It’s time for big changes and a different direction

By John Enders

Ashland voters in the coming special election will face a significant decision on how to continue paying for their wonderful parks and the Ashland Parks and Recreation Department. It’s a subject that has the town’s people roiled up, and rightfully so.

I’m a refugee from Ashland, and now live in Talent, so some will say I have no right to speak out on Ashland affairs. But when it comes to Ashland parks, I quite literally wrote the book: It’s titled “Lithia Park: The Heart and Soul of Ashland,” and I wrote it sponsored by the Ashland Parks & Recreation Department to help fund activities of the Ashland Parks Foundation.

I learned a lot while researching and writing the book. For me, it was a labor of love, partly because I love Lithia Park — as we all do. My family has been intimately tied to the park and the city since 1907. In addition, I had the honor of chairing the Ashland Charter Review Committee that in 2004 and 2005 studied and weighed in on many issues — including the future of the APRC’s relationship to the city.

There’s a huge amount of information about the proposed levy circulating, especially on social media, some of it true, some of it not. Rather than argue the pros and cons of each aspect of the proposal, I would like to offer some history, and then suggest some changes I think would help in the future.

City councilors and members of the Parks & Recreation Commission are fighting over how much of the annual food and beverage tax revenues parks should receive, for how long, and who will control the spending of that money. Does anyone even remember that that tax originally was meant to sunset?

Since 1908, Ashland has had a unique parks governance and funding setup. Originally, parks had its own permanent dedicated tax levy, but that ended in 1997, after Oregon voters passed Ballot Measures 5 and 50. Subsequently, there was an unwritten agreement between the council and APRC that parks would continue to get the same amount of money. That agreement in recent years has fallen apart. Add to that a city charter change that gave more authority to the city manager — and less to the mayor — and today we have a situation where the parks director and APRC are fighting for more money when there is less and less of it to go around.

To complicate matters, the long-serving head of the parks and rec department appears to believe he and the commissioners are not answerable to the people of Ashland, governing the department as if it were a fiefdom with independent funding. Its independence is a thing of the past. Sadly, there also have been problems of mismanagement and alleged abuse in the department in recent years, which have been consistently swept under the rug.

The Ashland Parks Foundation, meanwhile, is acting as if its only purpose is to reward private donors to the parks budget, including, most recently, one who gave over $1 million for a new Japanese Garden in Lithia Park, a pet project of the parks director and the donor.

It is time for the City Council to adopt policies and ordinances that clearly define how the city will fund its magnificent parks system and continue its diverse recreational opportunities for all ages. That will undoubtedly include decisions that will rankle some members of the community, but democracy is about doing what’s best for the majority. The welfare (and funding) for parks and recreation should not be in the hands of either an empire-building parks director and parks commission, or, for that matter, a city manager who comes and goes. 

Given all of this, in my opinion it is time for a thorough and comprehensive clean sweep of the parks and recreation department, starting with the director, who does not live in Ashland, and has been divisive for nearly a decade on the job. In addition, the old guard on the parks commission — who essentially rubber stamp the director’s decisions — ought to make way for new leadership. The current commissioners — like most such boards — are too close to the parks director and his policies to change course. It’s time for Ashland voters to elect new parks and recreation commissioners, and for that new commission to then recruit a new director who will lead the department into the future. The council should do what it can to make this happen.

Ashland’s parks are its most beautiful feature. Band-aids won’t work, and Measure 15-214 is not only a band-aid, but a bad idea. It’s time for big changes, and a different direction.  

John Enders is a retired journalist, former editor of the Ashland Tidings, and former chair of the Ashland Charter Review Committee. He also was Executive Director of the Southern Oregon Historical Society in the mid-2000s.

April 23 update: The abbreviation “APRC” in parenthesis deleted after Ashland Parks and Recreation Department as those initials refer to the commission, not the department.

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