Basalt — meet your new town manager

Gloria Kaasch-Buerger, Basalt’s new town manager, started with the town on Monday after having only recently moved to Basalt to settle in. 

In her first week at the town, according to her, she’s been “drinking from a firehose” as she gets acquainted with town staff, council members, heads of departments, and is beginning to contextualize what she says she’s been familiarizing herself with for the past six months. 

“A town manager is like a CEO,” Kaasch-Buerger said on Wednesday. “The community elects their representatives, those representatives give me direction, and then I implement that direction with the staff. One of the things really big in this role is communication, so making sure that you know if the council wants to research a certain policy or wants more information on something, I make sure that they have all the tools to make those decisions and policies.” 

Kaasch-Buerger grew up in the Jemez Valley in New Mexico, which is around an hour and a half west of Santa Fe and three hours from Durango, Colorado, where she attended Fort Lewis College. After majoring in English-Communications, she completed a University of Colorado Denver master’s program in Fort Lewis. The political science master’s connected her with work in local governments. 

From there, she worked with a Colorado State Senator before entering a fellowship program that connected her with Durango, where she worked directly under the city manager’s office as a special projects coordinator. 

After working with Durango, Kaasch-Buerger made connections at the City and County Manager’s Association of Colorado and began to work on conferences for emerging managers. At the Manager’s Association, she saw many local-Colorado governments operations, learned from their experiences and challenges, and then ultimately brought that experience and connection to Silverton as the town administrator, a position very similar to a town or city manager. 

“When I first started (at Silverton), we had a lot of division, a lot of mistrust, a lot of confusion around what was going on,” she said. “There were 10 administrators in seven years; there was no organizational infrastructure. We did a lot of work there in those four and a half years. My goal was to clean it up, to regain trust in what we were doing, and get some really big projects done.”

Under her leadership, Silverton created its own master plan that was distinct from the county’s, increased public participation in the council process, incorporated affordable housing communities into Silverton to give them a voice in local politics, created a housing authority to manage debt for projects, and more. 

After more than four years at Silverton, when the Basalt position opened up, Kaasch-Buerger felt ready for a change. Family and friends in the Roaring Fork Valley, proximity to skiing and rafting, and a more urban environment were among the things that caught her attention early on. 

At Silverton, she named transparency as the most important part of restoring a breakdown in trust. At Basalt, she plans to keep transparency front of mind to ensure the best operation of the town government. 

“I think transparency is the biggest thing and that communication with your elected officials from staff,” she said. “There can be that communication breakdown, and that causes confusion in meetings, and people will be confused about what is going on. You really need to have everything in lockstep, so being very transparent about the issues in front of us is key.”