name Dormouse — and a hand-built climb. About
$30,000 from the Parks capital trail budget. Maintenance by volunteers, per
the City's own application form, which assigns upkeep to whoever proposes a
trail. The pitch: the first true beginner trail near town, a
car-free way down from the watershed network, and a sanctioned line on a
slope where bikes already ride illegally on footpaths that — per the
application's own words — "were never designed and instead were adopted and
modified after being created by unsanctioned use."
Art by CONTRA
One aside, and then we leave the arithmetic alone — it deserves its own
hearing, not a supporting role in the culture war. The application's three
central figures — about half a mile per trail, a grade of four percent or
less, roughly 250 feet of elevation — cannot all be true at once; holding four
percent over that much elevation takes about a mile of tread, not half of one.
The most careful reading of the proposal anywhere, at the single-author
citizen site [easthillsidetrails.org](https://easthillsidetrails.org) — whose
author *supports* the project — walked the flagged route, did the division,
published its coordinates and caveats, and concluded the paperwork describes a
trail that cannot exist as described. Nobody at any podium has engaged the
point. Each camp has sorted every fact by which side it helps, and a fact that
merely indicts the paperwork belongs to no one. Remember that; it is the tell
for everything below.
## Two Years of History in One Sitting
The war predates the trail. The 2024 Lithia Park Master Plan process — the
"hundred-year plan" — carried an earlier version of the idea, and the fight
then was about the terminus: end at Pioneer Street, or run gloriously on past
the duck pond to the Plaza itself — a Champs-Élysées for the fat-tire set,
beloved of some riders and touched by no committee. The terminus has been the
casus belli from the beginning. By September 2024 the Chronicle reported the final draft
contained no bike trails at all; the adopted plan steered mountain-bike
investment toward land *adjacent* to the park, while an addendum left a door
ajar for future consideration inside it, away from the creek. The two camps have
been quoting their preferred half of that document ever since, up to and
including two commissioners and a staff slide detonating one another in
public on August 5, twenty-two months after adoption.
September 17, 2025: a fresh application for the shorter alignment, sponsored
by RVMBA and written — sole-authored, per a newspaper correction that
mattered — by Parks Commissioner Justin Adams, who also chairs the Trails
Advisory Committee. On November 19, that committee, chaired by the author,
voted to recommend the author's proposal, at a meeting where the item had
been noticed on the agenda as *informational*. A committee member — Stefani
Seffinger, a former city councilor — filed a complaint arguing the vote
violated Oregon public meetings law. The City Attorney answered in roughly
fifty pages that an advisory body may recommend things. Fifty pages. The
application is fourteen. The matter went to
the state ethics commission, where its outcome has never surfaced in the
public record. Parks staff, for what it is worth, had recommended holding a
public meeting and comment period *before* any committee recommendation. That
is not what happened.
Then the summer of small erosions: comment opened June 15; a promised guided
public walk of the route became, in the space of a month, "a potential onsite
meeting," and then nothing; flagging of the route began on the ground weeks
before the announced marking window opened; a City forestry review returned
fifteen recommendations that residents cannot find posted anywhere; and the
City's own project map changed its crossing count without a revision note,
the sign on the hillside still carrying the old number under the same print
date. None of it is a scandal, and this paper alleges none. All of it is the
same choice made over and over by the same body: that telling people things is
a step which can be taken later, or somewhere else, or not at all. A public
that watches a process wobble like this does not become suspicious of trails.
It becomes suspicious of *everything*, and then a study session needs a fire
marshal.
Art by CONTRA
And then August 5. Twenty-two months after the master plan was adopted, eleven
months after the application was filed, seven weeks into a public comment
period, in a room the fire marshal was counting, staff told the Commission and
the town that bicycles are banned from Lithia Park by municipal code — and
that a yes vote here still requires the City Council to change the law before
anyone may legally ride a foot of what they were arguing about.
Read that again with the dates attached. Every resident who filed one of the
first several hundred comments, every speaker who spent two minutes at that
podium, every household that had this argument over dinner, was arguing about
a bicycle trail in a park where bicycles are illegal, and about a decision the
Parks Commission cannot make by itself. That is not sediment. It is the single
most important fact about the proposal; it was true on the first day and every
day after; and the public learned it in the twenty-third month, in passing,
because a study session got around to it.
The public learned that bicycles are illegal in Lithia Park **in the
twenty-third month of the argument about a bicycle trail in Lithia Park.**
## The Order of Battle
**The association.** RVMBA is the valley's mountain-bike organization — the
IMBA-affiliated club whose volunteers built and maintain much of the trail
network in the hills above town, a network the club's own materials count
generously and the careful count puts at about 53 miles in the Ashland
watershed. That number matters, because it is both sides' favorite weapon:
the opposition asks why a club with 53 miles needs one more in the park's
last quiet corner, and the club answers that not one of those 53 is rideable
by a beginner or a child — the watershed is steep, and Wasabi, the trail
built a decade ago with beginner hopes, came out with banked switchbacks and
an intermediate climb, a failure the current application admits with unusual
candor. Both are right. That is the maddening shape of this whole fight.
**The author.** Commissioner Adams wrote the proposal, chairs the committee
that recommended it, carried its statistics through nine prepared minutes on
August 5 — and announced on August 11 that he will not seek a second term,
citing family, work, and health. His conflict is not financial; it is
personal — the mountain biker's origin story, his own son nearly struck on
Winburn Way. He has acknowledged the optics sideways — "more than 90% of my
time is spent working on topics... that do not involve mountain biking" —
which, as we observed at the time, is the kind of statistic one volunteers
only when the other ten percent is standing at the podium.
**The opposition.** Not one thing but a coalition: the Behind the Curtain
campaign site, which has made the trail a chapter in its broader case against
city government; the authors of a 23-point technical rebuttal, whose best
points — an adaptive-standard claim the application cannot back, an accident
statistic that collapses under a filtered query — are good ones, and earned; a
respected ecologist's viewpoint arguing this slope is the city's last intact
pine-oak woodland; the former councilor pressing the process complaint; and
behind them a broad, real constituency of walkers and dog owners for whom the
flat gravel stretch of Pioneer is the one dirt route in town that asks
nothing of the knees. Their strongest material is strong. Their weakest —
we will get to it — is doing their cause active harm.
**The supporters.** The club, the bike shop owner who testifies he has no
answer to "where do you take kids?", the Devo youth-cycling coach who named
the gap exactly ("If you're an experienced rider, Ashland is world class. But
if you're a child... there isn't an entry point"), the twelve-year-old who
filed the shortest brief in the record ("I would totally ride this trail"),
and — awkwardly for the tidy version of this story — the trail-running author
of the most rigorous *critique* of the application, who wants it built anyway,
with seventeen conditions. The support is younger, less organized, less
practiced at public comment, and largely absent from letters pages, which has
allowed the impression that it barely exists. Three hundred ninety comments
say otherwise.
## The Fight Under the Fight
Spend enough hours with the transcripts — this paper has now spent more of
them than anyone should admit to in print — and the pattern stops being about
dirt.
It is about age, first, though nobody wants to say it plainly. A speaker told
the Commission that over seventy percent of Ashland is over 55 — the census
puts the over-60 share nearer a third — and instructed the commissioners:
"your special interest, you want your bike stuff." The room's most reliable
applause lines (jazz hands, by then) tracked the demographic split almost
perfectly: the walkers who have loved this hillside for forty years against
the parents whose children have nowhere legal to ride, each side sincerely
unable to see itself as the special interest. Sage Connolly, a mountain biker,
took his two minutes to read out five satirical reasons to oppose the trail —
anything outdoors is unsafe, children should stay indoors, "biking in our
park. What's next? Girls on bikes in our park" — and drew a gasp before the
room caught the joke, which rather proved the joke.
It is about class-of-resident, second: who counts as Ashland. The opposition
speaks of visitors and outsiders and Devo families from elsewhere; the
supporters note that the median opponent has time to attend a 5:30 study
session on a Tuesday. Each side accuses the other of astroturf, of being a
small group impersonating a large one — and, in the comment threads this
paper has read in quantity and will characterize only in aggregate, they do
it in nearly identical language, each certain the other's letters are
coordinated and its own are spontaneous.
And it is about the city itself. This is Ashland in the third year of its
civic confidence crisis — the parks-fee fight, the City Hall fight, the
everything fight — and the trail has become the small, walkable proxy for the
large, abstract question of whether anything this government touches can be
trusted.
Which brings us back to the tell. When the shared record is unreliable — when
the numbers in the application cannot all be true, the map revises itself
without saying so, the review is unpublished and the governing plan can be
quoted both ways — then nobody can argue from the record, because there is no
record both sides will stand on. So they argue from the only things left:
motive, identity, and who counts as a real resident. That is not a failure of
neighborliness. It is what people do when the paperwork will not hold weight.
Art by CONTRA
And it is fatal to the middle, because the middle is the only position that
needs the record to exist. The one conditional voice in this fight — supports
the trail, seventeen conditions, keeps a public corrections log — did not lose
an argument. His list was renamed "a bait-and-switch" by "a select group of
mountain bikers," and he was reclassified as the enemy, which is cheaper than
answering him. Meanwhile the single most damning fact anyone has produced, that
the application's own three central figures cannot all be true at once, sits
where it has sat since June: adopted by neither camp, because it indicts the
paperwork and the paperwork is not on the ballot. A town with a trustworthy
record would have started there. This one has nowhere to put it.
The one fact that indicts only the paperwork **belongs to nobody, because
the paperwork is not on the ballot.**
The hand-wringing has earned more than a paragraph, and the record supplies it
in the opposition's own words.
At the podium on August 5: the trail "will destroy the peace and tranquility
of the park." It "will destroy the native and cultured plants... and will
adversely affect the wildlife." "You're gonna take a mini excavator in there,
you're gonna destroy the plants." The hillside, per two separate speakers, is
"sacred." This for a
proposal whose own City forestry review — fifteen recommendations attached —
found the impacts avoidable with careful planning, and whose subject is a
slope the park's visitors overwhelmingly never set foot on. Destroy, three
times, for half a mile of hand-raked tread. That register did not come out of
any stewardship manual. It came out of church.
The campaign apparatus matches the register. The Behind the Curtain page
instructs its readers to email the Parks Commission with the subject line
"NO Bike Trails in Lithia Park!" — capitals and exclamation point supplied —
and closes its case with "Just say No. Not maybe." Its treatment of the one
conditional voice in the debate is to call a published list of conditions "a
bait-and-switch" and "a roadmap to approval," authored by "a select group of
mountain bikers" — the select group being, as far as this paper can
establish, one trail runner with a corrections log. When your campaign's
strongest engagement with the most careful document in the fight is to
rename its author, the campaign is telling you what it can and cannot
answer.
And then there is the comedy, which this paper has thought about longer than
it expected to.
Still from Jim Falkenstein's published video
Connolly's bit included a line about the city pandering to "those who post
most on Facebook and make YouTube videos." Three speakers later, one of them
took the podium. Jim Falkenstein — as **Bro Falkenstein**, a character he also
performs on YouTube — spent his two minutes as a wealthy mountain biker:
"Fellow bros of the Manosphere and Lady Bros. We totally deserve these two new
mountain bike trails." He owns five mountain bikes, "but only three of them
cost me over 10 grand each." Asked to justify the trails, the character
recites the reasons he has "been told to say — for the kids and fire migration
and economics" — before admitting it is "just for me to have one half mile
more of epic mountain bike shredding." It closes with the bros telling "the
Karens and the complainers and the locals and the old timers and the grannies
to suck it." The chair cut him off: *Excuse me, you're done.*
It is skilled work, and the video version is better than the podium version,
because after the character runs out the bit turns into two minutes of the
clearest public explanation of this geography anyone has produced: Glenview is
chip-sealed, the main park trail is bark chip and nobody wants to ride it,
Pioneer is already shared and that is not changing. He also says the thing the
whole fight is short of — "I wasn't on the committee, I don't know if this is
real, it's kind of a guesstimate" — and then he walked it and checked. A man
with that much command of the map spent his two public minutes doing a voice.
This desk is not the room's decorum monitor, and satire aimed at power is
older than the republic. But the power in that room was seated at the front,
and the bit's targets were the people in the folding chairs: the families, the
coach, the twelve-year-old who filed the shortest brief in the record.
Punching at a dais is comedy. Reading a room full of your neighbors their own
supposed contempt for grannies, while they wait their turn to speak, is
something else, and the laugh it got does not settle which.
What happened afterward settles more. When a member of the bike community
wrote that his side had worked through the system for a year and got a prop
comic for its trouble, the replies informed him he was a "bike bro" with thin
skin, weeping emoji supplied. Councilor Dylan Bloom, who may yet vote on the
ordinance this requires, called it one of the best uses of satire he had seen
at a public forum and praised it as "making fun of local government" — which
it conspicuously was not.
Local government was the audience. **The neighbors were the joke.**
For the avoidance of doubt: this paper has defended Jim Falkenstein in print,
over a police officer sent to his driveway after he reported an unlocked
public building, and would do it again tomorrow. That is precisely why this is
worth saying. He is not a troll; he is one of the more capable civic minds in
this argument, which is the whole subject of this piece, and he aimed it at
the grannies.
And the columns. The Chronicle's opinion page has lately taken up the genre
this paper can only call anticipatory grief: pieces devoted to toppling the
*minor* arguments of the other side — one aimed at the notion that trails get
kids off screens; another, this week, methodically dismantling an economic
case nobody with a name attached ever made at that scale, under a headline
answering a question no one asked. No, mountain bikers should not be the
arbiters of Ashland's economic survival. They were not applying for the
position; the sponsor's own strongest advocate wrote that "the goal isn't to
make Lithia Park a mountain bike park." When a movement starts winning
arguments nobody is making, it is usually because the arguments people *are*
making — where do children ride, what happens to the paperwork's numbers, who
maintains this in year ten — have gotten uncomfortable.
The supporters are not innocent of the mirror-image sin: answering specific,
checkable objections about width standards and crossing counts with the
general goodness of childhood exercise. A town can produce ten thousand words
a week about a hillside and somehow leave each camp dodging the other's best
case. Ashland has managed it all summer.
## September 9: Good, Bad, and Ugly
So: the vote. The Commission has set "potential action" for its September 9
business meeting — potential action being bureaucrat for a vote, unless the
room looks dangerous. Comments close September 3, and the newest front in the war
— opened the moment Adams announced his departure — is whether voting at all
is legitimate. Three of the five commission seats turn over this cycle;
exactly three candidates filed for them. The question now circulating, in
public comment and in the threads, is whether a lame-duck commission,
including the proposal's own author, should decide a contested question it
will not be present to manage. And each camp has discovered, with the
flexibility that is this war's most renewable resource, exactly the
principled position that happens to serve it.
One fact ought to cool all of this, which is presumably why neither camp has
raised it: because the ordinance has to change, the Council gets the last word
regardless. A departing commission cannot push anything through to completion.
It can hand a recommendation to a body with four seats on the November ballot,
and that is the whole of its power here. The legitimacy war is being fought
over a decision that is not final in either direction — a fact the Commission
has been in a position to say out loud since August 5, and has not.
**The case that postponement is good** is the boring one, and this paper laid
most of it out above: the application's numbers need correcting, the adaptive
claim needs a standard or a retraction, the forestry review needs publishing,
the ordinance step — because, as staff finally told the room on August 5,
bicycles are banned from the park by municipal code and a yes here still
requires the City Council to change it — needs a stated timeline. A
postponement that produces corrected paperwork defeats nobody. Call it
homework.
**The case that postponement is bad** has teeth of its own. This proposal has been in
some version of process since 2024. Every month of delay is another month in
which the actual current condition — illegal riding on undesigned footpaths,
the thing both camps claim to hate — continues unmanaged. Comment was open
for eleven weeks; the route was flagged on the ground; a record 390 people
weighed in. At some point "more process" stops being diligence and becomes a
decision in favor of the status quo that nobody voted for either. The
opposition knows this, which is why delay is its second-favorite ask.
**And the ugly**: the version now unfolding, in which the postponement
question itself becomes the war. Supporters read every call to wait as
Ashland's veteran obstruction playbook — the same town that has studied its
own buildings for eighteen years without repairing a rafter, now proposing to
study a half-mile of dirt into the next decade. Opponents read any September
vote as a departing author jamming his legacy project through a friendly
board before the electorate can reach it. Both camps are now publicly
excoriating not each other's arguments but each other's *legitimacy* — and
that is the corrosive development, because arguments end and
legitimacy wars do not.
## The Verdict, Which Is Not About the Trail
What this paper keeps arriving at is less a position on bicycles than a
position on proportion.
This is, measured against everything else on this town's docket, a minor
question. A mile of dirt. Thirty thousand dollars — roughly one percent
of the first phase of the park project across town that draws a fraction of
the letters. A slope that carries trespassing bikes today and will carry
them, sanctioned or not, in every future anyone votes for. In the great
ledger of things Ashland must decide this fall — a city manager, a charter's
worth of habits, four council seats — Dormouse is a footnote with a fan club.
Art by CONTRA
And it has consumed the summer, because it is *legible* in a way the big
things are not. Nobody can hold the structural deficit in their hands. Anyone
can stand on the East Hillside — it is your hillside, and the flags are in the
ground until September 3; go stand on it. The smallness is not incidental to
the heat; it is the cause of it. This is the faculty fight moved outdoors:
vicious because the stakes are low — except here they are not quite zero,
which is what makes the viciousness a waste rather than a comedy. Somewhere
under the jazz hands there is a real child on a real bike on Winburn Way, a
real corridor of birds and rare plants, real seniors on the one flat dirt road
in town, and a real volunteer club offering real labor to a city that, on
current evidence, cannot maintain what it already owns.
On the vote itself, briefly, because it has stopped being the interesting
question: wait, but *price the wait*. Postpone once, in public, with a list —
the corrected figures, the named standard, the published review, the Council
timeline, the maintenance agreement in writing — and a date certain in front
of the incoming commission, so the delay cannot quietly become the tenth year
of a two-year process. If the proposal cannot survive its own paperwork being
corrected, it should die; if it can, three new commissioners will own it
honestly. Either outcome is fine. The trail was never the point.
The point goes, by name, to everyone this piece has described, and it comes
with something close to admiration, which is what makes it hurt.
This fight has been a full inventory of what this town is capable of when it
cares. The Rogue Valley Mountain Bike Association can organize volunteers,
draft a fourteen-page application, produce a video, and offer a city free
labor in perpetuity. The authors of the 23-point rebuttal performed better
technical review of a $30,000 proposal — caught a false statistic, ran down a
published engineering standard — than anyone performed on the compensation
schedule that cost this town two million dollars. And then the author of
easthillsidetrails.org: one resident, one half-mile trail proposal, and a
corrections log in which he retracts his own findings, with dates, when the
math improves. He holds a dirt path to a standard of self-correction that
nothing the government of Ashland publishes has ever met, and the tragedy on
this hillside is that he aimed it at the hillside. The Behind the Curtain
operation, meanwhile, has demonstrated it can mine municipal records with the
patience of a forensic accountant. Three hundred ninety residents wrote
comments. A room overflowed past fire code, on a Tuesday, in August.
Now the ledger on the other side. City Hall has been closed since February
and no roofer has been called. The structural deficit is $2.4 million and the
councilor doing the fiscal homework is doing it as a hobby. The city manager
question consumed a year, the senior center gets held hostage annually for
$5.15, the union contracts are unfunded, and the budget that governs all of
it drew — at its public hearings — a crowd this trail fight would call a slow
Tuesday. Not one of those problems has ever filled the foyer. Not one has a
23-point rebuttal, an evidence-classed citizen audit, a campaign site's
sustained attention at this pitch, or 390 comments. The talent exists. This
summer proved it, half a mile at a time. It is simply all deployed on the
one problem in town that is small enough to lose gracefully.
Half this effort, aimed at the problems that are actually eating this town,
would transform it. **The talent exists.** This summer proved it.
## And They Were Given Every Reason
It would be a dishonest accounting to stop there, because a footnote does not
absorb a summer of that much talent on its own. It needs help, and the ledger
of help is above: the vote noticed as informational, the fifty pages
establishing that the sequence had been permissible rather than the four
minutes of running it again correctly, the ethics outcome nobody was told, the
hundred-year plan drafted so both camps could quote their half of it, the
unpublished review, the map that revised itself in silence, the walk that
evaporated — and the law, mentioned in the twenty-third month.
Not one of those is corruption, and no reasonable person needed to intend any
of it. Together they are something more ordinary and, compounded over three
years, more expensive: a government that treats informing the public as a step
available later. Ashland's crisis of civic confidence is not a mood and it is
not imported from anywhere. It is a reasonable inference, drawn by residents,
from a filing cabinet. And when people cannot trust the paperwork, they turn
up in person, in numbers, over the one thing they can actually go and stand
on. The flags are in the ground until September 3. The budget is not.
> Ashland's crisis of civic confidence is not a mood. **It is a reasonable
> inference, drawn by residents, from a filing cabinet.**
So, to the combatants, from a paper that has read every word all of you
produced and means this as the compliment it contains: you are the most
capable civic corps this town has fielded in years, and you have spent the
summer aiming it at a footnote. Rebuttal authors — the facilities plan, the
one with no commas in it, deserves your twenty-three points. Trail-audit
author — you built a fact-checking machine with a working conscience and
pointed it at a bike path; the city budget, the facilities file, and the
utility-fee arithmetic are sitting right there, un-audited, and unlike the
hillside they will not be settled by September. Behind the Curtain — there are actual
curtains; the executive session that started the Cotta affair was behind one.
RVMBA — a city that cannot maintain what it owns needs organized volunteers
more than it needs any single trail. And the 390: the comment portal accepts
input on other subjects. This paper has checked.
And to the Parks Commission, which is not a combatant and does not get to be
one: none of the above required a vote. Post the forestry review. Date the map
revision. Say in one sentence, at the top of the September 9 packet, that the
Council must change the ordinance before a wheel turns, and say when you will
ask it. Publish what the ethics commission decided. You cannot settle what
this town wants on that hillside, and it is not your job to. You could have
settled, at any point in the last two years and at the cost of an afternoon,
what this town was actually being asked. That you did not is why 390 people
had to find out for themselves, and why the room needed a fire marshal to
hold them.
You are neighbors, and you fought a war over half a mile while the town it
runs through needs everything you demonstrated. The other municipalities got
the trail question right by being bored. Get bored. Then get to work on the
rest of it. We will see everyone on September 9 either way.
With jazz hands.
---
_Sources: The RVMBA East Hillside trail application and the City of Ashland's
posted project map. Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission meetings of June 10,
July 8, and August 5, 2026, and the Trails Advisory Committee record of
November 19, 2025, as transcribed from the public meeting record. The Lithia
Park Master Plan, adopted October 9, 2024, with addenda. Reporting and guest
opinion in Ashland.news, the Rogue Valley Times, and The Ashland Chronicle,
2024–2026, including the November 2025 procedural complaint coverage, the
December 2025 correction identifying the application's sole author, the
July 2026 forestry advisory review coverage, the August 3, 2026 Ashland.news
viewpoint on the hillside's ecology, the Ashland Devo board president's
supporting viewpoint, recent Chronicle opinion columns addressing the
screens and economic-benefit arguments — including the August 19, 2026 guest
opinion "Should Mountain Bikers Be the Arbiters of Ashland's Economic
Survival?" — and the August 11, 2026 report that Commissioner Adams will not
seek a second term. The Behind the Curtain campaign page on the proposal
(btcashland.com) is quoted directly, including its prescribed comment
subject line and its characterization of the conditions list. Podium
quotations in the hand-wringing passage are from the August 5 study session
transcript, unattributed by name where the record does not confirm the
speaker.
[easthillsidetrails.org](https://easthillsidetrails.org), a single-author
citizen research site that supports the project with conditions, is the
source for the trail-length and grade analysis, the 53-mile watershed count,
the crossing-count map comparison, and the crash-data queries referenced in
passing; its methods, caveats, and corrections log are published there.
Public social-media discussion is characterized in aggregate only, and no private commenter is named, quoted, or paraphrased individually — with the standing exception this paper applies everywhere: an elected official's public statement about a matter they may vote on is on the record, which is why Councilor Bloom is named and the people arguing with him are not. Podium satire is quoted from the meeting transcript; the Bro Falkenstein video is quoted from its own published captions ([youtube.com/watch?v=HgFJmkCZlNc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgFJmkCZlNc)), and Jim Falkenstein is named because he performed in public, under his own name, and published the character himself. The census figure
for Ashland's over-60 share is from American Community Survey estimates.
Where this piece conjectures — the eleven-minute parks board elsewhere in
America — it says so._
Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/the-sunday-edition/2026-08-30-the-smallest-war-in-oregon
