Small Community Park and Recreation Planning Standards
Rural Planning Institute Consulting has recently released the Draft Small Community Park and Recreation Planning Standards for the State of Colorado.  This project stems from a Heritage Planning Grant and joint contributions from the City of Rifle, Town of Silt, Town of New Castle, City of Glenwood Springs, and Town of Carbondale.  The project focuses on park standards for Colorado communities with less than 10,000 people.  The product was prepared to assist with identifying park capital facility needs and justifying parkland dedication and facility impact fees.  The primary questions this report answers are:

• What types of parks and recreation facilities do residents of small communities in Colorado use and desire most?
• How many of those parks and recreation facilities types does a community need given its population?
• How many people can each parks and recreation facility serve?

The RPI team is also producing an interactive program to simplify some of the calculations used in parkland planning (i.e. acres per resident).  Keep an eye out for the final draft of this report and program later this month.  .  For more information contact Gabe Preston, RPI Consulting, Gabe@rpiconsulting.org, 970-382-9153.

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Eagle County Updating its Master Plan
Primarily used as a guiding document for development review and capital improvement planning. Much has changed since the current Eagle County Master Plan was written in 1996. We would like your participation in identifying the values and assets of Eagle County. Several meetings will be held throughout the County. Please join us at any meeting.

From more information contact Rebecca Leonard, Senior Long Range Planner Eagle County, (970)328-8749, Rebecca.Leonard@eaglecounty.us.

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RFTA union ends by one vote
Roaring Fork Transportation Authority drivers are ending their union affiliation after union supporters came up one vote shy on Friday.

After two days of voting at RFTA facilities throughout the valley drivers voted 55-30 to keep the union, but by state law, the union needed 56 votes to stay in place. That's a majority of the 110 drivers eligible to join the union.

Supporters blamed the failure on state laws they said discourage union affiliation, and poor timing that saw the vote come as several of RFTA's roughly 40 union members were out of town.

This week's vote was the second decertification vote in less than two years for RFTA drivers. In February 2002, drivers voted 60-36 out of 114 eligible to remain in the union.

By state law, the union needed a majority of eligible drivers to vote to keep its affiliation this week. Those who don't vote are counted as "no" votes.

See full article by David Frey, www.aspendailynews.com, 8.30.2003

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RFTA wins top awards
The Roaring Fork Transit Agency brought home three top awards after Thursday’s Colorado Association of Transit Agencies annual conference in Steamboat Springs.

Competing against transit agencies across the state, RFTA received the 2003 CASTA Large Transit System of The Year Award and, along with the city of Glenwood Springs and the city of Aspen, received the top award for Transit Marketing Program of the year. Pitkin County Commissioner Mick Ireland won the 2003 Friend of Transit award.

The CASTA awards committee selected RFTA because of what it called RFTA’s innovative and creative services, its responsiveness to its customers and community needs, and supplying effective and reliable services, according to Jeanne Erickson, CASTA Executive Director.

The Transportation Marketing Alliance, a collaborative transportation marketing effort between RFTA, the city of Glenwood Springs, the city of Aspen and numerous media outlets and private organizations, won marketing program of the year.

The awards selection committee selected the valley’s Transportation Marketing Alliance alternative transportation program for its innovative regional partnerships, effectiveness of ad messages and design, and ability to leverage resources in a year of scarce public funds.

In addition, Mick Ireland, Pitkin County chairperson and Intermountain Transportation Planning Region chairperson, won the 2003 CASTA Friend of Transit Award. This award honors an individual who has made sustained contributions to advance transit services.

See full Staff Report, www.aspentimes.com, 9.5.2003

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Rifle voters approve street bonds, fill council seats
Rifle voters decided overwhelmingly to allow the city to sell bonds in order to make street improvements.

The vote was a landslide — 957 for and 181 against (A turnout of 47% of registered voters). The city will now sell $4.1 million worth of bonds to make the street improvements.

In the city council race, six candidates were vying for three open seats. Sandy Vaccaro, Jonathan Rice and Jeff Johnson were elected to four-year terms. defeating Carolyn Bernhardt, Rae Ann Bartels and John Getty.

Vaccaro, who served on council from 1993-97, was the top vote getter with 735. He is a teacher at Rifle Middle School. Rice is a teacher, and an assistant football coach at Rifle High School. He received 608 votes. Johnson, a local architect, received 590 votes.

The bulk of the street improvements will be centered around south Rifle where a Wal-Mart will open in late October. Right now there are temporary traffic signals going up at three locations in south Rifle.

See full article by Dale Shrull, www.citizentelegram.com, 9.11.2003

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Garfield County Code Re-write Public Meeting and State Model Code Development
Garfield County is well underway on its rewrite of Subdivision and Zoning regulations, and will host the final  public kick-off public meeting September 25th, 5:30 - 7:30, in the Commissioner's Hearing Room at the Courthouse Plaza Building, 108 8th Street, in Glenwood Springs.

This is the last of five early meetings in a series designed to reach out to the agricultural community, developers and private consultants, conservation/environmental interests, and the general public for the solicitation of issues and concerns about how the county currently conducts business in its zoning and subdivision processes.  All issues and concerns are captured, and will be made available on the County web site at www.garfield-county.com under Building and Planning, Code Rewrite.  Issues from previous meetings are being posted, and there is a 'White Paper' of potential regulatory options developed by consultants Sullivan Green Seavy as a discussion piece.  The White Paper contains some very interesting options gleaned from around the country, presented
for discussion purposes, that you may find interesting.

This Code rewrite also leads to a statewide Model County Code, and everyone is encouraged to provide input as to what they'd like to see in that model, or have explored in this process.  That includes work on definitions and language pieces that we all use.  Now's the time to do that, to get some free consulting on elements you'd like to see refined that you can fold in!  The web site has a 'Feedback' button which deposits any comments or requests into a special email account.

Garfield County is also meeting with each of our Planning Commissions and other officials in our six municipalities as part of this project.  We're adding on to their regular evening meetings early and buying the Pizza.  Glenwood Springs is done, Silt will be on Oct. 7th, Parachute/Battlement Mesa is November 20th, other dates are pending.    

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National        

The Great Blackout 2003 from Space

 

A picture is worth a thousand words . .

 

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surviving the new economy
Economic development used to be easy. You’d look around, find the 800-pound gorilla, and feed him.  It wasn’t hard to spot the beast. He was the lumber mill, the aluminum plant, the mine. You just took all your economic development eggs, stacked them in a single basket, and gave it to the gorilla for lunch.

“That was the approach in the old economy,” said economist Larry Swanson. “And in the new economy, that approach is exactly the wrong approach.” Swanson heads the Regional Economy Program at the Missoula-based O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, and believes Montana towns need a new understanding of the new economy if they are to find new and successful ways to attract quality jobs.

“Today,” Swanson said, “the way to go after it is to find ways to steadily improve and develop your work force. You need to pay attention to the amenity factors – the good schools and the open space. Twenty years ago, they liked to say ‘you can’t eat the scenery.’ But now the scenery, the environment surrounding your town, has become the setting for your economy. The setting is the reason the economy is here.” Swanson has been tracking national and statewide economic trends for years, and what he’s seen has convinced him a “sea change” took place in the late 1990s, altering forever the way the economy is shaped.

In today’s world, Swanson said, the jobs follow the people, and the people follow the local amenities. “They make quality-of-life decisions,” he said, “and they bring the economy with them.”

Which brings us back to that new way of doing economic development. “Some towns are still looking for that next big company,” Swanson said. “They’re willing to gamble it all on that next big player. That’s a backward way of looking at things, a rear-view mirror approach. They need to find ways to attract lots of different kinds of small business, not one big business.”

How to do that? “Develop and train a skilled work force,” he said. “Build an infrastructure so workers can continually train and retrain.” Then, he said, offer those skilled workers a nice place to live, with open space and good schools and bike paths and quality health care and a clean environment. Build some growth-management guidelines for your town, and protect what makes it appealing.

“Unfortunately, most places will just flat-out kill their economies by destroying the amenities,” he said. “It’s all coming – the good, the bad and the ugly. Communities have to figure out how to get the good, limit the bad, and avoid the ugly. I mean, if you trash it, what do you have to work with?”

“People and businesses are going to move around until they find a place they want to be in,” he said. “We used to ask, ‘how do I fend off pressures to protect the environment so I can get on with making money?’ Now we have to ask, ‘how do I protect the environment so I can sustain this economic growth?’ ”

“We need to look at the economy in a whole new way,” Swanson said. “What’s driving our economy today is the attractiveness of the area. The world is looking for a nice place to do business, and the world wants to know, what do you have to offer?”

See full article by Michael Jamison www.mtinbusiness.com, Summer 2003

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More Vehicles in U.S. Than Drivers