# The Smallest War Ends Two To Three

*The Sunday Edition · September 15, 2026 · by Nixie Worthington*

> The chair gave every speaker one minute, the interim director gave the commission six reasons, and after two years, 933 comments and about ninety seconds of roll call the Lithia Park bike trails were dead, two to three. Then the commission voted four to one to send the author of the proposal off to find another hillside. What the record shows about the evening, including the man who came to talk about a statue.

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.

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Chair Jim Bachman brought up the second business item at the Wednesday
meeting of the Ashland Parks and Recreation Commission on the ninth of
September by warning the people in the back of the room, who he could see were
strategizing, that there would be one minute apiece at the microphone and that
anyone who had prepared three minutes should think of it as a summary. The
agenda said "potential action" beside the Lithia Park East Hillside Mountain
Bike Trails, and the chair said he was going to call it action unless somebody
gave him a reason to delay again. Nobody did. About an hour later Commissioner
Rick Landt voted no,
Commissioner Andrea Weiner yes, the chair no, Commissioner Justin Adams yes and
Commissioner Mike Gardiner no, and two dirt paths of about half a mile each on
the hillside between Glenview Drive and Pioneer Street, which this town had
been arguing about since the autumn of 2025 and in one form or another for a
good deal longer, were dead. This paper spent most of a Sunday in August on how
they came to be a war and will not go over that ground again here.

## Take Me Up On My Offer

Before any of that there was the public forum, the time the commission sets
aside at the top of every business meeting for anybody who wants to talk about
something not on the agenda, and one man used it. He had
been there about three months earlier to ask about a carousel and wanted to
know whether the idea was dead or still alive. The chair told him the
commission does not engage in conversation during the forum, that staff would
note what he said and he was welcome to contact them, and he took that about as
well as a person can. Then he came to his second item. Somebody on the dais
had told him three months ago that Abraham Lincoln was up in an attic, and he
would like Lincoln brought down and allowed to find a sculptor to put the head
back on him, and he would pay the full cost of it himself. He gave his
references. He had been an airport commissioner, and there is a mural on the
side of the airport building that he had seen through, the first artist having
wanted four thousand dollars and the local artist he found, Linda Dixon, having
done it for eight hundred, which the commission paid, although he would have
paid it himself if they had not. The chair thanked him. He said that he would
turn ninety-six next week and might not be around much longer, so they should
take him up on his offer. The chair congratulated him and said staff would
hopefully have a conversation with him in the near future, and moved on to the
consent agenda, on which there was nothing, and then to the parks fee, which is
another story and will get its own.

The rule the chair cited is a real one and a sound one, since a forum that
turned into a negotiation would run all night, and nobody should hold it
against him that he applied it. What a reader may hold against the city is the
three months. A man came to this commission in the early summer with a
question, was told that a statue of the sixteenth president was in an attic,
and came back in September with a sculptor's job priced at nothing to the
taxpayer and a record of having got a public mural painted for a fifth of the
first quote, and the whole of his government's answer, across a quarter of a
year, was that staff had noted it and would hopefully be in touch. Within the
minute the deputy city manager was at the same microphone explaining that the
general fund departments have to find roughly two million dollars a year in
cuts, more if the parks fee on every utility bill is allowed to lapse, that
seven positions are gone already and the seasonal staff thinned, and that the
commission would be deciding before long where inside its own department the
knife goes. This is a government that has spent the biennium telling its
residents there is no money, and when a resident arrives with money and a
specific thing to spend it on, the machinery has no slot to put it in. Nobody
on the dais was rude to him. They were kind, in the way a bank is kind. The
forum exists so that the public can be heard, and it has been refined over the
years until being heard is all that happens there, so that a proposal which
costs nothing, offends nobody and arrives with its own funding gets the same
treatment as a complaint about the restroom hours, which is thanks and a note.
I for one hope the department has his telephone number, and that somebody
dials it before next week.

## I'm Gonna Call It Action

Interim Director Rachel Dials gave the commission the history first, in the
order it happened, and it is worth having in one place because most of the
argument was conducted without it. The Rogue Valley Mountain Bike Association
submitted the proposal to the Trails Advisory Committee on September 17, 2025.
That committee recommended it on November 19 to the Forest Lands Management
Advisory Committee, which took it up on May 12 and sent its memo on June 4. The
commission opened public comment on June 15, took an update on July 8, posted
signs at every entrance, exit and trail crossing on the hillside on July 22,
gave the whole of its August 5 study session to in-person testimony, closed
comment on September 3 and released the staff memorandum, recommending denial,
on September 4.

The memo gives six reasons. The Lithia Park Master Plan, adopted by this
commission in October 2024 as a hundred-year framework with thirty-seven
recommendations, which staff read as steering any bicycle investment to land
acquired beside the park rather than to the park itself. The municipal code,
section 10.68.210, which the city's legal department reads as prohibiting
bicycles in any park except where the commission has specifically designated a
place for them, as it has the skate park and certain watershed trails, so that
approving these trails and designating them would satisfy the ordinance without
amending it. Enforcement, which the memo calls "nearly impossible" under
present budget and staffing, riders straying off designated paths being "a
recurring issue already in the Ashland watershed" and e-bikes harder still.
Drainage and erosion, on which the department writes that it "lacks internal
expertise to assess drainage and erosion on the hillside" and asks that a
geotechnical engineer review the whole slope before any final decision, at a
cost of eight to ten thousand dollars from the operating budget, with
particular worry about the ground near Glenview Drive and Pioneer Street and
the possibility of retaining walls. The downhill exit onto the dirt portion of
Pioneer Street, a shared-use road, for which the proposal "does not include
plans for slowing bikers." And alternatives, of which the memo says there are
viable ones in and around the watershed, and names the pump track and bike
skills park now under construction at East Main Street Community Park, due to
open in late summer 2027.

On money the memo is brief. The association says about thirty thousand dollars,
based on the Wasabi trail as a comparable, and there is money in the parks
capital budget for trail work. Other than the geotechnical assessment, "staff
does not have an estimate on construction costs to build the proposed trails."
Weiner asked later what would happen if the motion passed, and Dials said staff
would work with the association on a construction plan, lay the trail out on
the hillside, and "really figure out how much it's actually gonna cost, because
the proposal says $30,000, I'm not sure of that."

The packet offered the commission two motions, both of them versions of
adopting the staff recommendation, with or without amendments. Neither was
made.

## A More Formidable Barrier To Grass Fires

The document that reached the commission before the staff memo did is on
Ashland Fire & Rescue letterhead, from Forestry Officer Chris Chambers, and
neither camp has quoted it much, which is probably because it does not do
either of them any good. It is not a denial.

"Overall, the proposal can avoid direct impacts to soils and plants if planned,
implemented, and monitored carefully. Having a well-used trail (mostly the
downhill route) stands to have a positive impact on fire danger by increasing
the number of people who can report illegal activities as well as the trail
itself being a more formidable barrier to grass fires than the smaller existing
trails that have not hindered recent fire spread on this hillside due to their
narrow nature. The downhill route is located in a useful location for
prescribed fire operations aimed at fortifying Glenview Drive."

Then fourteen conditions. Sign the pedestrian crossings and think about safety
on Pioneer Street toward the Shakespeare campus. Decommission the unmapped
trails the route crosses and aim for no net gain in trail mileage on the
hillside. Put steps at the mapped crossings so a walker can tell they are
entering one. Keep off the mapped milkweed and California lomatium and the rare
silk tassel, which is easily confused with mountain mahogany, of which the
hillside has plenty. Follow the tree protection code, a machine-built trail
disturbing root zones in a way a hand-dug one does not. Pre-treat for
invasives, seed the bare dirt with natives, take out the dead and dying trees,
and skip the wood cribbing so a prescribed burn does not eat it. Warn riders
that closures for fire management take precedence. Consult the forestry officer
during layout. Acknowledge that steady bike and human traffic has an effect on
wildlife, while noting that the site is already inside the urban core and
probably has less wildlife use than most. Write down who maintains it and when,
with storm and fire triggers. And consider a State Historic Preservation Office
review for cultural and archaeological resources, "given longstanding human use
and occupation of sites in the core area of Ashland."

Nancy Boyer raised that last one from the public microphone, having heard the
historic preservation committee take an interest in the hillside, and observed
that the people named in the land acknowledgment the commission reads at the
top of each meeting "just did not live on the plaza. They lived in the canyon."

## Nancy Created A Spreadsheet

The comment period produced 933 comments from 804 individuals, of which 256
were supportive, 545 were not and three were neutral, or as Dials put it from
the dais, "a 32 percent to 68 percent." Adams asked whether the tally counted a
person who wrote five times as five, and it did not, a staff member having
built a spreadsheet and taken out the duplicates. The chair named her, and it
is the second time in this fight that Nancy Mero has done the tedious part and
been thanked for it by name.

Two other versions of the number were spoken that evening. Adams said "803
people." Landt said, twice, "245 comments supporting a beginner bike trail." The
memo says 804 and 256, and the two commissioners may have been counting
different things, support for a beginner trail somewhere as against support
for this one here. The gap is smaller than the margin either way, and it is put
down here only because a fight that spent two years disputing whose numbers
were real finished with three readings of the one number everybody had agreed
to collect.

The themes staff drew from the letters are in the packet in no particular
order, which Dials confirmed when the chair asked. For: beginner and adaptive
access, a safer way down from the watershed trails than Winburn Way, fire
mitigation, discouragement of illegal camping, the economy, families with young
children. Against: erosion, the loss of quiet, conflict between riders,
walkers and wildlife, no need for it, the cost of building and keeping it,
riders straying and cutting new trails, the exit onto Pioneer, and bikes
through the Shakespeare campus.

The letters themselves are not in the packet. The 191 pages attach the
proposal, the trails committee minutes, the fire department memo, the master
plan and the ordinance, and not one of the 933. The memo says every comment
"has been shared with the Park Commissioners." This paper drafted a public records request for them in August and has decided
against filing it. The decision is made, the letters would arrive weeks after
the vote they were written to influence, and eight hundred people who wrote to
their parks department in good faith should not learn from a newspaper that
their names were the cost of a follow-up.

## One Minute For Each Person

Weiner asked, before testimony, whether erosion studies had been done or
required on the other trails built in the park and the watershed, "and if not
there, why here?" Dials said on some in the past, but that this hillside had its
own concerns, and that anyone who stands on Glenview and looks down can see the
road sloughing into the slope. Adams asked whether staff had looked at what the
Forest Service or the international mountain bike association require before a
hillside trail gets that kind of review, and Dials said she had not. He said he
was not certain that a road sloughing off was erosion "in the geological
sense," asked whether any geologist or geotechnical engineer had written in
against the proposal, which nobody could recall, and said there had been a
geologist on the trails committee who thought the trail would protect the slope
rather than harm it. The record does not give that geologist a name. Landt
confirmed with Dials that the department still wanted the geotechnical study
before any final approval, and it did.

Then sixteen people, called up five at a time to stand along the wall, at a
minute each. Michael Neiman walks the paths every day and could not imagine
heavy machinery carving a four-foot trail without an erosion problem. Barb
McGee, a former nurse, said her worry began at the Glenview quarry, where kids
coming off the uphill trail would meet southbound traffic on Glenview Street,
and ended on the downhill of Pioneer, and that she did not support any testing
or assessment "because the risk remains the same whether you do an assessment
or not." Kurt Evans said the mountain bike community had been bombarded with
unfounded fears. Monika Settles had driven her son thirty to sixty minutes to
Lake of the Woods to find a trail a beginner could ride and said it was a shame
she had to put him in a car to get somewhere safe to learn. Jan Calvin, one of
the three neutrals, and "not without passion," said the process had sidestepped
or disregarded the procedures the commission already had, had eliminated its
own objective criteria, had abandoned the capital improvement process and had
set the community up for a battle, and that "there is no enemy here." A boy
named Luke spoke for the trail. Wiley Chase came from Medford. Pat Turner said the debate had been emotional,
spirited and sometimes downright nasty, that the community was divided and that
the process reflected badly on the commission, and then tied it to the parks
fee and the beverage tax, which expires in 2030. Ed Zobel, thirty-eight years
beside the park, had heard that the paths were well engineered, with excellent
visibility where they crossed, and said that was like saying you could dodge
the bikes efficiently: "Why do we have to dodge the bikes?" Jim Bowen, twenty-six
years in town, counted six to eight crossings, said an e-bike cannot be
stopped, and asked the commission to follow its staff, not to waste money on
erosion control, and to "leave us the hikers this one thing."

Boyer, besides the canyon, asked Adams to correct a figure she said he had been
using, forty to fifty-three bicycle accidents on Winburn Way, when the ad hoc
committees had corrected their own minutes to say one in ten years. Adams in his
remarks later gave it as an average of more than four reported motor vehicle
versus bicycle accidents a year over the last decade between the bandshell and
the plaza. Both numbers went into the record and the record does not settle
them, and the city's crash log would.

The other side of the room was younger. Audrey Taylor spoke, and Natalie, who
said her age is six and mountain biking is really fun and this is her first
year, and Callum Taylor, who arrived from soccer practice in the middle of the
item and was told just in time, you're up, we have one minute here. A mother
whose name the captions garble held her son Otto, who is nearly three, and said
that most of the children in the room had been his age when this project
started, and that she would like him on a beginner trail before he is twelve
and past needing one.
Merlin Stewart, who coaches and is board president of Ashland Devo, told the
commission the city will never have unlimited money for education, maintenance
or enforcement, but that it has organized groups of trail users willing to take
responsibility for the places they ride, and asked it to see them as a
resource rather than a burden.

## The Chair Will Entertain A Motion

Adams made it. "I move that we approve the Dormouse, a.k.a. East Lithia
Hillside mountain bike trail, and that we ask the park staff to return with
best practice guidelines from the Forest Service and/or [IMBA] regarding the
need for a geotechnical assessment." The motion, in other words, was to approve
the trails and to send staff looking for an authority that would say the study
they had asked for was unnecessary.

The captions do not settle who seconded it. The chair says "I'll second to
ensure we have some discussion and conversation," and a few minutes later
invites Commissioner Weiner to speak to her second, and the minutes, when they
are approved some weeks from now, will say which of them it was.

This paper reported on August 30 that Commissioner Adams wrote the application,
which says so on its own summary sheet, that he chairs the Trails Advisory
Committee that recommended it in November, and that a former councilor on that
committee filed a complaint over the November vote under Oregon's public
meetings law. The fire department's memo records that he and Weiner were at the
May 12 meeting to answer questions about the proposal. On September 9 he moved
it, spoke to it for eleven minutes and voted for it. Neither the September 9
transcript nor the August 5 transcript contains a declaration of conflict, a
recusal or a discussion of either, and whether Oregon's rules for public
officials reach a volunteer trail application written for a club is a question
this paper has not answered and will not answer in a sentence. What can be
said is that in two years nobody in the room, on either side, put the question,
and the two sides in this fight have put very nearly every other question
there is.

## There Is No Magical Barrier

Adams framed his eleven minutes as a series of messages the commission would be
sending with each vote, and the demography of the letters as he read them, the
yes side mostly though not exclusively younger, children and their parents and
young professionals, the no side mostly though not exclusively older people
who had moved to Ashland to retire or had finished their careers here and liked
to walk, sometimes with dogs. He offered the one argument on his side that the
other side has never answered: "There is no magical barrier surrounding Lithia
Park that keeps mountain bikers out. And let's face it, there isn't much
enforcement. The only thing that keeps all but a handful of the hundreds of
cyclists who enjoy Ashland's trails daily out of Lithia Park is their choice not
to ride there." A dedicated trail, he said, keeps riders off a pedestrian path
better than anything else does, and the proposal commits in writing to
decommissioning the unsanctioned trails already on that slope. He also spent a
passage on pickleball, and on the oldest continuously used tennis courts in
Oregon having been given over to it under pressure from the same seniors who
invoke John McLaren like a founding father, McLaren having designed the park in
1913 and pickleball not having been invented for some decades after, and on
residents who write in capitals, deface signs and demean mountain bikers on
YouTube. He said the park no longer has a zoo, or free car camping on the
creek, and that Lithia Park is not a painting, it is a park, a line he credited
to former Commissioner Jim Lewis.

Weiner promised to be about half as long and announced that her remarks would
"in no way, shape or form support pickleball in Lithia Park," which got the
only laugh of the night. Her three points were that the engagement showed the
demand was real, that the concerns could be mitigated with thoughtful design
and that a commission which only ever takes up-or-down votes never improves
anything, and that the body should be data driven rather than emotion driven,
half the letters saying nobody walks those paths and half saying they are
heavily used, "but we don't have any data to demonstrate one way or the other."

Landt said he would vote no, informed by the master plan and the staff report,
that the 245 comments in favour of a beginner trail were meaningful, and that
"if this doesn't pass, I will follow up with a motion to at least in some way
address that." Gardiner said it was not a beauty contest and not the one with
the most wins, that he had heard loud and clear what the community cherished,
and that the thing that decided him was what Landt had said: "our policy of the
Lithia Park master plan, to adopt that and then to ignore it, is a problem for
me."

The chair spoke last and at length, and roughly, which is how he talks.

"I'm gonna vote against this motion. I find my personal core mission for this
group is to protect the people's land in perpetuity. Doesn't mean there can't
be change, the only constant is change, but to do it in a very deliberate way
and to, and provide stewardship for all the open land, open space, trails and
parks. That's a core mission. Now, we've added recreation, we've added senior
services, but the core mission was started out, and I firmly believe, and one
of the reasons I'm up here is there's a constant erosion of support for public
lands coming from some political sectors."

He said mountain biking is without doubt an economic driver in this town, that
he agreed there is not enough access from town to the watershed trails for
beginners, that Ashland is a big place and Lithia Park a small part of it, and
that "the thing that seals the deal for me is it's a two-to-one public comment
that we shouldn't put this trail in this spot."

Adams took a minute more to say that the master plan as adopted had been
amended to say future trail development in the park should avoid the riparian
corridor, so that this trail was entirely consistent with it, and to thank the
youth who had ridden in to speak "sweating in their mountain bike helmets."
"Whatever the vote of this body, and it doesn't look great for us," he said, "I
read your emails. I see you and I feel you." Then the roll call, and the motion
failed two to three.

## Patently Ridiculous

Landt moved at once "to reaffirm the Lithia Park Master Plan's prohibition of
new bike trails through Lithia Park and direct the Trails Advisory Committee to
work with RVMBA and other groups and individuals to find a site for a
beginner's mountain bike trail outside of Lithia Park." Speaking to it, he
disputed Adams's reading of the addendum, the addition to the plan having been
an addition and not a subtraction, and asked that the committee treat the
search as a priority.

Gardiner said he was surprised the yes votes had not wanted to support further
investigation. Adams said the first half of the motion was "patently
ridiculous" and the second half "completely meaningless," and that he would
vote against it. Weiner said she had been taken a little aback by the first
half, had pondered it a wee bit, and had concluded that if the plan said what
Adams and her own reading said it did then she could affirm it, that most of
the ground outside the park is Forest Service land and "it'll require
aggressive engagement with them," and that "I just think that it was a bit
wonky." The chair said he was going to support her. Weiner yes, Bachman yes,
Adams no, Gardiner yes, Landt yes.

So the commission has directed a committee chaired by the author of the
proposal it had just rejected to go and find another site for the same idea,
with no site in hand and no money named. That committee meets on Wednesday the
sixteenth at four fifteen at The Grove, and the department has already put the
item on its agenda.

## The Verdict

Three commissioners reached the right answer for the reason a commission is
supposed to reach answers, which is that they had adopted a plan two years ago
and the plan said no, and Gardiner said so in one sentence where the staff
memorandum took six pages.

What will outlast the trail is the other thing. A commissioner wrote an
application, chaired the committee that sent it forward, sat on the dais that
judged it, made the motion and cast a vote, and in two years of the most
closely watched argument this town has produced, with a complaint already
before the state over the committee's November meeting, nobody on either side
asked him to step back for the vote and he did not offer to. The rules may
permit every bit of that. Adams has said he will not seek a second term and
three of the five seats turn over this cycle, so the next time a commissioner
brings the commission a proposal in his own hand, the question should be asked
out loud before the roll is called, by the chair if nobody else will.

Natalie, who is six, told five adults that mountain biking is really fun.
Callum Taylor came from soccer practice and spoke anyway. Otto, who is nearly
three, was held up to the room by his mother, who would like him on a beginner
trail before he is twelve, and what the three of them were sent home with is a
committee meeting on the sixteenth. As the room emptied somebody the recording
never identifies said "disappointed" into a live microphone, and that is the
last word the record has.

---

*Sources: the caption transcript of the September 9, 2026 business meeting of
the Ashland Parks and Recreation Commission and the 191-page packet published
for it, whose first fifteen pages are Interim Director Rachel Dials's memorandum
of September 4 and whose attachments include the application's summary sheet,
the November 19 Trails Advisory Committee minutes, the Lithia Park Master Plan,
AMC 10.68.210 and Forestry Officer Chris Chambers's memorandum for the Forest
Lands Management Advisory Committee, all quoted here from the documents. The
933 public comments are not in the packet and this paper has chosen not to
request them, for the reason given above, so everything said here about what
they contain is the department's summary of them and is labelled as such. The
Winburn Way crash figures are two speakers' figures and not the city's, and the
sentence that gives them says so. Minutes for this meeting will not be approved
for some weeks, so both roll calls and every name are taken from the captions
and checked against the spelling the city's own minutes use, and where the two
disagree the minutes will win and this paper will print the correction. The
captions do not establish who seconded the first motion and this piece does
not guess. Commissioner Adams's authorship of the application is stated on the
application's own summary sheet, and the absence of a conflict declaration is
an absence in the transcripts of September 9 and August 5, not a finding about
what he was obliged to declare. The man who spoke at the public forum does not
give his name anywhere on the recording, and it is not printed here because
he came to talk about a statue and not to be in a newspaper. The
mother of the boy named Otto is not named because the captions garble her
surname and no minutes yet exist to correct it. Quotations appear as
transcribed, with the software's garbles repaired and the speakers' left
alone.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/the-sunday-edition/2026-09-15-the-smallest-war-ends-two-to-three