Community members gathered at the Durango Public Library last week for a hands-on discussion about the future of ranked choice voting, election funding and civic education in the region.
The event was held as part of a statewide political and community involvement tour headed up by cross-partisan initiative Courageous Colorado.
Executive Director Landon Mascareñaz began Courageous Colorado’s 2025 fall Activation Tour last week in Colorado Springs. The tour is set to continue through mid-November, with plans for stops in Cortez, Telluride, Montrose, Gunnison and several Front Range cities.
The activation tour is intended to move Colorado communities from listening to building, he said.
“The big idea is that the future of our communities, the future our democracy, begins with people at the local level deciding to make a change,” he said. “And right now in politics, we’re dominated by a national and media discourse that tells us everything’s in a bad place – and there are a lot of challenging aspects to our politics right now – but our local communities are showing us that innovation, change, is possible.”
The room was split into three groups, each with their own topic, to bolster hands-on teamwork and active discussion among attendees. Each attendee chose which topic to work on based on interest.
Mascareñaz selected election funding and ranked choice voting as two of the three discussion topics because of their applicability to Durango politics, he said. Attendees selected civic education as the third.
He gave each of the three discussion teams a poster, a Sharpie and a prompt: Imagine it’s 2028, and your team’s topic is now a thriving part of county politics: what does success look like, and what happened to make that a reality?
The election funding cohort envisioned La Plata County as a leader in voter turnout and accessibility in 2028, and attributed the hypothetical success to a future of robust election funding, innovation in election processes and employing long-term voting staff.
The civic education group imagined the county in three years having fostered a desire – within K-12 and higher education and throughout the community at large – to engage in more active responsibility, understanding and enthusiasm for political processes. The group envisioned that being possible thanks to educated and motivated young voters and robust civic education in schools.
The ranked choice voting team saw a future for the county in which increased representation and multi-party voting is prominent on ballots. They also envisioned a voting process that supports greater cooperation, increased voter participation, community needs being better met and “less mudslinging in campaigns” – which they feel could be achieved through better voter education on ranked choice voting.
Colorado voters rejected a statewide initiative to adopt ranked choice voting for some elections in November 2024; but some cities, like Basalt, Boulder and Broomfield use ranked choice voting in elections. Several community members expressed interest in using-ranked choice voting in Durango elections.
In a second round of envisioning ideal outcomes on paper, each group was asked to fill out a pie chart on their topic listing the individuals, groups, businesses or organizations they felt could help make increased civic education, ranked choice voting or bolstered election funding possible in the county.
Posters quickly filled with local names, organizations and groups, including the La Plata County League of Women Voters, Visit Durango, local media and youth organizations and La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee, who spoke at the event.
Lee said she was excited about the invitation to attend and speak at the event.
“It’s important for me to hear what the community is really concerned about, and also their ideas and suggestions and thoughts,” Lee said. “Sometimes I get so focused on just conducting the election, and what’s happening currently with the laws, (and) it’s fun to actually think about what we could be doing here in the next five years.”
The event’s intention to connect community members across partisan lines was an especially valuable element, Lee said.
“I think it’s really important to try to get different perspectives together in the same room, speak civilly together and be able to disagree, but also listen to each other,” she said.
Attendees said the two-part exercise felt “hopeful,” “energizing” and “like a break from existential dread.”
Community member Sarah Kappel said hearing about local and national politics in the news can make her feel powerless, and that the event provided her with a hands-on approach to making a difference.
“It’s really empowering to talk about how things can look at the community level,” Kappel said. “We forget that we have power here, and that we can make change and make this community (the) way we want (it).”
epond@durangoherald.com
