Symposium Leaders Want to Improve the State of the Valley

Roaring Fork Valley Leaders Aim to Be More Inclusive

By Mitzi Rapkin, 5-08-06

Over 160 government officials, government employees, non-profit representatives and concerned citizens gathered on Friday for a State of the Valley Symposium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado sponsored by Healthy Mountain Communities, a non-profit dedicated to regional collaboration.

It’s no easy task to assess the state of a valley where it’s a two-hour commute from one end to the other, where oil and gas issues dominate one end and skiing and recreation dominate another. In between Aspen and Rifle (the two ends of a valley that is actually made up of two river corridors and therefore two valleys) are issues of race, cost of housing, transportation, development and most of the other common maladies facing a growing West. Colin Laird, Director of the Carbonbale, Colorado based Healthy Mountain Communities said, ”It was the largest turnout we’ve ever had [for this symposium] and I think that speaks to the scale of the issues facing the region and also about the hopefulness people have about the future and doing something about it.”

Executive Director of the Sonoran Institute, Luther Propst opened the symposium. His organization is dedicated to helping Western communities accomplish conservation goals which recognize the passions of the people that make up the towns and cities they live in. His first remark to the crowd, “You are so far ahead of the curve on dealing with growth,” may have been an encouraging sign for residents of the Roaring Fork Valley, but it certainly didn’t mean the curve is flattening out.

An interim report on Demographic Forecasts for Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin Counties 2005-2030 showed that Pitkin County (where Aspen is located) is set to grow to 26,148 residents in 2030 compared to 15,914 in 2000. Garfield County (where Glenwood Springs is and where most of the oil and gas development is occurring) is set to grow from 44,787 residents in 2000 to about 105,000 by 2030.

This more than doubling of the population is the modern story of the West.

Propst said the population of Western states is going to increase by 20 million people in the next 20 years. The question at hand is: how is the West and specifically the Roaring Fork Valley going to handle it? Propst suggested that whether the community is in Aspen or Billings the ideas for the future and what shape it takes has to be a large, group discussion. “We have to promote community discussions that promote conserving the land and the community. We have to think regionally, we must match passion with the land, with passion for the people. We must protect what we value and articulate a compelling vision for the future that appeals to the hopes and aspirations of the public,” he said.

Presentations on the Valley’s most pressing problems: housing, transportation, global warming, watershed issues, oil and gas development and general growth and development were highlights of the symposium.

The challenge evident with all these topics is how do people find common ground to even start with. How does one community find a starting point when one faction believes growth is too rapid and another feels it’s not happening fast enough?

So as not to leave the attendees without a salve for the wounds such divisive questions may inadvertently inflict, solutions for dialogues were presented and new ways of thinking were offered.

David Chrislip, author of Collaborative Leadership, spent the greatest portion of the day in a dialogue with participants on how to engage citizens and community members in collaborative ways. He stressed that the four critical aspects of collaboration must include: a focus, inclusion, a process that is constructive and strong and facilitative leaders.

He then surveyed the participants on their perceptions of the community and even this group of generally involved citizens and government officials had a fairly low level of agreement on the level of concern about issues in the greater community.

The exercise, which surveyed the group on if they thought the community was inclusive in discussions, addressing issues in a comprehensive way, convening the public in a diversity of ways and looking at leadership broadly or narrowly, was insightful. While most of the people in the room are general leaders in their fields, the answers to these questions gave them a good starting point to continue the dialogue and move it toward action.

Most of the questions resulted in the fact that the community in general could look at issues more broadly, could conceive of public processes better, could convene more formally and can share leadership more broadly.

Healthy Mountain Communities is committed to surveying the group soon to identify next steps the community can take to actually put some of the theoretical exercises into action. The hope presented by most in the group is to not have the same meeting next year discussing ideas on how to better address changes in the community but to actually address them in comprehensive, inclusive ways.

Laird said this was encouraging. “There was a real interest in taking this up a notch in commitment and effort in recognizing that we’ve had successes in the past but the scale of issues facing us now are so much bigger than our current efforts are regionally to address them. We don’t have the organizational framework to deal with these issues on affordable housing and transportation. We are going to convene a smaller group to continue to discuss what we can do regionally in the coming months.”

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