The Optimist: A resonant critique of local policy

As a believer that vigorous, wise government can help society do great things, recent critiques of modern liberalism hit home, especially as a resident of the Upper Valley.

Once upon a time in the 1970s and 1980s, our local governments completed big works quickly. Before 2000, we created the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority and developed nearly all of the community’s affordable housing. We launched the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority. We flipped the Rio Grande Railroad to an extraordinary trail. We cut some corners on these moves. We experimented fast. But enough good happened quickly enough that we are all living off the subsidy of vigorous, effective policy from 40 and 50 years ago.

Over the past couple decades, our community has made less progress on critical issues not just because of NIMBYism and red tape, but because we want everything. We simply do not prioritize. By pursuing five or 10 different, unprioritized goals in grab-bag policymaking, we often end up paralyzed and do nothing. Or we end up with mushy policy that fails to achieve any goals well. Urgency and speed do not factor into the equation.

I had direct experience with this dynamic when Aspen set out to change its residential building standards three years ago. I participated as a citizen in focus groups and city council meetings. It became apparent that we were trying to do too many things — reduce construction activity, incent greener homes, reduce home sizes, raise more money for affordable housing, reduce construction waste. That is only a partial list of the goals I heard. I would ask city officials and elected officials — do we have a prioritization framework for which goals are most important? How do we resolve tension when a prospective policy puts two goals in conflict? The answer was: “No, we have no stack-ranking; we want them all.”

In the end, we ended up with flawed policy — a demo allotment system that artificially capped home demos, harming longtime locals and incenting gamesmanship; mitigation fees that further inflate the already high floor value of homes; and further elevation in construction costs. The latter impacts may have been intended. They are just poor policy if we care about affordability. In recent local news, we witness the plight of a local family seeking to re-develop their family property, but who cannot afford the now-prohibitive development fees charged by the city.

I thought funding and accelerating construction of affordable housing where density already existed (and without further impacts to Highway 82) could have been the primary goal of this policy work. At the same time, any policy needed to prevent injury to local families who could not afford the city’s increased development fees. Corollary policies might have focused on accelerating permitting for affordable housing (from an exhausting several years to a few months), re-zoning to make affordable housing easier where density already existed, and creating aggressive, positive carrots for affordable housing developers.

Similarly, the Entrance to Aspen and Aspen-Pitkin County Airport have sat as known problems for two to three decades. The cost of inaction is substantial. The Entrance and Airport will each cost three to five times what they would have cost 20 years ago. Will we be better off for waiting?

There’s a democracy innovation that Aspen and Pitkin County could adopt, which would help us prove that government can be effective. Very early in evaluating any key issue or major project, government should survey voters and other stakeholders about how they stack-rank goals and values. Don’t ask us about specific policy choices — don’t ask whether we want a modified split shot or a straight shot. We elect government officials and they hire experts to design policy at a technical level. Instead, ask us to allocate 100 imaginary Aspen Bucks on 5 to 10 potential goals that a policy could seek to achieve. We can each distribute our imaginary A-Bucks on the goals we think the policy-making process should prioritize. Play this prioritization of goals and values back to the voters in a council meeting. Then, with a clear prioritization framework, government can go about the business of policymaking with clarity and efficiency.

After many years of hearing different voices purport to represent the views of the community on the Entrance, the city recently completed a version of a goals survey on that issue. The results were surprisingly clear. The survey process and methodology may not have been perfect; we can improve the process with practice and iteration. But the exercise demonstrated a way forward on the thorniest issues we face — we can efficiently survey the community to stack-rank goals and to determine the implicit or explicit trade-offs we would make when we can’t have everything. We can do this quick work much earlier in the policy development process.

Once upon a time in America, government was an accelerator of progress, not a hindrance. But we need a modernized model that acknowledges that we can’t have everything. When there’s tension between policy elements, we need a better way to make trade-offs. Our community has largely resolved that tension by debating, then debating some more. Repeating the same approach going forward will feed the noise that government is bad or useless. In our local democracy, we can implement an early and unbiased method to survey the community on goals that policy should seek to achieve.

With clear prioritization, we can make policy in months, not years. And we can more rapidly deliver tangible results, refuting the idea that government is a hindrance, rather than an accelerant, to progress.

Greg Goldfarb lives in Aspen.