The Optimist: A different survey about the Entrance to Aspen

Thanksgiving this year offered a much-needed break — with huge snow totals, followed by Colorado blue sky days. It felt like a metaphorical turning of the season after an acrimonious fall nationally and locally. Returning from family visits, we discovered nature had gifted us a spectacular start to winter.

Smiles on our faces, we opened the local papers. Our hearts fell a bit. “Oh no,” many of us surely thought as local headlines signaled yet another local battle over competing ballot initiatives, this time related to the Entrance to Aspen. Didn’t we just weather a heated debate over a different piece of infrastructure?

Two citizens groups now jockey for their preferred Entrance policy outcome through initiatives they will place on the March ballot. By failing to build a clear framework for prioritization and then failing to make trade-offs between competing priorities, our leaders, for many generations, have created this vacuum. A day (or 10,000 days) late, a dollar (or $100 million) short. Rightly worried about the state of the most critical piece of infrastructure in the City of Aspen, citizens now seek to take the matter into their own hands.

Today’s column offers a framework for avoiding a contentious disagreement over unclear priorities. Most of us have no idea which policy solution for the Entrance is best for the community. Why? Because our community has not aligned around clear prioritization of values and objectives. It is hard to make policy when goals are undefined. It is impossible to make policy trade-offs when we have failed to rank our objectives. We end up with diluted policy that weakly accomplishes many objectives, solving few well. We also end up in an endless debate loop that offers plenty of time for confusion, personal agendas, and rising acrimony.

The survey we all received after Thanksgiving did not ask citizens clear, simple questions about values and priorities. It launched immediately into technical questions about specific routing options for the Entrance. It could have asked three simple questions that would have offered our leaders a prioritization framework to arrive at a good policy decision. Here is the three-question survey we could have issued:

Question 1: You have 100 points to allocate between different objectives for the Entrance to Aspen. Please allocate those 100 points between the statements below. You can place all 100 points or 0 points on any issue below or you can distribute your points in any weighting that reflects your priorities for the Entrance to Aspen.

Our solution for the Entrance to Aspen should prioritize the following values and objectives:

1. Preserve the Marolt Open Space in its current form at all costs.
2. Prioritize life safety to more rapidly evacuate residents, guests, and commuting workers in an emergency, such as a summer wildfire.
3. Focus on reducing rush hour traffic for locals, guests and commuting workers.
4. Emphasize carrots and sticks that seek to incent users to shift from private cars to buses.
5. Sustain the S Curves in all circumstances.
6. Ensure that Cemetery Lane users always have a direct turn into Aspen, rather than having to move through the roundabout in at least one direction.
7. Provide greater redundancy so that if one access point fails, there is a second way to efficiently exit or enter Aspen from the east.

Question 2: Which of the statements below do you agree with most?

In selecting a solution to the Entrance, Aspen City Council should:

1. Weigh the values and objectives of Aspen residents significantly higher than the values and objectives of Entrance users from other communities.
2. Weigh the values and objectives of Aspen residents in equal weight to the values and objectives of Entrance users from other communities.
3. Weigh the values and objectives of Aspen residents significantly lower than the values and objectives of Entrance users from other communities.

Question 3: How urgently should we decide and act on a solution to the Entrance?

1. This should have been done 10 years ago. We need to make a decision and get shovels in the ground immediately.
2. We should decide in the next two years and take action once a decision is made.
3. There is no urgency. We can get to this when there is community alignment.

In a representative democracy, the best path to achieve both legitimacy and effective policy is for leaders and citizens to align through a stack-ranking of values and objectives. We cannot ask citizens to develop expertise on the infinite array of policies needed for a complex world. But leaders can spend time asking the right questions of citizens when it comes to values and priorities. Leaders and the experts they retain can develop policies that meet those objectives and that make the right trade-offs. Citizens can then hold leaders accountable for the results they deliver.

I will work to publish the attached survey and will share the results (and raw data) in an upcoming column and will also send the results to Aspen City Council. If any current candidates for Mayor or City Council are interested in working together to increase response rate so we all can better understand community priorities, please reach out. It would be a great outcome if we could quickly align around clear priorities and then hold our leaders accountable for efficiently delivering a policy solution aligned to those priorities.

Greg Goldfarb lives in Aspen.