Election Day has come and gone and the Herald’s Editorial Board is pleased to welcome Kip Koso, Shirley Gonzales and Jessika Buell (back) to the Durango City Council. Koso received 3,571 votes, Gonzales 2,725 and Buell, 2,698. Chris Elias and Olivier Bosmans received 1,781 and 1,305 votes, respectively. Koso, Gonzales and Buell will be sworn in on Tuesday April 15, at 5:30 p.m.
Congratulations on strong campaigns and appealing to enough voters (34% turned out) to secure a seat at the dais and in Durango’s history. Congratulations, too, to organizers of OPT-in Durango on the passage of Ballot Issue 2A (3,230 voted for the measure and 1,557 against) that renews the 2005 half-cent sales and use tax.
Ballot Issue 2A’s passage will continue to fund – in equal parts over the next 30 years – parks, open space, and trails, and the renovation of the former 9-R Administration Building for a new city hall and police station.
Campaigning, nor serving, is easy, but we believe the former might be easier than what is to come for Durango as the federal government divests itself of state and local support in jobs, grants and contracts. With it, people, positions, institutions, programs and activities we took for granted, or simply did not know came to us care of the federal government, will be diminished or disappear altogether.
They already have, and it’s been happening since January resulting in chaos and massive inefficiencies. Indiscriminate firings (and rehirings), canceling committed grant funds and contracts, all put people and communities like ours at risk. It will be up to our local elected officials – and the people and organizations across sectors that receive federal support – to determine what effect that lack of federal investment will have on our communities and region, and let us know.
Communication and collaboration – something we heard a good deal about in candidate forums – is more critical than ever. We must pull together as a community, as we are so good at doing.
We already know cuts to probationary employees with the San Juan National Forest, and grant funding for its partner nonprofit San Juan Mountains Association (Herald, Feb. 16), will impact the level of service tourists have come to expect. La Plata County Public Health funding cuts, a result of the revocation of Health and Human Services funding (Herald, Mar. 27), will affect the services the agency can deliver (Herald, April 2).
And Superintendent Cheser, of Durango School District 9-R, warned of the dire consequences cuts to the Department of Education the Trump administration has set in motion would have for 9-R students (Herald, April 2). And that is just a few examples. There are many others and there will be more.
At the state level, legislators are grappling with cuts to arrive at a balanced budget (Herald, Mar. 27). Transit funding is being cut that may impact Durango’s transit services (Herald, April 2).
With measles having reached Pueblo, it seems inevitable it will spread to more of Colorado. Will we have the resources we need to respond? Or to wildfire, that after the dry winter we’ve had seems inevitable, too. And how will the national economy – with a free-falling stock market and new tariffs – affect local tourism and our sale-tax driven economy?
Will we have the resources we need to deliver the level of service city residents have also come to expect and address our ongoing affordability challenges? Or the $6 million in revenue the 2005 sales tax, just renewed, on average delivers a year to city coffers?
At least from state and federal government, the answer is ‘no’ and what we do about it is largely going to fall on our local elected officials first to address, and our community, next – together.
We have a new prosperity office that we hope will be looking closely at all of these changes. It could be this office is best poised to track, inventory and project the impact of this divestment, as well as proposes responses.
It may not seem so, but certainly for the people and organizations that have been directly affected already, it is a crisis. Let’s start our response now.
